“Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.”

—  Susan Sontag , book Under the Sign of Saturn

Fascism" http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm"Fascinating (1974), published in The New York Review of Books (6 February 1975) and reprinted in Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 92, ISBN 0312420080

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Susan Sontag 168
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist 1933–2004

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“This is a work which ought to be in every library in Canada; perhaps, after twenty-five years or so, it might silence the recurrent hubbub about nude paintings which is a feature of our national life. Yes, they are erotic. Yes, madam, the painters are often naughty men, and the models are sometimes bad girls. But there are elements involved in the painting of the nude which draw upon what is highest in art and express what is highest in mankind. Now, may we please look at the pictures?”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

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“There were nude pictures… a lot of it is erotic or sexual. But I don't view my collection as dirty in any way. I view it as art.”

Paul Reubens (1952) American actor, writer, film producer, game show host, and comedian

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“Technical criticism in particular is the despair of the artist. No one but an idiot would offer a poet his comments in terms of spondees and trochees; why must the painter daily suffer the indignity? Any picture which makes one conscious first of its technical qualities, good or bad, is not a good picture, whatever else it may be.”

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“I remember the first time I saw a photograph of Lenda Murray in a magazine. I was in complete awe, I cut out that picture and placed it on my refrigerator and, from that point on, my goal was to develop a physique like hers.”

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“Like any admirer of Celtic myth, I was eager to have a go at depicting Cernunnos, the antlered god. I often sit with one of my many books on the subject and look in awe at the reproduction of the Gunderstrup Cauldron, on which he appears.”

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Source: en.wikiquote.org - Alexander Calder / Quotes of Alexander Calder / 1930s - 1950s / Statement from Modern Painting and Sculpture', (1933)

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