My friend Tee Corinne the photographer is very ill. I have been going up to Oregon to see her but she also really likes mail.
So I decided to send her naked lady postcards. After all she is a premiere photographer of nudes of women. She was delighted with the idea. I assumed that this would be really easy, lots of post cards of naked ladies and lots of choices. I was quite looking forward to picking ones she would especially like. Wrong!
My first stop was Good Vibrations – a sex positive co-op in the Mission district in San Francisco. Lots of sex toys, lots of books, but they don’t carry postcards any more. So I went to a Latin crafts shop nearby and in a very large selection of post cards found exactly one bare bosomed mermaid. (A really excellent mermaid.) I mailed her to Tee.
Then I went to the Asian Art Museum. Museum gift shops have always been excellent places for fine art naked lady post cards. The only NL was a photograph of a stylized Indonesian goddess.
Technically a nude but hardly “naked”.
So I went to the De Young fine art museum. It’s a beautiful new building in Golden Gate Park.
Many post cards. I thought I’d find at least a Manet “Olympia”. But no – again, exactly one NL postcard. She was an Americana mural nude but at least she was naked.
Then I was in LA and picked up a Modigliani nude in a video store (again the only NL). Tee really loved this one. She has it on a shelf in her bedroom.
Finally, I made a special trip to the Museum of Modern Art and found no NLs at all. The closest post card was a Chagall painting that included a women with bare breasts.
I’ve also gone to lots of art and card stores. Nothing!
So my question is – where have all the naked ladies gone?