If partial or total nudity is a condition, art nudity distinguishes itself through numerous rules. The nude is an artistic genre in itself, and its codes depend on social, religious, and political mores as well as fashion and morality. From antiquity to the present day, in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and living arts, the nude provokes extensive theoretical debates. Feminine, masculine, divine, heroic, glorious, suffering, scandalous, shameful, trivial, sensual, orientalizing, erotic, chaste, militant, or even pornographic, the nude is diverse.
This thematic and diachronic course explores certain facets, from academic drawing to colonial photography, from heroic genre to erotic masters, from body art to fashion shows, from cinema to theatre or dance. Prehistoric and Botticelli Venus, Kouros or hermaphroditic figures, Michelangelo's nudes veiled by Daniele da Volterra and the intimate exposure of Rick Owens' models, Gustave Courbet's Origin of the World or Artemisia Gentileschi's Suzanne and the Old Men, Marcel Duchamp's The Nude Descending a Staircase and Gerhard Richter's Ema, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe or Nan Goldin, and performances by Deborah De Robertis—through ancient and contemporary examples, sometimes reevaluated in light of current events—the course will examine the aesthetic, moral, and political issues of the nude in art, placing them within their contexts of creation and reception.