An exhibition so good, you’ll take your kit off to see it. You may even be forced to if you visit the latest exhibition on nudism and naturism at the Mucem museum in Marseille.
ADVERTISEMENTOnce a month on a Tuesday, Marseille's Mucem is allowing visitors to enjoy the ‘Naturist Paradises’ exhibition in nothing but their birthday suits. If walking around a museum naked doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, the sartorially dependent are allowed in any other day of the month.
‘Naturist Paradises’ will run at the southern French museum until 9 December 2024. The photography exhibition catalogues the growth of nudist communities across Europe and the philosophy behind a desire to return to nature.
Nudism isn’t just a fad of the 60s, the museum explains, noting that “a new craze for nudity in nature has arisen, going hand in hand with the search for healthy, vegetarian diets and the use of natural therapies, meditation, and yoga in the open air.”
“These lifestyles, along with the rejection of the diktats that so weigh down our bodies, are all keys to understanding the issues at stake in the naturism of yesterday and today.”
Mucem is a perfect location for the exhibition as France has become one of the leading nations for European nudism. Situated in Marseille on the Mediterranean coast where the weather is frequently gorgeous, it’s no surprise that stripping off is more prevalent than in, say… Glasgow.
Marseille is host to multiple nudist beaches and communities of naturism are spread across France. It’s a tradition the country owes to both Germany and Switzerland, the museum curators emphasise.
Through a collection of 600 photographs, films, magazines, and everyday objects, the museum tells the story of how these communities that were pioneered in the 1920s have evolved to the movement it is today, a century on.
Originally in the early 20th century, much of the thought process around naturism was that exposing the body to the elements had a medically beneficial effect. This idea, found often in the early Swiss and German communities, was also contrasted by a traditionalist belief in an ascetic return to simpler times, away from worldly pleasures.
Amélie Lavin, one of the exhibition’s curators, explained to 20 Minutes the complex histories of the thinking behind those early communities: “A strong libertarian dimension, with the idea of getting rid of one's clothes as so many tinsel of capitalist society. There is also the theme of natural medicines, of exposing the body to the elements to strengthen it with a discourse on the degeneration of the race and its regeneration through naturism that would be difficult to hear today.”
The first community to be established in France is a Parisian gym called Spartaclub, founded in 1927. This was followed by naturist campsites popping up across France, notably including in Noisy-le-Grand along the Seine river.
Some of the biggest figures in the exhibition is the inclusion of the Durville brothers, André and Gaston. The two doctor siblings founded Héliopolis, a naturist club in Île du Levant, an island off the French riviera.
They had already created the Physiopolis naturist camp on the Seine’s Platais island in 1928, but Héliopolis took things to another level, creating an isolated community for their holistic, vegetarian lifestyle.
At the height of its popularity, 60,000 people would visit Héliopolis every summer in the 1960s. It’s still a popular site for nudist beaches today.
