Bare necessities | 28 July 2007

The Naked Portrait

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until 2 September, then Compton Verney, Warwickshire, from

29 September to 9 December

The advance publicity I saw for this on the whole excellently curated exhibition contained a health warning: ‘Please note this show contains nudity. Children under 16 must be accompanied by an adult.’

The title comes from the phrase used by Lucian Freud for several of his nudes but, alas, for the prurient, there are few images that might disturb or inflame either adults or children, except perhaps one of a woman holding a silk rosette bearing the word ‘Boob’ against her own left breast mutilated (but not removed) by surgery.

The show limits itself to nude portraits and self-portraits from 1900 to 2007 and is a skilful mix of classics of modern art and contemporary work by artists not yet famous, with a fair proportion of photographs and a little sculpture to counterbalance the natural dominance of the paintings. The curator, Martin Hammer, has also written the excellent accompanying catalogue and his selections veer from images so well known as to be, no matter how brilliant, clichés to a sophisticated sense of humour in some of his juxtapositions. It’s a bit of a bore to see, yet again, Lewis Morley’s famous shot of Christine Keeler sitting naked on her back-to-front chair but there’s a welcome smile of relief to see David Frost and Barry Humphries as Dame Edna equally naked in the same posture and snapped on the same chair.

As often in shows of contemporary art the old question of whether size matters is repeatedly posed. The one fault with the catalogue is that it fails to include dimensions in its captions so that you have to see the originals to reflect on the sizes.