There are an awful lot of naked bodies in Western art.
And they are often causing trouble, even now.
Whether it's demonstrating against sexual violence...
We're here to stop rape! We're here to stop rape!
...or a case of concealment to preserve diplomatic relations...
Boxed up so as not to offend,
ancient nude statues in Rome's Capitoline Museum
were covered up during a visit by Iran's president.
...or simply being taken down...
An art gallery in Manchester
has removed a Victorian painting of naked, adolescent girls.
...the nude stands on some of the deepest fault lines running
through society now,
speaking directly to issues of men and women,
gender and sex.
Actually, that's nothing new.
For centuries, naked bodies, especially female ones,
have been wrapped in high-minded talk of
beauty and the ennobling effects of art.
But I don't think you can talk about the nude
unless you also talk about male desire.
In this, the first of a pair of programmes on the naked
body in Western art, I'll be looking at how, for so long,
men got away with it!
Just in this gallery, there's loads of female breasts,
just a particular concatenation of them here.
And we'll be looking at how women artists have tried to tackle
this tradition head on.
Seeing you from behind, in your stripper shoes,
you look quite vulnerable.
I wasn't really prepared for how powerful this thing
of being a naked woman... is.
Rest assured, I'll also be sizing up
how artists have seen naked men...
...getting a grip on works from the ancient past...
I think that's perfect!
...as well as today.
Oh, blimey.
And I'll be try my hand at a bit
of reconstructive surgery
of some VERY private parts.
Ah!
Don't expect a straightforward history of the nude
in these programmes.
I'm going to be exploring the problems, the anxieties
and the scandals surrounding the image of the naked body,
ever since the ancient Greeks.
I'll be asking quite why Western art
has been so obsessed with nudity.
I hope
that after this, you'll never look at a nude painting or sculpture
in quite the same way again.
I'm starting my deep dive into the history of the nude
in an Aladdin's cave of sculpture.
It's full of replicas from all periods, but the one I'm here to see
goes back to an ancient Greek city on the coast of the Mediterranean,
and I've been thinking and talking about her for almost 50 years.
It may not stand out now,
but actually, it has been one of the most contentious
nudes in Western art.
The statue of the goddess Aphrodite, if we're talking Greek,
or Venus to the Romans.
We rather coyly tend to call her the Goddess of Love,
but I think Goddess of Sex would be a better title.
This one goes back 2,500 years
to a sculpture by the Greek artist Praxiteles,
and that sculpture is particularly famous
because it's supposed to be the very first sculpture,
full-size, of a naked woman in the Greek world
and probably in the West.
She wasn't an instant success.
The town she was first offered to said "no, thanks".
She's now known as the Aphrodite of Knidos
after the city who said yes.
A canny move, as she soon became a tourist attraction and was riffed
on by sculptors over and over again.
The original is long gone, but reconstructions, including
pristine versions of how it once might have looked,
are still in demand.
The big point, though, is quite how controversial it was.
In the 4th century BC, this was shockingly new.
It was close to unacceptable.
But there are signs that Praxiteles has been pretty careful
about how he presents the goddess to us.
She's not blatantly exposing herself.
I think the giveaway is this water pot and this towel -
or perhaps her clothing - that she's holding in her hand.
We have to imagine we've just come across her by chance
as she's getting ready for or finishing her bath,
and she modestly covers herself up.
Praxiteles is giving us a kind of alibi
for looking at the naked deity.
The first large-scale representation of the naked female form
amounted to a revolution in art.
Frustratingly, we have no idea of why it happened when it did.
But we do know that the many sculptors who followed and imitated
Praxiteles in the classical world, all of the men, I'm sure,
adopted similar pretexts for displaying the woman
or goddess as both demure and naked,
giving every viewer an excuse for gawping at her.
When centuries later,
male art-lovers from the Renaissance onwards
praised the achievements of the ancients,
they were captivated by these coy Venuses.
But not everyone was always entirely seduced by her charms.
You can see this very clearly
with another ancient statue, now known
as the Venus de Medici, after the family who once owned her,
and a highlight of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
For centuries, she's resided in the room known as the Tribuna,
where the most special masterpieces were displayed.
Visitors now are not allowed beyond the door,
but I've been given permission to pad about in my socks.
She's pretty clearly a version of
or descended from
that first female nude by Praxiteles.
It's true that she doesn't have her bathing equipment -
she's got a little dolphin here instead - but she is covering
herself up, modestly, as if she's been surprised.
Although some cynics say that she's actually pointing
to the bits that matter.
Now, she called forth the most extravagant praise from visitors,
both male and female, in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Travellers wrote in their diaries about how many times
they'd visited her
or how long they had spent looking at her,
and others scrutinised her bodily parts
as if she was almost like a race horse.
The art historian Johann Winckelmann looked at her navel, said
it was really a bit deep.
Others thought her ankles a bit thick.
But scratch the surface, and you find certain anxieties.
In particular, they have a sense that those expressions
of great, erotic desire for this statue
might somehow be undermining their elite
art appreciation.
It's almost as if they felt they were being dragged down by her,
to the base level of the common herd.
No wonder that some of them called her
a dangerous goddess.
And dangerous these female nudes certainly were.
Praxiteles's first version set the tone.
It was even said that one young man made love to her marble form,
then went mad and threw himself off a cliff.
In fact, throughout history, desire has shaped the way we see
and respond to the nude.
You can't really escape it.
One important twist on this came in Renaissance Italy,
with the creation of what is now another of the greatest hits
of the Uffizi,
a painting by Titian,
Venice's most celebrated 16th-century artist.
It's called the Venus of Urbino,
after its first known owner, the Duke of Urbino.
Though there's no evidence that either he or Titian actually
gave her the title, Venus.
In contrast to those ancient statues, this lady looks
like she's definitely been expecting us,
and though her pose is familiar now,
this is one of the very first reclining nudes in Western art.
But there's more to her than that.
In a way, she looks a bit like a classical Greek nude
turned on her side.
In which case, that hand is really in a gesture of modesty.
But quite a lot of people have looked at this painting
and seen it as a bit less innocent than that.
They've wondered if she wasn't actually playing with herself.
Some critics have seen this as a painting
celebrating a marriage,
which would make the naked woman an idealised version
of the bride.
But, in that case,
isn't the hand still a problem?
Well, it isn't,
if it reflects popular 16th-century scientific views
about fertility,
which claimed that female orgasm aided conception
and so, the production of children.
But, for me, it's hard to forget that this is a naked woman
painted by a male painter for a male buyer
or commissioner.
You have to imagine him standing here, meeting her gaze,
probably titillated by whatever the hand is doing.
It's hard, really, not to see this painting, like so many other
similar European nudes,
as one of a passive, naked woman
being the object of an erotic male gaze.
But the idea of paintings like this being the expression
of a male viewer's fantasy raises another problem.
Where does it leave a female artist
or female viewer, like me?
Let me just say that I enjoy this painting
in a slightly subversive way.
In MY fantasies,
I'm with this naked lady,
and we're both giggling
at those blokes who are leering at us.
There is, though, an extra layer of intriguing complexity here.
If it was male desire that fashioned the female nude,
there have always been male artists
who recognised and satirised exactly that.
In the 1770s,
one work by a very shrewd German painter nailed it better
than anyone before or since.
Never mind its risky theme,
today, it's held at the heart of the British establishment,
in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
But the scene it captures is back in Italy,
in the Tribuna Of The Uffizi.
This is one of the cleverest and funniest paintings ever painted
about what it is to look at art.
It's by Johann Zoffany
and he's sexed the Tribuna up a bit.
He's introduced a crowd,
mostly of visiting Brits.
As one later writer said, "A flock of travelling boys."
Now, one of my favourite scenes is this group here.
There's a young milord carefully drawing
this erotic sculpture here.
This lad is looking over his shoulder
to see what he's doing.
Behind him, a slightly older bloke
seems to me to be rather enjoying rubbing himself
up against the lad's bottom.
But also, there's a very strong sense that sexual desire
and sexual proclivity is guiding their viewing.
Um, if you take this figure here, Thomas Patch -
now, he was very well-known
to be addicted to improper practices,
that's to say, he was gay.
