mARTSm Are the days of the nude numbered?

Political correctness is threatening the nude painting. Rosie Millard investigates

GLAXO, the pharmaceuticals giant, won't have them in its corporate art collection. Sainsbury's don't have them either, nor do ICI or Mobil or Credit Suisse. Unilever have two, but one is apparently "very vague". TSB have lots, but then they have, in Sir Nicholas Goodison, a forward-thinking chairman. Frankly, most art advisers for corporate collections just don't want to touch them. Now, it must be made clear that we are not talking extreme modernism; nor wacky sculptures made by Helen Chadwick urinating in the snow. We are talking nudes, and the emphatic policy of most corporate art collections today is to have no nudes.

Since Kenneth Clark, of Civilisation fame, defined the nude as "the central subject of art", paintings of the naked human body have entered a distinctly un-central period. Never-mind corporate squeamishness, national collections view them nervously and a university has taken nudes off its walls in deference to the PC brigade. In some senses the nude has replaced abstract art as the great problem area in contemporary art - which is ironic, since in many cases, abstraction is now the genre often preferred by collectors who feel nervous about buying nude paintings. The nude has become a problem with a capital P.

"There's nothing we wouldn't show in the gallery," says Matthew Flowers, of Flowers East, one of London's more fashionable contemporary galleries. "We've had lots of sexy stuff." However with 30 per cent of his sales going to corporate clients, the liberal policy ends there. "Companies always say `no nudes'," he continues. "It's a recent phenomenon; but they always stipulate it. I think they're worried about what women in the workplace will say."

"Nudes offend people," confirms Leah Byrne of the Contemporary Art Society, one of the country's biggest art consultants. Really? The nude? Paintings of what Lord Clark defined as the "balanced, prosperous and confident body"? Offend people? An Ingres nude? A Michelangelo sculpture? Botticelli's Venus? "Of course, it's not the same with the great masters," says Byrne. "They've been somewhat sanctified by age, but with contemporary art, nudes are seen as dangerous. We do try and persuade clients to buy nudes, but they always think they are too racy. They watch out for nudity: they can sometimes spot vague nudes in a picture which you hadn't even noticed were there. We've never sold a nude to a company and I think basically they're wary of hanging paintings which might make their employees or visitors uncomfortable."

"An art piece in a workplace is designed to help, not to cause a rumpus," says City art consultant Tom Tempest-Radford, who has just organised the vast collection of paintings for P&O's new super cruiser, the Oriana (no nudes in the cabins). "If you were a secretary in an office, and a nude was hanging in front of you, you might find it disturbing. Willies or breasts in a picture don't necessarily mean the picture is threatening, but it's understandable."

The chill wind of modesty has not only been blowing through City boardrooms. It has entered the temples of liberalism, namely the university campuses. At Southampton Univ-ersity earlier this year, three paintings of female nudes by the artist Larry Wakefield were taken down from the Social Sciences' conference room on the grounds of political correctness after complaints by some staff and students.

``Paintings of naked women . . . have no place in public space. Many people have problems with the objectification of women,'' said Maire Ni Brolchain, one of the campaigners against the paintings. She went on: ``The depiction . . . of women as primarily sexual beings [undermines] their dignity in the workplace and their professional status.''

Depictions of the naked body have, of course, always caused offence - but the complaints are different today. "The problem now with nudity is about the perception of women, whereas it used to be a problem about sex," says Neil MacGregor, director of the National Gallery. "There was of course a brief moment in the 1960s when neither issue was problematic.

``In the 19th century, there was a considerable question as to whether nudes should be acquired at all for show. And we know that when the Bronzino Allegory with Venus and Cupid was acquired for this gallery, the word `sensuous' was completely avoided in its description, although the painting was clearly very sexual. When it first went on display it was said that `every clergyman in England would complain'. Clearly, however, you can't show Western European art without including the nude. Now I think the only problem for us is in the context of academic debate and dealing with a multi-cultural audience, for some of whom the nude may be taboo."

This may be true for the Old Masters but in contemporary art, whose practitioners are constantly encouraged towards erotica and to step over the boundaries of what many would say was common decency, the issue becomes more murky. It is clearly easier to defend exhibiting an Ingres nude than, say, a Robert Mapple-thorpe photograph. However today's outrage - remember that Manet's Djeuner sur l'Herbe caused a terrible outcry when it was first exhibited in Paris - becomes tomorrow's commonplace.

Earlier this year, the Tate Liverpool withdrew its plans to publish an image of a male nude by Caroline Coon in a forthcoming student workbook, on the grounds of the "presence of an erect penis". The book, which would only be available at three Tate outlets, or for teenage students in schools, was commissioned to accompany an exhibition of female nude sculptures, "Venus Redefined".

