when did body hair begin in art?

I know there are pubes now and then but armpit hair? Damned if I can find much of anything outside a few faint dark patches.

so were those breakthrough stylings?

yes the txt said body hair not pubic hair, that wz just my google-gag: i am tempted to call vick and ask her LOUD SEARCHING QUESTIONS on her mobile in the tate except i am supposed to be doin homework for a job interview

"Hair there and everywhere" by Barbara A. Melville.

"Years ago she noticed that 'in Italian Renaissance art, females were presented with no body hair at all but males were shown with pubic hair.' In Northern Renaissance art, however, artists painted pubic hair on females and underarm hair on men."

Umm...hmmm...corrected link here.

it's those skidmore college people again! martin s to thread! (and school us on the japanese take here plz)

ok vick has finetuned her question to sidestep the "great gay exceptions" and basically wants to focus on the topic of women's armpit-hair art in history

My college is of help again, hurrah!

Damn, I thought I had a book on the crucifixion in art, but if I have I can't find it now. That would be good for holy armpit hair action.

Japan: apart from the more explicit end of the shunga (erotic) print market in the 18th and 19th C, the nude wasn't a subject at all in Japanese art. You might get zen monks in few enough clothes that you could in theory see the armpit hair, especially if we're talking about Hotei (http://www.japanese-arts.net/painting/zen_hotei.htm) say, who spent much of his time pointing at the Moon (presumably only at night), but since the style is not at all naturalistic, and they were interesting in a few calligraphic brushstrokes rather than lots of fiddly detail, I don't actually recall seeing body hair. Also the Japanese are not a terribly hairy people, mostly.

Erotic comic books (a large market sector) often don't show pubic hair either (or genitals) - they leave spaces or put something else there to symbolise the genitals. Because the acceptability criteria are so different in the West, when work is to be translated, the original artist - or someone else if they are unavailable - is often contracted to replace the swords and aubergines and so on with actual genitals and pubic hair. It's that 'if the original artist is unavailable' bit that strikes my fancy. I am hoping that with the manga boom there are now people who do this full time, and I like to imagine how they describe their branch of the arts.

I was thinking if there's anybody in Japanese with underarm hair, it'd be Hotei, but I've come up empty in my searches...though there is this Kimono image with a tuft of chest hair.

I read somewhere that in Victorian times axillary hair was just TOO SEXXXXXY so it had to be kept from view.

I suppose someone should make a reference to John Ruskin, although that story might not be really true.

Modligliani had a bunch of nudes with underarm hair.

http://www.taschen.com/media/images/original/ka_modigliani.jpg

haha xpost that's immediately what i thought of when i saw this thread & i can't believe nobody has mentioned it until now! (re: john ruskin)

invention of photography: 1826
ruskin marries effie gray: 1848

unspoken theory here: turner's entire pictography is a study of female body hair

if only john ruskin had been around in the era of the brazilian and the hollywood

some paintings of john the baptiser had hair on chest and armpits, i think (15th/16th)

i have nothing to add besides john ruskin. and i have been beaten to the punch.

hotei goes disco
I describe that image as 'Saturday Night Fever Hotei' on the page I linked to!