When This Feisty Woman Reclaimed Female Nudity
The exuberant and defiant self-portrait of Florine Stettheimer
The history of art is stocked full of female nudity. For centuries, male artists have depicted the female form, providing their patrons with up-close apparitions of unclothed women.
To mitigate possible accusations of indecency, many nude portraits were painted in the guise of Classical figures. Venus was a popular subject: her role as the goddess of Love permitted her nude form to stand for the high morals of fruitfulness, fertility and peace in the face of war.
Sometimes a nude female was depicted looking into a mirror as a suggestion that her nudity was the result of her own vanity — and thereby further exonerating the male viewer from any suspicions of licentiousness.
In modern times, female artists have successfully reclaimed the female nude as a subject in art. One of the very first artists to paint a nude self-portrait was the American artist Florine Stettheimer, who around 1916 made this remarkably self-assured image A Model (Nude Self-Portrait).