Now, he's holding the Venus of Urbino,
but he's not looking at her.
In fact, he's pointing to the hunk of male flesh
in the wrestlers towards the back.
And if you go to the crowd of paid-up heterosexuals
around the Venus de Medici,
you'll find that one is examining her
really closely with a magnifying glass,
and this group here are looking straight up her bum.
Now, it can be no coincidence, I think,
that although women were perfectly allowed to go into the Tribuna,
Zoffany has painted only male viewers here.
It's as if he's trying to give us, quite literally,
an image of the male gaze.
Zoffany saw right through it,
that the art establishment always tries to defend itself
from accusations of smuttiness.
Around now, English critics began to distinguish
between the naked and the nude, like they still do,
applying "nude" to the body in painting and sculpture,
elevating it above the lewd world of the naked -
that's you and me without our clothes on.
But we come back again to women.
Where does all this leave a woman who is not a model,
but an artist herself?
That was a predicament faced
by a rare professional female Italian painter
in the 17th century.
Burghley House in Lincolnshire
is home to a lavish painting collection,
amassed over the centuries
by several art-loving and rich earls of Exeter,
including one work that encapsulates the dilemma I'm talking about.
Of all the painted flesh in this house,
and there is quite a lot of it,
this painting, for me, stands out.
It's one of the favourite biblical scenes of the 16th and 17th century.
It's Susanna And The Elders.
The story is that she is a virtuous married lady
who has gone into her private garden to have a bath.
And she thinks she's alone,
but actually, these two creepy men
have come in to spy on her and they insist that she has sex with them.
Now, she resolutely refuses,
even when they utter the most awful threats.
And it ends up as a story of virtue triumphant,
sexual virtue triumphant.
But what's particularly interesting about this painting
is that it's painted by a woman -
in fact, by a woman who herself had been raped,
Artemisia Gentileschi.
When she was just 17,
she was assaulted by her own painting tutor
and her father's friend.
Now, that background really adds something to this painting.
It is a painting by someone
who has been on the receiving end of sexual violence.
Susanna herself looks terrified.
She's not just modestly covering herself up.
She's clutching herself.
And the two men are really, really menacing.
These horrible noses they have.
And what, for me, is striking
is you can't see their eyes,
because actually they're leering her.
I think I challenge anyone not to see
that we're being asked to face here what sexual violence feels like
from the point of view of its victim.
But there are always different ways of seeing.
Whatever Gentileschi intended,
this ended up in one of his lordship's bedrooms,
and I doubt anyone there
saw it as an advert for sexual restraint.
And maybe, however important it is,
we're oversimplifying things
if we focus only on Gentileschi's assault.
Gentileschi did at least three versions of Susanna And The Elders -
one before she'd been raped,
this one just over ten years later, and another later still.
She was a painter working on the commercial art market.
She wanted to sell her stuff.
She wasn't in the business of creating a visual diary
of her own personal trauma.
Now, I can't help but see her rape in this figure,
but I do wonder if that perhaps says more about me than about her.
Throughout her successful career,
Gentileschi put strong women centre frame.
It was no doubt an ideological choice,
but it was a practical one, too.
For centuries, male art students
were trained in drawing naked models,
but women students were not allowed to draw naked men.
One worry among many was the terrible thought
that under all that female scrutiny,
a male model might get an erection.
Not so now.
Beyond art schools, life drawing today
is even enjoyed by hen parties.
Would you like a beret?
Have a beret. It'll suit your outfit.
Oh, blimey.
And one kindly let me join in.
I'm just going to start by introducing our model.
This is Julian.
A rousing reception.
So, you're going to draw Julian using just geometrical shapes.
Just to make it fun, OK? So, start.
He's got really good bum cheeks.
There's a perfect crescent there, isn't it?
Do we get a rubber?
Yes, we get a rubber. Good.
His genitals on this ought to be here.
But, it's under...
Yes. They're under his arm.
Oh, blimey.
Thank you ever so much for letting us gate-crash your hen party.
I've never done anything like this before,
but this kind of arrangement of, you know,
a group of 12 of us women drawing a naked man
is something that would have been unthinkable.
Certainly in the 18th century,
you get, in many places, not everywhere,
a complete ban on women being allowed
to draw nude models in art schools.
And you get these wonderful accounts
of, you know, how women are no good at drawing the human body.
Well, of course, they're no good at drawing the human body,
cos no-one's ever let them try.
Today, the image of the full-frontal naked man
can seem more challenging than a naked woman.
For whatever reason,
and I'm tempted to say it's about male insecurity,
it's male genitals that cross the line
of what's allowed to be seen.
That wasn't always so.
The history of our male nude, like the female,
starts in ancient Greece,
but it begins several hundred years earlier.
And unlike the women,
the men originally don't appear to have been controversial at all.
And they were everywhere.
Oh, it goes really well.
God, it's brilliant.
The Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University
is an ideal place to explore just what they meant.
And as I'm a member of staff,
they've let me take a few liberties moving things around.
We're nearly there. Right.
I think that's perfect. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you.
I wanted to put these two together
to show you rather different versions of the Greek male nude.
This one's the earlier one.
He's from the middle of the sixth century BC.
This guy is about 100 years later,
the middle of the fifth century BC.
And, actually, this is a later copy.
Now, both of them in their different ways are highly idealising.
Greek men didn't all look like this.
And indeed, this guy,
his musculature is actually physically impossible.
What these are are images
of a kind of perfect version of Greek masculinity.
In that context, it's quite interesting
that the genitals are noticeably small.
It might be idealising,
but idealising in Greek terms didn't mean a big penis.
But what's really important is that,
unlike their female counterparts,
these guys don't need a defence to be shown naked.
This is totally in-your-face, Greek male nudity.
And then the question is,
given that we find these in their thousands all over the Greek world,
what does all that acreage of Greek naked male flesh,
what does it all actually mean?
Firstly, don't assume that there was a culture of working out,
or that the gymnasia of Ancient Greece
were packed with men like this.
What we're really dealing with here
is an idea of Greek male citizenship
seen both in terms of bodily perfection,
but also moral and political virtue.
Now, we get a pointer to that in a common Greek phrase
used to describe or compliment the elite male.
You'd say that he was kalos kai agathos,
that he was beautiful and good.
Good in the sense of moral virtue,
but also political responsibility.
Now, what these sculptures are doing
is they're making that idea of the kalos kai agathos visible.
They're bringing us face-to-face with the combination
of the perfect citizen as bodily beautiful
and morally, and politically beautiful.
The ancient Greeks' relationship with the male form
was very much a product of their own culture,
but their sculptures hugely influenced
later male nudes from the Renaissance on.
One of the most popular now, come sun or rain,
was made in Florence in the early-16th century.
It was here that a pushy 29-year-old
sculpted a young giant killer from the Old Testament
as he'd never been seen before.
Today, it's hard to imagine,
but when it was made, this statue carried a dangerous charge.
There's never been a more showy
or bravura David than Michelangelo's.
What we're looking at here is actually a copy of the original,
but this one stands in exactly the spot where Michelangelo's stood
for almost 400 years after it was first put here in 1504.
This was the first colossal figure, naked or clothed,
to be made since the age of the Romans.
He's also very clearly in dialogue
with the nudes of classical antiquity.
In a way, he's recreating the connection
between the ideal male nude and the ideal male citizen
in opposition to tyranny.
But times have changed since the days of the ancients.
And now the male nude was a much-rarer sight.
The influence of Christianity had quite a lot to do with that.
And what's certain is that some viewers
were not at all happy about David's colossal genitalia.
The first day it was put up, for example, it was stoned.
And within a few weeks of it being here,
he'd had a modesty belt fitted.
A little chain of brass with 28 gilt bronze leaves
hanging from it to cover up his genitals.
And for most of his history,
cover-up was the order of the day.
First, that elegant and, no doubt, rather nickable belt,
and later, a single large fig leaf.
The fig leaf was for centuries, and occasionally still is,
the method of choice for concealing the genitals of men,
and sometimes women, in sculptures and paintings.
