Naked Conversation

Last Wednesday, we trekked to the Cooley Gallery at Reed College to view The Language of the Nude: Four Centuries of Drawing the Human Body, curated by Stephanie Snyder. I was interested to see how the portrayal of the human form changed through the years, from the embodiment of religious and mythological ideals, to the embodiment of ideals of beauty, to the embodiment of scientific perfection in realistic proportion. Actually, what was even more interesting was seeing how the ideals of beauty in the past seemed to be far removed from those we generally hold today. Many of the images surprisingly revealed grossly disproportioned people, with impossibly bulging muscles and teeny-tiny heads, for instance. Today, it seems that - popularly - nudity is not so often portrayed as an embodiment of some spiritual ideal or even necessarily of any beauty ideal, but more so as a subject of erotic interest. And as such, it does not tend to be openly and publicly portrayed (as art, for instance), but privately and discretely viewed. Perhaps this has to do with the embarrassment our country still seems to feel when confronted with nudity, as though it is shameful and in and of itself will sully the pure minds of our children (I'm not really this snide, by the way). And perhaps I'm simply wrong. After all, I won't deny that there is great reverence for the nude human form in the world of art…and even to some extent in religious circles...where the nude may be used to convey a sense of vulnerability, of psychological complexity, of an integrated sense of personhood, or of dignity and strength. We'll see if and how our perception and portrayal of the nude continues to change in coming centuries.