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I'd originally made some sculptures of disabled people after going round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.