That goes back to, or finds an excuse in, religion,
specifically the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve.
They had been living in the Garden of Eden
in a state of innocent and naked purity
until, that is, they tasted the fruit
that is the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.
And at that point, they became aware and ashamed of their nakedness.
So they picked some fig leaves,
and sewed them together into little aprons.
Artists tended to simplify a bit, like Durer does here,
and instead of a whole apron of fig leaves,
they'd use just one big one,
or something pretty similar.
The relationship between Christianity and sex
has never been simple.
But in short, at various times and places,
depending on how those in charge interpreted the scriptures,
the church has made sexual desire a sin.
And the fig leaf, which, despite its reputation,
was never just a Victorian thing,
was used to hide what shouldn't be seen
from most of us, who shouldn't see.
Fig leaves now seem a quaint relic of past prudery.
And they've largely been stripped away.
That's exactly what's been happening in the Republic of Ireland
at Cork's Crawford Art Gallery.
Under the knife is a set of plaster casts originally taken,
we think, with their genitals intact,
from classical sculptures in Rome.
Given to Cork in the early 19th century,
it's thought they proved too much for the local guardians of morality,
who demanded fig leaves for the protection of the people.
OK, so, I'm going to start gingerly chiselling away,
delicately chiselling away the plaster
attaching the fig leaf to the sculpture.
Looks like a kind of a version of dentistry, really.
A rather brutal dentist.
I'm not going to go to your dentist, Mary.
Can I have a go? Sure.
Of course. How am I going to do this?
Now...
God, this is quite exciting.
I shall be putting this on my CV, you know?
You see, my hand is taut with the nerves of it all.
I think I'm going to give it back to you.
Very good. OK. Thank you. Thank you.
I'm going to try and see how firmly that's attached now.
Oh, gosh. Is this the moment, then?
It could be.
So, here we go.
Are you ready, Mary? I am ready.
It's coming.
Now...
Ah. Oh, that's relatively intact.
Yes, I mean, he's still got his balls. He does.
But something has happened to his penis here.
I reckon so.
A bit of limited castration gone on, I think.
There's something really ironic
about these things that were sort of meant to stop you seeing things,
but what it's doing is saying,
"Look at what you can't see. Look at what you can't see."
Very counterproductive. I think so.
Fig leaves and their like were mechanisms of control,
an attempt to police who could see what.
But it was never that simple.
Artists have often painted subjects who flaunt their virtue,
while at the same time inciting illicit,
or at least naughty, thoughts.
At Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, there's a particularly
provocative example.
A painting of Saint Sebastian tortured by an arrow.
For centuries, the fear was that images like this
would drive women wild.
There's a nice story from a church in 16th century Rome,
where they have their own version of Saint Sebastian,
by Fra Bartolomeo.
And there, the priests reported that women were turning up
at confessional to fess up to sinning at the very sight of it.
Now, whatever "sinning" is a euphemism for -
and I expect we can all guess -
what's surprising for us about that story is that it does
focus on women.
Because for the last century or so, Sebastian has very much been
a gay male icon.
Saint Sebastian is not the first gay nude in Western art.
There was a strongly homoerotic side to classical Athenian culture.
And you only have to look at, say, Donatello's David to be struck
by the sensuality of the male body.
But Sebastian was one of the first - if not THE first -
modern male nude who was repeatedly eroticised.
How this came about isn't entirely clear.
I guess it's got something to do with the connection you could draw
between this soft, sensual, pierced male body,
and that distinctive Victorian combination of decadence,
sadomasochism, and the love of men for men.
And there was also the obvious connection between the persecution
of the Christians and the persecution of homosexuals.
And even now, the image of the naked body of this saint
still holds huge cultural power.
In the hands of more recent artists, the image of Sebastian has often
explicitly occupied a blurry space where art meets erotica.
But it's not just a problem with Sebastian.
That boundary has always been debated.
Where does art end, and pornography begin?
In Paris's Musee d'Orsay,
one work in particular challenges that boundary.
Finished in 1866 by the radical painter Gustave Courbet,
it's still so edgy that, almost 150 years later, a French teacher
had his account terminated when he posted it on Facebook.
And it's easy to see why the social media platform got its, well,
no-knickers in such a twist.
This is a full-on picture of a woman's genitalia and bushy
pubic hair in an almost-hyperrealistic style.
It's pretty in-your-face - and made more so by the fact that
Courbet has cut-off her legs, her arms, and her head.
This is woman as body, not woman as person.
Now, for 100 years or so, it was owned by a series of private
male collectors, including, towards the end, by Jacques Lacan,
the French psychoanalyst, who wrote a good deal about sexual desire.
What's even more interesting, though, are all the little tactics
that are in play to keep this picture on the right side of the
fuzzy boundary that separates art from porn.
Its place in a major art gallery is obviously one of those.
But so, too, is its title - The Origin Of The World.
Now, we don't know exactly when it got that title,
and it wasn't necessarily given by Courbet, but just think
how differently we'd look at it if it was called,
well, Jeannette's Pussy.
Meanwhile, one critic has called it the "Mona Lisa of vaginas" -
apparently unaware that this lady's vagina is well-hidden.
And the museum's own website says that it is Courbet's virtuosity and
his delicate amber colour scheme,
that means this escapes the classification of pornography.
To me, this skews things rather.
What I think this painting is doing is exposing so many other
of those European nudes for exactly what they are -
they're this, but in disguise.
It's an oversimplification to say that the point of a nude
is to incite male passion.
But the idea that a work of art could be an object of desire
goes back to the origin of the Western nude itself.
Remember that poor lad who made love to Praxiteles'
very first nude statue?
The ancient tale of Pygmalion takes it a stage further.
It's been a popular subject for many artists, but the 19th-century
Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones spins it out
over four separate paintings.
In the first one, you're seeing this rather broody artist lost in
his own thoughts, certainly not taking any notice of the real women
outside his door, or the sculpted women in his studio.
In the second painting, he's in the act of sculpting a nude
figure in marble.
But you can tell from the look on his face that he's beginning
to fall in love with her.
In the next painting, Pygmalion prays to the goddess Venus to come
and to make his statue into a real human woman.
And that's exactly what she's doing.
And you can see the difference in colour from the grey marble here,
to the fleshy tones here.
And in the last painting, the boy does get the girl.
She's down off her pedestal, and he is holding her hands.
Basically, it's a happy ending.
Now, there've been all kinds of ways of interpreting this story.
For some, it is a celebration of the absolute triumph of art
and artistic creativity.
Others see it as if, somehow, the only thing that Pygmalion can
ever love is an object of his own creation.
This is, kind of, ultimately narcissism.
For me, it takes the idea of the male gaze one step further.
It's not just that Pygmalion is looking, desiring the woman.
Here, Pygmalion has created - he has made her.
She only exists because of him.
And there's a joke that goes,
"This is not manufacture that we're seeing here.
"It's woman-ufacture."
I'm torn here.
In a way, I do find myself seduced by these paintings,
but at the same time, I'm also put off
by what I think they're saying about women.
There's no easy answer.
That is certainly what Manchester Art Gallery discovered in the case
of one of its most popular works.
A 19th-century painting based on a Greek myth in which a beautiful man
is lured to his death by supposedly predatory water nymphs.
The Manchester Art Gallery has made more headlines than normal today
by taking down a Victorian painting which featured several
naked young women.
The response on social media and in the gallery has been divided.
Some critics have accused the gallery of jumping onto the
bandwagon of political correctness.
The painting in question is Hylas And The Nymphs
by JW Waterhouse.
Its removal is part of a new art project by the artist Sonia Boyce.
The takedown was part of a night of disruptive interventions
devised by Boyce in response to the gallery's 19th-century collection
and the views of people who worked alongside it.
Back from its stay in the storerooms -
never meant to be permanent -
Hylas And The Nymphs is again on display.
And I met with Boyce herself and curator Hannah Williamson
to ask how its removal created such a furore.
Why pick on this painting in particular?
Well, what happened - I was coming up over a period of a year,
and each time I came to have a discussion with members of staff,
volunteers, and we'd walk through the various galleries,
and we would always end up here in front of this painting.
