The nude—the aestheticized naked human body—has been a fundamental element of Western painting since the 15th century. Renaissance painters were initially inspired by the idealized sculptures of Greco-Roman antiquity, and nudes appeared on canvases with biblical and mythological themes. But by the late 19th century, artists began to subvert the traditions established by their forefathers, radically reinventing the nude, exploring concepts of form and challenging viewers’ preconceptions about age, race, gender, and sexuality.
20th Century Nude Paintings at Tate GalleryOn view at the Worcester Museum of Art through March 9, 2025, the touring exhibition’s only U.S. stop features two dozen iconic paintings from Tate Britain.
Artists at the turn of the twentieth century began painting nudes in everyday situations, a clear rejection of art historical convention. These unidealized bodies occupy domestic and private spaces, sparking discussions about socially acceptable displays of nudity. The works in the exhibition by Walter Richard Sickert and Pierre Bonnard sometimes allow the viewer to assume the role of a voyeur, peering into intimate moments of the individual. Female artists such as Vanessa Bell took a different approach to the nude figure. Bell was a leading figure in the Bloomsbury School, a progressive circle of London intellectuals and artists in the early 20th century, and one of the first British painters to embrace abstract art. In “The Bathtub” (1917), she used boldly simplified forms on a large scale to capture a nude subject in a stylized but unromantic setting.
Idealized female beauty—the object of the male gaze—has been depicted in Western art for centuries. Sylvia Slee’s realistic nude Paul Rossano Reclining (1974) is a direct response to the conventions and stereotypes that dictate gender roles throughout art history. In this life-size portrait, Slee depicts her sitter, the musician Paul Rosano, as a male “odalisque”—an artistic trope used to depict the harem’s maids. In doing so, Sleigh subverts the power dynamics associated with traditional representations of nudity and invites viewers to question and reconsider stereotypes within this age-old subject.
Other works in the exhibition, including legendary works by Marlene Dumas, Lucian Freud and Willem de Kooning, use the nude as an exploratory experiment sexual, boundary-breaking technology. Beginning in the 1950s, artists working in figurative subjects became increasingly interested in engaging with the human body, exploring its diversity of shapes and sizes and the expressive potential of painting. In this new era, the texture and weight of thick paint take on a separate reality. The artists emphasized the physical properties of paint, which they equated with the materiality of human flesh. They sculpt the body with thick smears, thick smears, and built-up impasto to convey the physical and metaphysical weight of what exists in this world.
Organized in partnership with the Tate Gallery, 20th Century Nude Painting at Tate Gallery On view through March 9, 2025 at the Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA.
To learn more, visit worcesterart.org.
