Hannah's tour through the history of the nude in art starts in Ancient Greece, where the male body was considered the only body worthy of representation. Episode One ""Birth Of The Ideal"" reveals that the glorification of masculine strength, invulnerability and rock hard abs all started back in the toga era. The depiction of the vulnerable, passive or coy female Cast evolved a little later, and Hannah follows the evolution of the nude, right up til the end of the nineteenth century.
The artists of the early Twentieth Century moved away from the traditional stories of History and the Bible and into the bedroom. While many classic foundations of art history were smashed in this period, the Cast and underlying assumptions about the female nude remained unchanged. Hannah celebrates the feminist art revolution that emerged. She looks at the ground-breaking work of Julie Rrap, Sarah Lucas and Louise Bourgeois who took the imaging of the female body into female hands.
Hannah Gadsby
Host
