I found our visit to the exhibit of drawings of nudes at Reed College's Cooley gallery fascinating. I have never done any drawing of nudes except for a couple images I reproduced from books, so it was interesting to see how this art was evolving during the time span of the collection. I had not known about the taboo on using a female model for life drawing, but it fills in a few gaps in the art history lectures!
I spent quite a while looking at images on the internet having searched "modern nudes" and other similar key words. If I had to make a solitary contrast between the ones we saw at the gallery and the ones I looked at today (and I looked at many), I would say that the gallery collection was largely preoccupied with depicting the nude as an anatomical study. Muscles and bones seemed to be the main focus, overpowering, in many instances, pose. The "modern" nudes seemed far less fixated on bulging muscles and every nuance of the body's construction being showcased. Of course, I did find photos of very sculpted muscular men, but the majority of drawings, etc. did not seem to obsess on muscles. Many of the modern ones employed some level of abstraction or featured partial figures, where as the old masters' work read more like an anatomy text book, striving for "realism" as they understood it. Overall, the many modern nudes I viewed had a softer appearance, both males and females. The artists seemed more concerned with the general effect of the image rather than rendering a painstaking record of the body.
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