Original subtitles

(intriguing music)

- The nude is the most enduring subject in art.

For more than 20,000 years, images of the naked human body

have been at the very center of a long and complex saga.

It's hard to understand

any of the major developments in art

without an understanding of the key role

played by changing depictions of naked men and women.

In this series,

I'm going to explore the ongoing significance of the nude,

what it tells us about various civilizations,

and what it tells us about ourselves

and the world in which we live.

(intriguing music)

At the beginning of the 17th century,

art was still essentially commissioned by the monarchy,

the church, and the aristocracy,

who used it as a way of enforcing,

of embellishing their own power and position in the world.

The dominant style of art was called The Baroque.

It had emerged when the Roman-Catholic Church

needed a way of fighting back visually and powerfully

against the Reformation.

But by the beginning of the 17th century,

it had been started to be utilized by monarchs

who wanted to show the world

that their power came directly from God.

So here in London, at the Banqueting Hall, we see Charles I

getting the greatest Baroque artist of the day,

Peter Paul Rubens,

to produce a series of canvases for the ceiling

that show monarchy ascending up to heaven.

All of which is amplified by otherworldly nudes,

voluptuous nudes, that sense and hint

at the paradise to come.

(elegant orchestral music)

But within 15 years

of these canvases being installed here on the ceiling,

Charles I had been overthrown in the Civil War and executed.

More broadly speaking, though,

there's a revolution happening in Western Europe

that we now call the Enlightenment,

and which is stunningly charted in the visual arts

of the next 200 years, where absolutism and God

are slowly pushed out to the margins,

and where the workings of the rational human mind

become much more central,

and man himself becomes the center of his world.

(dramatic choral music)

The Enlightenment was predominantly an 18th century movement

at a time when the population was expanding rapidly,

the West was becoming industrialized,

and aspirations were changing radically.

It placed human beings at the center of things,

and explored different ways of using art,

which depicted and wrestled with human society and reason

as much as it did religion and belief.

And the nude became a weapon in this battle of ideas.

- I think what's fundamental

to understanding the Enlightenment

is the rise of the private, the rise of the individual,

and the rise of the citizen against the absolute monarch.

In a sense, Enlightenment nudes celebrate man,

celebrate him or her as an individual,

but above all, as a citizen,

all citizens being equal before God.

This is the nude of the citizen-state

rather than the nude of the absolute supremacist monarchy.

(dramatic flute music)

- The idea of absolute monarchy

was most effectively undermined

by the growth in scientific understanding

of how the human body worked,

which suggested that all men were potential equals,

and mere mortals too.

In turn, artists began to benefit

from the methods of science.

(dramatic flute music)

(upbeat music)

Anatomy lessons flourished in 17th and 18th century Europe,

and in the newly founded art academies

that began first in Italy and then France and then England,

there would be professors of anatomy

who would teach the students to look beneath

the skin of the nude human body,

and explore the way that it worked.

So in a place like this, the operating theater

at Old St. Thomas' Hospital, there'd be over 150 people

crammed in to watch the surgeon operating,

amputating, and dissecting.

Mainly, they'd be medical students,

who'd be looking and learning

but there'd be artists here too,

sketching, recording, documenting,

producing images that sometimes became

the basis of medical textbooks,

art in the service of science,

but also artists learning to fuel their own art.

(saw rings hollowly)

The lessons of the anatomy class

were most dramatically put to use

by a French artist called Theodore Gericault

who painted this work, "The Raft of the Medusa," in 1819.

What Gericault was doing was commemorating

and exploring almost journalistically

an event that had happened three years before,

in 1816, when a government-sponsored frigate,

called the Medusa, had gone to sea

with an incompetent captain appointed by the government,

and it had sunk.

150 passengers then were cast adrift on a raft,

and after two weeks at sea, they were found,

and 15 of them survived.

Now, Gericault studies the human form intensely

by going to prison hospitals, where he looks

at the ill and the dying.

At the same time we learn that he himself

has a debilitating spine disease

that eventually leads to his death in 1824.

And at this time he's painting severed limbs and heads

and charting his own decay,

and part of that lesson is transferred onto this work.

