The nude — the aestheticized human body laid bare — has been a fundamental element of Western painting since the 15th century. Renaissance painters were inspired initially by the idealized sculptures of Greco-Roman antiquity, and nudes populate the canvases of biblical and mythological subjects. But by the end of the 19th century, artists began to upend the traditions established by their forebears, radically recasting the nude to explore concepts of form and challenge viewers’ preconceptions about age, race, gender, and sexuality.
Twentieth-Century Nudes from Tate, on view at the Worcester Art Museum through March 9, 2025, showcases more than two dozen iconic paintings from Britain’s Tate galleries in the traveling exhibition’s only stop in the United States.
In a marked rejection of art historical conventions, artists at the turn of the 20th century began to paint nudes in everyday settings. These unidealized bodies occupied domestic, private spaces, provoking discourse on socially acceptable displays of nudity. Works by Walter Richard Sickert and Pierre Bonnard in the show place the viewer at times in the role of the voyeur, peering in on personal, intimate moments. Female artists such as Vanessa Bell took a different approach to the nude figure. Bell was a leading figure in the Bloomsbury Group, a progressive circle of intellectuals and artists in London in the early 20th century, and was one of the first painters in Britain to embrace abstract art. With “The Tub” (1917), she uses boldly simplified forms at a large scale to capture a nude subject in a stylized yet unromanticized environment.
Idealized female beauty — the object of the male gaze — has been depicted for centuries in Western art. Sylvia Sleigh’s realist nude, “Paul Rosano Reclining” (1974), is a direct response to the conventions and stereotypes that dictated gender roles across the history of art. In this life-sized portrait, Sleigh presents her model, musician Paul Rosano, almost as a male “odalisque”—an artistic trope used to present a female servant in a harem. In doing so, Sleigh subverts the power dynamics associated with a traditional representation of the nude, and invites viewers to question and reconsider the stereotypes found in this age-old subject.
Other works in the exhibition, including larger-than-life works by Marlene Dumas, Lucian Freud, and Willem de Kooning, employ the nude as a means to explore experimental, boundary-pushing techniques. From the 1950s onward, artists working with figurative subjects became increasingly interested in the encounter with the human body, exploring its diversity of shape and size and the expressive potential of paint. In this new era, the texture and weight of thick paint took on an independent reality. Artists emphasized paint’s physical properties, which they equated with the materiality of human flesh. They shaped bodies out of thick smears, heavy daubs, and built-up impasto to convey the physical and metaphysical weight of existing in this world.
Organized in partnership with Tate, Twentieth-Century Nudes from Tate is on view through March 9, 2025, at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts.
To learn more, visit worcesterart.org.
