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Skin and Art
In pre-modern times, skin was still a structurally insurmountable boundary between the invisible and mysterious interior, and artistic depictions of skin in this early period could only be properly appreciated in the context of mythology (e.g. depictions of Venus) or religion (e.g. depictions of Adam and Eve or Mary), or the incarnation of the Christian faith. With the beginning of the Renaissance, the highly paid profession of the carnatic painter developed. This was a painter who was particularly adept at depicting skin structurally and in terms of color. In the term "carnatic," skin and flesh are materially inseparably linked, and the human being as a whole is captured via or through the skin. The color used by the artist was considered a kind of equivalent for the flesh or the whole person. During the Renaissance, the artist became a god-like creator who animates the people depicted in his pictures and creates animated flesh from mere paint.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, a fundamental shift in the perception of the body slowly began. The idea that skin limits life lost its validity, and depictions of skin left their contexts fixated on "mythology and religion." At the beginning of the 19th century, Ingres was the first to show a great deal of skin in a previously unseen setting, such as a bathhouse. It was the pioneer of modernism, Édouard Manet, who caused a scandal in 1863 when he painted the Parisian prostitute "Olympia" in a frivolous manner, using a bold style and choosing the same pose as Titian had used with his Venus of Urbino (1538) a good 300 years earlier.
From the beginning of the 20th century to Pop Art in the 1960s, all imaginable colors can be found in which the skin is depicted and given messages.
Kirchner depicted his skin in green to say "I'm not feeling well." Warhol depicted Marylin Monroe's skin in exaggerated pink and emphasized lips, eyes, and hair as "sexual attributes" in bright colors.
"The skin is the deepest part of a person."
Paul Valéry
A major turning point in the context of skin and art came in the 1970s, with the advent of performance art, in which skin was increasingly used as a canvas and projection surface for sociocultural viewpoints and attitudes to life. Skin is now also being addressed in installations, for example, in the pavilions of biennials, creating even more complex layers of meaning.
Every artist who wishes to depict humans in their original form, i.e. naked, must consider how they wish to depict their skin, as the skin represents the whole. The French philosopher Paul Valéry once summed up the importance this gives skin with the beautiful words, "the skin is the deepest part of a person." The cultural history of the skin has been portrayed and depicted in fascinating ways in art from the Middle Ages to modern times. The variety of depictions, with their varying colors, formal languages, and metaphors, is an excellent example of the changing perceptions—that is, the aesthetics, terminology, meanings, content, and messages—with which our largest and most beautiful organ has been associated for centuries.