Abstract
After 1948, the visualization of naked female body was banned in socialist Czechoslovakia. According to the authorities, the female nude was inherently understood as "bourgeois" and "decadent", contributing to the exploitation of women.
As a result of "thaw", the nude was allowed again, first in fine arts (sculpture, painting, graphics), later in the field of photography. Since then, interest in the nude has grown so much that the visualization of naked female body became the most common motif in Czechoslovak photography magazines during the 1960s.
This development was accompanied by numerous discussions about how to visualize the female body in the conditions of a socialist society. Contemporary theorists sought to formulate, on a Marxist basis, a specific, non-exploitative "socialist nude" which was to be distinguished from the nude emerging in Western capitalist countries.
This article will analyse the contributions to the period discussion from photography theorists (Miloslav Kubeš, Ludvík Baran, Ján Šmok, Václav Zykmund), who dealt with the formulation of the nude on a theoretical and practical level. At the same time, it will place these theoretical concepts in the international context, both its progressive side (Marxist critique of the female nude as an object of market exchange) and its conservative, traditional thinking about the form of nude based on normativity and ideal proportions.