Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Body Bared

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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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RON ATHEY, 1994

Catherine Opie, Ron Athey, 1994

In Human Interest

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Catherine Opie, Ron Athey, 1994

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Narrator: Catherine Opie took this photograph of the performance artist Ron Athey in 1994.

Catherine Opie: He's just a very incredibly amazing, giving, lovely person who has pushed the boundaries with his own body.

Narrator: This photograph came from a time when Opie had just started making studio portraits of her friends in the San Francisco leather community. She used brightly colored backdrops intended to recall the northern Renaissance painter Hans Holbein, who is known for the intense humanism of his portraits. Catherine Opie.

Catherine Opie: By using bright colored backgrounds, I was able to reference Hans Holbein as a painter and begin to create these very loving, political portraits at a time in which my community was decimated by AIDS, and really wanted to talk about the idea of identity politics in relationship to being an out queer person. I wanted to kind of redefine the notion of my own documentary practice, so that the site became the body.

Catherine Opie’s large-format photograph features her friend, Ron Athey, a queer performance artist known for pushing the physical limits of his own and fellow performers’ bodies during live events. Opie, who has participated in some of Athey’s works, made this image to celebrate what she has described as his commitment to “transforming his body for himself and art.” Opie first gained attention in the early 1990s for her portraits of transgender women and men, drag queens, and others who fall outside traditionally assigned gender roles. Her approach is documentary but also personal: “I try to present people with an extreme amount of dignity,” she has explained. Opie acknowledges that some of her subjects, particularly those who participate in such body modification as tattooing and piercing, are “always going to be stared at.” Her aim is “to make the portraits stare back.”

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On the Hour

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

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