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2/11/2023 Comments

ART & NUDE PHOTOGRAPHY: A Fashionable Ideal by John Cat

"Photography is not art." - Man Ray

On 14 May 2022, L'Violon d' Ingres ( Ingres Violin), a black & white photograph created by Man Ray ( Emmanuel Radnitzky b.1890-d.1976 ), set a new record for the most expensive photograph when it sold for $12,400,000 ( 12 million & 4 hundred thousand dollars ) at auction. Inspired by Neo Classical French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, this 29.6 cm × 22.7 cm (11.625 in × 8.9375 in) photograph is now owned by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

     The photo is captivating in it's surrealist simplicity, a nude photograph of KiKi De Montparnasse', ( Alice Ernestine Prin ) his model, lover and companion at the time.
Kiki was a French cabaret performer, painter, and artists’ muse who acquired her nickname for being a fixture in the bohemian circles of the Montparnasse neighborhood in Paris. She modeled for numerous artists such as Amedeo Modigliani, Man Ray, and Alexander Calder.

In Ingres Violin, she is posed half naked wearing a turbin, seen from the back with violin sound holes positioned on her back, thus transforming her body into a musical instrument, This picture maintains a tension between objectification & appreciation of the female form.



  Man Ray was a pioneering American fashion & portrait photographer who worked primarily in Paris and was one of the key figures in the Dada art movement but his work also straddles surrealism. Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works.

      Man Ray was also a painter and one of his works is The Lovers 1933, created in the aftermath of his passionate and sometimes volatile relationship with the beautiful American photographer and model Lee Miller. In their Surrealist love affair, she was often his model, frequently nude, and her sculptural presence in front of the camera – honed as a fashion model, is one of the most tempestuous and creative relationships in the history of art.

The naked body has, since ancient times, fascinated artists of all backgrounds. Sculptors, painters and illustrators competed to celebrate the body and represent it in its original state, as evidenced by the works from ancient civilizations, notably Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. Prehistoric representations of the naked human body can even be seen on the painted walls of caves and prehistoric statuary art. But if masculine nudes prevailed in Antiquity, especially among the Greeks, the trend has now shifted and it is the female body that has become the ultimate muse for artists.

  In 1850 France, photographer Jean-Louis-Marie-Eugène Durieu (1800 - 1874) collaborated with artist Eugène Delacroix on a series of nude photo studies depicting a human bodies male and female. These model photos were created to help the artist paint & draw without having the expense of a live model. Delacroix then called these "palpable demonstrations of the free design of nature," & later drew from Durieu's photographs. Durieu was a founding member of the Société heliographique in 1851 and the Société Française de Photographie in 1854.

      Although the first known printed nude photograph was a male ca. 1840 France, the female form quickly grew in popularity for this new printing medium. Ever the entrepreneurs, the French quickly capitalized on this by producing postcards of females in various stages of dress, undress and often completely naked.

Printed on a postcard sized piece of cardstock featuring a photograph of a nude or semi-nude woman. Such erotic cards were produced in great volume, primarily in France, in the late 19th and early 20th century. The cards sometimes depicted lesbians.

       Some of the most popular models of the day appeared on them as well as singers, actors, circus performers & burlesque strippers. Nude photography has long been assimilated to a sub-genre of eroticism, no doubt because it mainly depicts naked women, but is now collected as an art form & still used by many artists in their work to understand the human body depicted.

French Postcard ca. 1900

Hand colored photograph for a French postcard circa 1910

Nude black and white photograph by Bellocq

Nude with a Mask by E. J. Bellocq

In 1897 New Orleans, Louisiana, a certain local politician declared a law that "whoring was illegal" in any neighborhood of the city EXCEPT those bordered by a set of 16 blocks. This "Cathouse Neighborhood", soon became known as "Storyville". Storyville is where a photographer known as Bellocq (1873–1949) shot a series of 84 sympathetic photographs of a group of Storyville prostitutes. Only of women, none of these photos depict any sexual acts or any implied erotic content but seem to be merely records of someone's obsession & documentation of the times.

