There is a wide gulf between the naked and the nude. "To be naked," wrote Kenneth Clark in his landmark study of the nude in 1956, "is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word 'nude'…projects into the mind not a huddled defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed." As Clark points out, while artists have one by one shed many ties to the past, "the nude alone has survived."

No doubt this is in part true because a beautiful figure is a pleasurable thing to behold. The nude in art conveys by design many emotions, and while one can not ignore its obvious erotic charge, to see it only in terms of sexuality would be self-defeating. For instance, we may wish to be in a stunning landscape seen in a painting, but the fact that we cannot does lessen the work's impact. The landscape, like the nude, is an ideal.

From May 23 to June 27, 1999, we presented an exhibition that explored the most intimate aspect of Ben Solowey's career. Simply called The Nude, this exhibition revealed a private world, while at the same time illuminating the connections Ben had to the art of his time and to the past.

From spontaneous pencil sketches to elaborate oils, Ben captured the female figure in both classical poses and everyday situations. For him, the nude was a springboard for work that embodied the highest reaches of human emotion and intelligence. Ben created a special world of beauty from the rhythms, shape and contours of the figure.

In this exhibition, there were homages to his spiritual forefathers such as his enchanting variation on Cezanne's bathers; another work, an elegant charcoal drawing of a reclining figure, titled Olympia, that owed a great deal to his study of the Old Masters. A group of four paintings from Ben's years in New York displayed in watercolor, pen and ink, the dizzying energy of the city. While Ben may have painted no cityscapes in his 14 years in Manhattan, he caught the mood and light of those exciting years in these works. Whether it be the demure beauty of The Manicure, or the intimate loveliness of Red Ribbon, these nudes showed the easy versatility that is Ben's hallmark.

As always his sketchbooks revealed his first impressions of a subject that he would later revork for paintings and sculpture. The exhibition featured a selection of these drawings. Click here for a virtual tour of some of these drawings.

While our Second Studio was devoted to this special show of nudes, the main studio housed a wonderful collection of works from different periods of Ben's career. A previously unseen 1927 portrait greeted visitors upon their arrival. As one moved through Ben's studio, there were sumptuous still lifes and a veritable travelogue of landscapes, including a special display of works from Casco Bay, Maine painted in 1930 and 1931. As always, there were Ben's classic portraits of Rae.

The Nude was also the first exhibition to focus exclusively on a particular genre in Ben's work. This focus might be limiting for another artist, but in Ben's hands, this work served as a retrospective of styles and media that he employed throughout his career. There was even a special section that showed a charcoal drawing of a seated nude on the back of one of Ben's famed theater portraits as it evolved into a striking 40 x 32 canvas. Along the way, we witnessed that each step was a wonderful work on its own.

This was not a show about body parts, but rather a showcase of an important part of an artist's work.