And we kept returning to this painting as being kind of symbolic
of some problems.
Symbolic, because... I mean, they're not actually nude,
these girls, they're topless.
They're topless.
I think it's to do with the age of the females.
I think that has been the sticking block, really,
in that... They're girls, aren't they? They're girls.
And because there are so many breasts in view,
and that they're of a very particular type.
And it kind of just says to me,
the female breasts are taken for granted.
And... I mean, there's lots of them.
Just in this gallery, there's loads of female breasts.
There's just, you know, a particular concatenation of them here.
The questions it was raising in my mind were...
...why are we giving people the impression that this is a space
where it's normal for breasts to be out?
And have we really thought that through?
If the aim was to provoke debate, then your intervention was...
...a fantastic success, wasn't it?
When the painting came down, the public were encouraged to give
their reactions on Post-it notes.
And feelings ran very high.
I think there's some good ones here. There are some good ones.
"Feminism gone mad." "I'm ashamed to be a feminist."
"Absolutely insane."
Yeah. There were so many, we couldn't get them all out at once,
so the others are in here.
Some of them are, you know, the usual kind of -
"Hitler dictated what art was suitable!
"Are going to burn books next?"
No. No, we're not.
Here, you have a comment saying,
"Waterhouse is my favourite artist - not to be politicised!"
I mean, it goes back to this question that I've had about
whether one steps out of everydayness when one walks
into a museum.
So, you know, how often would one see naked bodies,
except for coming into a gallery?
There really is a strange disconnect in the West between the way
we've treated the naked body in real life, and the way we've often
venerated it as artwork.
Of course, there are thousands of wonderful representations
of the unclothed body in other cultures all over the world.
But they don't play quite the same strange, almost fetishized role
as the Western nude.
In the Horniman Museum in London,
there are a number of works that help us get this into perspective.
And I was joined at a conservation room here by Gus Casely-Hayford,
an expert in African art.
We are looking at one of the finest examples of a southern Nigerian,
a Yoruba Epa headdress... and it's glorious.
At its centre is this naked woman who's holding, in one hand,
some kola nuts, and in the other, a cockerel.
And this was actually worn on somebody's head?
Yeah - it could be 120 pounds.
And then, it would be danced... as well.
And so, you could imagine this coming out of a forest
on a festival day, so that this would appear as a kind of magical,
mystical figure - with this right at its apex.
So, why is she naked?
Well, it's not about her nudity.
So, she has a child on her back.
And so, her having her breasts bare -
that is about her being the mother
of a community, the centre of a community.
So, if one looks at the figures that surround,
they are men and women, and they are carrying out all of the functions
that make this community work.
So, this is part of a societal ritual, not a kind of male gaze?
Oh, absolutely! It's not sexual. It's not prurient.
This is about, absolutely, a celebration of community
through the female form.
But when Western artists come across objects like this... Yes.
...in the beginning of the 20th century, they really transform it
into something else.
I mean, the classic example of that has got to be Picasso's
Demoiselles d'Avignon. Absolutely!
And you can't get a more important single image,
in terms of the history of modernism.
But the way in which it draws from African art, the way in which it
casts women are deeply problematic.
Because he turns some of these forms, which are non-sexualised,
into the image of the highly-sexualised prostitutes.
They're sexualised almost in a predatory way.
They're fairly frightening figures.
It's hard to imagine a kind of representation that is further in
its significance from these objects themselves. Exactly.
Which are all about community, about continuity.
And they're not about the nude. No, exactly.
The naked human has taken different forms in cultures across the world.
And there are all sorts of rewarding and complex stories
to be told about them.
But what they also do is expose the bottom line
of so many Western nudes.
They show up their insistent sexuality and a very elite
male way of looking.
Recently, we've seen women push back,
and female artists directly engage with this legacy
in all sorts of ways.
From swapping the reclining female for the reclining male...
...to painting a naked woman as she might see herself.
But for my money, one of the most arresting attempts -
and one which explores the power of the woman as object -
has been Jemima Stehli's.
Throughout her career, Stehli has featured in her work
her own naked body.
But it was in 2000 that she made the piece she's probably now
best known for.
She invited a selection of men in the art world whom she already knew
to watch her taking her clothes off.
It was all photographed -
but only when the men chose to activate the camera.
It is interesting how the poses of the men are so very different.
That... the guy at the top - he's altering his position,
he's kind of engaging with you.
But the middleman... I mean, to me, looks terrified.
This is a curator, Matthew Higgs.
And I feel like he decided on a way of managing this situation.
And I thought that was kind of interesting, that he -
in relation to the others, who respond and move around as if
they're feeling slightly uncomfortable -
he's chosen clearly beforehand not to do that.
But in the end, it kind of looks more awkward.
But they're doing different things, as well.
Like Adrian Searle - he's an artist, you know, first of all.
And I think he took the most interesting shots,
but then, he was really mortified afterwards when he had this bit
of his leg showing above the sock!
So, he's got a naked woman in front of him, and he's worried about
showing a little bit of leg? Yeah.
I mean, it seems to me, in some of these pictures, seeing you
from behind in your stripper shoes, you look quite vulnerable.
And you get that feeling that the woman who's depicted naked
doesn't have the power - except these are your photographs,
even if they're taken by those guys.
I mean, the point is, to me, is that nobody is in control,
so that the woman can be powerful and sexual, and objectify herself...
...and still be interesting, intellectual, all the other things
that she also wants to be.
I was at art school in the '80s, and that was a time when the debate
around feminism was very black-and-white.
And I always felt like I was a feminist, but I really wasn't
happy with that simplification.
And especially, also, the idea of demonising men, for instance.
What did they say afterwards?
I think after each time...
...both me and the...whoever it was just wanted to say "bye" and go.
I mean, there's obviously big, serious issues here.
But, you know, I'm also tempted to say, can we take this playfully?
It's just, you know...
I think when I first thought of it, I woke up in the morning,
I was like, you know, I was kind of like, "Mm, interesting."
And I think also, that's one of the reasons why it's had some quite
negative responses as well, because it's playing those kind of games.
What did people object to?
Well, one thing that was often asked was,
"Would you do it if you didn't have a body like this?"
And that was sort of an impossible question to answer,
because I think...
...probably I made the work because of having a body that fitted in
with a, kind of, desirous shape, and feeling like,
"How could I be myself as a woman the way I am,
"and be taken seriously?"
When, 2,500 years ago, the sculptor Praxiteles
made that first naked goddess, he could never have known
that he was bequeathing to the West a really very weird tradition
that has been enjoyed, manipulated, debated, and deplored ever since.
And giving it the title "art" helps us to enjoy it,
and sometimes obscures what's driving it.
A cover-up, you might say.
The point is not really, though, about how much flesh is revealed,
or which bits of it.
It's not just about prudery or permissiveness.
For me, the all-important questions are how we look at the nude,
who looks at it, and why?
And then, you can't escape other questions about sex, gender,
and the power of desire.
And those put all of us on the spot.
I, for one, can never be quite sure whether I want to take that painting
of Hylas And The Nymphs down or put it back up again,
whether I'm with those guys peering up the statue's bum,
or whether it's my bum they're peering up.
And it's those difficult questions about oneself
that are the real shock of the nude.
Next time - I go beyond the body beautiful,
looking at the vast range of naked bodies in Western art
that often go under our radar...
...revealing a great deal more than you might have seen before...
...and that includes of myself.
This is Body Worlds in central London.
A display of corpses skinned and preserved,
then posed to show the inner workings of the human body.
You might not call it "art," but these figures give a sense
of what I'll be doing over the next hour.
I'm going to be peeling back the skin to find a glimpse of some
deeper truths about being human,
and some uncomfortable ones.
Just occasionally, I shall be finding body bits in some
frankly surprising places.
I have to warn you - it's not always a pretty sight.
When we talk of the tradition of the nude in Western art,
we often think of images of the young, perfect,
and conventionally desirable.
But I'm interested in the long history of naked bodies
that overturn that idea.
Nudes that try and fathom some of the most difficult but
fundamental issues about who we are.
Nudes that challenge us to confront mortality.
To ask, "Who's been left out?"
