Naked, Nude, But Not Naturist

Not naked but nude

Jonathan Jones
Wednesday February 8, 2006
The Guardian

Vanity bare ... February's cover of Vanity Fair taken by Annie Leibowitz. Photograph: PA

What does it take to get two stars who have absolutely no need to do anything so potentially desperate to take their clothes off for a magazine? First, the magazine has to be Vanity Fair, which persuaded Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson to be photographed naked in bed on its cover. Second, tell them they're not naked, but nude.

It was the art historian Kenneth Clark who claimed there is a difference. A naked human body is exposed, vulnerable, embarrassing, he wrote in his 1956 book The Nude. "The word 'nude', on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body ... "

I wondered, coming across this recently, what on earth he meant. Then I looked at Annie Leibowitz's cover photograph for the annual special edition of Vanity Fair that portrays the people who matter in Hollywood. On the cover the former Gucci designer and guest artistic director of the issue Tom Ford nibbles at an ear. But don't be fooled into thinking this is a carnal image.

The women in this picture are not naked - they are nude. They have the gorgeous unreality of Botticelli's Venus, or Lorenzo Ghiberti's Eve, or the 18th-century paintings by Boucher and Fragonard that are its more direct models. These stars' bodies are Art.

Johannson's pose is based on a rococo painting by Boucher of Louise O'Murphy, a mistress of Louis XV, undressed and lying on her front, in what the cataloque of Munich's Alte Pinakothek - its owner -calls "a lascivious position".

Then there's that famous, anonymous French Renaissance painting in the Louvre of Gabrielle d'Estrées and her Sister, in which one aristocratic bather tweaks her sister's nipple.

You can see why Leibovitz is Hollywood's favourite portraitist. Her camera worships celebrity as something superhuman. If she lived in ancient Greece she'd have been sculpting gods and goddesses with marble flesh as smooth as the sun. What, then, does this picture tell us? It tells us its subjects are in on a sophisticated game, flirting with nakedness but withholding it in the artifice of nudity. It tells us, subtly and authoritatively, that appearing nude on the cover of Vanity Fair is a very different thing from appearing naked on the cover of FHM.