Edgar Degas presents us with a pastel piece of a nude subject aptly titled “The Bath.” We are given an intimate view of a young female in the process of bathing herself. He made thorough use of the pastel and gave impressionistic texture. It’s worth acknowledging his innovative approach of depicting the female nude in a way his predecessors did not venture, as well as original compositional ideas and elements. However, this piece remains a canonical voyeuristic portrayal of a female nude and appeals to the male gaze.
When we look to Greece we get the male standing nude, which associated the male body with moral excellence and male prowess. However, the attitudes towards female nudity were different and evolved from a different point. The female body was associated with the divinity of fertility, and for about five centuries, the Greeks preferred to see the standing female statue clothed. Then four centuries, the sculptor Praxiteles carved a naked Aphrodite, known as the Cnidian Aphrodite, which started a new aesthetic tradition for the female form. The ideal Greek nude statue was designed to appeal to the mind as well as the senses, and was later also adopted by Hellenistic Greco-Roman art but mostly discarded. Of course, elements of this have been resurrected by numerous societies who have had interest in Greco-Roman art.
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We see a fair-skinned, supple young woman. She is depicted with a natural body with no blemishes or unflattering ailments. Despite the slight gawky positioning it doesn’t detract to the sensuousness of the figure. We feel a seductive warmth that she exudes. She is beautiful and the scene only adds to that. There are no visually jarring components that would detract from the beauty of the model
practice amongst the men, which is nudity. The sculptor depicted Dionysos with a slightly S-shaped body
Her body reflects strength and confidence something that other women in the novel were not seen to
The Two Bathers was influenced by the Mediterranean whiahc can be seen in this small piece of art with its meauserements of 12” x 9.5” crated in Paris in 1921. His work was inspired by antique statuary, from the Cycldic Islands. Pablo Picasso showed his art to his idol Andre Malraux:’ Only the sculptors of the islands found a way to transform “ fertility goddesses” into signs… its goddess, if you will, imean the magic object is no longer Fertilitty. In this painting it shows a sigh of fertility in my opinion while the women standing, is half hiding her nudity behing a white cloth which is a color of pureity, and the male lies on the ground while their vertical and horizaltal postions sturture the compostions.
Although, both the Aphrodite of Knidos and the Birth of Venus have like traits such as nude female body, contrapposto stance, and iconography, they also can be easily contrasted by period of creation, technique, and artist. The human body has always been a popular choice among artists, but it seems the nude female body is quite controversial. The Aphrodite of Knidos, sculpted by Praxiteles about 350 – 340 B.C., or during the Greek Late Classical period, was a nude female modestly covering her genitalia. The Aphrodite was what made the small island of Knidos known to people around the world. Some 1,000 years later, the Birth of Venus arrived. Artist Sandro Botticelli, during the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1482,) defied odds with a similar interpretation of the Aphrodite despite stricter views on nude women. Both pieces share similar traits, yet can be easily identifiable apart from each other.
Ca.630 BCE. Limestone. This is a women freestanding statue in Greek art. Both of these two statues are youth sculpture and freestanding which are the naturalistically and not stocky. They do not have muscles and a strong body, I can only see they are being the lean body types. As the female statue, her feet are standing on the same level, but the male one is not. She is putting her right hand on her chest and wearing clothes to wrap her slim body. Thus, the Greek art only has little bit impact by Egyptians. Portraying nude men can be accepted, but for women it is not.
Edgar Degas’ paintings on the bourgeois family life puts an emphasis on the “apartness and disjunction” of the family structure during 19th and 20th century.1 Interior with Two People represents Degas’ interest in the fragmentation and contradictions that riddle the common idea of the bourgeois family in the nineteenth century.2 The man and woman in Degas’ Interior with Two People seem to belong to the upper bourgeois class in French society as suggested by the clothing of the two. It could be speculated that Degas paints a husband and wife, yet unlike the love and intimacy commonly thought to be in a marriage, both individuals have their backs turned towards each other. In contrast to the warm colors Degas uses to paint the interior, the frigid and disjointed atmosphere of the painting symbolize the fragmentation of bourgeois family life. The woman expresses sorrow and the man, with his tense stance and fisted hand, expresses tenseness. Similar to Degas’ The Interior (also called The Rape, plate 2) or Sulking, the “yawning space between the gendered opponents and/or fragments or centrifugal composition constructs a disturbing sense of psychological distance or underlying hostility between the figures in question.”3,4,5
- Priest of Troy being punished by the Gods for warning against accepting horse from the Greeks. Sea serpents attacked him and his sons. Beautiful anatomy.
