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Issue 40 hair
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Full view of, and evidentiary detail from, Georg Pencz, A Sleeping Woman
(Vanitas), 1544.

84
Acomocliticism
Blake Gopnik
Aesthetic ideals, imagined as remote and superlunary,
may never be more than lowly preferences putting on
airs. If only he had grasped that possibility, John Ruskin
could have had a thrilling wedding night. Instead of
being defeated by the sight of his bride’s un-ideal pubic
hair (that is one longstanding parsing of the “certain cir-
cumstances in her person” that he later said had deflated
him), Ruskin could have followed many other aesthetes
and artists, and simply told her he preferred her shaved.
The smooth pudenda of Western art may reflect a
grounded taste for hairlessness as often as they mark
aesthetic elevation. Ancient Greece, source of our
later Platonisms, was an acomoclitic place. The Greeks
shaved and plucked and even torched. (Although there
is still scholarly debate about the precise glabrosity
achieved, and its Freudian implications.)1 Some of their
later followers, rather than standing heir to a philo-
sophical tradition, were likewise victims of a capillary
fashion. “Ideal” figures such as those in Antonio Cano-
va’s hairless Three Graces might have gone Brazilian for
“the convenience of pleasure, out of libertine curiosity
and following the custom of the courtesans who mod-
eled in Athens and Rome,” as Diderot explains when he
discusses hairless statuary in his 1765 Salon. 2 Several
decades earlier, John Dryden, translating Persius’s first-
century Fourth Satire, annotates its reference to pubic
depilation by citing “that effeminate Custom now used
in Italy, and especially by Harlots, of smoothing their
Bellies, and taking off the Hairs which grow about their
Secrets. In Nero’s times they were pull’d off with Pin-
cers; but now they use a Paste, which applied to those
Parts, when it is remov’d, carries away with it those
Excrescencies.”3 (As late as the 1950s, Dryden’s note
was still being expurged from editions of his writings.)
Even art history’s most famously hirsute pudendum,
seen in Courbet’s Origin of the World, is less natural
than it seems at first glance. Under close examination
by the chief of gynecology at a major American hospi-
tal, it revealed “evidence of waxing at the bikini line.”
Marcel Duchamp, though always conceived of as
caring more about ideas than matter, “had an almost
pathological hatred for hair,” according to his first wife, and
is known to have requested pubic depilation of his lovers,
to match his own.4 His art reflects his taste: the spread-
legged female nude in his Étant donnés, the magnum opus
of his later life, is perfectly hairless. It seems that Duch-
amp’s smooth crotch has more to do with Burma Shave
than with ancient artistic ideals and their ravishment by
85
modern art.5 Or rather, Duchamp may have caught on
to Praxiteles and Canova as his precedents in lather.
As so often in art history, the Renaissance provides
the test case for our argument. It is said that classical
ideals were reborn among Renaissance artists, but it
might be better to say that those artists caught on to
classical tastes. In a letter published in the 1560s, the
Venetian satirist Andrea Calmo wrote of a dream in
which antiquity’s greatest heroines, from Helen to Dido
to Lucretia, gave him a depilatory powder to bestow
upon his lady.6 Granted, those heroines don’t specify
the powder’s place of application. Upper lips, too, were
kept smooth in the Renaissance.
Depilatory geography is less approximate in a
shamefully neglected print from around 1540 by the
German artist Peter Flötner, in which a naked woman,
perhaps personifying vanitas or nuda veritas, trims
her mons veneris with a huge pair of shears.7 And in
1544, once again in Germany, Georg Pencz, a follower
of Dürer, provides additional evidence that ought to
close our case for pubic realism. Pencz’s lovely paint-
ing of a sleeping nude, propped on one of the finest
pillows in art, is now in the Norton Simon Museum in
Pasadena. The standard take on a picture such as this
would describe it as a marriage of Italian idealism and
a northern commitment to the real. The ideal seems to
be there in Pencz, in a hairless pudendum worthy of the
Medici Venus. But his realism reveals it, once again, to
be nothing more than a preferred and available option.
When observed very closely—rudely closely—the
model’s lower belly reveals tiny flickers of black paint
spaced across the pink of her skin.
Stubble.
1 See Martin Kilmer, “Genital Phobia and Depilation,” Journal of Hellenic Stud-
ies 102 (1982), pp. 104-112.
2 “… la commodité du plaisir, la curiosité libertine, et l’usage des courtisannes
qui servoient de modèles dans Athènes et dans Rome.” Denis Diderot, Salon de
1765, in Salons, ed. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1960), vol. 2, p. 210.
3 Quoted in Maurice Johnson, “Dryden’s Note on Depilation,” Notes and Que-
ries, no. 196 (27 October 1951), p. 472.
4 Lydie Fischer Sarazin-Levassor, Un échec matrimonial: le coeur de la mariée
mis à nu par son célibataire meme (Dijon: Presses du réel, 2004), p. 69.
5 See Michael R. Taylor, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (Philadelphia: Philadel-
phia Museum of Art, 2009), p. 69.
6 The gift is “una polvere da butar via e far cazer quanti peli vu havé adosso.”
Andrea Calmo, Le lettere di Messer Andrea Calmo, riprodotte sulle stampe
migliori, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1888), letter 24 of book 4,
p. 307. See also Lynne Lawner, The Lives of the Courtesans (New York: Rizzoli
International, 1987), p. 28.
7 Reproduced on p. 58 of Ann Sophie Lehmann, “Op de grens: Lichaamshaar in
de kunst van de Renaissance,” in De grenzen van het lichaam Innerlijk en uiterlijk
in de Renaissance, ed. Arie-Jan Gelderblom and Harald Hendrix (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp. 47–73. This is the main text on pubic hair in
Renaissance art. A better image of Flötner’s print is available online in the British
Museum’s collections database.