We still don't see lots of images around the black male body
by black queer artists.
I actually don't think that there's enough images of
the nude body, period.
To see why the nude matters.
People come up to me at the end of sessions and say to me, you know,
"That's the first time I've seen a trans body outside of porn."
And how we think about being young... and getting older.
I mean, when I say I like that one, I kind of wonder whether, actually,
that face looks like me when I'm 20.
And so, I feel quite conflicted here.
This is, in a sense, an alternative story of the nude,
exploring all sorts of versions of the naked body.
And it's one that's never been more relevant or contentious.
It's about a lot more than mere flesh.
It's about what the nude can tell us about the complexities
of being human.
Ceremony by New Order
A 12-tonne marble statue of a naked and heavily-pregnant disabled artist
has joined Lord Nelson and other military heroes
in London's Trafalgar Square.
Well, over my shoulder, you can see the new artwork,
Alison Lapper Pregnant.
When this statue by the artist Marc Quinn was unveiled in 2005,
it shattered many people's idea of the classical nude,
the so-called ideal human form.
You stare at it slightly aghast. Then you turn away.
Then your eyes are drawn back, creeping back to look at it
with a gruesome fascination.
I love it, and I think the sculpture is brilliant.
And it's so inspired.
So, how had this boundary-breaking work come about?
This is the original work.
I'd originally made some sculptures of disabled people after going round
the Louvre and the British Museum, and looking at everyone
cooing and ahh-ing about the fragmented classical statues.
You know, people look at the Venus de Milo, people saying,
"It's so beautiful."
You know, girls standing in front of it to be almost measured up
next to it, having their photograph taken next to it.
Then I thought, "If someone whose real body was shaped like that
"suddenly appeared in the room, people probably wouldn't know how to
"react to that person."
Because if you look at the tradition of the European nude,
the Western nude, it's... There are all kinds of people who
don't get a look-in. Yeah.
And in fact, when I started to think about the idea of making this series
of work, I looked for images of disabled people in art,
and they're usually pejorative. Yeah.
They're not flattering, they're not treating the person with dignity.
And did people get the sense that there's a... kind of slightly
edgy conversation going on here with the classical nude?
I don't know how many people did, but one of the things I like
is to bring reality into art.
And the one area you could think you'd never bring reality
into is marble nude statuary.
Yeah, it's terribly, terribly contrived.
It's very abstract, really.
It might be subversive, but in some ways, Alison Lapper Pregnant
is still a version of a conventional classical statue.
But other works by Quinn go further,
literally turning the nude inside-out.
Monumentalising embryos in the womb.
What we're seeing here...
Well, it's sort of what we're not meant to see. Yes.
Except now... we do. We do. Scans.
It's almost a nude becoming, isn't it? Yeah.
It's - in a way, it's the ultimate sculpture in the world.
It's a creation of a human being.
And this is what, in some ways, the artist cannot do. Exactly.
You know? I'll never be able to make one as good as that. Yeah.
And when you see early foetuses and you realise that we've all looked
like that, how can anyone say that anyone else looks weird?
So, your job is to remind us... Exactly.
...of our...weirdness? Inherent weirdness.
But it's not only contemporary art that challenges us to reflect on
real, rather than idealised, bodies.
In the classical world, the body bruised and battered was the
inspiration for the exceptional sculpture of this boxer
resting after a fray.
More recently, there's one anguished figure in European culture who's
shaped Western thinking about the body, and who's made it
a lot more complicated.
Someone who's hiding in plain sight in any number of galleries
or Christian places of worship.
It's Jesus Christ.
We probably find him pictured naked or nearly naked more often
than anyone else.
But we don't actually talk about him,
we don't see him as nude.
But I think we really should.
When artists have imagined the naked Jesus, they've done more than simply
illustrate Bible stories.
They've explored some almost impossibly difficult theology about
the human and divine body.
And there's no better place to get the measure of that
than in some prints and drawings now at the British Museum.
I discussed them with former director Neil MacGregor,
starting with a particularly arresting - and for some,
no doubt shocking - one.
This is one of the most extraordinary images.
This is Christ after he's been brought down from the cross,
he's dead.
You can see the wounds on the hands.
So, it's the dead Christ, but his loincloth is gathered in a way
that looks as though he has an erection.
It would be possible for a sceptic -
I mean, I think wrong, but possible - to say, "Oh, well.
"The loincloth's just got a bit gathered-up, a bit tangled".
Some tangle, one would have to say.
You'd have noticed what you'd drawn. I think so. I think so. Yes.
And that's, of course, absolutely the point of this image.
Because it's not just showing that Christ was fully man,
as well as fully God.
It's the fact that this death will generate new life.
It's to assuage the sceptic that I went in and picked this one out...
...where I think you can't deny the stress on the genitalia of Jesus.
Absolutely.
Here, you have the Virgin Mary holding Jesus Christ.
And his grandmother, Saint Anne, is pointing out to us, the viewer,
that this is a boy.
Jesus is both fully God, but fully male -
and that means fully sexually male.
Neil, here you've got two real, real gems for us.
These are two of the most valuable drawings -
not just in the British Museum, but in the world.
They're both by Michelangelo.
And on the left is the study he makes around 1511
for the figure of Adam on the Sistine ceiling.
That moment, when God makes man in his own image,
is the ideal body.
And on the other side, Michelangelo's late drawing
of Christ on the cross with the Virgin Mary and Saint John.
This is made about 40 years later.
And the quality of the drawing is directly matched to the content.
This is the perfect body.
And only Michelangelo, I think, is able to find expression
in the muscles of the abdomen.
Everybody else wants to put it in the hands, in the face.
But the body, for Michelangelo, can carry all that.
Then, look at the later drawing.
Everything about the technique speaks to the fact that this is
a world dissolving. Yeah.
Dissolving in pain, in grief, and in bewildered guilt.
"What did we do? How could we have avoided this?"
So, in a way...
...Christianity is kind of unthinkable without the naked body
at the centre of it?
You can't - you can't have it.
The body - and the suffering body - is right at the heart of Western
thinking for 1,000 years.
And so it is that the tortured form of Jesus has been one of the most
common subjects in Western art.
Painters took up the challenge of interpreting Christ's mystifying
body - both human and divine - in different ways,
in different times, and in different contexts.
In London, around 1800, one group of artists -
driven partly by contemporary scientific inquiry -
were determined to make the body of Jesus as realistic as possible,
and were intent on understanding how the interior could inform the
portrayal of the outside... with disturbing results.
Today, this crucified body at the Royal Academy of Art hangs as one
of a trio of works - all created in the pursuit of authenticity.
What we see here is actually three corpses... that have been skinned,
they've been flayed, and then, they've been cast in plaster
to reveal the structure of the body underneath the surface.
Their backstories are really chilling, actually, particularly
the figure in the crucifixion.
He was a criminal by the name of James Legg,
who was executed in 1801.
And while he was still warm, they cut him down and they nailed
him to a cross so that his body would fall as it naturally would
in a crucifixion.
And the other two are also executed criminals.
They weren't originally intended to be on public display.
They were intended for the training of art students here.
Now, for us, they're very hard, uncomfortably hard to place -
a bit like the bodies in Body Worlds.
They stand rather awkwardly on the boundaries between art,
science, and sadism.
And they're still on the borderline here in the academy.
They're not in the main galleries.
They're displayed in a connecting corridor.
It's as if they're still neither one thing, nor the other.
In Bologna, in Italy, there's another object on that borderline,
which goes out of its way to ape the canon of Western art
with an even more disturbing effect.
The university museum houses a very weird woman -
designed in part to give an 18th-century twist to the famous
female nudes of classical antiquity.
She was known as an "anatomical Venus."
She's one of a series of wax models that were used in anatomy classes
to demonstrate the internal structure of the body,
and how the organs fitted together.
And I think what you have to imagine is that she would be lying on
this bed, looking kind of perfect.
She's got a nice little set of pearls, she's got a rather sleepy,
almost ecstatic expression on her face,
long, brown hair, and actually even pubic hair.
And the instructor would come along and would remove, in a slightly
sadistic way, the breasts and the chest, and the belly to reveal
what was inside.
