inkbluesky

keira and scarlett

Nude awakening

The words reclining nude conjure up a vision of voluptuous femininity, a bed with crumpled sheets, and a painter, mind focused, brush alert, making his mark on the canvas. All very sexual, really. Which has always been the problem.

Fine art, as we know, is respectable. Sex is not. The reclining nude is where they meet. One of the most fascinating of fine art’s spectator sports is watching the rude removed from the nude.

…Kenneth Clark, in his book The Nude, published in 1956, puts it with perfection: “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body re-formed.”