At This French Exhibition, Check Your Clothes at the Door

A group of visitors listened intently to their tour guide last Friday at one of Marseille’s biggest museums. One woman examined old posters with bright colors and bold graphics. Another studied a collection of black-and-white photographs laid out on a table.

They all were naked, save for their shoes.

The disrobed spectators had come to the Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean, known as Mucem, for an exhibition about social nudity, which practitioners often call naturism. According to the museum, almost 100,000 people have visited the show since it opened in July, and, at five special viewings, about 600 of them have been naked.

Some were regular naturists, identifiable by their tan-line-less, often leathery backsides.

But many had never been naked with strangers before, except for the odd skinny dip. For them, shared nudity was mostly confined to locker rooms or bedrooms, for sports or for sex. This was a new way to relate to art, and to their bodies. Acceptance. Or, maybe, neutrality.

“Normally, bodies are so sexualized,” said Jule Baumann, 27, one of the visitors on Friday. “I liked the idea of being in a place where it’s just normal to be naked.”

A naked museum show itself is not novel: Museums in Paris, Vienna, Montreal, Barcelona, Milan and the small English town of Dorchester have hosted such evenings before.