(I wrote an essay on “the nude” for my art history class and I guess some people might find it interesting so I will post it.)

In Kenneth Clark’s essay “The Naked and the Nude,” Clark argues that the nude is its own form of art. He defines the nude as “an art form invented by the Greeks in the fifth century, just as opera is an art form invented in seventeenth-century Italy.” The nude was deeply influenced by Greek notions of beauty and often depicted naked women who appeared fertile (plump thighs, stomachs, and breasts) posed with a “balanced, prosperous, and confident” body – innocently free of any shame for their nakedness.

To Clark, the only works worthy of being classified as a “nude” were those that adhered to these Greek principles, and he criticized photographers’ and other artists’ attempts to capture the nude form as “hardly ever satisfactory to those whose eyes have grown accustomed to the harmonious simplifications of antiquity.”

Clark’s criticism of photographers and other artists suggests that the Greek ideal of beauty is the supreme ideal of beauty, and one carried on through the Classical era to today. To Clark, our modern standards of beauty were “really the diffused memory of that peculiar physical type developed in Greece between the years 480 and 440 B.C., which in varying degrees of intensity and consciousness furnished the mind of Western man with a pattern of perfection from the Renaissance until the present century.” Certainly this ideal was extremely powerful for much of Western civilization’s history, and relatively few positive depictions of women (in particular) exist for centuries that did not conform to the Greek ideal.

But the beginning of the 21^st century marked the turn towards new ideals, like the “hourglass” physique, which changed perceptions of a desirable woman’s figure by trading belly fat for flat tautness. Towards the end of the century, the ideal Western woman’s figure had lost almost all curvature and rotundity, no doubt to Clark’s posthumous and, thus, truly eternal despair. The decline of the Greek ideal disproves Clark’s suggestion of its supremacy, and it was probably photography and film’s popularity and ability to capture more realistic, and attainable, beauty that led to its downfall.

What is most intriguing about the nude, at least Clark’s interpretation and definition of it, is how intensely the nude glorifies and denigrates the female form. Clark claims that in art “[w]e are immediately disturbed by wrinkles, pouches, and other small imperfections, which, in the classical scheme, are eliminated.” Many might agree with Clark’s claim at first, but wrinkles and pouches are also completely natural physical traits that every person deals with on a daily basis. On the contrary, many artists, photographers, and filmmakers have proven that wrinkles and pouches on a body can be a landscape unto themselves and just as worthy of depiction.

What Clark is hinting at, but leaving unstated, is the deep sexism of the Greek nude. After all, wrinkles on a male are often depicted as a sign of elderly authority and knowledge. On women, they are symbolic of age, decay, and infertility. And in this deep-rooted sexism we can find the Greek ideal’s obsolescence.

 Most nudes are of the female form, and thus place greatest emphasis on the inherent beauty of that form over the male form. This, too, proves that Greek ideal beauty is outdated. After all, the arts have changed from being an exclusively male field to one with an equal, if not greater number of women artists. It is only natural that this demographic switch would make for more depictions of the nude male, but these depictions are not nearly as common in creation or acclaim.

The Greek ideal is thus limited: it is an ideal created by and for heterosexual men with the intent of denigrating the real, palpable female form and glorifying one that does not exist.

But even the glorified, nonexistent female nude is often denigrated. In applying Clark’s theory of the nude to a selection of paintings, specifically Velazquez’ Rokeby Venus, Ruben’s Andromeda, and Renoir’s The Large Bathers, we can find commonalities that hint at this duality of glorification and denigration. Notably, all these works, while featuring the ideal nude forms of many women, obscure or otherwise fail to depict female genitalia, the ultimate (and unreasonably taboo) symbol of womanhood. The subjects of Andromeda and The Large Bathers find ways to hide genitalia behind wispy cloth (highly unrealistically, in the case of Andromeda), while Venus seems perfectly content to admire her own figure – so long as it’s her face – but turns her front side away from the audience.

Indeed, the shamelessness of Clark’s ideal nude seems totally incongruent with these examples, which all lack female genitalia: if the figures were really and truly unashamed of their nudity, then why do they, and in some cases nature itself (with the help of preposterously physics-defying sheets), conspire to hide their genitals? Simply, they cannot be nude and shameless while simultaneously hiding something. It is impossible.

The nude is, to Clark, “our chief link with the classic disciplines.”While he makes a case for the nude as a form of art, he does little to justify its meaning and relevance in a world that has evolved drastically since antiquity and the Renaissance. His view that Greek beauty is the ideal beauty has since been discredited by its contradictions, sexism, and fall from prominence.

Though the Greek ideal of beauty has given us some great artwork, it passed mostly unmourned, proof enough of its growing old in a world indifferent towards the limitations of idealization.

 Citations

Kenneth Clark, “The Naked and the Nude.” In The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1956, 120-126.