We’re so used to seeing millions of images of the naked human form, yet at the same time a single nude artwork in a gallery can still prove extraordinarily controversial at times.” Only recently in Australia, an art magazine was compelled by its publisher to conceal the nipples on a female nude painting it had chosen for its cover. “Even today there is this amazing mix of prudity and permissiveness. “The debates about honesty and idealisation from the Victorian period reverberate right through to our own time, which I think resembles the Victorian period in quite striking ways, particularly when you look at the way nudity and body issues are discussed in the culture at large,” he says. In many ways, contemporary portrayals of the naked body differ vastly from Victorian works, but there are also strong similarities. When we think of the nude, many of us may carry in our minds a classical image of the heroic, sculpted bodies that dominated 19th-Century art, but as Paton points out, “the nude is actually an ever-changing and endlessly contested form”.
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