Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Nudity does not equal Obscenity

The other day in my art class, I got very little respectful feedback from my (adult) classmates, and this due to the subject of my project. Indeed, I dared to draw a naked body, and my drawing was instantly called obscene. I utterly disagree.
       First of all, nudity is the obligatory way to represent anatomy and all its details; we can see for example in all the statues and paintings representing Greek or Biblical heroes that the hero is naked to show his strength with the details of the muscles and his sacredness (Michelangelo's David or other Italian contemporaries), or even today to show the extreme humanity of the subject (Schiele, Gauguin, etc).
       Linked to that, we can affirm that nudity is the purest form of humanity (and was used to show one's humanity in medieval religious paintings, like Adam and Eve), or represented the sacredness of a being (gods in mythological paintings of the following time period, like in Boticelli's Birth of Venus) and therefore is in itself the opposite of obscenity.
       Now, I agree that many artists (Rodin, Buffet, etc.) used nudity for eroticism, whose point is obscenity, and that it can hardly reach this goal without naked figures. But eroticism is very different from nudity, for the simple reason that eroticism seeks to shock the viewer through obscenity and nudity to convey the human or sacred atmosphere.
       So, if there is nudity in my works, it doesn't make them obscene. It shows the aesthetic of the body, the humanity in the characters, and transforms the atmosphere to something deistic. And disrespecting them because of that is absolutely idiotic.
Marlene

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