Kniender weiblicher Akt in Vorderansicht, den Blick erhoben 

Victor Müller made this nude study, in pencil, during the late 19th century. The figure is kneeling, in what we might now call a ‘power pose’, looking upwards, arm raised. But this work would have been made in a very different social environment than our own. Germany, at this time, saw the nude as a form that had to be justified by the aesthetic values of the academy. The study was a genre heavily policed by institutions. Any hint of modern life was rigorously excluded from idealized representations of the body in art. The purpose of life drawing in academic institutions was to train artists in the established rules of proportion and anatomy. But this was also meant to instill in students a conservative mindset and the study of the nude was a powerful tool for policing the boundaries of representation. Looking at the institutions that shaped the work of Victor Müller, we can better understand the ways that the naked form has been used, across history, to project very different social meanings.