Baring it all: Weekend detour as nude model raises questions about intimacy in art

There was a draft coming in through the window, and I had an especially persistent itch on my left tush cheek. Generally these aren’t really life’s big problems, but on Saturday morning I found myself standing on a platform bare-ass naked in front of 15 strangers, their eyes fixed on my most private parts.

It’s hard to say what moved me to bare all for a public figure drawing class in Dodge Hall last week. Until very recently I’d been happy, if not insistent, on keeping my junk under wraps.

I was the teenage nevernude who changed for gym in the handicap stall. Not five years ago, I wore my father’s winter sweaters and oversized Levis like a daily uniform, not a lazy hipster convenience. So to say that posing nude for a sketching class would surprise those who know the old Leah would be a vast understatement.

Nevertheless, my fascination with the nude portrait began in eighth grade—by all accounts the height of my baggy-sweater-wearing repression—when my mother took me to an Amedeo Modigliani exhibit.

My mother was eager to introduce me to a renowned Jewish portrait artist, but what we found was nude after nude after nude. I still remember how my cheeks burned as my mother and I stared at the snatch of pubic hair on the “Reclining Nude.”

But besides the obvious searing shame of being forced to contemplate naked women with my mother, something about that exhibit stayed with me. Modigliani’s paintings of these women were full of intimacy, warmth, and understanding. Did I want to be sexy like them one day? Maybe. But more than that, I wanted to be loved and understood like they seemed to be.

And so it was Modigliani’s nudes–their blank eyes and world-weary smiles–that led me to put my cooter on display for a class, with what I consider to be a disproportionate number of middle-aged men.

The moment I dropped my sundress and struck a pose was the easy part. It was quick and surprisingly painless, like jumping into a pool. One second I was just another person in a room full of people … the next I was an object everyone studied with surgical attention.

I tried to keep my mind clear. Ignore the chilliness in my extremities, the pain in my arm, and the man whose loopy repetitive sketching resembled the jerking off I hoped he wouldn’t be doing later.

I tried my best to be silent and still. It was a surprisingly easy $30 ($15/hour to model for the Columbia Artists Society—less work than babysitting).

I peeked at a few drawings. In one man’s charcoal sketch I looked like a fleshy sex goddess with a gravity-defying set of breasts. One woman’s pencil drawing showed a vulnerable, bony adolescent. I don’t think I’m either.

Researching Modigliani’s work this week, I learned that his nudes were all strangers—paid models. I had believed they were his great loves, women he’d just rolled out of bed with to capture a transcendent moment of bliss. But the intimacy and understanding that had so moved me was never really there.

The sketching class gathers up their things and exits quietly while I put my underpants on behind a set of cabinets.

Leah Greenbaum is a Columbia College senior majoring in English and human rights. Slouching Towards Somewhere runs alternate Fridays.