The whole picture is created as some kind of giant pyramid,

with the figure at the top, who's just taken off his shirt,

and therefore is the nude as symbol of hope,

as he waves defiantly at the ship

that's just disappearing off the end of the horizon.

But, our eyes are dragged down the raft

to this nude figure here, which is a figure

of absolute pathos.

It's man, stripped down and in his most vulnerable state,

about to fall off the edge of the raft,

and be sucked up by the icy sea.

And so we have two images, both conveyed by the nude.

One, of man's strength and monumentality and endurance.

The other, of man's absolute vulnerability.

And what we have ultimately is an image

of man as nothing when faced

by the sublime forces of nature.

(melancholy flute music)

The nude now had a number of purposes.

It could be forward-looking and radical,

but more popularly, it was backward-looking

and conservative, best exemplified

in the glorification of kings and emperors.

The preferred style here was a reworked Classical one,

Classical effectively referring to anything

based on the work of ancient Greece or Rome.

And an example of this Neoclassical work

is this extraordinary sculpture of Napoleon

that now resides in the stairwell of Apsley House in London,

formerly the residence of the Duke of Wellington.

What we see is Napoleon in the guise of a classical god.

Napoleon was a small man, this is a monumental sculpture.

It's aggrandizing him, it's making him look bigger

and more powerful and mighty than he actually was,

and that was the point of the sculpture.

And Napoleon had decided to commission

one of the great Neoclassical sculptors of the day,

in 1802, to do this work, the Italian, Antonio Canova.

And so, Napoleon duly sat, Canova made the sculpture,

took him nine years, and finally, the work was unveiled

at the Louvre in 1811, and the emperor himself appeared.

Now when Napoleon saw this work,

rumor has it he was angry and embarrassed,

but what we do know is that he said that the work

was never to be shown publicly.

It was not for public consumption,

and I think we can see why.

The point, I think, is that to show the most powerful man

in Europe clutching a symbol of victory in his hand

down there, but covered only by a fig leaf, is ludicrous.

It's absurd, it might've worked in Roman times,

but in 19th century Europe, it didn't.

The great exponent of Neoclassicism in painting

was a Frenchman called Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,

who at the beginning of the 19th century

won the Prix de Rome, and he was only 21,

so he was almost a prodigy, and for the next two decades

he spent his time in Italy,

learning the Classical idiom and the ideal.

And when he came back to France,

he soon became the darling

of the French artistic establishment and the Academy,

and throughout his life, he painted at regular intervals

classical nudes, of which this is the last,

and some say, the culmination.

Now, it's painted in 1862, when Ingres was 82,

so this is very much the workings of an old man

at the end of his life, but his spirit is very youthful,

at least in its hedonistic feel.

What we see here are a group of women lounging around,

eating, drinking, playing music.

It's almost orgiastic, but not quite,

and they're luxuriating and washing themselves

in a Turkish bath.

All the senses are invoked very consciously

by Ingres in this painting.

Women eat, the sensation of taste.

The smell from perfume and incense.

There's the idea of sound from the woman in the foreground

playing the guitar or the mandolin,

and of course, the touch is there in the way

flesh is painted, and the visual is provided by the viewer.

The great French poet Charles Baudelaire said that

the best of Ingres art was deeply sensual,

and you can see where he's coming from.

This is a deeply sensual painting,

and a celebratory one too, but I'm slightly unnerved by it

because of the sexual politics of the age.

Women weren't allowed to draw from the nude,

and it was only after the middle of the 19th century

that they were allowed into life classes

to start sketching, and so half the population

of the West were disempowered, while the other half,

the male half, were celebrating feminine beauty

in this kind of way.

But Ingres, of course, was not interested

in sexual politics, certainly not as an old man.

He was interested in sensualism, and celebration,

and keeping the classical flame alive in art.

(sensual instrumental music)

The great enemy of Neoclassicism and of Ingres in particular

was Eugene Delacroix, who used painting

as a vehicle to express radial political sentiments,

like this painting from 1830

called "Liberty Guiding the People,"

which commemorates an event that took place that year

in which the proletariat of Paris rose up

and overthrew King Charles the Tenth,

and so provocative was this painting deemed to be,

that it was banned from public gaze for at least 20 years.

