The nude — the aestheticized human physique laid naked — has been a basic factor of Western portray because the fifteenth century. Renaissance painters have been impressed initially by the idealized sculptures of Greco-Roman antiquity, and nudes populate the canvases of biblical and mythological topics. However by the top of the nineteenth century, artists started to upend the traditions established by their forebears, radically recasting the nude to discover ideas of kind and problem viewers’ preconceptions about age, race, gender, and sexuality.
Twentieth-Century Nudes from Tate, on view on the Worcester Artwork Museum via March 9, 2025, showcases greater than two dozen iconic work from Britain’s Tate galleries within the touring exhibition’s solely cease in the US.
Vanessa Bell, “The Tub” (1917), oil paint and gouache on canvas (© 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London. Photograph: Tate)
In a marked rejection of artwork historic conventions, artists on the flip of the twentieth century started to color nudes in on a regular basis settings. These unidealized our bodies occupied home, personal areas, upsetting discourse on socially acceptable shows of nudity. Works by Walter Richard Sickert and Pierre Bonnard within the present place the viewer at instances within the function of the voyeur, peering in on private, intimate moments. Feminine artists equivalent to Vanessa Bell took a unique strategy to the nude determine. Bell was a number one determine within the Bloomsbury Group, a progressive circle of intellectuals and artists in London within the early twentieth century, and was one of many first painters in Britain to embrace summary artwork. With “The Tub” (1917), she makes use of boldly simplified varieties at a big scale to seize a nude topic in a stylized but unromanticized surroundings.
Sylvia Sleigh, “Paul Rosano Reclining” (1974), oil paint on canvas (© Tate. Photograph: Tate)
Idealized feminine magnificence — the item of the male gaze — has been depicted for hundreds of years in Western artwork. Sylvia Sleigh’s realist nude, “Paul Rosano Reclining” (1974), is a direct response to the conventions and stereotypes that dictated gender roles throughout the historical past of artwork. On this life-sized portrait, Sleigh presents her mannequin, musician Paul Rosano, nearly as a male “odalisque”—a creative trope used to current a feminine servant in a harem. In doing so, Sleigh subverts the facility dynamics related to a standard illustration of the nude, and invitations viewers to query and rethink the stereotypes discovered on this age-old topic.
Lucian Freud, “Standing by the Rags” (1988–89), oil paint on canvas (© The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2024 / Bridgeman Photographs)
Different works within the exhibition, together with larger-than-life works by Marlene Dumas, Lucian Freud, and Willem de Kooning, make use of the nude as a method to discover experimental, boundary-pushing methods. From the Nineteen Fifties onward, artists working with figurative topics turned more and more within the encounter with the human physique, exploring its range of form and measurement and the expressive potential of paint. On this new period, the feel and weight of thick paint took on an unbiased actuality. Artists emphasised paint’s bodily properties, which they equated with the materiality of human flesh. They formed our bodies out of thick smears, heavy daubs, and built-up impasto to convey the bodily and metaphysical weight of current on this world.
Organized in partnership with Tate, Twentieth-Century Nudes from Tate is on view via March 9, 2025, on the Worcester Artwork Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts.
To be taught extra, go to worcesterart.org.
