This year marks the 100th anniversary of an exhibition of paintings by the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, at the Berthe Weill gallery in Paris. The exhibition, displaying a number of nude works, was too much for some and shut down within hours of its opening. The police commissioner at the time had been offended by the depiction of pubic hair.

"It really did shock people," said Nancy Ireson, one of the curators of a new exhibition of Modigliani's paintings at Tate Modern, "and some of the paintings had to be taken down."

Upending traditions

To our contemporary eyes, Modigliani's hirsute women are hardly shocking, in fact their poses reveal the painter to be in thrall to elegance and classicism. Yet, in rejecting the traditional hairless nudes of antiquity, Modigliani was seen to be attacking the social order -- and in this, he was not alone.

Modigliani was part of a radical group of Belle Époque artists, who wanted to subvert cultural conventions, and what better way of doing this than forcing people to confront how they see themselves?

Some painters, like Modigliani did it by sticking closely to the facts, others, like Picasso, tore the body apart and re-constructed it for the modern world. The nude had become a subject of challenge and contest.  

If you subscribe to the aphorism that sex is really about power, Ireson suggests another reason to why Modigliani's nudes were so shocking: "These women are overtly sexual and that really connects with the way women were troubling society at the time. These pictures were made during the First World War, when more women were working, more women were living independently ... there really is a social anxiety about that."

Censoring the nude

So began a golden era of the nude in Western art, thought not without censorship. In 1912, Austrian painter Egon Schiele, spent 24 days in jail convicted of immorality relating to hundreds of sketches of the naked form, and artists Otto Dix and George Grosz were both brought to trial for obscenity in the 1920s. Others preferred self-censorship rather than prosecution. René Magritte's "The Rape" was concealed behind a velvet curtain when it was first exhibited in Brussels in 1934, with only Surrealist sympathizers permitted to see it. For Modigliani however the censorship of his nude paintings didn't help sales -- he died young and penniless in 1920.

Yet for all the trouble censorship caused these male artists, their reputation was rehabilitated and they went on to be celebrated as transgressive -- even visionary -- outsiders. Their nudes were lauded as sexually brave, raw and unconstrained. The same cannot be said of the women artists who came in their wake as a result of that burgeoning female autonomy.