The nude and the body

The naked body is one of art’s oldest and most charged subjects. Here we follow the nude from Stone Age figurines and Greek gods to Manet’s Olympia, the dissolving bodies of modernism and the pointed questions feminists asked about who looks and who is looked at.

• From Stone Age figures to the Greek ideal
• The Middle Ages and the Renaissance rediscovery
• The reclining Venus – Venice and the Baroque
• The Academy, the Salon and the Olympia scandal
• Nordic bodies – Sergel, Zorn, Munch and Jansson
• Modernism breaks up the body
• The body in China and Japan
• The gaze questioned – feminism and contemporary bodies