Nudity  

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Olympia by Édouard Manet, painted in 1863, depicting a courtesan gazing at her viewer.
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Olympia by Édouard Manet, painted in 1863, depicting a courtesan gazing at her viewer.
Image:Richard Dadd - Come unto These Yellow Sands.jpg
Come unto These Yellow Sands (1842) by Richard Dadd. Images of nude and semi-nude fairies dancing in rings became popular during the Victorian era.

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"The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. 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 defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed."--Kenneth Clark in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form

Nudity is the state of wearing no clothing. It is sometimes used to refer to wearing significantly less clothing than expected by the conventions of a particular culture and situation, and in particular exposing the bare skin of intimate parts and has analogous uses. Nudity is different from nakedness; Kenneth Clark declares in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form that " the word [nudity] was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders [of the UK] that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art." Sixteen years later, in 1972, John Berger in Ways of Seeing says that "a naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude," introducing the concept of sexual objectification.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Nudity" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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