Note: Heads up to regular readers. This is going to be my last Erotic Art Friday for May and June this year, as I'm going to have to take off from art research to focus on an off-line writing project that is seriously horribly overdue. I'll also be blogging a bit more sporadically than usual, in hopes of both completing the writing project, starting on the next one and, of course, getting as much gardening in before the impossibly hot days of summer set in.

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Today's show is devoted to female nude portraits by women painters. Most if not all of these painters may be new to you -- some are just starting out, some have begun to make inroads and are emerging as successful painters, and some are now gone but have left a legacy of somewhat obscure yet achieved work that continues to get attention.

I started this research wondering if a focus on female nudes by female artists would show me something different from female nudes by male artists. It did! But I'm not sure exactly what. Still, I noticed that after googling for a couple of hours I could predict, with reasonably good accuracy, which nudes would turn out to be the works of women and which would be done by men. One very obvious difference, of course, is that nudes by men on the whole are more sexually suggestive and tend to draw attention to specific areas of the female body (particularly breasts, with asses and legs close behind). Yet even when it came to simple figure studies where it almost appeared that the male and female artists could have been working off the same models or under the same teacher, there was some difficult-to-pinpoint fundamental difference between the way women perceive female nudity and the way men do.

Am I imagining all this? Look carefully at this grouping of women artists (from the early 20th century through today) who've created lasting impressions of the naked female body and tell me what you think.

Artists arranged alphabetically after the jump.

Angela Abbott

Elise Blumann

Delia Brown

CES

Natalie Yoshino Ellis

Mary Alice Evatt

Sarah Hyde

Marianne Johns

Peggy Kirk

Coco Larrain

Anna Lemnitzer

Erika Meriaux

Charlotte Orford

Ella Malek Orszanski

Catherine Oswald

Debbie Reed

Ora Ruven

Chantal Samson

Helma Schleipfer

Diane Walkey

May 23, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink

Your Comments

Well, from what I've noticed (though that might not be saying much, because I don't go around looking for nude art), if you ignore the obviously oversexualized ones, female nudes created by men tend to have a more "vulnerable" vibe and those created by women tend to have a more "natural" vibe. Kind of like "exposed" versus "it just is". I'm not sure how to better put it. But this is probably only a minor tendency, not a fundamental difference.

Were I given to pop psychology, I might suggest that this could be because most men don't see naked women in a casual context often if at all, where women are more likely to (locker rooms etc., plus they actually see their own bodies while bathing if nothing else).

Posted by: Nightfall at May 23, 2008 9:28:03 PM

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