Our newest editorial contributor, Lilianne Milgrom, will be reporting on the nude in art and the nude AS art in a series entitled The Body and Beyond. We'll follow her throughout the year in her search for the next Great Nude.

The intersection of art and the nude has a long history, almost as long as human mark-making itself. Throughout the ages, the nude has been depicted in exquisite, grotesque, idealized, shocking or perverse ways, and artists will continue to surprise us with their interpretations. The fact that each and every one of us is born au naturel makes it inevitable that, at some level, the viewer sees him or herself mirrored in the image of the nude, no matter how it is represented. The nude is personal, and therein lies the fundamental source of both its enduring fascination and its contentious history.

I have always been greatly moved and inspired by the nude in art. At the age of eighteen, Auguste Rodin's divine renderings of the human body in marble reduced me to tears. Fast forward several decades to Lucian Freud's recent retrospective at the Pompidou Center, where I found myself in thrall of the palpable humanity of Freud's subjects. On the other hand, Larry Clark's photographs on view across town at the Paris MOMA felt somewhat exploitative. These mixed emotions reflect the vast range of responses elicited by the nude in art. One of the few things art critics will agree upon is that the final interpretation of nude works is in the eye of the beholder. It is the one genre which seems to turn everybody into an expert.

Lilianne Milgrom in Paris' Musee d'Orsay, about to start her authorized copy
of Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World).

View Larry Langner's video interview
on the artist's final day>

There is no question that L'origine du monde blurs the fine line between nude, naked, erotic and pornographic. What makes one nude acceptable to the public and another one abhorrent? To a large extent I believe it is the degree to which the nude has been 'denuded' of its less palatable attributes; namely, the hairy, lumpy, wrinkled side of the idealized figure. It's like catching the nude without its make-up on. While artists need to continue challenging boundaries, the general viewing public sometimes pushes back, and how hard they push back is often culturally determined.

But no matter what the trends, the nude is here to stay in all its glory. I look forward to taking the readers of thegreatnude.tv along to some interesting exhibitions near and far. Stay tuned!

Lilianne Milgrom