Tag Archives: nude

Coke Wisdom O’Neal’s Boxed in Nudes

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Installation view, Blue Nude

Coke Wisdom O’Neal has a really nice photography show up at Mixed Greens in Chelsea at the moment. Continuing his work with boxes, he photograped his subjects inside tight, clear plexiglass boxes and them mounted the prints with a plexiglass frame that mimics the models enclosure in the image. The result is beautifully fleshly and vulnerable. Rarely does one see faces, and the focus turns more onto the hands or hips of the person. There is a great luminous quality to the skin tones that really adds to the little details: the little rolls of a sotmach or the wrinkles of an arched foot.

I love see the flesh pressed against the glass, reminding one that these contorted figures are indeed contained. Its makes for a nice study of the human form, although within the models limp poses it suggests more along the lines of captivity and restraint, freedom and identity than pure aesthetic study.

Installation View, Blue Nude

The single figures also speak of lonliness.

Naked And Nude

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Artists, listen up. Don’t change your art–just show a little skin. The nude has a long history in art as being provocative, symbolic, realistic, and many other things. Go one better, and use naked people not as some prettified, distant nude in a painting, but as naked people. Articles are still pouring out about Abromovic and MoMA, but now they are mostly about the use of two naked models in a doorway- a genre begun by Jerry Saltz, picked up by the NY Times, and now hawked by any widely-read publication for a general audience.

Abramovic herself is all but forgotten sitting there in her chair below. Don’t worry though, this could work if you aren’t (yet) an internationally known artist with a decades long career. Case in point: work by Brian Reed at Chair and the Maiden Gallery in February. The show got plenty of street attention, and even made the NY Times when a model in the window, wearing only something between a mobile and a spiderweb on her head, was asked by police to step down.

In terms of attention-getting, naked is the way to go. It is an amazingly effective and simple technique to get more people, some who don’t even like art, to look at your work. Or is it nude? Whatever it is, it can still raise people’s, ahem, hackles.

Stieglitz’s Nude Photographs of Georgia O’Keefe

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It was all going so well. O’Keefe had found someone who appreciated her radically abstract drawings and watercolors–and that someone was none other than Alfred Stieglitz, avant garder owner of 291 Gallery and photographer. In 1918, she moved into his niece’s loft in New York city. They were in love, despite an age difference and Stieglitz’s marriage.

Stieglitz began taking nude portraits of O’Keefe, some of which are on view at the Whitney’s O’Keefe exhibition. His wife walked in on a session (some people think he arranged it so that he would not have to confront her with his affair). Either way, she got the idea and got a divorce. O’Keefe and Stieglitz married, and most of his nude photographs of her date from the early days of their marriage.

These beautiful and passionate photographs are some of the most expensive photographs sold at auction. The treatment of O’Keefe’s hands is especially nice.

These photographs became a sensation when they were known, making O’Keefe’s name recognizable. Unfortunately for O’Keefe, Steiglitz showed these works before he showed her own abstract canvases. Her critical reception became that of an emancipated woman making art about sex because of the photographs as much as the suggestiveness of the paintings.


O’Keefe began to moor her work in recognizable objects to defend against such limiting criticism. And she never let herself be photographed nude again.


Part of the Whitney Museum’s Georgia O’Keefe exhibition on view through January 7, 2010.