Depilation was also a huge thing throughout most of ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt. Somehow a whole lot of moderns have the bizarro idea that the ancients were all more Naturally Authentic then us and didn't shave (which is how you get the "how could they call the razor Venus? You think the goddess shaved her pussy??" meanwhile the Romans who invented her loved bald puss puss and portrayed her with one zillions of times.) The aesthetics of ancient art became extremely influential on western art from basically the renaissance on, and in many ways set the standards of "academic" style in 1700s and 1800s Europe that defined what we typically consider "classical" art.
Furthermore, portraying nudes in this academic environment was a fraught process, as anything akin to mere pornography would be not only rejected but scandalous. This could be avoided by creating a remove between real naked human, and "nude art," especially for women. Lack of body hair (which in the 1800s was typically considered sexy and was associated with the sex drive) and vaguely smooth, undefined nether regions on women were part of this standard and allowed representations of the naked form to be presented in an artistically acceptable way.
Of course, some artists didn't care about their art meeting these standards. Pieces painted for a private owner, such as Goya's "Nude Maja," for instance. Or intentionally shocking pieces, like Courbet's "Origin of the World." But even artists who intended to toe the line could find their art deemed not up to par. John Everett Millais' painting "The Knight Errant" depicts an armored knight freeing a naked woman who has been tied to a tree. Her head is modestly turned away from the viewer, her body is hairless, even her loose coiffure trails down to veil her crotch, all of which were means of establishing an acceptably "artistic," modest, remove from reality. But it still caused titters, because Millais was a Pre-Raphaelite, a circle of artists who were rejecting Neo-classical modes and studio staidness in favor of overt naturalism, and applied that naturalism to much of his depiction of the woman in "Knight Errant"— she was recognizably human, even individual, not the safely sylph-like airbrushed ideal removed from humanity and sex, and enough so that even with his bows to academic mores, a lot of people still considered it at least borderline distasteful. (And it wasn't just nudity that was expected to keep an idealized remove from reality in order to be respectable, nor was this the only painting of Millais' that got the side-eye, his depictions of the Holy Family in a warts-and-all, natural, domestically-messy style also caused controversy because it wasn't refined or respectful enough!) This struggle between artistic realism, edification, and "vulgar reality" was a constant (and notably was one of the criticisms that was leveled at the naturalism of the Impressionists as well), and bald pussy has been one of the elements at the center of the debate for a long time.
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