And interestingly, there's a uterus with a foetus in -
showing us very clearly what the 18th century thought women were for.
Now, seeing her for the first time, I'm struck much more than I thought
I would be by the visceral messiness of the internal organs.
It's kind of hard to put out of my mind the thought that I've come
across a rather nasty crime scene.
Probably our first instinct when we look at this is to see in it a
slightly odd, slightly distasteful, and certainly morbid corner
of 18th-century culture.
But we shouldn't be so sure.
When an artist now like Damien Hirst makes the statue of a man
in which his heart, lungs, and intestines are clearly visible,
or when Marc Quinn makes a head out of blood,
they're not making a model for an anatomy class, that's for sure.
But they are exploring the big question that is posed and,
in a way, answered by this waxwork.
How do we understand the difference between the body that we see
and what lies inside?
Many artists, in exploring what it means to be human,
have honed in on the tension between the body's outer form
and its inner structure.
But one painter in the early-19th century used the image of
the ravaged body to focus on the agonised line
between life and death.
And to suggest that barbarism may always lie beneath what we like
to think of as civilisation.
He was Theodore Gericault, and his vast canvas -
now in the Louvre - was inspired by the true and tragic aftermath
of a shipwreck in 1816,
when the French frigate Medusa ran aground off the West African coast.
The story was that 150 survivors were cast adrift on a makeshift raft
with hardly any supplies.
Only ten lived to be rescued.
What had kept them alive was cannibalism.
It's a moment towards the end of that ordeal that Theodore Gericault
catches in this picture.
You can see the pallid corpses trailing in the water.
They haven't been thrown overboard, because, of course,
they're going to be eaten.
And over on the right-hand side, there's the telltale axe,
which is going to be used to hack the bodies to pieces.
Gericault's pushing at the boundaries of the nude.
These dead bodies are not just dead, they are...
...dead, beginning to decompose, and about to be cannibalised.
People said that if you visited Gericault's studio,
it felt a bit like a morgue, cos he had body parts there to copy.
But there's something else which is really striking, and which was
controversial when this picture was first put on show in 1819.
The figure who sits on top of that pyramid of human bodies,
who's waving to try to catch the attention of a ship who might
rescue them on the horizon, the only figure of hope in this old picture -
that man's black.
It's rare to find naked - or even partially naked -
black bodies starring in Western art before the mid-20th century.
Most white viewers could not or refused to see the common humanity
beneath the black skin.
So, black men and women were usually either dehumanised,
treated as scientific specimens -
like South African Sarah Baartman, also appallingly nicknamed
the Hottentot Venus.
Or they were exoticized, cast as bit players in romantic fantasies
of the decadent East...
...in a style now often called Orientalism.
So, Gericault's choice in 1818 to place a black man heroically
centre-frame was bold.
I went to have my own private seminar with Denise Murrell,
who's researched black models in Western art.
What do we know about the black figure who's waving at the top
of that pyramid of bodies?
Well, we know his name is Joseph.
He may have been born in France, but definitely
of French Caribbean origin.
He was known to be a very interesting personality.
He had a strong interest in music, and he took a very professional
approach to his modelling.
And he is portrayed in a heroic way.
Gericault was known to be an abolitionist.
And he deliberately placed this black figure as the last, best hope
for everybody on that slowly-sinking raft.
What other images does Joseph appear in?
This particular study was commissioned by the great
French portraitist Ingres.
And he was working on a large history painting,
or a biblical scene.
And he actually wrote in his instructions that the Devil
was to be portrayed by a black man.
He chose one of his best students, Chasseriau, to make this study.
Chasseriau was of mixed racial heritage, a descendant from an
enslaved Haitian mother.
And Ingres specified that he was not to be told what the purpose was.
So... He was not to be told that...
...that he was to portray a black man as the Devil.
And so, what comes down to us in history is this
gorgeously-rendered, classicised, non-stereotyped portrayal of a black
male figure by an artist of colour.
Which, at that particular moment in history, was probably unique.
It was many years before more Western artists began to cast nude
black figures in a fashion traditionally associated with
white men and women,
and to put people of colour in the foreground.
So, while, in the 19th century, Edouard Manet famously painted the
high-end prostitute Olympia, attended to by her black maid -
in the 20th, artists swapped the boss for her servant,
and showed the black woman occupying the couch, displaying her sexuality
on her own terms.
Romare Bearden, who was African-American,
is taking this black female figure from the position of servitude
to being the sole focal point of interest.
Not as the servant, but as the nude! Yes, as the nude.
And he is surrounding the black nude not by scenes of a brothel,
but by a patchwork quilt to evoke
the African-American popular culture.
This image is one that you just... you couldn't possibly begin
to understand, unless you put it back into the context
of Manet's Olympia. Oh, absolutely.
It's as if Bearden is saying, "I really like what you do, Manet.
"But I can take it somewhere you never thought of." That's right.
The empowered, nude black body is a relative newcomer in Western art.
But there's another kind of person that's been kept out of the picture.
And that's anyone like me.
When I walk through public parks in Paris, I see sculptures that are
not just different from me, but ones I could never in my wildest
fantasies imagine myself to be like.
In my 20s, I might have regarded this sort of work as a tediously
idealised version of myself and other young women I knew.
But now, in my mid-60s,
the absence of the older woman's body in art seems stark.
When artists throughout history portrayed naked old men,
they sometimes did so with sympathy.
But whenever an old woman revealed any flesh, she was almost always
a figure on which to project deep-rooted prejudice.
The late-19th-century sculptor Auguste Rodin might seem to be
an exception to that.
He's known for his nudes in the prime of life.
But I'm here to see his interpretation
of an elderly female body...
...and to ask, "What's really going on with it?"
Seems to me that this sculpture is OF an old woman,
but not really ABOUT her.
Sure, she's got a decrepit body, she's got sunken breasts
and a saggy belly.
And the only positive bit of it, that very inhabited, old face -
something you can barely see, as it's pointing down.
Well, Rodin did several versions and variations of this figure.
But it's the titles that are often given to those pieces
that so strongly suggest how we should be reading them.
This one is often called
She Who Once Was The Helmet Maker's Beautiful Wife.
It's taken from a 15th-century poem.
But there's also Dried-Up Springs, The Old Courtesan,
or Winter - coming after Spring, Summer, and Autumn.
I think what those titles are telling us is that we should be
looking for the young, attractive, vibrant woman that this
decrepit, old body once was.
We're looking through it to an earlier time,
the time she's lost.
Now, Rodin isn't by any means alone.
That's a common theme in the history of mainstream Western art.
But it does mean that within mainstream tradition,
there's really no space left for a work of art that depicts
an old woman in her own terms.
Some modern artists have embraced this challenge.
But I'm still looking for a naked portrait of an older woman
who looks like I feel.
Hey, Mary. Hi. Great to see you. Hi - and you.
Catherine Goodman is co-founder of the Royal Drawing School,
a recipient of the National Portrait Gallery Portrait Award,
and an expert life-drawer.
And she very kindly agreed to capture me starkers on paper.
I'm not, like, an actual life model.
In making this programme, I felt very strongly that I didn't want
to come over as a elderly academic lady...
...never putting herself in the position of the people
that she's talking about.
But I do feel a bit apprehensive about this.
I think, "Oh, hope I don't look too fat," you know?
It's a terribly kind of... well, adolescent vanity, really. Yeah.
I mean, when you draw other people, do you find that they start out
being very apprehensive?
Some people like the gaze of another person. Yeah.
In a way, it's quite a nice opportunity just be able to
be ourselves for a short while, you know? Yeah.
I'm sure there are going to be some people watching this who are
going to be saying to themselves,
"Did she have to? Couldn't she just have kept her clothes on?"
I'm sure. "You know, that would've been so much better."
You know, whereas I feel quite, sort of, slightly brave about doing this.
Yeah. Yeah. Let's go in.
Shall we go and get this started? Yeah.
I sat for Catherine three times.
And on my final visit, I was just a little nervous
when the camera joined us.
Are you OK there?
I'm... very comfy.
I like the way you always do that with your hand, Mary.
