Long ago, in the time when the pretentious highs of undergraduate art education had tricked me into thinking that I actually knew what I was talking about, my little cousin asked me a disarming question: why do we draw naked people? I must have rattled off some convincing nonsense at the time, something about Christianity and the naked body, and classical ideals of purity, but I think the question deserves a little more than this paltry treatment… It’s definitely a question that has stuck with me, and came up recently when talking with a good friend of mine. Once again I thought I knew the reasons why we portray the naked body, but I am again finding my initial response less than compelling. So in quick order I will lay out a few things that come to mind.. The results are delightfully contradictory and I’m probably missing tons, so let me know!
Pareidolia
Biologically, we’re tuned to respond to the human figure, and particularity, the face, so much so, that we see faces where they do not exist. This is my pseudo-evolutionary-psychology argument. We just are naturally drawn to the human figure. Still, this doesn’t quite get at the whole “naked” issue, just the tendency to represent the human form in general.
Ancient Art
We can look at the so-called earliest known art piece, the “Venus of Willendorf,” as an example of how far back our tradition of depicting naked bodies stretches. It is a simplistic, yet compelling notion that the same impulse that motivated that first artist are at work today when we represent the naked body. Aren’t we still interested in exploring ourselves in the state that we enter the world?
Sex
Naked people are hot. This alone is a compelling reason to represent naked people. And before you castigate me for being intellectually slothful, I declare that we needn’t intellectualize the fact that titillation is wrapped up in the visual arts (though we all recognize a slippery slope somewhere thereabouts, and we will quickly end up in the tired semantic debate of pornography versus art). I’m just pointing out a reason why we look at naked people, not making value judgments. Here’s Courbet at his best, doing 19th century lesbian soft-core.
Purity
So those wacky Christians had this notion that the clothed body was actually profane, that clothes are the pitiful result of the fall and symbolic of original sin. The naked body is perfect, godly and pure. We’re all naked in heaven; it’s like a nudest picnic without all the sex. This is sort of ironic considering the fact that in other epochs, the church tediously obscured all genitalia from artwork. I guess since we were booted out of the garden we just can’t handle seeing all those penises or vaginas without being whipped up in a hedonistic frenzy. Thanks puritanism, fight the good fight.
Form
The human body is a remarkable machine and is a pleasure to look at. We are intimately familiar with the human form, yet are socially constrained from staring at that really weird looking guy on the train going home. So we just create legitimate forum where we can do what we all want to do anyway- stare at each other in the buff.
Liberalism
Artists are interested in breaking social convention. Sometimes this desire is simply incidental to the work, and sometimes its part-and-parcel to it. In general artists are liberated from some of the constraints imposed by other elements in society… They are the ones lost in the sandbox, free to create what they wish; society’s collective id. So naturally they will at some point end up taking their clothes off. Still, it is ironic that even the fascists are into naked people. Check out Nazi artist Ivo Saliger’s take on the Judgement of Paris:
Scary, right? Oh, there’s also a lot to be said regarding the difference between the “naked” and the “nude,” but that’s for another time. Anyway, sometimes I’d rather just look at a chair.
