Nude

“ Watts' picture the boy's natural beauty is lost in a coarse and rough planing out that tells of an eye that saw vaguely and that wearied, and in an execution full of uncertain touch and painful effort. Unless the painter is especially endowed with the instinct of anatomies, the sentiment of proportion, and a passion for form, the nude is a will-o'-the-wisp, whose way leads where he may not follow. ”

“ One may study the proportions and grace with pure pleasure, because the subject is pure, also the spirit of the painter, whose object was to paint pure beauty.
The question is often asked, "What shall we do with the nude in art?" "As a community we inherited prudery from our English forebears. More than that we have surpassed them in fastidiousness. Those who have studied the matter know that the nude, painted purely for the sake of its beauty, as most of it is, demoralizes nobody's mind. It is the straining to conceal the nude which injures morals. ”

“ Trust me, I have many; and I can assert to you as a positive and perpetual law, that so much of the nude body as in the daily life of the nation may be shown with modesty, and seen with reverence and delight,—so much, and no more, ought to be shown by the national arts, either of painting or sculpture. What, more than this, either art exhibits, will, assuredly, pervert taste, and, in all probability, morals. ”

“ Entragues gazed at her with pleasure but without agitation, for the nude, especially in a woman's chamber, is not particularly sensuous; it is such a natural state, so simple, so free of provocation, so little suggestive by its absence of mystery, that a foot glimpsed in the street, a bodice cleverly arranged, a rustling of petticoats, an ungloved hand, a smile behind a fan, a certain air, a certain gesture, a certain glance, even with a wholly chaste intention, are much more rousing. ”

“ To love the nude, and first of all femininity with its graces and insolences, is traditional in those races which hard reform has not altogether terrorized. The idea of the nude being admitted, costume can be modified to take in floating loose robe, manners can be softened, and something of splendor illume the gloom of our hypocricies. ”

“ The modern art of painting the nude does not stop at the baseness of uncovering; but not content with merely reproducing the figure stripped of its clothing, would make the nude shoulder its way into the world of decorum and ceremony. Forgetting that being wrapped in clothes is the normal state of human life, they are trying to give the nude all the rights. They are striving to bring out strongly the fact of being stark-naked, emphasizing the point excessively, indeed, over-excessively beyond fullness. Art carried to this extreme debases itself, in proportion as it coerces one who looks at it. ”

“ The Nude in Art.—For years there has been a great craze after the nude in art, and the realistic in literature. Many art galleries abound in pictures and statuary which cannot fail to fan the fires of sensualism, unless the thoughts of the visitor are trained to the strictest purity. Why should artists and sculptors persist in shocking the finer sensibilities of old and young of both sexes by crowding upon their view representations of naked human forms in attitudes of luxurious abandon? ”

“ To this day I have no patience with persons who cannot view the nude in art without low-minded comments (or thoughts) on what seems to fill their entire field of vision to the exclusion of the work as a whole. I once showed a vulgar-minded woman a picture of a beautiful, three-year old child, nude—a thing so lovely I thought it must appeal even to her ”

“ Nude in Art The nude in art is not necessarily obscene, lewd or indecent. The nude in art is, however, capable of, and often is employed to convey most lewd, lascivious and demoralizing ideas.
The artist conceived and makes a beautiful figure of a nude woman. From a standpoint of execution it is as perfect as he can make it. ”

“ A score of men were there—authors, actors, firemen, lamp lighters, scene shifters—who came, went, worked or looked on, and in the midst of them seven or eight women, practically nude, walked about with an air of the most naïve tranquillity. The pink tights that covered them from the feet to the neck were so thin and transparent that one could see not only the toes, the navel, and the breasts, but also the veins and the colour of the least mark on the skin on all parts of their bodies. Towards the abdomen, however, the tights became thicker and only the form was distinguishable. ”

“ The artist who endeavors to enforce a lesson, becomes a preacher; and the artist who tries by hint and suggestion to enforce the immoral, becomes a pander.
There is an infinite difference between the nude and the naked, between the natural and the undressed. In the presence of the pure, unconscious nude, nothing can be more contemptible than those forms in which are the hints and suggestions of drapery, the pretence of exposure, and the failure to conceal. The undressed is vulgar—the nude is pure. ”

“ And here it would not be amiss for me to state a fact well known to all painters and sculptors who have used the nude model (except a few senile pretenders, whose purity, not being of the right sort, has gone rank from too much watching) , namely, that nothing is so chaste as nudity. Venus herself, as she drops her garments and steps on to the model-throne, leaves behind her on the floor every weapon in her armory by which she can pierce to the grosser passions of man. The more perfect her unveiled beauty, the more keenly it appeals to his higher instincts. ”

“ Certain ages proscribed all representation of the nude, not only on moral but esthetic grounds. The sculptors of the Middle Age shunned the naked body as a thing deformed, believing that "clothing was necessary to bodily grace." ”

“ What man would take a woman near and dear to him to look upon a nude male statue or painting,—"not a detail of which has escaped the loving care" of the artist? Certainly few Western or Southern men would do so! Worship of the beautiful may pardon the nude female figure, but the nude male figure never. ”

“ The various pictures of the nude, semi-nude, single figures, and groups comprise the largest collection of nude female, male and child subjects ever published in a single volume, and the most complete work of its kind in existence. ”

“ It is perhaps a little less beautiful but it has quite the same feeling of gentle strength, of delicacy. One feels the joy of the artist who throws himself against the problem of the nude in the open air. ”

