Cooley Art Gallery exhibition The Language of the Nude: Four Centuries of Drawing the Human Body

Ongoing through December 5

Cooley Art Gallery exhibition
The Language of the Nude: Four Centuries of Drawing the Human Body

For centuries, the nude body was the highest expression of human aspiration. Religious figures, gods and goddesses, heroes, and even personifications of abstract ideals found visible form in the undraped human figure. This exhibition of 60 rarely seen drawings from the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, examines the nude its place in the artist's process, and the ideals and desires it expressed in European art. Tracing how artists saw the body, for example the influence of Michelangelo and Raphael in the 16th century and French Academy nudes in the 18th, it also examines the body's context in Christian art, Classical mythology and literary subjects. For more information, visit the Cooley Art Gallery website. (Image: Charles Le Brun, Man Clinging to a Rock. Red chalk on buff laid paper, 44.5 x 28.8 cm. © Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California.)

Noon–6 p.m., Tuesday–Sunday, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Hauser Memorial Library.