Naked Since 1950, the Fall exhibition of C&M Arts, is a stimulating and controversial investigation of almost forty major works depicting the unclothed figure in painting, sculpture, photography and video. Always a central subject for the artist (even when displaced by the reign of Abstraction), the figure in recent times has served as an analytical flashpoint, reflecting the critical changes so marked in contemporary society.

In The Nude (1955), Kenneth Clark proposed a simple distinction between Nudeness and Nakedness – the one being classically cool and restrained, the other, closer to the bone, and more greatly admissive of the erotic impulse. But Clark would scarcely recognize the aggressive differences that have come to mark the two states of undress today, let alone the differences between today’s incisive work from that of the mid-century masters.

Naked Since 1950 includes loans from private collections and public institutions. The exhibition consists of major works of classicizing achievements by Lucian Freud, Richard Diebenkorn, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning and, among more recent exemplars, Robert Mapplethorpe, John Currin and Ron Mueck. But representative works by such probing radicals as Yves Klein, Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman and Lucas Samaras and feminist inspired examinations of the figure by Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman and Louise Bourgeois will also be included.

In the essay accompanying the show’s fully illustrated catalogue, Robert Pincus-Witten traces the long history of the nude and its changed status in later twentieth century art. Pincus-Witten reminds us that, in the end, the great representational works found in Naked Since 1950 are not about often shocking and transgressive imagery – they are about art, not politics.