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You miss a lot of wonderful as well as historic art if the nude is denounced. (B. J. Adams)
When women pose thoughtfully and artistically - in nothing but their bare skin - they find themselves. They discover that they are truly alive. They become a Nude. (David Allio)
Naked is a human commodity. Nudity is God's art. (David Allio)
Why do female nudes always have to look downtrodden? Is it because artists of the past could only find prostitutes to take their kit off, and they were naturally jaded and despondent... ? (Daniela Andersen)
As a model, you're so used to taking your clothes off that you just don't care. (Tyra Banks)
Something about the nude figure brings out the philosopher in me. Sometimes I'll add text as I'm drawing the figure at open studio... I find myself writing thoughts from a different perspective that never would have occurred to me alone at home. (Theresa Bayer)
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. (John Berger)
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress. (John Berger)
The nude, if you tackle it, is a very fascinating subject, especially for a woman. (Isabel Bishop)
Traditionally the Nude was used to express formulations about life as larger-than-life, as Heroic or Ideal... The nude is not a 'genre' subject. (Isabel Bishop)
The nakedness of woman is the work of God. (William Blake)
Are Artists who create nude human forms getting 'turned on' while they create? Our brains are in spatial-thinking mode and conscious sexual thoughts would get in the way and defeat the intention. (Kelly Borsheim)
When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed. (Bill Brandt, photographer)
I couldn't portray a woman in all her natural loveliness... I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty... (Georges Braque)
In the Nude, all that is not beautiful is obscene. (Robert Bresson)
The nude portrait is only incidentally about the naked person in the middle of the room. (Paula Brook)
We must look for the pure essence of the human body and not the niggling details that sometimes clutter up the flow of form. (Harley Brown)
-in 1815...
I have read that the ancients, when they had produced a sound, used to modulate it, heightening and lowering its pitch without departing from the rules of harmony. So must the artist do in working at the nude. (Antonio Canova)
The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
It matters not what kind of figure-pictures he [the artist] wishes to paint, he will never be able to draw the figure properly, whether draped or otherwise, unless he has gone through a preliminary course of study from the nude. (John Collier)
Painting figures is the hardest, certainly the most taxing genre, and you have to be the most on your game. If you have significant drawing problems, the figure will fall apart and it will read wrong emotionally. (Jacob Collins)
Modern pessimism denies the intrinsic beauty and replaces it with a subjective vision that cares little for the objective truth. In this thought the figure, whether nude or clothed, loses its form by putting more value on its symbolism than its actual form. That's when you need a Rembrandt to step in a remind us of the value of content in its relation to form and beauty! (Shane Conant)
Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul? (Richard Corliss)
a pretty girl who is naked / is worth a million statues (e. e. cummings)
Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience. But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations... it is as if you were looking through a keyhole. (Edgar Degas)
- letter to his father, 1867...
When a man paints a naked woman he gives her less than poor Nature did. I can conceive of few circumstances wherein I would have to paint a woman naked, but if I did I would not mutilate her for double the money. She is the most beautiful thing there is - except a naked man, but I never saw a study of one exhibited. (Thomas Eakins)
Beautiful nudes made it possible for us to contemplate our sexuality in safety. (Martha Mayer Erlebacher)
Woman's nudity is wiser than the philosopher's teachings. (Max Ernst)
Nudity is a problem for Americans. It disrupts our social exchange. (Eric Fischl)
The problem with painting a nude... is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body. (Lucian Freud)
When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't. (Lucian Freud)
A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!... (Paul Gauguin)
Since nudes in all countries and centuries possess standard equipment, it's difficult to say precisely why the pictures at the Brooklyn Museum right now are so thoroughly American. (Emily Genauer)
Our bodies, apart from their brilliant role as drawing exercises, are the temples of our being. Like the bodies of all fauna, they deserve both our study and our appreciation. (Robert Genn)
There is nothing in all the world more beautiful or significant of the laws of the universe than the nude human body. (Robert Henri)
When we respect the nude, we will no longer have any shame about it. (Robert Henri)
A thorough understanding of the anatomy of the human figure in its ideal form is fundamental to relating to, and interpreting, our perception of the world. (Marvin Humphrey)
-on critics of his series of paintings of Hindu goddesses...
It was all smoke and fire! And actually very curious, because there are naked goddesses in temples all over India. But no, because I'm a Muslim, that was the point. (Maqbool Fida Husain)
-The Guardian...