I kind of put it in my mouth? Yeah, yeah.
Nearly finished. Gosh.
Well, I hope you're not going to be too horrified by the drawings.
It's funny, not having seen anything that you've done.
Yeah... exactly. Of me, I mean. Exactly. That's funny.
Because... I've never looked at how somebody else sees me. Yeah.
Which is really what it is, isn't it?
OK. I think that's it.
Is this the moment when I can have a look at it?
Yeah, you can.
Come and have a look. All right.
Oh, wow!
Wow.
Do you - what - I... Bit of a shock?
Well, I just think...
...I thought I'd be a bit horrified by them, and I'm not remotely
horrified by them. Oh, good.
And I think that, you know, the fleshy, over-60s bits... Yeah.
...kind of work fine.
I don't - it's like, I look at myself, and I don't think,
"Oh, God, she should lose a bit of weight," I think, "That's me."
Yeah. Good.
And, you know, to some extent... I feel happy with it. Oh, good.
I actually feel happy! Yeah, yeah.
That first one of you asleep...
...looks very, kind of, strange and vulnerable.
I noticed that I wasn't much looking at you. Mm.
You know, we were chatting quite a lot, but I wasn't looking.
And I thought - when I saw you looking at me, I thought you were
actually trying to work out, you know, how to do my tits, basically.
Hmm.
I'm trying to work out how to make a good drawing, actually.
So, Mary, tell me which one particularly do you relate to best?
I... have to say, I think the one with a beer bottle is the one that I
kind of... most relate to. Most relate to?
I mean... I wonder how much I'm kidding myself, because...
...I mean, when I say I like that one, I kind of wonder whether,
actually, that face looks like me when I'm 20. Hmm.
So, I feel quite conflicted here, because I'm wanting to see
old Beard here.
But I suspect my motives for liking that one so much.
Today, we've become used to the idea that a successful nude -
like any portrait - should give an insight into the inner self.
And in Britain over the last century,
artists from Stanley Spencer to Tracey Emin have done just that...
...bringing to the surface something of the subject's hidden psychology.
One of the earliest artists to infuse the skin with the anxieties
and insecurities of the subconscious was a young Austrian
in the early 20th century...
...working in Vienna around the time of the father of psychoanalysis,
Sigmund Freud.
His name was Egon Schiele.
Schiele has been one of the most tragic victims of our modern
fondness for explaining art as the agony of the artist genius.
And in his case, I guess it's easy to see why that's so.
This self-portrait, for example, shows him slightly desiccated,
truncated in a kind of tortured pose with a fearful face.
And this really does look like pain inscribed in painting.
There's also the sense that he was a genius who was unrecognised
in his time, you know, he was shunned by the art world.
Now, it's true that he didn't go down well everywhere.
And even for my taste, there's a bit too much masturbation around here.
And there are self-portraits by Schiele himself where
he is enthusiastically wanking.
Really more important, I think, is a bigger intellectual argument
that Schiele is trying to make about the naked body,
how it's represented, and what it means.
Schiele painted his own body again and again
in an act of repeated self-reflection.
Almost universally in Schiele's nudes,
the figures are quite isolated.
They're not part of a story, they're not part of a social world.
We are meant to focus on them as body.
And we're not particularly being asked to look at the face.
That's not the giveaway.
It's the nude flesh.
And here, for example, we have to puzzle about that hand,
which actually looks like hand-as-penis.
We don't actually know if Schiele had studied Freud,
but the questions he's raising here are what, in general terms,
we'd now call Freudian.
And they're the kind of questions that artists have raised ever since.
That's to say his project is to make the interior exterior.
In pursuit of psychological truths. Schiele rejected artistic
conventions of beauty and modesty.
Around 50 years later, another artist -
the grandson of Sigmund Freud, in fact - made a similar choice,
pursuing honesty of a different sort.
A near obsessive commitment to revealing the body in
uncompromising, fleshy, and forensic detail.
Lucian Freud scrutinised, in his words, the "human animal."
Famously demanding many months of sittings to complete
a single painting.
But he could put his subjects under other pressures too.
His female nudes may not be conventional illustrations
of the desirable body...
...but his mix of art and sex has long been talked about.
He slept with a number of his models, one of whom has spoken
openly of his predatoriness.
And he had at least 14 children.
Cozette McCreery sat for the artist in 2003 when Freud was 80,
and she was in her mid-30s.
An old friend of one of his daughters, by then she'd known him
for over 20 years.
But she was still not entirely sure what she was letting herself in for.
In your mind, of course, you kind of want to look your best.
So, of course, you know, you're sort of lying there like some sort of
Olympia kind of thing with a very flat stomach.
And he was saying, "No, sit, like, sit how you would normally sit."
And then, the sort of rolls of flesh start.
I always felt very much like he brought me into the process.
On the painting, there's, like, a stabbed pillow,
and there's these cherries that he'd always wanted to paint.
And he actually talked to me about that and said,
"What do you think?"
And what did you feel about it? Did you like it?
Erm... did I...?
That's an interesting question.
When he first started painting my face,
an art critic called Bill Feaver had been in, and he actually remarked,
"He's painted you as pretty as you are."
And it was like Lucian had had an electric shock.
The next day I came for a sitting, I looked at it and I was like,
"What have you done to my mouth?"
And he'd made my mouth very crooked.
I still - I have a slight slope on one eye.
And that had been exaggerated.
And he just went, "I only paint what I see."
And I was like, "Ech, well, I see Sylvester Stallone, so..."
You must've known something about Freud's reputation as well?
Sexual predator, you might say.
I mean, basically... did he try to seduce you?
It, of course, was part of the, sort of, the myth of Lucien.
And definitely, that was in my mind whether or not he -
to quote you - ever, you know, tried to seduce me.
It never... it never came about.
I mean, he was very intense.
And there was definitely this animal magnetism about him.
In a lot of ways, I think he played up on that.
But I realised that, actually, quite a lot of that was to do with
the fact that when he engaged with you, when he looked at you,
there was - he was completely focused on you.
I mean, maybe I'm kidding myself that there wasn't anything sort of
sexual about it.
Yeah, it was quite - it was quite an odd dynamic.
Cozette's is only one account.
And every model has his or her own story.
As I suppose I myself found, modelling is an act of trust.
And for some, it comes with a risk of exploitation.
It's a concern magnified when the naked model is not an adult,
but a child.
This is very much a contemporary anxiety.
In the 19th and early-20th centuries, unclothed boys
enjoying the great outdoors were a popular subject.
And some artists took photographs of semi-clad young girls too.
But today, our own awareness of the sexual abuse of children means
it's hard not to see something disturbing in works of this kind.
When images of naked children present a more complex view of
childhood, the challenges magnify.
In the early-1990s, the American photographer Sally Mann
faced criticism when she exhibited pictures and published a book
showing her three young children naked or semi-clad
around their home in rural Virginia.
This was before the age of the internet -
so also, before the age of anxiety about how images of children
could be spread.
But even at the time, critics denounced some of the works as
"exploitative" and "pornographic."
The collection was hugely controversial, even though only
about a quarter of the photographs showed children with no clothes on.
Most of the album was really a meditation on the visual impact
of kids in different themes.
There were kids wetting the bed, kids with cuts,
kids with spots, children with their elderly relatives.
And you get an insight into the strange texture of the child's body.
I think one of my favourite photographs is a pair of kids' legs
covered in dried-up flour paste, almost making the children's legs
look as if they were the legs of an old person.
I suppose I can see why these naked photographs might have
been shocking, if you took them on their own.
A lot of them - the children seem very knowing.
These aren't kids caught unawares.
They're modelling or posing.
And that puts the viewer in an awkward position.
You know, have we just come across somebody's family album here,
or are we being asked to think of these kids as objects of desire?
And that, of course, is underlined by the fact that in modern culture,
photography is the prime medium of pornography.
But begin - you think, "Well, why shouldn't I enjoy the
"images of children's bodies, and the beauty of children's bodies?"
Mann let her children veto any image they did not want shown.
And as adults, they've never claimed they were exploited.
But not every artist who uses their own child's body for inspiration
does so innocently.
