The exhibition presents the female nude as the renewed genre of the 19th century and at the same time the heir of the renaissance humanist way of portrayal. We approach the art in which science 'discovered' the female gender from different point of views. The exhibition puts female nude presentation into the renaissance academic medium in which the European art of the New Age came to existence and in which the task of presenting a living female nude belonged to academic art instead of the guilds. It is a strange contradiction that the knowledge of female anatomy was unattainable for the artists since nude women were only provided at the academies of London (from 1753), Paris (from 1800), and Munich (from 1808. The situation was that until the 1850's.

Beside the experience, the studio of the artist and the portrayal of the female nude was the field of imagination. The picture sources of female nude representation were the erotic works of the antique and renaissance. For the painters in the 19th century, the sample of bathing woman, the woman brushing her hair, and the topos of nude painting of real living model was the 'Great Bather' by Ingres painted at the academy of Rome in 1808. We present the female nude by the help of the traditions of European pictures and perception.

Bertalan Székely devised a unique training to teach the perception of the body in the Sample Drawing Studio. He taught to portray female nude in relation of motion, form, color, and body all based on physiology, psychology, and physics. For this work, he is held the forerunner of modernism in Hungary. When Picasso painted the 'Misses of Avignon' in Paris inspired by the reviving power of African art then József Rippl-Rónai exhibited his own works along with artworks from outside of Europe in Kaposvár and Budapest.

Most of the 350-exhibited works were selected from the material of the Hungarian National Gallery and the Graphic Collection.