The art of every culture and every era has depicted the human figure. Some of it is documentary. Some of it is adoration to the point of fetishization. Some of it is religious—the gods always look like elevated humans. Some of it is portraiture (and if you think filters, Photoshop, and AI enhancements are new, consider the idealization of royal, religious, and mythological subjects). We express ourselves in exaggerations or surrealistic use of bodily features. The Chu culture of ancient China imagined figures that were part-man, part-animals. The Surrealists, such as Magritte, merged people with objects. From Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” to contemporary horror tales, books, and movies, we couch our fears in human features made terrifying. Millions take selfies each day: the subject is still the human figure.
Art teachers say that drawing a human body is the most difficult challenge for a student. A life drawing class is the most unsexy thing in the world. Yes, the model is naked. But when you’re trying to get the details of proportion, contour, light, shadow, and foreshortening (showing how a limb looks from the end rather than the side), the task is long and stressful. I regularly left those classes with pounding headaches. It was the farthest I could get from erotic arousal.
Artists and architects say that we subconsciously measure everything by our bodies. If you enter a space, the doorways must be the right height and width, the doorknobs and handles should be at reachable levels, and a room’s proportions will range from intimate to grand. If you look at a miniature figure, you’ll relate to it differently than if it was life-sized or larger than a person. Think of a doll compared to the Colossus of Rhodes. There are all sorts of implications to every step on the scale between those two extremes.
The human figure in art can show our aspirations. Consider the Greek and Roman statues. Did they really “look that way”? Or did they represent what the people of those times held to be divinely human? Artists also depicted the darker sides of life—grief, sadness, starvation, and war. Some artists showed the apotheosis of human existence. Others showed humanity’s grotesque suffering.
You can’t get away from the human figure in art. Art reflects our existence: ugliness, beauty, youth, old age, death. That’s why every culture has the human figure as a subject: art shows us ourselves.