Art is about showing and seeing: to show that which is concealed, to see what was veiled, is fundamentally gripping. (Jonathan Jones)
I would prefer a normal-sized breast, or a small breast or whatever, and that it be natural, than to understand that it was just some jelly in there. (Jeff Koons)
Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud. (Milan Kundera)
There is nothing as humbling as drawing, sketching, painting the human body. Young, old, middle aged, it is such a thing of beauty and wonder. (Mary Jean Mailloux)
When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion. (Henri Matisse)
The living model, the naked body of a woman, is the privileged seat of feeling, but also of questioning... The model must mark you, awaken in you an emotion which you seek in turn to express. (Henri Matisse)
And who is so barbarous as not to understand that the foot of a man is nobler than his shoe, and his skin nobler than that of the sheep with which he is clothed. (Michelangelo)
He who does not master the nude cannot understand the principles of architecture. (Michelangelo)
The gesture must be correct. If the gesture is correct, your mind really creates the reality of the figure, and it is not necessary to hang on all the rest [of the details]... (Nathan Oliveira)
For nudes, I usually have a set-up for the model and take about twenty slides for each painting, often combining parts of several references to get all of the elements I'm after. (Ron Parker)
A nude which has little if any affiliation with exhibitionism, which expresses warmth and confidence and an actual story, which has little or nothing to do with contemporary angst or submissiveness or abuse or domination, would best be described as a 'who' and not a 'which' or 'what.' Sad to say that such a wondrous nude is today rarely visible, or even recognized, in the realm of the arts. (Bernard Poulin)
A painter is not intellectual when having painted a nude woman, he leaves in our minds the idea that she is going to get dressed again right away. (Odilon Redon)
I look at a nude. There are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)
My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)
I wouldn't do nudity in films. For me, personally... To act with my clothes on is a performance; to act with my clothes off is a documentary. (Julia Roberts)
Man's naked form... belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages. (Auguste Rodin)
I have unbounded admiration for the nude. I worship it like a god. (Auguste Rodin)
The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is. And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning. (Auguste Rodin)
-on Rigoberto Rodriguez...
It is not easy to sense, or catch, that fleeting moment when, for instance, a rock gels to feminine shapeliness precisely at the same moment that a woman's beauty attains the perpetuity of stone. Only an eye standing permanent watch may capture the rich concurrence of two kingdoms of nature without slipping into the neighboring field of pornography. This fly on the wall is enamored. (Carlos Cesar Rodriguez)
Men's magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women's magazines also often feature pictures of naked ladies. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is hairy and lumpy and should not be seen by the light of day. (Richard Roeper)
The undraped figure in nature has a beautiful outlook. It is the important task of the artist to save the world. To defend art from pornography means to defend art model from offensive image. Pornography offends the model; art – never. Art respects, arises, loves model. (Yaroslaw Rozputnyak)
I paint a woman's big rounded buttocks so that I want to reach out and stroke the dimpled flesh. (Peter Paul Rubens)
What is the body? That shadow of a shadow
of your love, that somehow contains
the entire universe. (Rumi)
-in February 1885...
As regards the supreme reasons against the admission of the female students to the study of the male nude, they cannot be mentioned to a maiden's ears. (Seeking and Saving)
The nude form is but Nature's mantle without the crust. (Ian Semple)
-on drawing the nude...
It's the most important study there is and the most challenging and the most difficult. (Wayne Thiebaud)
-in 1879...
Criticism is a queer thing. If I print, 'She was stark naked,' and then proceeded to describe her person in detail, what critic would not howl? Who would venture to leave the book on a parlor table? But the artist does this and all ages gather around and look and talk and point... (Mark Twain)
-On the Vineyard
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. (John Updike)
The best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms and knees, with bones underneath. (Giorgio Vasari)
When you draw a nude, sketch the whole figure and nicely fit the members to it and to each other. Even though you may only finish one portion of the drawing, just make certain that all the parts hang together, so that the study will be useful to you in the future. (Leonardo da Vinci)
O painter skilled in anatomy, beware lest the undue prominence of the bones, sinews and muscles cause you to become a wooden painter from the desire to make your nude figures reveal all. (Leonardo da Vinci)
Shooting nudes gives us the opportunity to take chances and experiment. It's about pushing boundaries – in art and in life. (Alex Waterhouse-Hayward)
I remember trying not to disrupt everyone else in the room, fumbling around trying to figure out how to use the medium with a beautiful model disrobed in front of me... (Don Watson)
Often a certain tenderness and love is felt capturing the nude's special beauty and spirit in paint. It is a romance with the subject and the canvas, and it's very seductive. (Coulter Watt)
-diary, 1926, Views on nudes by Bill Jay...
The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it? (Edward Weston)
Her husband, he's German you know. When her husband came to me, I said, 'John, you don't mind me painting your wife.' And he said, 'No, that's fine, just don't paint her nude. (Andrew Wyeth)
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