L. Egon Schiele - Nudes for the 21st Century: Photography and commentary (21st Century Nudes Photography Book 1)

To create the nude for the 21stCentury, I have experimented with style to reflect the aesthetic and societal evolution that accompanies the new Millennium. I present the outcomes using black-and-white photography. This medium is inherently more abstract than, for example, color photography; and, as such, it provides a surreal means to represent the nude.

Because the nude is the longest enduring theme in the history of art, depicting the nude to represent new aesthetic values requires innovation. Thus, the sine qua non of this work is that the 21st-Century nude differs in its visual impact from the nudes of earlier epochs. Before describing the features of the 21st-Century nude that are evolutionary, I mention some aspects of the nude that reflect the tenor of earlier epochs.

The Greeks of the 5thCentury BCE were prolific sculptors of primarily male nudes. Their subjects were anthropomorphic gods and goddesses and sports figures. Thus art glorified the beauty of the human body and was not associated with any religious proscriptions.

In Biblical times, based on the content of the Old Testament, the Jews proscribed both public and private nudity. Over more than two millennia, these proscriptions arising from the story of Adam and Eve evolved into an intricate and convoluted set of religious laws that is still operative in contemporary Orthodox Judaism. Because the Jewish dogma strictly forbade creating and worshiping idols, until modern times, Jews generally tended not to create visual art. Thus, these religious prohibitions of creating representations of nudity indirectly affected the evolution of Western art.

As Christianity arose and developed, becoming a world religion, the taboos associated with viewing the human body evolved with it. And they remain operative today. Likewise, in Islam, related taboos evolved, which also have their origins in the Old and New Testaments and in the Koran. These taboos strongly influenced the evolution of Western art, both directly and indirectly.

The direct influence meant that artists were not allowed to create paintings and sculptures of actual, nude people. Until the mid 19thCentury, both religious and secular authorities enforced this proscription strictly through the threat of severe sanctions. By the mid 19thCentury, censorship and legal sanctions were still operative, but their effectiveness had diminished. Until recent times, the churches, the art academies and the governments focused their authority on attempting to enforce which elements of the nude should be more taboo than others. For example, many paintings of Victorian nudes show females having voluptuous breasts but having no pubic hair or genitalia.

The indirect influence was that artists created images of nude, ostensibly non-human figures that they depicted as humans. These anthropomorphic figures represented gods and goddesses from Greek and Roman myths and characters from Biblical myths. Thus artists, such as Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens, Raphael, and many others, were able to create images of nudes that the observer could appreciate as representations of humans without either the artist or the observer openly violating the taboo.

When artists depicted nudes as real people instead of as mythical characters, they could create new messages on various themes instead of reiterating the theme of the ancient myth. The distinction was often subtle between the image of a human and the image of a mythical figure. We consider several examples.

Titians Venus of Urbino (ca. 1538) was and is a well known depiction of the Greek goddess Venus as a reclining nude. Whereas, in 1863, douard Manet painted Olympia, in which the primary figure superficially resembles Titians Venus. However, Manets Olympia represents a prostitute who appears to look directly but indifferently at the viewer. Although the distinctions between Venus and Olympia may have been subtle, the exhibition in Paris of Manets Olympia created a taboo-breaking scandal, perhaps because some of the viewers may have known the model professionally. Moreover, Manets purpose was to create awareness of and condemnation of the Victorian double standard and hence to offer a new message to the viewer. The ensuing scandal represents his success.

Alana: Flapper
In 1863, Manet painted Le djeuner sur lherbe, which he may have based on several Renaissance paintings that show nude female and clothed male figures from myths. In Le djeuner sur lherbe, Manet painted a nude woman accompanied by two well dressed dandies who are enjoying a picnic in a park while another woman bathes in the background. Manet leaves the subject of conversation between the three main figures to the imagination of the viewer. Atraditional interpretation is that the park shown in the painting represents a Parisian park used by prostitutes to meet clients and that the figures are discussing an associated business arrangement. A contemporary interpretation is that Manet presents a patriarchal view of a woman, in which the clothed dandies represent controllers of the womans sexuality. Manet presents a limited view of the womans body, and that limited view reflects the control of her sexuality.

In 1899, Gustav Klimt, who was a leader of the counter-academic-art movement, Wiener Secession, painted Nuda Veritas. This 2.6-meterhigh painting of a female nude, which has red hair, provoked and shocked Viennese society, in part because Klimt included pubic hair in the depiction. With this taboo-breaking painting, Klimt assaulted the hypocrisy of Viennese society.

Cassie: Orgasm
During this period, the University in Vienna commissioned Klimt to paint murals for the large lecture hall on the themes of philosophy, law, and medicine. Unlike the triumphant idealism of philosophy, law, and medicine that those academecians who commissioned the work desired to see expressed, Klimt used erotic depictions of nudes in these paintings to express antithetical ideas, namely, the rise of existential philosophy, the dismal state of the system of justice, and the powerlessness of medicine. These works triggered a scandal in which Klimt was labelled as a pervert and a pornographer. Gilles Nret, author of Gustav Klimt 1862 - 1918 (Taschen GmbH, Kln, 2003), describes the painters viewpoint: ...Klimt is determined to demolish the pillars of the temple and to offend the prudes by the representation of sexual archetypes. Klimt used the artistic representation of the nude to attack the hypocrisy of the era.

As the Modern era waxed, the nude of yesteryear, which was an image of a god or goddess that reminded the viewer of antiquity, had evolved into an image that carries a message about the present. For the artist, the nude has evolved from a form with which to voice traditional themes from Classical and Biblical tales to a form with which to voice new and contemporary ideas and values.