The Naked Nude
This book grew slowly. In 1994, the exhibition of Jenny Saville’s huge nude women – huge in terms of painting size and the women’s generous flesh — impressed me as introducing a completely new kind of nude to art.In 2008, Australian radio asked me to revalue Kenneth Clark’s The Nude of 1956 in which he said the nude was a category cleaned up for art. And then there was the feminist interest in the tyranny of the perfect body. These were just some of the things that led me to write about the way Clark’s definition of the nude was no longer relevant.
The Naked Nude is an attempt to account for the discrepancy on gallery walls between the traditional idea of the nude as the pinnacle of artistic beauty and the uncomfortable reality of art’s nudes today, all lumps and bumps and pubic hair. No longer sanitised, they cause the viewer anger and embarrassment.
‘Frances Borzello has produced a thoughtful, highly intelligent book, tracking the newly frank, newly naked nude.’ SW, RA Magazine, winter 2012
‘..Borzello brilliantly updates the evasively genteel distinction between naked and nude made by Kenneth Clark in 1956, exposing the new qualms of conscience that have emerged in our own frnker but more scrupulous era. Borzello’s illustrations are titillating, embarrassing and sometimes outright disgusting: here we find art holding a mirror up to our troublesome human nature and showing us who we are, genitals and all.’ Peter Conrad, The Observer, Dec. 2 2012