“ His masterly drawing follows the most delicate inflexion of the muscles and suggests the nervous system under the skin. He observes with extraordinary subtlety the awkwardness of the nude being at a time when nudity is no longer accustomed to show itself, and this true nudity is in strong contrast to that of the academicians. One might say of Degas that he has the disease of truth, if the necessity of truth were not health itself! These bodies are still marked with the impressions of the garments; the movements remain those of a clothed being which is only nude as an exception. ”

“ Honi soit qui mal y pense, and “to the pure all things are pure” are as true to-day as when they were first spoken and written, and while I am as opposed as is any one living to nude pictures and statues that have nothing to commend them but their nudity; while I am strongly opposed to promiscuous nudity either in whole or in part, I am equally opposed to the mental attitude that nudity in itself is wrong, and that the Creator did not know His business when he created us both nude and of different sexes. ”

“ By what right does a few selfish men enter the privacy and denude women for the inspection of others or seek to put these representations of nudity upon the open market for all classes to gaze upon?
The painting, with its sweet harmony of blended colors and tints, is one thing to the cultured mind; but to the cold reality of black and white in the photograph, where the nude figure is placed prominently before the eyes of the uncultured, is, in character and effect a very different thing. ”

“ Here she was to be surrounded by every beauty and comfort that art could supply and that money could buy. Wherever her eyes should turn they would rest upon representations of nature’s most perfect work—the nude human form! ”

“ It seems that only highly-cultivated and imaginative women enjoy the spectacle of a finely-shaped nude man (especially after attending art classes, and drawing from the nude, as I am told by a lady artist) . Or else the majority of women dissemble their curiosity or admiration. A woman of seventy, mother of several children, said to a young wife with whom I am acquainted: 'I have never seen a naked man in my life.' This old lady's sister confessed that she had never looked at her own nakedness in the whole course of her life. ”

“ A search for some expression beyond the minimal in the choice to go nude will often yield nothing: a person may choose nudity, for example, for maximum sunbathing. But when nudity is combined with expressive activity, its stimulative and attractive value certainly can enhance the force of expression, and a dancer's acts in going from clothed to nude, as in a strip-tease, are integrated into the dance and its expressive function. ”

“ Constituted as society is, with hundreds of thousands in the community who cannot appreciate the nude in art at its best, photographs of the nude are a curse to many. They appeal to passion, and create impure imaginations. ”

“ We have for so long trained ourselves to the half expressed belief that there is something wrong about nudity that we find women’s clubs draping statues, and organizations rejecting figures because they are nude, which all ages and all civilized peoples have accepted as pure and chaste works of art. I would not for a moment have it thought that I approve of all nude statues or pictures. Many of them have no virtue to commend them. ”

“ A man, married twenty years, told me that he had never seen his wife entirely nude. Such concealment of the external reproductive organs, by married people, appears to be common. Judging from my own inquiry, very few women care to look upon male nakedness, and many women, though not wanting in esthetic feeling, find no beauty in man's form. Some are positively repelled by the sight of nakedness, even that of a husband or lover. On the contrary, most men delight in gazing upon the uncovered figure of women. ”

“ What would be the effect of such pictures upon young men? If nature cannot expose herself; if a photograph from life may not be allowed; why, then, should a photograph of an artist's attempt at reproduction of the nude figure of this girl be allowed a cheap and indiscriminate sale upon the public thoroughfares?
In the artist's picture the figure is chaste in expression and posture, and surrounded with a beauty and harmony of blended colors and attractions which practically clothes it. ”

“ Those who wish to prevent children seeing artistic representations of the nude are influenced by two very different motives, although by the morality-fanatics themselves these motives are not clearly distinguished. Sometimes we are told that the sight of the nude in art may awaken the child's sexual impulse, sometimes that morality forbids such representations of the nude. ”

“ Whether the figure is draped or not, the nude is the basis of form. The best painters have always made their studies of pose and action in the nude, and then drawn the draperies over that. This insures the truth of action and structure, [Pg 348] which is almost sure to be lost when the drawing of the form is made through drapery or clothing. The underlying structure is as essential here as in portrait. It is the more imperative that the body be felt within the clothes from the fact that it cannot be seen. ”

“ Photographing from the nude is not the fad of the harlot alone. Women infatuated with their shapes begin with the exposure of a beautiful foot, arm or well rounded bust, then a leg, etc., etc., until they stand before the camera almost in puris naturalibus. ”

“ There is nothing immoral in our eyes, it is the monotony of nudity that we fight against. Painters possessed of the desire to display on canvas the bodies of the women with whom they are in love have transformed picture exhibitions into{175} galleries of portraits of disreputables. We demand for the next ten years the absolute suppression of the nude in painting. ”

“ Conspicuous among the postures assumed for its iconoclastic purpose by the genius of photography is that of "art." That fetish of the great body of the unenlightened, the dim feeling that to the enlightened bodily nakedness in pictorial representation is something very fine, is played upon. The "art photograph" is an ironic tour de force. If specimens of this have ever fallen in the way of your observation, then you have reflected upon the strange discrepancy between the female nude as presented in painting and sculpture and in photographs. ”

“ He points out that not only is the nude in art not to be condemned without qualification, and that the nude is by no means necessarily the erotic, but he also adds that even erotic art, in its best and purest manifestations, only arouses emotions that are the legitimate object of man's aspirations. ”

“ This condition of the limbs is well seen in pictures and statues of the nude figure, and it is often exaggerated by the artist or sculptor, probably to give a more distinct idea of a woman's helplessness or modesty. ”

“ The mere portrayal of the naked human body does not qualify unless (in the definition of adult cabaret, adult theater, and nude model studio) it is featured live. Qualifying depictions and descriptions do not include human genitals, but only human genitals in a state of sexual arousal, the fondling of erogenous zones, and normal or perverted sexual acts. ”