Olympia (Figure 1), one of the many paintings by Édouard Manet, the nineteenth century painter, attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists and art lovers every year from around the world. It inspires artists and delights everyday people, but it has not always been this way. At the 1865 Paris Salon it raised many eyebrows, caused scandal and brought a horrible wave of criticism to the artist. To understand this huge outcry, first we have to examine the tradition of the female nude in painting throughout history.
The painting, in its simplest form, consists of a naked woman lying elegantly upon stately and rich cloths, while a young, also nude boy, is holding a mirror which contains her reflection. Upon first glance of this work, I was quickly able to make out the identity of the two subjects. ...
The primary focus of ancient Greek sculptures was that of the human body. Almost all Greek sculptures are of nude subjects. As the first society to focus on nude subjects, Greek sculptors attempted to "depict man in what they believed was the image of the gods and so would come to celebrate the body by striving for verisimilitude or true – likeness (realism and naturalism!)."(Riffert) Not only did the Greeks celebrate the human form in their art but also in everyday life. (Riffert) One of the favorite topics for sculptors was that of the athlete. In Greek culture athletes were described as "hero–athletes". (Riffert) This shows that athletes were revered and looked upon as heroes. The influence of athleticism is evident in many famous sculptures. I will attempt to show how the human form influenced Greek art. It is important to note that many of the Greek sculptures discussed do not exist in their original form but rather in Roman copies of the original bronze sculptures. (Riffert)
In ancient Greek society, nudity was revered as a natural state of being. In exercise, art, and daily life, nudity was closely associated with the Greeks’ concept of youthfulness and beauty. The era was and continues to be famous for the depictions of precise, idealized anatomy that proliferated sculpture, pottery, and paintings produced by artists from the time. But this obsession with and celebration of the au naturel wasn’t afforded to all members of society. The lugubriously low social standing held by women at the time forced them to assume a more conservative way of dressing, as they continued to be disenfranchised and devalued.
Of all the Impressionist artists, it is Pierre Auguste Renoir who is most interested in painting humans and studying the portrayal of human emotions. Renoir’s technique of broken brush strokes was combined with brash colours to portray the light and movement of the subject. He was greatly inspired to paint figures, particularly of women. Renoir succeeded in assembling several figures in one frame and his compositions were complex and demanded several revisions. In the 1880s Pierre-Auguste Renoir sought to move his art beyond Impressionism and to forge a link between modern art and the classical tradition of French painting from the Renaissance period. The result was this large-scale composition of nude bathers, which occupied much of his attention for three years. This work is unique in the history of modern painting for their representation of feminine grace, and they show Renoir’s ability to capture the soft and pearly texture of skin. Even though his figures in “The large Bathers” do not follow the impressionist style of broken brush strokes, the landscape in this painting seems looks like an impressionist landscape.
... becomes distracted by her bare, white, chest. This is a picture of the style of the people and how they lived their lives, as well as an unpleasant figure of their goddess.
Montañez R, Dinhora (2013). Diario del Huila, ed. Body painting, el arte de la poesía
The groundbreaking Demoiselles d’Avignon was controversial not only for the way the women looked but also for the positions of the women. Although Picasso did not emphasize on detail, he “saw that the rational, often geometric breakdown if the human head and body employed by so many African artists could provide him with the starting point for his own re-appraisal of his subjects”(Cubism 53). “The naked women become inextricably bound up in a flux of shapes or planes which tip backwards and forwards from the two-dimensional surface to produce much the same sensation as an elaborate sculpture…”(Cubism 54).