Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1950

Recent mega-exhibitions have addressed the theme of nudes in Middle Eastern art–for example, Institut du monde arabe’s Le Corps découvert (Paris, 2012) and Pera Museum’s Bare, Naked, Nude: A Story of Modernization (Istanbul, 2015). Tapping into years of art historiography assuming the taboo nature of this material, they reductively pitted the art against the society of its makers. 

By contrast, Partisans of the Nude considers the role of nudes during the colonial era (1920–50) as social agents in the production of the unfolding political processes and cultural conditions. Why were nudes a genre of high regard in formerly Ottoman societies? How were they viewed by the artists’ peers? And why have they become so forgotten that they now seem not to have existed except on the fringes of society?

For the exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery, the curator Kirsten Scheid reimagines and updates for American audiences a 2016 exhibition she co-curated with Octavian Esanu at the American University of Beirut: The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener. The Wallach project includes a new selection of domestic and international loans by artists born between 1860 and 1920 and hailing from Algerian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian societies. 

 Thematic sections include: “Living as Partisans of the Nude,” “Universalizing the European Nude,” “The Genre of Professionalism,” “Looking at Looking,” “Muslim Visibility and Islamic Visuality,” “Modernizing Arab Masculinity,” and “Resistance to the Nude.”

Credit: Overview from museum website