“I have never seen so many naked people in my life,” my friend from home told me three days after arriving in Murray Edwards. In fact, even to my sheltered eyes, there is something quite shocking about the sheer volume of nude women on display in the halls of my college’s Women’s Art Collection. As I wearily ascend the stairs to my accommodation after a long, hard day of lab dissection, I am confronted on each floor by a new woman, proudly nude in all her glory.
“There is an innate hypocrisy in our culture’s treatment of nudes”
In truth, across the centuries, artists have had a curious obsession with the nude female form – it is striking how much meaning and symbolism can be found in such a daily reality, and how this varies throughout time periods.
There is an innate hypocrisy in our culture’s treatment of nudes. Some depictions of naked women are elevated to masterpiece status, presented as paragons of good taste, while other pieces, and actual female bodies by extension, are condemned as vulgar and obscene. Few people in the twenty-first century (or in centuries past) would consider Botticelli’s 'The Birth of Venus' titillating or particularly obscene, due to commonality of the painting and its classical context, despite it ironically depicting the goddess of beauty, lust, and fertility.
In Ancient Greece, depictions of both nude men and women were common, though they represented vastly different ideas. Muscular nudes of male warriors were created to emphasise power, dominance and athletic prowess whereas the softer, more flirtatious depictions of nude goddesses symbolised fertility and procreation. Surprisingly, the first known nude depiction of Aphrodite was sculpted by Praxiteles quite late into the Grecian period, and presents her flirtatiously, half covering herself with a cloth – as if caught unawares. This pose emphasises her sexuality, but also her playfulness and flirtatiousness. Crucially, she is depicted with a sense of pride, free from the shame that often accompanies nudity in subsequent eras. The ancient Greek sculptors aimed to capture an ideal of the human body, based on mathematical ratios and myths, attractive but not for titillation – rendering these figures forever young and beautiful, representing national power and pride. This way of depicting nude women has influenced much of Western art.
There were much fewer depictions of female nudity in late antiquity through to the middle ages, due to the rise of Christianity. There were two main, yet wildly different, depictions of female nudity during this time: Eve and the Madonna. Depictions of Eve in the Middle Ages, such as 'Expulsion of the progenitors from Eden' by Masaccio, where her face is contorted into an agonising cry, use her nudity to represent her vulnerability and weakness. Gothic art similarly depicted nude women as sickly and fragile looking – vulnerable and powerless. The exception to this is of course the Madonna, who is depicted as beautiful in the context of feeding Jesus Christ.
Artists have since challenged this unrealistic, mythological view of the female body: as simultaneously sexual and an object of classical beauty. Manet did so by depicting his nude women realistically and within the context of the time, without using classical references and biblical stories to render the nudity acceptable. In his painting 'Olympia', he depicts a young prostitute wearing only a flower in her hair, a black string choker, and clogs, reclining in the same pose as 'Venus of Urbino' by Titian Vecellio (1538). However, Manet’s painting was much more challenging due to its harsh lighting and the direct, proud gaze of the young girl. Manet challenged ideas of morality by transposing the nude figure from a historical to a modern context – elevating a prostitute to the level of a goddess, highlighting the hypocrisy of celebrating nudity as highbrow in certain contexts and condemning it as vulgar in others.
While 'Olympia' was controversial, the most ‘scandalous’ painting of the nineteenth century was Gustav Courbet’s 'L’Origine du Monde' ("The Origin of the World"), which depicted a hyper-realistic, close up view of the vulva and abdomen of a naked woman. Blurring the lines between what society deemed artistic versus pornographic, Courbet’s painting aims to depict utter realism and not to titillate through the unflattering angle, the vulva being disembodied due to the composition, the pallor of her skin and the presence of hair, in stark contrast to the typical hairless depictions of women. It is difficult to decide if Gustav depicts his subject with respect or degradation, as she is without face or identity, yet the title highlights the hypocrisy of viewing the vagina as taboo and shameful, as we all did come from one.
“Many are playful, joyous and colourful – a celebration of changing social sensibilities”
It’s undeniable that feminist artists of today still hold this same obsession with female nudity – in particular, the vagina. It’s possible to scroll through reels and reels on social media of vulvas depicted in different mediums and different levels of abstraction; hyper-realistic depictions of clay vaginas lined up in little white squares – resembling a gender-flipped version of the art exhibit in BBC’s Fleabag, colourful, vibrant gilded abstractions to be used as coasters or wall decorations.
The 'Great Wall of Vulva' is constructed of plaster casts of real women’s vulvas, made to combat the confusion and mystery that often permeates conversations surrounding the organ. With the labiaplasty being one of the fastest growing cosmetic surgeries worldwide – largely thought to be a result of the increased availability of pornography and social media – it is undeniably important to have exhibitions that do not present a romanticised view of the vulva, to serve as much needed points of education for the general public. Not all of these pieces are serious, however. Many are playful, joyous and colourful – a celebration of changing social sensibilities and a freedom to depict a part of the body that was previously considered taboo. This new sense of pride resists prevalent cultural ideas about the shame and inferiority of the vulva – subverting ideas like Freud’s penis envy, in a way reminiscent of ‘Frau Freud’ by Carol Ann Duffy, which playfully asserts that most women, in fact, do not want a penis.
The sheer quantity of art like this dulls the shock that these pieces would have once possessed. And perhaps that is their aim: to normalise and demystify a part of the body possessed by about half of the population. However, something about boiling down an entire person to this one organ still feels a bit voyeuristic and objectifying – there is something a bit inhuman, but also powerful about a faceless grey wall of vaginas – the juxtaposition of the private, vulnerable nature of exposing the vulva with the imposing display feels both powerful and a bit odd. In addition, one could interpret the sale of this vagina art on T-shirts and mugs and bags as just another way to commodify the female body for capitalistic gain.
Compared to the number of very detailed nudes I have researched for this article, Murray Edwards seems conservative in comparison. Still, there is a difference in the nudes depicted here compared to those I have previously described. Many women are depicted in full, with “imperfect” bodies doing everyday activities, like relaxing in the bath or hanging up the laundry – imbuing them with a sense of life and humanity. Conversely, many other paintings include nudes contorted past the realm of anatomical possibility, rendered in off-putting colours to invoke horror – not pleasure when viewed – expressions of pain or vulnerability or even anger. The taboo of nudity, and the blurry line between what is considered artistic or obscene will likely always hold an appeal for artists. Nudity is at once the most simple and most complicated state of being.
