Emma Chambers

Curator of Modern British Art at the Tate in London, and of The Body Laid Bare: Masterpieces from Tate

I hope that the female gaze

— the new generation of boundary-pushing female artists — would consider the exhibition to have shown how the portrayal of the nude has shifted over time in line with political and social shifts. The history of the nude traditionally has been one in which men look at women, but this exhibition also includes men portraying male bodies, women looking at women, and women looking at men, and in the later rooms of the exhibition it includes feminist nudes and anti-nudes by artist activists.

Works in the show that employ a female gaze

are startling in their different viewpoint and bring home to us the extent to which a male gaze had come to seem natural in the 19th and early 20th century. The many paintings of female nudes in familiar poses by male artists such as Leighton, Matisse and Picasso in the show suddenly seem much less inevitable once a male nude is painted in a similar pose by a female artist, such as Sylvia Sleigh’s portrait of Paul Rosano.

One of the key strategies of feminist artists

from the 1970s onwards was to reclaim ownership of the female body and images depicting it. This was often overtly political in works by artists such as Linder, Jo Spence, Hannah Wilke and the Guerilla Girls in the exhibition. But contemporary nudes are just as often about vulnerability as they are about politics, for example the photographs of Reneke Dijkstra, Cindy Sherman and John Coplans. I have never been a life model. Living in Britain in a cold and wet climate, my mantra in terms of clothing is: definitely more.

The mouth is the most provocative body part.

It is able to communicate both physically and intellectually.

Although the instant availability of images and information

has transformed the ways we can find out about art for the better, it is still important to have longer print pieces that allow a deeper engagement with artworks.

I could not live without

sight.

If my house were on fire,

the material thing I would rescue is a box of old family photographs.

I’d like to have been a fly on the wall

to hear the conversation when Lucian Freud was painting Queen Elizabeth II.

If I could live in an era of an emerging “ism”

— cubism, futurism, realism, etc — I would pick constructivism.

I would like to ask

Marcel Duchamp: Why did you give up art to play chess?