A brief history of the nude in art and photography:The following are excerpts from the sources listed at the bottom.
In the classical world of Western art, it was the beauty of the standing male nude that signified moral perfection - a symbol of virility and heroes. In contrast, the reclining male nude was more symbolic of his weaknesses, being unmanned or as in death.
With the exception of the standing statues of Venus, the goddess of love, carved with her genitals modestly covered by her hand, the ancient Greeks were not interested in the nude female body, seeing women as ill-proportioned creatures who could not be made to fit in the pattern of male perfection.
This hostility to females was continued by Judao-Christian beliefs with Eve inheriting Pandora's role as the source of all evils, thus the reclining female nude was rare until the Venetian painter, Giorgione during the Renaissance in 1507 as a celebration of humanist thought that honoured the senses rather than attempt to conquer them as the medieval world had done.
But these early female nudes were not a picture of reality but were a transformation from a live model into a carrier of meanings - she becomes nature, or vice, or a figure from mythology. Very few were completely naked, they were usually accessorised with bracelets, or hats, etc and generally had long flowing hair.
By portraying her reclining, it distanced the nude from embarassing links with intimacy and makes it suitable for public consumption, with only a minority escaping from these constraints to allow a sexual element to intrude such as by Balthus, while Ingres subtly suggests lesbianism, masochism and sadism. Female genitals appear with increasing boldness from the end of the 19th century.
It has often been asserted that Modernism begins with Manet, in particular with those paintings wherein the vexations of the unclothed female body burst forth with a power of disquietude that appalled the public: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) and Olympia (1863). Manet deprives his models of the acceptable academic veneer of classical nudity, forcing them into the modern age, a naked age, disturbingly and yet ambiguously contemporary.
The hypocrisy towards the nude was highlighted in the protestant Victorian era of the 19th century during which representation of the naked body was considered morally dangerous and life models regarded only marginally above prostitutes. On the other hand, the male nude violated the strict moral code much less since it personified the virile ideal of conscious masculinity. Despite this, Queen Victoria herself gave her Prince Consort Albert every birthday a nude study as an official symbol of her true love. From this developed the prudish English nude, now felt not to be sensuous, having lost its provincial character. The new-style nude spread rapidly – from the paintings in the Royal Academy to mass-produced photographs and magazines – and was received by an interested public. The nude became socially acceptable and invaded the realms of high art. The Victorian nude was a central theme in the works of famous artists such as Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones or Sargent.
The American hypocrisy on nudity. In the mid 1930s a Clark Gable movie inspired many men to discard their shirts in defiance of American law and since then the sight of bare-breasted men has not been such an issue. Restrictions in law on women's breast exposure stigmatize women for being women, it suggests that public breast exposure always implies sexual activity. No woman, in other words, would go top free unless she were asking to be assaulted. She couldn't possibly take her top off because it was a hot day; or she was breastfeeding her child, was more comfortable swimming that way, wanted to gain confidence, or - was protesting men's authority over her body. Most Nth American films in the 20th century link nudity with sex, further reinforcing the brainwashing of society that public nudity means sex. While male nudity in films is quite unusual still , reasons to censor men's genitals include homophobia. Male nudity beyond the locker room may be a threat to many men, leading to doubts about their sexuality and control. Another is that men's body image may suffer if they think women are comparing their genitals with another man's. A third is that the power structure inherent in looking is upset: the roles of men and women may be reversed through male nudity, leading through a different route to men's vulnerability and loss of a privileged position. Sex is a tough subject for most people to discuss. It connects through intense emotions to privacy and security, intimacy and bonding; and therefore entails much vulnerability, and risk of violation of personal boundaries, breakdown of relationships, and loss of self-respect and will. To help reduce these dangers, we wear clothes that hide the parts of our bodies our culture deems sexual at the end of the 20th century. But in doing this, the paradoxical result is that for many, others are viewed in sexual terms rather than as humans as occurs in situations where social nudism exists such as in nudist camps.
The essential problem, the art historian Paul LeValley pointed out, is confusion between fundamentalism and religion, between religion and morality, between morality and sex, and between sex and nudity.
Contrary to some people's assumptions, nudism isn't exhibitionism and voyeurism gone mad. Paradoxically, nudist beaches and resorts seem to be mostly safer than others. When clothes come off, other barriers are raised. Codes of conduct are in place not to gawk or harass; indeed to treat people at least as well as when they're clothed. Curiously, the absence of sexual expression, such as flirting and teasing, makes nudist locations more conservative than many other places. Women have reported feeling more respected in nudist environments than anywhere else in public. They've expressed joy at being naked and not objectified, threatened, or demeaned. To understand women's bodies, we must get as far away as possible from the peculiar notion that worthy women are all about 22.
Kenneth Clark's 1956 treatise pointing out the difference between the reality of nakedness and the artistic rendition and transformation into the "nude":
"To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word 'nude,' on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed."
To look at the naked body of a stranger is both privileged and peculiar. There is a strange dichotomy that can occur when a naked life model who is completely comfortable being observed by a dozen life painters may suddenly become uncomfortable if she becomes aware of a person seeing her who is not involved in the context but who becomes a peeper - herein lies the difference between the artist or photographer as a privileged observer rendering a nude and the others who are unauthorised voyeurs causing embarrassment due to their context that she is naked not nude.
The unspoken expectation is that art students observe the naked body scientifically and objectively, without eroticism or other feelings. To suppress the erotic and to maintain control and propriety in this unusual situation, the nude and the naked have been separated. Aesthetic distance is a device used to convince us that unclothed bodies, used in the studio, are neither sexual, social, nor political; they are exempt from common human behavior.
The bareness of the naked body can sum up everything to which we aspire and everything we most fear. The body is the source of our deepest pleasures and traumas; our experience of the world is set by the way we experience our bodies.