The Coon painting, Mr Olympia, was a pastiche of Manet's famous nude, Olympia, but with a man as the naked subject rather than a woman. But once a copy of the picture arrived in Liverpool, the gallery decided that Mr Olympia's erection made it "unsuitable for use'' - notwithstanding the fact that the Tate's own education department had previously judged the work to be "a perfect image".

"In this day and age, I would have thought art is the one place where you can discuss issues of nudity safely," says the unrepentant Ms Coon. "And the Tate is a gallery with a history of male nakedness. Have you seen Epstein's Jacob and the Angel? If that isn't a display of male genitalia, I'm not sure what is."

"Nudity is part and parcel of the Tate's collection," says Sandy Nairne, the gallery's Director of Public and Regional Services. "Probably the single most iconic work in our collections is Rodin's The Kiss." Yet he too admits that "the nude is not an innocent subject. Feminist thinking has had a great impact since the 1970s. Obviously Caroline Coon's picture was difficult with a publication for schools; but for the gallery, I don't think for a second that the trustees would not purchase a nude." So how far would they go? Would they purchase, for example, a Helen Chadwick picture of female genitalia achieved by the artist sitting on a photocopier?

"Yeeeaah, I suppose so," says Nairne, after a pause. "Don't forget we exhibited the infamous Allen Jones sculpture where a kneeling woman is made into a table. Oh, of course it caused great provocation: acid was thrown over it at one point, but we'd never stop showing it."

How about a painting of an erection, then? A longer pause. "We might show it," says Nairne. However we would feel we'd have to help people with how to deal with it. For example, we wouldn't hesitate to show the picture of Jeff Koons (the New York shock artist) and La Cicciolina (the former porn star who became an Italian MP) having sex. But we would ask what is the responsible way of showing the work. Like we have done with the de Kooning exhibition."

He has a point. The bug-eyed, grotesque nudes in the Tate's current Willem de Kooning retrospective are dealt with very carefully indeed. There are lectures, and films, and catalogues. Every room in the exhibition has carefully written introductory boards on the walls. Free booklets explaining the show, in particular de Kooning's controversial and, some would say, misogynistic Women paintings, are thrust into the hands of all visitors. Even so, a member of the Tate's security staff told me she was getting 20 complaints from the public each day.

"You can't get away with pretending nothing has happened politically in the last decade," says Gill Saunders, curator of the V&A's 1989 "Nudes" exhibition. "You simply cannot address people about the nude without carrying along this intellectual baggage. The nude is not seen as pure and unadulterated art any more. It is a political issue; and publicly funded institutions like the V&A have to be careful."

Strangely, this tentative approach, with its caravan of booklets and explanatory films, appears to be strictly limited to the world of the visual arts. Nudity and erotica don't appear to be much of a problem in other arts. The current English National Opera production of Life with an Idiot is liberally sprinkled with priapic stage-props. ENO also has simulated sex in its Don Giovanni. And Kevin McNally's total body strip on tour around the country in Terry Johnson's hit play Dead Funny was hugely appreciated by audiences from Darlington to Bath. "We had no letters of complaint," says Richard Wakely, company manager of Hampstead Theatre, which produced the show.

``McNally was absolutely bollock-naked and I think the audience loved it in the regions even more than at Hampstead. Perhaps nudity seems more offensive in paintings because when the moment is frozen it's more disturbing."

But in the visual arts, even the most radical of spaces has to take the current political agenda on board. "We have to be sensitive with what we show," says Julia Peighton-Jones, director of London's avant-garde Serpentine Gallery. "The whole idea of nudes being wrong is shocking, but you need to take your public along with you. It's a fine line - and the more contemporary it is, the more problematic it is. I mean, the British Museum doesn't have a problem."

Indeed it doesn't. In the 19th century anything risqu was locked away in each department's "secretum". Today the BM has no fears about showing any of its myriad Greek, Roman and Egyptian nude statuary or figurines.

"There are no taboos here,'' says John Taylor, curator of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities. "The Egyptian god Min has a permanent erection. Statues of him have been shown in the gallery for many years. I don't think people tend to notice him too much. Then there's the Naucratite figurines (c 600-100BC), which are basically groups of figures having sex, and men with very large organs. Penises wrapped around their necks, that sort of thing. I've never heard of any complaints from the general public. We even publish illustrations of them in our books."

The idea that theatre-goers and visitors to the British Museum cope better with nudity than today's bankers, businessmen, art students or contemporary art fans sounds mad, but there it is. "As I said, we would not go for a nude in a picture," repeats the PR woman from Credit Suisse. "I can't tell you why. It is just the policy. It just is." !