Now fussing about whether subjects are even acceptable (day, painter, paint)

[Cida]

In an Ethics Q&A column, this person wrote in, considering that painting people of a different race was automatically offensive. Or, at least nudes. But you have to wonder if the person would think it works both ways - that a non-white artists shouldn't paint a white person? Should woman not be allowed to paint men? Or what if the grandfather, instead of nudes, painted a black woman scrubbing a floor? You can see that I consider it a slippery slope.



I’ve inherited from my mother and uncle a collection of paintings by my grandfather, who died in 1969. He was relatively well known in his home city, and many of his paintings are quite lovely. Unfortunately, the themes of some of his paintings are no longer socially acceptable, particularly the many nudes of Black and Asian women, as well as paintings of minorities that are meant to appear exotic. No one, including me, wants to keep these paintings, and I don’t really know what to do with them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/m...ccination.html

[banjomike]

I don't think the race or color of a painter makes any difference in the artwork's acceptance in a general sense.

The problem with female nudes as subjects is these days, that's pin-up territory or lower. The nude as an art form is not longer so admired or appreciated as high art as it once was.

One of the biggest problems with nude pin-up art was, back in it's Golden Days of the 1950s, an ethnic nude always was portrayed with something that stereotyped them. If the model was Chinese, there was something that was Ching-ching-chinaman in the painting.
Same goes with women of other colors and ethnicities. Except for black women, who, no matter how beautiful, were very seldom portrayed as the nude at all. If there was a lady of color in a painting, she was the maidservant or the comic figure in the work.

All that began to change in the 70s after Playboy magazine, the great taste-maker of pinups, began crossing the racial divide.
By then, any painting with a nude central figure in it was considered to be a pinup, and most galleries wouldn't touch them. The few that did specialized in them.

Today, we have a big strange puritan thing happening in fine art when it comes to nudes in general. Photography seems to be the only fine art area where the nude is still accepted as s fine art subject.

A painter has to be dead before the nudes he painted will ever be shown nowadays.

I find this very strange considering how easy and popular it has become for folks of all ages to take nude selfies.

[Swoods15]

Are they more like fetish paintings than fine art? The note about "meant to appear exotic" sounds pretty sketchy. Obviously the idea that you're not "allowed" to paint nudes of people of different races is absurd. But the fact that this pretty much always comes up in the context of white men wanting to paint sexualized women of color, well, that's some helpful context right there too.

Context and how it's done matters. Each viewer gets to decide for themselves if they think a work is to their own taste and liking, as is their right. If you're unable to find anyone who's interested in a work, then figure out what resonates with the audience you want to reach and change accordingly, or keep making art to your own personal tastes and enjoy it for your own amusement.

Nudity shouldn't be taboo in fine art, but racism and misogyny is not welcome anymore.