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 Frieze, No. 2, Four Panels, John Coplans lays bare the physical markers of old age—including wrinkles and loosened skin—on a large scale. Despite the fact that aging is a shared human experience, images of its effects are far outnumbered by those that celebrate the appearance of youth. Coplans, who spent much of his professional life as an art critic, curator, and museum director, began in 1978 to take photographs in the evenings. By 1984, at age sixty-four, he had committed to being an artist and to using his own body as the exclusive subject of his work. “An old man’s body?” Coplans once explained. “There are millions of them. . . . I watch them, look at them, and I know it’s me.” Recognizing himself in others, Coplans offers his own aging physique to the viewer in defiance of cultural standards of beauty.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Body Bared

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FRIEZE, NO. 2, FOUR PANELS, 1994

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Body Bared

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FRIEZE, NO. 2, FOUR PANELS, 1994

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection