Tasteful Nudity, Part I: William-Adolphe Bouguereau

I'll most likely be drummed out of the contemporary art associations I belong to for this post, but in the spirit of giving the people what they want, I've decided to add a series of "Tasteful Nudity" posts to the line-up here. Of course, "tasteful" is totally subjective, so if you don't like the first round of images, do check back.

The first artist in this series is William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825-1905 - Academic Classicism). This painting to the right is his "A Nymph Defending Herself against Cupid" ca. 1880 (also sometimes titled "A Nymph Defending Herself against Eros"...as the Milanese would say, "Boh, Mah, Qui Sa?"). The Getty Museum owns it currently. It hails from an era that makes many contemporary art historians and artists cringe. And, as I'm sure you've guessed, that has nothing to do with the nudity. As Paul Jeromack explains in an article on artnet.com:

[T]here is [a] kind of picture that even the art press really doesn't like to acknowledge -- 19th-century academic paintings. Works from this category are both wildly popular and consistently strong performers on the market. But despite 40 years of work by rehabilitationist art historians and small museums, 19th-century paintings are looked upon as rather embarrassing, something that is decorative and middlebrow, hardly the stuff of serious collections.

I generally assume this sort of work is what most Americans think of when they say "tasteful nudity." I know Americans well enough, however, to suspect that a generalization like that will prompt many of them to deny such a claim for fear that it pegs them as unlearned or old-fashioned, or whatever, which is a pity. No one who loves Bouguereau, in my opinion, should apologize for it. Again, taste is subjective. I'd have one if it were available (of course I'd install it as part of some ironic juxtaposition just to maintain my street cred, but I'd admire it secretly when no one was looking...William-Adolphe Bouguereau could paint).

Here's another painting ("Nymphs and Satyr," 1873):



And one more ("Orestes pursued by Furies," 1862):