Hugh Hefner (Credit: AP/Carlos Rene Perez)
Hugh Hefner was as important to U.S. culture as any artist, art critic or influencer of the 20th century. Books have (literally) been written about his role as a multidisciplinary cultural touchstone. The popularity of Playboy, which was truly his personal vision, in spreading a cultivated, elegant idea of what it was to be a guy (or, as he would have preferred, a “gentleman”), made what was featured in the magazine reverberate throughout American, and subsequently international, concepts of the cool. An entire book deals with his popularization of the mid-century modern aesthetic and modernist architecture, which became (and largely remains) synonymous with the high-end bachelor pad. He created an archetype, borrowed from 19th-century British men’s magazines and Playboy’s elder peers (especially the early years of Esquire) — pipe-smoking, velvet robe, fine single malt, art collection, jazz records — and adapted it to the mid-20th century, the sexual revolution, the liberation of women and their positive sexuality (which was launched thanks to the Pill), and allowed his vision to shift and evolve with the decades.
It was only the internet, and the universal, free access to naked ladies (most often in a crass, far less subtle format than his tasteful magazine endorsed) that made the bell toll for his au courant influence. While plenty of articles are flowing, since his death, about his role, what is less often noted is that he and his magazine were part of a rich art historical tradition of the elegant depiction of the female nude.
Straight men like looking at naked women. Let’s be clear and up front about that. This is nothing new. Regardless of the historical era, as long as reproductions were available, from the walls of ancient Roman villas to the most cultivated oil paintings of High Renaissance masters, the female nude has been among the most popular subjects for art patrons who, until the 20th century, were around 99 percent male. It is a recent phenomenon that the consumption of such images was rendered entirely private, meaning that you could google your way to images (and now videos) of anything you might enjoy watching, without anyone else being approached, commissioned or interacted with. This privacy began with subscription by post, but really took off with VHS technology and, of course, the internet.
In past centuries, men could acquire images of naked women, but largely did so through a skin-thin filament of propriety, a sort of escape clause that permitted gentlemen (largely the nobility and the clergy, if we’re talking about the Renaissance and Early Modern eras) to commission famous artists to paint them naked ladies in a socially (and spiritually) acceptable format. That is why the vast majority of female nudes in art history ostensibly depict goddesses or mythological figures.
Consider Venus at Her Bath, also called Crouching Venus, originally a lost Hellenistic sculpture of a beautiful, voluptuous nude female crouched by a bath or pool, either washing herself or, in some other variations, surprised by the appearance of an unexpected, and presumably male, visitor. Scores of sculptures based on this lost original, and the account of it published in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, were created, and many remain in major collections. That this is Venus is largely arbitrary — sometimes a beautiful female figure was referred to as “a Venus” — and it is really an excuse to admire the female form. One viewer was said to have admired it a little too much, and seems to have, well, orgasmed while looking at it.
Past eras limited access to men’s views of naked ladies to wives, mistresses and prostitutes. “Dating” in the modern sense was not a thing. You were meant to sleep with your wife, or have illicit affairs, or sleep with prostitutes, and that was it. So the open sight of a naked lady had a taste of the forbidden to it. But it was deemed OK if the figure in question was a goddess (inevitably Venus, as the only goddess regularly shown au naturel), or a mythological figure (particularly from the naughty tales told in Ovid’s “Metamorphosis,” a collection of poems about gods chasing mortal women with carnal intent — it’s no surprise that stories from Ovid are among the most popular non-Christian images throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods).
Art history often presented the excuse that, if the classical artists did it (meaning largely ancient Athenian sculptors, who inspired Roman copyists, and it was the Roman copies that were best-known to Renaissance artists and thinkers), then it was “kosher” to do. Thus ancient depictions of Venus, in marble and idealized (crucially without pubic hair) made the subject acceptable, and were adapted into Renaissance oil paintings with the title “Reclining Venus” or “Sleeping Venus” (consider examples by dozens of artists, including Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Poussin, Velazquez, Lucas Cranach, Correggio, you name it), or variations like Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” These were paintings loaded with symbolism, but built around the excuse to paint a beautiful naked lady. Particularly paintings in which we are privy to a sleeping nude feel somehow illicit, as if male viewers are seeing something we should not (and keep in mind how much more illicit such a view would feel if we did not live in our current era of limitless access to an infinite number of naked lady pictures online).
The Vatican owns the largest collection of ancient pagan statuary in the world, likewise with its share of nude females. And yet this is considered OK if the female is a) idealized and b) excused as a mythological picture, therefore not of a “real” person. But some of the owners of paintings of nude Venuses admitted, indirectly, to the “naughtiness” of owning such a picture: Some pictures were fitted with curtains, so they could be covered up and out of sight until the viewer wished to show them to his friends (which I imagine as accompanying both admiration and perhaps giggles) or to enjoy them “privately” (let’s be frank here — this was sometimes very high-end whacking material).
The history of elegant pictures of idealized naked ladies, as Venus (almost always based on real models posing live for the artists), is far longer than the relatively compact history of unidealized naked ladies. When Jan van Eyck included a nude Eve (and Adam) in his Ghent Altarpiece (1432), with visible traces of pubic hair, this was deemed too realistic. Even with idealization, Manet’s “Olympia,” a version of Titian’s “Venus of Urbino,” was deemed too realistic because of Olympia’s bold, direct, confrontational stare at the viewer — naked ladies were meant to be passively admired, not to glare back at their admirer. And the most outrageous female nude of all-time, still shocking today, is Courbet’s “Origin of the World”: A full-frontal, legs-spread view of a hoo-ha, with the rest of the woman invisible. Such overt objectification runs in line with the legs-spread views of vulgar Playboy offshoots, like Hustler, and marks the distinction between softcore porn/erotica (which is generally lumped in the artsy category) with hardcore pornography (which certainly is not).
Thus Hefner’s Playboy was a continuation of a long, rich tradition of images of naked women, legs together, idealized (in the photographic sense, not airbrushed of pubic hair — although personal grooming style would make that the norm today — but idealized in the sense of his selecting models who were ideally lovely), and arrayed for the male gaze. He no longer had to pass them off as Venus, but in some ways they were presented as if they were mythological beings, situated and coiffed and made-up (even airbrushed) to a perfection that is all but impossible for mortals. And such women, the invisible message told, were only sexually available to male gods. People like Hugh Hefner.
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