Today is Édouard Manet’s 180th birthday, so we’ve decided to pay homage to one of his most scandalous accomplishments — the presentation of Olympia at the 1865 Paris Salon. The controversy! The uproar! Oh, that “shocking,” “vulgar,” “immoral” reclining nude! It wasn’t as if society hadn’t seen a nude in art before; it was the way she was presented — not as some floaty goddess, but a real, confident, vampy naked gal, seemingly in the middle of a commanding crotch grab, perhaps even a high class prostitute. And so, let’s take a semi-random survey of the reclining nude in art history, from Manet’s Olympia inspirations — Titian’s 1538 Venus and Giorgione’s 1510 Sleeping Venus — to sleeping, lying, horizontally leaning nudes in contemporary visual culture. See all that flesh change along with aesthetic movements and trends and commercial motivations. Observe the body language. Naturally, we’ve left huge gaps, so feel free to fill in our jagged little timeline with your suggestions and favorites in the comment section.
Sleeping Venus, Giorgione and Titian, 1510. Courtesy of Wikipedia
The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, 1511. Courtesy of Wikipedia
Venus of Urbino, Titian, 1538. Courtesy of Wikipedia
Male Nude known as Hector, Jacques-Louis David, 1778. Courtesy of Wikimedia
The Naked (or Nude) Maja, Francisco de Goya, 1797–1800. Courtesy of Wikipedia
La Grande Odalisque, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1814. Courtesy of Wikipedia
Olympia, Édouard Manet, 1863. Courtesy of Wikipedia
Reclining Male Nude, Thomas Eakins, 1887. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Reclining Male Nude, Egon Schiele, 1911. Courtesy of Art.com
Reclining Nude, Amedeo Modigliani, 1917. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bather (Female Nude), Salvador Dalí, 1928. Courtesy of ArtNet
Nude Girl on a Fur, Otto Dix, 1932. Courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland
La Poupée, Hans Bellmer, 1933 – 1937. Courtesy of Art Tattler
Nude with Abstract Painting, Roy Lichtenstein, 1949. Courtesy of Sexuality in Art
Study for a Crouching Nude, Francis Bacon, 1961. Courtesy of Bloomberg.com
Bergstrom in Paris, Helmut Newton, 1970s. Courtesy of Art Knowledge News
Sanatorium, Joel Peter Witkin, 1987. Courtesy of Live Auctioneers
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, Lucian Freud, 1995. Courtesy of Wikipedia
Naomi Campbell – Fruit Passion, David LaChapelle, 1999. Courtesy of ArtNet
Eine Tanzerin, Jan Saudek, 2003. Courtesy of Saudek.com
Nude with Skeleton, Marina Abramović, 2002-2005-2010. Courtesy of the MoMA
Untitled (Kaori), Nobuyoshi Araki, 2004. Courtesy of ArtNet
Untitled (Bathtub), Ryan McGinley, 2005. (Image via)
Marc Jacobs ad by Juergen Teller, 2010
Still from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, 2011