At first glance it might not seem appropriate to be blogging on International Women’s Day about a book with the title “The Female Nude – Art, Obscenity and Sexuality” by Lynda Nead. But don’t judge this book by the title.
As you delve into the pages you’ll be disappointed if you are looking for cheap titillation. The subject is, as you would expect, well researched by the author who lectures at the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London.
One of the many questions that is posed in this book is something that I have been asking myself since the start of this project – what is the definition of art in the context of the female nude and why is it so prevalent in our art galleries and museums.
The book does go into the theories why this has come about but the topic that interested me the most was the questioning of the message our art galleries and museums were giving out with the female nudes they had on display.
Considering that a large percentage of these works would have been created by male heterosexual artists it is not surprising that there is an abundance of creativity that depicts women as idealised objects of desire. A rather one dimensional view of women if you think about it.
From my reading of the book, the author has no wish to destroy or ban these pieces of work. In the final paragraph of the book, the author argues that there should be a wider diversity of creators of the female nude to show the complexity and reality of half the population in the world.
This book was written in 1992 and so on International Women’s Day in 2016, I do wonder how much since then we have done (to quote from the last line in the book) to give “feminist voices to be heard and for feminist images to be seen.”