body language; The nude is always vital, never stale, writes Dodie Kazanjian of a time-honored aesthetic tradition.

Byline: Dodie Kazanjian

As an art form, the nude is as old as it gets. An unknown cave dweller sculpted a voluptuously nubile figure known as the Venus of Willendorf around 23,000 b.c., and-except for a few hundred years during those dreary, uptight Middle Ages-humans have kept right on making likenesses of fellow humans without their clothes on. Art's clearest link to its classical past, the nude remains vital by reflecting the present, as it did in the days of Titian, Velazquez, and Rubens, and as it does today in the work of Lucian Freud, John Currin, Jenny Saville, and many other leading artists.

Two years ago, Vogue commissioned a group of artists to make self-portraits. This time around, we asked six well-known contemporaries to address the nude. As you might expect, the results were strikingly dissimilar. Julian Schnabel, known since the eighties for his visionary, over-the-top, semi-abstract canvases, weighed in with a suavely brushed sketch that could almost be called traditional. At the other extreme is Jeff Koons's many-layered puzzle picture, with its curious mix of monkey faces, dot patterns, and hard-to-read pornography. Italian-born Vanessa Beecroft, the only one in our group who regularly uses the nude in her work, is famous for presenting naked or almost naked females in staged tableaux vivants; for us, she made her first venture into sculpture-a sculpture with a most surprising patina. "I want to disturb people," Beecroft tells me. "The shape is classical and nude, but the purpose is to ...