This was very much a product of the Enlightenment,

a questioning of the status quo, a call for reform,

even revolution.

The key to Delacroix is speed and dynamism.

This is a dynamic painting, there's a sense of movement

surging upwards like a revolution.

But also in the speed of execution.

Brush strokes are looser here,

and in these obsessive preparatory studies

that Delacroix makes for all his monumental works,

brush strokes are like lightning,

and he once said that if you wanted to sketch a man

falling off the fifth story of a building,

if you couldn't sketch him by the time he'd hit the ground,

you'd never be able to make a monumental painting.

What we see here is the nude

used as a vehicle for political propaganda.

In the foreground, there's a male without his trousers on,

who's faintly absurd and useless. He's dead.

Contrast with this powerful symbol of woman,

holding the tricolor, a symbol of "La France,"

and of "La Liberte", but also, as a symbol

of the growing role that women were playing

in the revolutionary movement.

Their role was prominent in the 1830s uprising,

but more broadly in society, women were deemed

to be more confident.

But it's also titillating.

It's a male view, and slightly absurd.

Why is she topless?

Well, the answer is this, that Delacroix will utilize

whatever he can to further his own political beliefs.

So here is the nude as tool of political propaganda.

In the middle of the 19th century,

another political radical launched an attack

on academic art and the values of the Salon.

Gustave Courbet, who we see here,

in the center of his own painting,

painting a landscape.

Courbet submitted this work to the Paris Salon of 1855.

The Salon were the annual exhibitions where the public

came to view and increasingly, to buy art.

The public loved big classical nudes

painted in a formulaic way, and placed in a safe

mythological or historical setting.

In a sense, they were very traditional.

Courbet was one of a group of artists

who felt that art was too sanitized,

too mythological, and too allegorical.

In fact, too divorced from the real world.

Courbet was emphatic that art had to be

about what the eye saw.

"Painting is an art of what is seen" he once said,

and when he was asked by someone to paint

an angel in a church, he said, "Well, show me an angel,

and I'll paint it."

Courbet's ideas about realism in painting

are most graphically expressed when he takes on

the subject of the human body, and the nude human body,

stripped down in all its bare glory.

Now, these images here are still very striking.

In fact, the painting behind me is deemed

to be too explicit for us to show you now.

When Courbet took on the subject of the nude

and showed it publicly, there was outrage.

The emperor, Napoleon the third,

was so incensed by one particular

voluptuous nude beauty who was bathing

in one of Courbet's pictures

that he took out his riding crop and whipped her backside.

And in some ways, Courbet is taking realism

and his graphic idea to an extreme,

and some of his art treads a fine line

between art and pornography.

Particularly these works that were commissioned

for a private patron, a man called Khalil Bey,

who was the Turkish ambassador to St. Petersburg,

who saw Courbet's work in the public Salons,

and decided he wanted something for his own boudoir.

The painting on the left is called "Sleep."

It shows two women, entwined.

They're non-idealized, in a way,

at least in a classical way, but in another way,

they're very fantasized, because this is a male view,

I think, of female sexuality.

And lesbianism was never, or had never been,

a major subject in Western art.

It had rarely been pushed into the mainstream,

and that in itself was a bold gesture.

The painting behind me is still a painting that unnerves.

It's one of the reasons why I find it one of the most

staggering paintings to be produced in the 19th century.

You watch people walking around the gallery here,

and their facial expressions always express shock,

sometimes horror, sometimes they smile,

sometimes they relax, sometimes they move in,

but it always gets a reaction, and often an extreme one.

In some ways it shows a gynecological view of a woman,

and what makes it so striking is that her head is taken off,

so her body is cropped, and fetishized, and objectified.

It's like a slab of meat,

and we're drawn right the way in to her vagina.

Courbet calls this "The Origins of the World."

Now, what he's alluding to, and in some ways

he's wriggling out of the debate

about exploitation and pornography,

he's alluded to the fact

that this is where we all come from,

and that procreation and the origins of the species

can some ways, physically, it can be said,

visually as well, to start here.

But at the same time, he is producing an image

which is for titillation, for private consumption,

which exploits, in many ways, the female body,

and it's that line, that boundary, that I think

makes this work so important.

