“How can you be a Christian and draw nudes?”
I have been asked this question many times of my own work. This question betrays two assumptions. First, that nudity is necessarily opposed to Christian morality, and second, that as long as a figure is clothed it does not compromise Christian values.
Both of these assumptions are problematic. I would argue that a depiction of the human body, clothed or unclothed, contradicts Christian morality only insofar as it presents a partial or reductionistic view of humanity.
Historically, the pudic gesture (see Renoir’s piece) has been problematic, not because of what was exposed but because of what was covered. A woman depicted in the pudic gesture would typically be nude or partially clothed attempting to cover her genitals with one hand and her breasts with the other. The narrative construct that underlies this pose tells us that the woman, perhaps stepping out of the bath, has been surprised by an intruder and is attempting to cover herself.
According to film theorist Laura Mulvey, images of this kind play on the “voyeuristic fantasy” of the assumed male viewer. This image places the male viewer in the position of the active subject and the female in the place of the passive object. This historical example is not far removed from some of the images that we see on a daily basis on the covers of magazines or in television commercials. Think of a magazine spread depicting a woman in a bed clutching sheets to her chest or a shampoo ad where we view a man or woman in the shower from behind. These are contemporary variations of this narrative.
Within the context of this hypersexual imagery, it is surprising that when a nude drawing is hung in the Robert N. Thompson building (RNT) there is often controversy. There is no such outrage against the even more explicitly sexual imagery on magazine covers or television commercials that we view, often uncritically, on a daily basis.
The life drawings that have been appearing in RNT have a critical role in resisting the one-sided, reductionistic portrayal of the body that proliferates in popular media. They offer the possibility of looking differently. While not all these students are consciously resisting prevailing representational codes, they are—by the very act of encountering another, looking with honesty, and trying to see clearly—doing something that the monocular and totalizing vision of a camera can never do. They are recording an embodied encounter between two subjectivities. In her essay on ethical vision, Kaja Silverman notably uses the example of a life-drawing class to describe “love and productive looking” in practice.
As Christians we have a special responsibility to image bodies lovingly, in ways that ascribe our bodies the dignity that their Creator has bestowed on them. Instead of stopping our inquiry at the first sight of a nipple we need to confront and explore the challenges around representing the body.
There is a profound opportunity in art to re-image and reclaim the dignity of the body. We are embodied beings and our bodies are as integral to our existence as our souls. Therefore, we need to re-examine the ways we respond to nudity in art and redefine the way that we think about the body and ultimately about our humanity.
