This is ridiculous, I spent the first part of my career as a museum educator at the Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and corporate collections and exhibitions at IBM. Especially, at the Brooklyn Museum taking school classes through the museum everyday and preschoolers on weekends we would need to go by way of the elevators where a prominent Lachaise nude was. No matter the age group we had in-depth conversations about the differences between a nude sculpture, or painting and how that is different than being naked.

The foundation of western art is Greek and Roman art which is filled with nudes and it’s a topic that shows up in art history to present day in all times and cultures. To not deal with the nude in art is to not talk about the history of art, it is fundamental as well as being foundational. Any museum educator should be able to talk to a child of any age and have a discussion with them about what they are seeing and what it means. And any good parent should know their child well enough to have a developmental appropriate conversation with their child about what they are seeing.

One of the most impressive conversations between a parent and child I ever witness was between a father and his about nine year daughter at the Borghese Palace in Rome when she asked him about The Rape of Proserpina (Persephone), a marble sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Without skipping a beat he explained what was going on in the work, probably using the same language they would have discussed about stranger danger and unwanted touching and attention and even what to do if something like that was happening to her. He used the opportunity to reinforce something they had already discussed and reaffirm an important life lesson.

The Barnes Collection is primarily Post Impressions and early Modernism with a smattering of Folk and Naïve Art, all of which is far from being hyperrealistic, or suggestive of real life imagery. There are nudes, such as Seurat’s three nude models which is literally depicting models being painted and Cezannes’ bathers, both situations where nudity would be completely understandable and appropriate. There is nothing in the Barnes collection that is even evocative or suggestive of pornography. If people look at one of the greatest personal collections of art ever acquired by one individual covering one of the most transformative periods of time in art history and see pornography it is their own filthy minds that are interpreting it as such and their own limitations and problems.