Is it art? Absolutely.

Is it graphic? Yes.

Is it pornography?

Well, that's probably in the eye of the beholder.

- Still people find that image objectionable,

even though it's a very honest, very open,

very real image of the beauty of the female form

and I think it's interesting that the head is not included.

He wasn't merely trying to excite people,

he was trying to, as he said, create an image

of the origin of the world.

It had strong symbolic value

through the sexual excitement of the image.

- Why do you think there has been

and there still is an obsession with

what we can see of a nude human body,

and what we can't see?

- I think it's part of, it's part of human desire.

The body is part of human desire,

and people are afraid of desire.

People are afraid of sex.

(upbeat music)

- The debates that had raised around realism

when Courbet was painting also were mirrored

in the development of sculpture,

when a young artist called Auguste Rodin

started to produce his sculpture

and show it in public for the first time.

And in this work, shown in 1877 at the Salon,

we see realism in all its graphic glory.

The gesture of this sculpture,

which is called "The Age of Bronze,"

but also at the time, Rodin called it "The Vanquished."

In some ways, he's a figure in agony,

but also in this way, it's a man stretching.

It's like a man waking up,

and every sinew of his body is realistic.

The musculature is absolutely right, and he's life size.

I'm standing next to him, he doesn't dwarf me,

he's not this monumental figure.

He's as a man, he's real.

And in fact, he was so realistic

that when the Salon jury of 1877 saw the work,

they accused Rodin of cheating,

of casting directly from a live human body

rather than carving the work in plaster

and then casting it in bronze,

which in fact, is what Rodin had done.

He'd not cheated at all.

And that furor about realism and cheating

launched Rodin's career, and made in some ways,

him a scandalous artist, but it also launched his career

as the most successful sculptor in many ways

of the last 150 years.

At the same time, it mirrored yet another debate

that was going on about art being drawn from life

and mechanical ways of reproduction

that in fact were centering round a brand new invention,

a brand new visual medium that changed everything.

The debate about artistic purpose was revolutionized

by the development of a new medium of representation,

photography.

(energetic orchestral instrumental music)

It was without doubt one of the most

significant developments in the history of art.

Pioneered in the late 1830s

by a French painter-turned-inventor called Louis Daguerre

who discovered that using a camera obscura,

he could fix an image cast by light.

And from this time on, once the myth grew up,

in certain circles, that painting was dead.

Of course it wasn't, but photography burgeoned,

and the nude loomed large.

But nude images that were photographed,

and photography in general, took a long time

before they were considered to be art.

(sensual jazz music)

A leading figure was Eadweard Muybridge.

He was a British-born photographer,

and a pioneer of motion photography.

Using many cameras with high-speed shutters

triggered by trip wires,

Muybridge studied animals and humans in movement,

eventually projecting the pictures

and showing the figures in motion.

And this was the precursor of modern cinematography.

Photography had a huge impact on many artists

by letting them study the way the human body actually moves.

(sensual jazz music)

There was a big debate as to whether photography

could be considered an artistic

as opposed to a scientific process.

After 1850 in France, photographs

were excluded from the Salons,

and barred from other official exhibitions.

The real point about photography

is that one could represent reality

far more effectively than painting or sculpture,

and in the decades to come, artists would ask themselves

in the presence of photography,

what is painting and sculpture for?

(cheerful orchestral music)

And a second debate was also provoked.

Up until this point, nude images were mainly available

only to the elite in the homes, or in art galleries.

But now they were available to the masses,

and there was suddenly a moral outcry.

(sensual instrumental music)

Many believed that photography was to blame

for a general spread of vice.

In Britain, between 1868 and 1880,

the Society for the Suppression of Vice

seized a quarter of a million photographs and prints.

(sensual instrumental music)

The debate about what constituted pornography

and what constituted art was now well and truly raging,

and it ran through the next century.

More broadly speaking though,

photography threw down a huge challenge

to those who painted or sculpted the nude human body.

Because what had previously taken weeks or months

to produce, could now be realized in the blinking of an eye,

or the clicking of a mechanical shutter.

And it was this challenge that shaped

the image of the nude human body

and the experimental art that blossomed

in the 20th century.

(upbeat music) (machine humming)