Forbidden Freedom – Veiled Truth
Radical Voices – Schiele, Gentileschi, Nora, Tunick
Here the hidden becomes both wound and weapon.
Schiele’s bodies cry out, Gentileschi lifts the brush against violence, Nora tells what was silenced,
and Tunick transforms crowds into landscapes of flesh.
Radical is not the act alone, but the resolve to remain unveiled.
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903: Egon Schiele; Seated Woman with Bent Knees
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Vienna, Austria-Hungary; 1917; Gouache, Watercolor and Pencil on Paper
Národní Galery, Prague, Czech Republic
Attribution: Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Photo Arnoseven, 2021)
#BodyPositivity, #UncensoredArt
Aspect | Description |
Unveiled | A woman sits with her knees drawn up, her body unembellished, vulnerable, and yet present. Schiele does not show an idealised nude, but a raw, honest corporeality. |
Veiled | In the pixelated version, the contours and fragile intensity disappear. What remains is only a rough shape – without the tension between closeness and distance, vulnerability and strength. |
Stigma and Reception | Schiele’s depictions were considered obscene in his time. In 1912 he was briefly imprisoned for “disseminating indecent drawings,” and many of his works were confiscated. Today he is regarded as an icon of modernism, yet on social media his works still face algorithmic censorship. |
Meaning | Schiele broke with the aesthetics of beauty and introduced a radical honesty. His figures show the human in its ambivalence – vulnerable, restless, yearning. Thus he stands as an example of art’s provocation: not to smooth, but to intensify. |
💧 They call it raw – yet it may only be honest.
The roughness lies in the hand of the painter, not in the truth of the body.
To beautify the body is to betray it. To veil it is to erase ourselves.
With Schiele, the rawness is style – an honesty unvarnished, a body allowed to be.
But in the next picture another rawness awaits: not aesthetic, but existential.
Gentileschi shows not a body at rest with itself, but a body under siege by gazes and by hands.
Here provocation turns to threat, and freedom becomes the question of power.
904: Artemisia Gentileschi; Susanna and the Elders
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Rome, Italy; 1610; Oil on Canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna (Collection: formerly in possession of the Gentileschi family)
Attribution: Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Photo Fondazione Cariplo)
#MeToo, #UncensoredArt
Aspect | Description |
Unveiled | Susanna sits as she is, at her bath, harassed by two older men whose gazes and gestures press her into a corner. Gentileschi makes her resistance unmistakable: shame and fear are at the forefront. |
Veiled | In the pixelated version, Susanna’s vulnerable gesture of resistance disappears. What remains is only a blurred scene, in which the violence of the gazes is concealed – and thus the core of the painting: the experience of assault. |
Stigma and Reception | For a long time, the subject was trivialised in art history – often read merely as a “biblical motif” with no relation to lived experience. Only recently has it been recognised as an expression of women’s experience of assault, especially in the context of #MeToo. |
Meaning | Gentileschi, herself a survivor of sexual violence, transformed the story of Susanna into an image of female defiance. She shows not seduction, but resistance. In this she differs sharply from her male contemporaries. |
💧 Do not call it a “biblical scene” when two old men close in on a woman.
Name it as it is: assault – a theft of gaze, a theft of body.
And do not dare to cloak it as “normal.”
Christ revealed love – and what have many turned it into?
I speak out these words because I know their weight.
I too was touched against my will.
And yet I stand here – not shattered,
but with a river flowing on my skin.
For wounds cannot steal love from me.
Nora’s voice lingers – sharp, clear, fierce.
Yet behind her sharpness lies another movement: a silence born of survival.
She knows that violence leaves its traces, but she knows as well that love holds the power not to let those traces have the final word.
Thus, the gaze shifts from Susanna to Nora herself:
No longer to a painted figure under siege,
but to a woman who bears what she has endured – and from it shapes her own expression: the river on her skin, the chalice that is her vessel.
My Story
#MeToo
💧 I will tell you my story – briefly, without the details that
would drag me back.
In Munich I met a young man.
He was fascinated by the love we live – love as unity, not just between two, but among all.
I told him: “Where unity is lived, the raw loses its power.”
But then came the raw – an assault.
What began in trust turned into force, and consent was shattered.
Some call it normal, part of life.
No – that is not love, but counterfeit.
Fake love, as fake as art that only paints beauty’s surface.
True love is unity – with myself, with others.
See me as a whole, not as a fragment, not an object, not prey.
This is my story.
And this is why I say: True art, like true love, preserves unity –
a unity we can live, one with ourselves, one with all.
My story is not only mine.
What I endured alone has also been endured by many.
That is why unity matters –
because together we take back what was stolen in isolation.
Art shows this shift clearly:
from the single body, exposed and judged, to the multitude of bodies, standing without shame.
This is where Spencer Tunick begins –
transforming the solitary wound into a collective image,
where vulnerability becomes strength, and presence becomes freedom.
Spencer Tunick – Installations (1990s – today)
#BodyPositivity, #UncensoredArt
Title / Participants | Place / Year | Reception / Stigma | Meaning in the Exhibition |
Installation in front of Federation Square (approx. 4,000 participants) | Melbourne, Australis, 2001 | Conservative media denounced it as “public indecency”; the city authorities wavered between prohibition and toleration. | Example of moral resistance and, at the same time, international attention. |
Mexico City Installation (approx. 18,000 participants) | Mexiko-City, Mexiko, 2007 | Initially scandalised by media and politics; later celebrated as a world record and festive cultural event; criticism soon faded. | Tunick transforms being who you are into a collective matter of course. What is scandalised in the individual loses its supposed offensiveness in the masses. Example of maximum visibility, acceptance, and pride in participation. |
Installation at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2,754 participants) | Cleveland, USA, 2004 | Partly criticised as “obscenity”; at the same time widely covered in the media and explicitly supported by the museum. | Tunick’s work here bridges isolation and community – showing that the body is not shame, but presence. Symbol of the tension between public/political discredit and institutional affirmation. |
Aspect | Description |
Unveiled | Collective being-as-one in public space (streets, squares, rooftops). |
Veiled | “Pixelation” of a mass erases individuality and meaning: |
Stigma and Reception generally | Alongside recurring local controversies (permits, “indecency”), there are simultaneously high participation numbers and strong media reception – visibility triumphs over moral panic. |
Meaning | From the scandal of the individual to the self-evidence of the many: what provoked with Courbet/Schiele becomes normal here as a communal experience. |
💧 With Tunick we flow together – many bodies, one breath.
Carrying one another, shame loses its tongue.
See – when we stand side by side, what is veiled in the individual is unveiled in the multitude.
The inclusion of Cleveland as a distinct example shows that reactions to Tunick’s works oscillate not only between fascination and scandal, but in some cities even led to open defamation. Cleveland thus becomes a symbol of how sharply the public and politics judge body and freedom – and of the urgency to render these voices visible through art.
💧 In Cleveland our presence was both cheered and cursed.
Some called it obscene, the museum called it art.
And here it shows: veiling is never neutral –
it is born whenever fear speaks louder than love.
