“Not to stare at”: Forget Titian, Botticelli and male illusionists – only women can paint great female nudes | art

‘IIf you want to paint, put your clothes back on! This is how Carolee Schneemann summed up the critical response to her 1975 performance piece “Inner Scroll,” which she performed nude on a gallery table. After performing a series of life models, she removed the scroll from her vagina and began reading her statement. In doing so, Schneemann asks an important question: “What does it mean for an artist to be both an artist and a life model?” Or as she said: “Photo and image maker together?”

The female nude, as depicted and embodied by the male artist, has dominated Western art for centuries. Despite decades of feminist efforts, this interplay between the great male genius and his—sometimes inspiring—female model remains a subject of enduring fascination. To walk into a gallery, or open a college book, is to encounter a procession of idealized female nudes by male artists from Rubens, Titian and Botticelli to Picasso and de Kooning.

When Gwen John stood in her bedroom in 1909 drawing herself nude, her body reflected in the dresser mirror, what was she thinking? At the time, she was in the midst of a passionate and unhappy love affair with Auguste Rodin, to whom she frequently pretended. But standing in front of her was different, not to mention bold. Unlike Rodin, June struggled to be her own muse, but this portrait shows her liberated from the male gaze.

Like many women, the female body – and what it means to live in it – has been on my mind all my life. Yoko Ono’s photographs for her Beautiful Mother series are taken from an angle at which we all probably encounter the female body as infants: looking down at our mothers. I was thirteen or fourteen when I read Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Female Nude,” which is told from the perspective of an artist’s model: “Nipple, ass in the window light, / Draws the color from me. / To the right, / Madam. And try to keep still.”

The quietly devastating final sentence – “I say / Twelve francs and have my shawl. He’s nothing like me” – profoundly changed my view, and is now one of the epigraphs in my novel Female Nude. The story revolves around Sophie, an artist who is assigned to paint a portrait of her friend while on vacation in Greece, and at the same time begins an affair with that friend’s ex-lover. Through Sophie’s interactions with other female artists, all of whom painted nude self-portraits, the reader learns about her inner world. The novel is interspersed with excerpts that see Sophie standing in front of these works in different galleries, and at different stages of her life, addressing each artist directly in imagined conversations about art and the female body.

The novel arose from the idea of ​​nude images made by women, especially portraits. For most of the history of Western art, women did not have access to nude models and, if they were brave enough, had to rely on their own bodies. The works he produced were often met with anger, ridicule, ridicule, or indifference. For some, Schneemann’s Interior was a groundbreaking work that reclaims hundreds of years of historical baggage when it comes to female nudity. For others, it was tasteless pornography. Because when an artist takes power over the depiction of her own nudity, it can only be political. It is always a threat to the status quo. (Schneemann had already gotten into trouble at art college for his drawings of nude men, work that was considered almost subversive.)

Like Schneemann, the Indian-Hungarian artist Amrita Sher-Gil caused a stir at school for wanting to paint nudes. In the end, she was expelled. Cher-Gill went on to paint herself topless in her 1934 work Self-Portrait as a Tahitian — a tribute to Gauguin, or an assessment of his colonial masculine gaze, depending on your outlook. The harshness of Gauguin’s gaze appears again in the work of Emma Amos, who often used her avant-garde art to criticize the whiteness and masculinity of the artistic canon. The Amos “nude” I chose to include in my novel is 1994’s “Business Suit,” in which she dresses Lucian Freud’s naked body like a garment in a statement that is both poignant and sarcastic. She wonders: “Is this what it means to be a great artist?” Amos, who died in 2020, has yet to get her due.

To my knowledge, no history of the female nude self-portrait has ever been published, so I set out to compile my own book. Officially, the first painting was painted in 1906 by Paula Modersohn-Becker, and it is this painting that opens the novel. The joy of being a novelist, rather than an academic, is that you are able to have freedoms. It’s not my business to debate whether Artemisia Gentileschi’s nudes are self-portraits or not, even though many of them have her face quite clearly on them. It’s in my book, which includes, in addition to Amos, performance art, from the inside pass to the Yoko Ono cut-out (in which audience members cut off pieces of Ono’s clothing). The Silueta series also features Ana Mendieta’s “Earth Body” works, as does “Woman of Hohle Fels,” a mammoth ivory carving found in a cave, made 40,000 years ago or more.

I looked at the photographers too. Some, like Francesca Woodman, are known for photographing their bodies. I chose her because her nude photographs capture the inherent strangeness of living in a young woman’s body, an experience that can seem strange and almost gothic, but is also sexy, powerful, and full of irony. Others, like Anne Brigman, who took nude photographs of herself in the California desert as early as 1907, are still often overlooked. I have included them in my book alongside paintings that are more explicitly figurative works of self-portrait by Alice Neel, Jenny Saville, Gwen John and Susan Valadon, as well as contemporary artists such as Lisa Price.

At one point in her life, Suzanne Valadon could have been the model for Duffy’s poem. She was, after all, a “Renoir dancer,” and worked her way out of poverty by modeling for many other famous artists, observing how they worked and learning from them. She is known for her frank, naturalistic approach to the female nude, and her self-portrait with bare breasts, from 1931. No different. Like Nell’s famous self-portrait, it shows a woman and artist who lived, gave birth, and grew up, her face slightly frowning, her breasts real, not for the sake of looking.

It is this refutation of the male gaze that unites many of these nudes, but at the same time each of these female artists looks beyond that, grappling with what it means to be a woman making art in a body that is also her subject. Whether it’s aging (Alice Neel), motherhood (Louise Bourgeois), disability (Frida Kahlo), race (Emma Amos), sexuality (Tracey Emin), fluidity (Zanele Moholi) or misogyny (Yoko Ono), these artists have done more than simply expand the definition of the female nude: they have reinvented it in a way that only they can.

In the words of Sophie, the novel’s heroine, who imagines a conversation with Artemisia Gentileschi while standing before Susanna and the Elders, a powerful depiction of misogyny and harassment: “You’re saying, ‘Here I am. Let me show you what a woman can do. Because only a woman can do this.'”