• 
• 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

The Human Clay

Until the end of the 19th century, when the nude began to be considered a means of identifying individual personality, the nude portrait was only rarely seen in art. At the outset of the 20th century various artists including Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl reflected specific emotions through an erotic exaggeration of the human body. Years later, Otto Dix would turn this motif into a vehicle for social criticism, while Stanley Spencer produced images charged with erotic content and Lucian Freud expressed the vulnerability of the human body. The naked portraits by Avigdor Arikha and Antonio López reveal the body through a process of objectification that results in representations that go beyond the limits of reality. All these images convey the loneliness of human existence through a single motif, that of the sitter’s nudity.