Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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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.

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In this image, photographer Sally Mann’s daughter Virginia regards the viewer with a calm, assured gaze. Using an antique 8-by-10-inch view camera, Mann renders her subject in sharp focus while allowing the natural landscape to blur. Shot on the farm in Lexington, Virginia, where Mann spent much of her youth, this and several hundred other photographs of her three children playing, sometimes unclothed, capture the artist’s conviction “that [her] lens should remain open to the full scope of their childhood.”Virginia at 5 is one in a series called Immediate Family, published in book form in 1992. Its frank, complex presentation of Mann’s children proved controversial, though, as she wrote in a 2015 memoir, it was not her intention to provoke. “Part of the artist’s job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation onto the conventional. With the family pictures, I may have done some of that. In particular I think they tapped into some below-the-surface cultural unease about what it is to be a child, bringing into the dialogue questions of innocence and threat and fear and sensuality.”

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Body Bared

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VIRGINIA AT 5, 1990

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Body Bared

10

VIRGINIA AT 5, 1990

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection