Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

All

10 / 15

Previous Next

Body Bared

10

The nude is one of the most time-honored subjects in Western art, but for centuries it was used to depict unnamed generic figures or mythological subjects rather than specific individuals. Since the turn of the twentieth century, however, artists have increasingly challenged this convention by producing frank, highly particular nudes, often with the sitters identified in the works’ titles. From Joan Semmel’s monumental self-portrait in bed with a lover to John Coplans’s unflinching document of his aging body, most of these works subvert expectations about how a nude should look, pose, and engage the viewer. Photographs by Katy Grannan, and Catherine Opie, among others, unabashedly question cultural assumptions about gender, beauty, and power, giving voice to groups and individuals who are often marginalized by both the traditions of portraiture and mainstream American culture. By transforming nudity from a classical ideal into something decidedly personal, contemporary, and idiosyncratic, these artists compel us to confront the complex and often contradictory feelings elicited by the human body: fascination and repulsion, pleasure and shame, freedom and inhibition.


Below is a selection of works from Body Bared.

Back

1 / 13

Previous Next

TOUCH, 1975

Joan Semmel, Touch, 1975

In Human Interest

0:00

Joan Semmel, Touch, 1975

0:00

Joan Semmel: I’m Joan Semmel. I’m an artist, and I live in SoHo.

Narrator: Semmel painted Touch in 1974.

Joan Semmel: It’s a representation of a male and female figure in a post or precoital situation. And I was at the time interested in showing the images from a female point of view. So I took photos of the couple—of myself and a partner—from my own point of view.

I was being confrontational, and I wanted the painting to confront the audience with an image that was different than the way they normally saw this subject. Our softcore porn pictures are essentially the same of images that are in the history of art, where the women are usually placed as a kind of seductive lure to the male eye as much as possible. Which, I don’t have any problem with, except that it doesn’t turn me on [laughs]. And I was interested in finding an erotic language that would be interesting for women. So for me the whole idea of the touch is very important, and one feels the flesh as the most important part of what’s happening.

Narrator: Semmel was part of an early generation of feminist artists, who wanted their art to have a personal and political impact on their contemporaries. To hear more from Semmel, please tap your screen.

In the early 1970s, Joan Semmel began painting nude figures engaged in explicit sex acts, and soon she was incorporating her own body into her compositions. In Touch, Semmel depicts erotically charged imagery from her perspective as a participant. By painting herself next to her male lover, Semmel subverts the long accepted artistic tradition of presenting women’s passive bodies solely for the spectator’s enjoyment. Instead, she offers an image of intimacy and sexuality on her terms. Some feminist artists objected to her work; they argued that representations of overt sexual content objectify women, even when the images are made by women. In defiance of this criticism, Semmel joined an initiative called the Fight Censorship (FC) group. Founded by artist Anita Steckel in 1973, the collective described itself as “women artists who have done, will do, or do some form of sexually explicit art.”

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 383 works

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.