And that forces us to question how we then should treat their work.
Eric Gill was an acclaimed sculptor, typeface designer, and print maker.
His naked version of Ariel from Shakespeare's Tempest stands
above the entrance to the BBC's Broadcasting House.
He was also a child-abuser, raping his two daughters,
Betty and Petra, when they were young teenagers.
And for that reason, some people have argued his art should be
removed from public view.
In 2017, when Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in Sussex,
once home to Gill's artistic community, staged an exhibition
of his work, they included engravings of Petra naked.
And they openly addressed these issues, asking the question,
"Can we separate the biography of an artist from the work they produced?"
The sculptor Cathie Pilkington, who co-curated the show,
thought very, very hard about how to weigh up the abuse she deplored
versus the art she admired.
One of her ideas was to create a set of new works,
responding to a wooden doll Gill had once made for Petra.
And it's a very strange and potent object.
It's quite ugly as a doll.
I think it's recorded that Petra really didn't like the doll.
And if I just turn it round, you can see it's got a very thick neck.
And my immediate response to it was that it looked...
very like a penis, actually.
I think what's most disturbing about this is that, really, the only bit
of detail that you get on it is the genitals. That's right.
When I look at the engravings he did - what should I do, really,
about my knowledge of his biography?
Yeah, I think a lot of people have problems with these images because
of the time that they were made - around the time that Gill
was abusing Petra.
And when he wrote about the abuse, you know, it's as if he is
conducting an experiment.
Like, this, sort of, odd remove that he has, as well.
That's the chilling bit, I think. Yes.
But when we were approaching the show, I was looking at it as
a practitioner, as a sculptor, as a woman, as a mother,
and taking all those things into consideration, but actually saying,
when somebody projects onto this bathing image,
"Look, she's turning away, she couldn't look him in the eye,"
I say, "No, he was really interested in the hair, how the hair falls".
And if there was a face on there, there would be too much information.
He wanted to look formally at the beautiful hair.
Do you think there's anything in there that you'd find unsettling?
No, I really don't.
I really don't.
I... no, I think they're beautiful images.
You could think about Degas, Le Tub, couldn't you,
when you look at this?
And you know, I have a daughter, and I have used her many times
as my model.
Right from when she was born, I've used her in my work and looked
at her and been fascinated by her body, by her growth, by her form.
And that is completely normal and natural for a sculptor.
There are quite a lot of people who would say we simply should not
show any of Gill's work now, that you don't display the work
of a paedophile.
So, we'd take this famous statue of Ariel down from the BBC building.
Yeah, well, where do you begin and end, once you start
having those conversations?
You know, once you start removing Gill's work.
It... there's no way to go, is there?
What could we be left with? Who stands morally pure?
And why should an artist be morally pure for their work to be fantastic?
Gill is an extreme and particularly awful example.
But I think Pilkington is actually bravely facing some of the big
dilemmas about art and morality, and how we judge art from the past.
Recently, the way artists such as Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin
treated some of the women in their lives has
been forcefully criticised.
And by today's standards, Schiele's behaviour around young women
probably crossed a line too.
And though we know that there have always been questions
about artists' morals,
we have very little idea about exactly what most of those great
artists before the 19th century got up to.
There's a long history to these debates, and I'm pretty sure that
anyone who claims to know what they think needs to think again.
Last Living Souls by Gorillaz
There's one more discussion we're right in the middle of
that I think will also impact on the future of the nude.
And it's about gender.
In the last few decades, we've come to understand more clearly the
tension between how someone might appear to the world,
and who they feel themselves to be - man, woman, or both.
But these conversations are not as new as you might think.
As I've often found, the ancients got there first.
Witness this piece of Roman art at the Louvre.
This is one of my favourite pieces of ancient sculpture.
You come up to her from this side, and you see this
gorgeous sleeping woman.
And the temptation to, sort of, touch her is almost irresistible,
and you can't resist just... taking a step round her.
It's one of those pieces where, actually, it turns out,
you only get the point if you get to the other side.
That's why I like it so much.
Because when we get to the other side, there's a surprise.
Now you see...
...both breasts and a penis.
Now, they're not the only figure in the ancient world to do this.
In the centuries after that first female nude Aphrodite
in the fourth century BC, there are a number of these hermaphrodites,
they were called, in sculpture and in paint.
And it's been puzzling to people what they really mean.
Some people think it's a, kind of, rich man's dinner party joke.
You bring your guests round here and they get a surprise, ha-ha.
Er, other people think that there's a, sort of, outing of the
male gaze going on here.
You come up, you see this luscious object.
When you come round here, you find they're a bit more complicated.
But I can't help thinking that there are bigger questions here too,
that 2,000 years ago...
...the ancients are asking what it is that genitalia have to do
with gender identity?
What does it mean to be a man or a woman?
And, in fact, can you be both?
Huarache Lights by Hot Chip
Those questions are still all questions.
As more people identify as neither male nor female,
but non-binary - or instead, reject the gender they were assigned
at birth and transition to a new one.
And in a society moving to embrace a more fluid idea of gender
and sexuality, art has a significant role to play.
Jared, can I ask you how you got into being a trans life model?
Yeah, so, it was a couple of different reasons.
Partly for the money.
That was helpful. OK.
Partly because as an artist myself, I wanted to see what it was like
from the model's experience to be drawn nude in a room
full of clothed artists.
And partly because I wanted to increase the diversity of the models
available at the class.
My first experience, I thought, you know, a lot of people there
didn't necessarily know I was trans.
So, I was kind of expecting, as soon as the robe dropped,
for them to scream or start shouting at me, or start throwing questions
at me, or just - I don't know, I expected big drama,
But really... nothing happened.
You know, maybe some people were a little bit surprised,
but then, they started drawing, and it was fine.
Are you pleased with... the impact it's had?
I - absolutely, yeah.
I've had people come up to me at the end of sessions say to me,
"You know, that's the first time I've seen a trans body
"outside of porn."
You know, I wonder how my attitude towards my transition would've been
if my first experience was, you know, in a big old frame
in an art gallery.
I feel that if art is meant to be a conversation with the world
around us and with society, and with humanity -
if it's not representing the broad range of humanity that we have,
it's, it's...
...it's not only boring, it's a bit lazy.
I agree with Jared.
But I can't help wondering what a more fluid view of gender might mean
for the Western nude.
After all, despite the classical hermaphrodite, it's almost always
relied on a binary idea of male and female.
Kiss My Genders at the Hayward Gallery at London's Southbank Centre
was an exhibition that explored and celebrated
diverse gender identities.
And there, I certainly found plenty of naked flesh.
I love to create images around the black male body that's also very
gentle and intimate and soft.
Because I think that lots of the images that I see around
of the black male body are around fear and threat, aggressiveness.
A lot of the images reference classical art history.
Vaginal Davis is inspired by Hans Holbein,
with the primary colour backdrop.
But you have this figure who's coquettish, but with a kind of
lime-green merkin, which sort of challenges the traditional fig leaf.
It's not so much to cover up, but to show that the idea of covering up
is something quite redundant.
It doesn't really matter what your biological make-up is.
Do you think you can ever look at the traditional nude, with its
very clear apparent certainties about gender in most cases?
Do you think you ever look at it in the same way?
I mean, you have unseated it in a way, haven't you?
For me, I love a lot of... what you'd call "Western art."
And there will never be a clean cut.
No. And there shouldn't be, neither.
So, hence, actually, it's how you constantly steal from
that great history.
I think there's ways that bodies have been, kind of, locked
into something, and I think artists and activists say,
"Well, actually, what other kinds of work can I create?"
The nude is nowhere near dead yet.
If it sometimes makes us feel uncomfortable,
if it still has the power to shock - well, so it should!
Because all those languid Venuses, suffering Jesuses,
private parts, folds of flesh -
they all raise awkward but essential questions about who we are.
The bottom line for me is that after more than 2,000 years,
the nude is still making us confront our own bodies, our own selves,
and many different versions of what it is to be human.
Will it still, in whatever form, be unsettling people
in another 2,000 years?
Of course, I can't know.
But I wouldn't be surprised.