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Foreword
As a foreword, I would like to mention François Jullien, a philosopher and sinologist, and his provoking essay, Le nu impossible (The Impossible Nude).1 In Western art, unlike in the Chinese pictorial tradition, the female nude is the academic subject par excellence. By just leafing through a history of painting from the Renaissance to the Romantic period, you can see that the female nude is abundantly present, whether it be in allegorical representations, scenes inspired from Antiquity, historical tableaux or mythological subjects. It so happens that these were precisely the type of subjects that realism rejected as artificial and overly conventional. Realist painters, who demanded verism in painting, not only as an aesthetic, but also as a moral imperative, thus invented a new type of "nude," all the while pictorially treating flesh in a novel manner, trying to capture the woman in ordinary intimate moments, such as grooming, bathing, sleeping, relaxing or even love-making, as in Gustave Courbet's famous painting Les dormeuses (Women Asleep), which depicts two young women whose legs interlock against a backdrop of wrinkled sheets.
"Appelons la femme un bel animal sans fourrure dont la peau est très recherchée"
(A woman could be called a beautiful furless animal whose skin is in high demand)
Jules Renard2
During the enterprising times of François Mitterrand's first presidency, a gorgeous creature, dressed in a small bikini that revealed more of her perfect shape than it covered, appeared very casually on all the great billboards of the French capital.
After a highly speculative week (since there was no accompanying text, nobody exactly knew what this beauty had to sell), she undid the top of her bathing suit, creating excitement in the passers-by with a promise written on the posters: "Demain j'enlève le bas!" (Tomorrow, I will take offthe bottom!). She kept her promise. The next day, on the placards replaced overnight, the beauty was not wearing anything. But instead of showing her sex plainly, as was expected in spite of embarrassed curiosity, she was showing her divinely tanned and dappled buttocks. The beauty had told the truth, but she had still conned us, because we did not expect this statue-like smooth nudity, which we usually ignore (or at least do not lust for) when it...