Nude with a Mask, ca.1912, a 12.8 × 18.1 cm (5 1/16 × 7 1/8 in.) gelatin silver print from glass negative, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one such photograph.

Storyville is not only known for the world's oldest profession, it is also the incubation area for the time frame in the creation of the JAZZ music form.

Black & white nude photograph by Edward Weston (1886-1958)Picture

Black & white nude by Edward Weston (b.1886- d.1958)

Another American, Edward Weston, was a vital pioneer of Modernist photography, who helped elevate the status of his chosen medium to that of a revered art form. He found early commercial success with a pictorialist style of image-making, using a soft-focus lens to create painterly portraits, but by the 1920s had adopted an increasingly experimental approach to his craft.
On a trip to Mexcio, he spent the next 5 years developing the radical stylistic traits that would come to define his later practice. This involved using a close-up lens and natural lighting “to make the commonplace unusual”, and saw rocks, clouds and plants rendered remarkably sculptural studies in line and texture.

First Nude in Color 1951 by Norman Parkinson for Vogue.

Norman Parkinson (b.1913-d.1990) was a noted British fashion and portrait photographer who shot beautiful images for magazines. Starting out as a Royal Air Force photographer in World War 2 he later gravitated towards fashion photography.

Parkinson shot First Nude in Color in 1951 for a Vogue magazine beauty book. The photo depicts a naked fashion model from the side, posing face down on a chaise type lounge chair in a sort of beige antique white juxtaposition of minimalist colors. Her body is long & her hair is immaculately coifed in this mid century masterpiece.

Diane Arbus (b.1923–d.1971), was an American photographer who shot poignant images of the various people she came across in her street photography. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, whores, carnival performers, transvestites, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. People on the fringes of society fascinated her and she oftentimes got to personally know her subject matter as she documented her artistic visions. In 1963, she made a series of nude images at a nudist camp in New Jersey. One such is, Waitress, a gelatin silver print (37.2 x 36.3 cm (14 5/8 x 14 5/16 in.) now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Waitress, a black and white photograph by Diane Arbus

Jeana by Patrick Nagel

Patrick Nagel (b.1945–d.1984) was an American artist and illustrator who created a remarkable archive of images epitomizing 1980's chic. First for Playboy magazine then branching into fine art seriography, he created popular illustrations on board, paper, and canvas, most of which emphasize the female form in a distinctive style, descended from Art Deco and Pop art. His minimalist style defined an era with cool, seductive women that became the most iconic of any single generation.

Utilizing staged photography of nude or semi nude uninhibited female models he met through his work with Playboy, Nagel then painted them on canvas or made film positives of his photos for silk screening (seriograph) as limited edition works of art. These alluring images soon became immortalized in popular culture at the time.

In 2020 one such image, Jeana 1983, a 40" x 25" acrylic on canvas, shattered the world record for Nagel when it sold at Heritage Auctions for $350,000.

Le Corbusier, a black & white photo by James Sasso 2002.

Le Corbusier, a work by Sasso, features a female stretched out on a vintage Le Corbusier chrome and leather chaise lounge. A lover of architecture & nature, Sasso also employs silk screening (seriography), dye sublimations, collage & digital imagery in his painterly oeuvre.
James Sasso (b. 1960) briefly attended commercial art school where he studied photography, fashion illustration, life drawing, technical drawing, design, painting and other art mediums. Sasso began experimenting with painting & drawing on canvas, photography and art on clothing to create a unique style in fashionable tee shirts and he is the main artist at ARTtoGO.com

All in all, nude photography since its inception at the invention of photography, has continued to be seen as a collectable art form. Photography has had an inspirational impact on the making of art by muse driven artists throughout the generations.

Special Thanks to other Cultural Practitioners like Phil Stern, Helmut Newton, Terry O'Neill, Patrick Demarchelier & countless others who manage to keep this aesthetic tradition alive for the benefit of humanity & the enhancement of world culture.