한국 근대회화에서의 누드 = The Nude in Modern Korean Painting

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The depiction of a nude figure is an art form born out of the Humanist tradition of Western civilization. Based on the belief that man can be improved by intellectual and physical disciplines, the ultimate state of this ideal man is expressed in the painted or sculpted image of a naked human body. Except for the Middle Ages, the representation of the nude figure constituted a primary link with the classical past and stood at the core of academic European painting curriculum.
When Korea, which had long been a hermit kingdom, opened her doors to the West near the end of the nineteenth century, she found herself exposed to a Western culture that was totally foreign. Western style painting, one representative of this culture, included paintings of the nude. Without a proper understanding of the concept of the nude in Western art history, the artistic representation of naked bodies was not considered a form of beauty. Particularly for members of the general public, brought up in a strictly Confucian society, paintings of the nude were seen as shameful, embarassing, and even vulgar.
Despite the fact that, at least among Western style painters, lifedrawing or painting from the nude are considered an important means of mastering technique, even today, nude painting is not a popular genre in Korea. There are no famous contemporary paintings of the nude or painters of the genre. One can safely say that painting the nude enjoyed its heyday during the Colonial period(1910~45). Most of the painters of the period had graduated from Tokyo’s art schools and had undergone thorough training in the drawing of the nude in their classrooms. This suggests that it was the Japanized version of European nude painting which was transmitted to Korea. For the painters of the period, drawing from a nude model and using the newly introduced technique of chiaroscuro to render the figure realistically were, in themselves, fascinating experiences. While the majority of the Korean nude paintings from the Colonial period rely on monotonous standing or reclining postures, artists such as Yi In-s?ng, or Im Kun-hong revealed their own sensitivity as they tried to express the characteristics of the Korean female body. Similarly, Yi K’wae-dae attempted grand compositions with dynamic movement in his depictions of various types of nude figures.
While Korean artists worked hard to catch up with several centuries of Western realism, European art went through radical changes and developed the abstract styles of painting which would become the mainstream of the first half of the 20th century art. It wasn’t until after the 1950’s that Korean painters finally looked directly at the European art world, and developed an interest in abstract art. Although Kim soo and Ch’oe Y?ng-lim have consistently painted images of the nude, the subject of the nude has not had an important role in Korea’s artistic scene since the introduction of abstract art. There seems to have been a revival of figurative art with the emergence of Post-Modernism in the 1980’s, and there are some artists who use naked bodies in their expression of the passion, suffering, frustration, and impersonalization of modern man. For the majority of painters, however, painting from the nude is only important as a training method.
* This is an expanded version of the original paper, presented in Japanese, at the 16th International Symposium on 《Human Figure in the Visual Arts of East Asia》, sponsored by the Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, in 1992.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 머리말
• Ⅱ. 동아시아에서의 누드화의 시작
• Ⅲ. 우리 나라 근대미술의 누드화
• Ⅳ. 맺음말
• Abstract