The female body in art

In Western art, the narrative of the female body has long remained dominated by men, and furthermore, its representation is rare and marginalized in older art. It's no coincidence that when Artificial Intelligence is asked to create a portrait based on the canons of modern art, the result is a white, middle-class man, the fruit of the selection and subsequent elaboration of as many as fifteen thousand portraits created between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. This is what has been codified for years in the art world.
The female body was initially relegated almost exclusively to sacred figures and devotees; later, mythology and noble portraits were added. Only in the nineteenth century did the female body no longer require narrative justification for its representation, but instead became a fully-fledged artistic repertoire on a grand scale, decontextualized from sacred or profane narrative and embraced as a subject in its own right.
As recently as 1989, the art collective Guerrilla Girls (note that the feminine version of the term does not exist) asked: "Do women have to be naked to enter the Met Museum? Less than 4% of the artists in the modern art section are women, yet 76% of the nudes are female." This article, however brief, aims to provide a brief glimpse into the female body in art, especially in the last century. We will browse, in the form of slides, some of its most dramatic interpretations, because a more comprehensive analysis would require a book. However, we will look at some iconic moments that codified a new vision of women and ushered in new freedoms, making women part of the discussion, exposing themselves directly to interrogate political and social issues.
Probably the painting that most opens the world to a new vision of the female body is Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World. With an almost photographic realism, it depicts a female vulva in close-up and from a foreshortened angle. The allegory is supported by the title: it is therefore not an erotic painting, but a factual reality narrated in a raw manner, leaving room for the power of the body to generate life, in a hymn to fertility, life, and even sex. Previously, to paint a female nude, a pretext was needed; only later does it become a concrete body, immersed in the reality of everyday life.
One of the first women of the twentieth century to use her own body as a model, not for social affirmation but to atone for her physical and mental pain, was Frida Kahlo. After the accident in which she was impaled by a pole, she spent long periods confined to bed in a corset. Her imagination was not only transferred to canvas, in her dreamlike bodies and disturbing visions, but she also painted the corset itself, attempting to atone for her pain with the power of color.
A decisive turning point came with performance art, arguably the greatest turning point. Artists like Valie Export, Gina Pane, and Marina Abramović didn't create works depicting bodies; rather, the body itself became a canvas, a form of expression, communication, and scandal.
Valie Export, with works such as Tap and Touch Cinema (1968), brings reflections into the realm of desire and the gaze. Wearing a box that leaves her breasts exposed, she invites passersby to touch, reversing the traditional dynamics of cinema and vision. The body is no longer a distant, two-dimensional image, but a presence capable of responding and destabilizing. Export denounces media objectification and restores control of her own exposure to women.
In 1974, in Rhythm 0, Abramović offers herself to the audience as a passive object, providing seventy-two tools, including a loaded pistol. The experiment reveals how quickly the gaze can turn violent when the female body is perceived as available. The artist does not represent vulnerability: she lives it, exposes it, forcing the viewer to confront their own responsibility. Years later, in The Artist Is Present, the still and silent body instead becomes a space of connection, emotional intensity, and resistance, especially in the encounter with Ulay, who had long been her companion in life and art.
Through actions like Azione sentimentale, Gina Pane uses cuts and wounds as symbolic tools. Her performances, often characterized by small acts of controlled self-harm, are not gestures to spectacularize pain, but rather attempts to make collective suffering visible. Blood becomes a sign, the body a political surface. Pane removes the wound from the private sphere and places it in the public realm, transforming sacrifice into language.
These practices pave the way for many contemporary artists. Consider Shirin Neshat, who, through photography and video art, addresses issues related to female identity in the Islamic context, political repression, and war. Often, her own face becomes the spokesperson for writing and resistance. The body becomes a narrative surface, an archive of memory, and a means of protest.
Female artists no longer demand inclusion in a pre-existing narrative, but construct a new one, bringing their physical presence into play. The transition from idealization to concreteness is not merely aesthetic, but much more. The female body becomes autonomous, a depicted subject or a means of communication; a woman's reclamation of her own body and its perception. She takes possession of her own space, seeking to free herself from a narrative to which she has been subjugated for too long, to finally find her own voice.