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Anyone who examines the history of Western art must be struck by the prevalence of images of the female body. More than any other subject, the female nude connotes `art'. The framed image of a female body, hung on the walls of an art gallery, is an icon of Western culture, a symbol of civilization and accomplishment. But how and why did the female nude acquire this status? The Female Nude brings together, in an entirely new way, analysis of the historical tradition of the female nude and discussion of recent feminist art, and by exploring the ways in which acceptable and unacceptable images of the female body are produced and maintained, renews recent debates on high culture and pornography. The Female Nude represents the first feminist survey of the most significant subject in Western art. It reveals how the female nude is now both at the centre and at the margins of high culture. At the centre, and within art historical discourse, the female nude is seen as the visual culmination of enlightenment aesthetics; at the edge, it risks losing its repectability and spilling over into the obscene.
The representation of the nude in art remained for many centuries a victory of fiction over fact. Beautiful, handsome, flawless its great success was to distance the unclothed body from any uncomfortably explicit taint of sexuality, eroticism or imperfection. In this newly updated study, Frances Borzello contrasts the civilized, sanitized, perfected nude of Kenneth Clarks classic, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), with todays depictions: raw, uncomfortable, both disturbing and intriguing. Grittier and more subtle, depicting variously gendered bodies, the new nude asks awkward questions and behaves provocatively. It is a very naked nude, created to deal with the issues and contradiction...
Rembrandt’s extraordinary paintings of female nudes—Andromeda, Susanna, Diana and her Nymphs, Danaë, Bathsheba—as well as his etchings of nude women, have fascinated many generations of art lovers and art historians. But they also elicited vehement criticism when first shown, described as against-the-grain, anticlassical—even ugly and unpleasant. However, Rembrandt chose conventional subjects, kept close to time-honored pictorial schemes, and was well aware of the high prestige accorded to the depiction of the naked female body. Why, then, do these works deviate so radically from the depictions of nude women by other artists? To answer this question Eric Jan Sluijter, in Rembrandt a...
A landmark study of the nude in art—from the ancient Greeks to Henry Moore—by a towering figure in art history In this classic book, Kenneth Clark, one of the most eminent art historians of the twentieth century, examines the ever-changing fashion in what constitutes the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form, from the art of the ancient Greeks to that of Renoir, Matisse, and Henry Moore. The Nude reveals the sensitivity of aesthetic theory to fashion, what distinguishes the naked from the nude, and just why the nude has played such an important role in art history. As Clark writes, “The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes th...
The nude has been interpreted through the vision of artists in countless ways -- the classical splendor of ancient Hellas, the innocence of Botticelli's Venus, the voluptuous women of Rubens, the magnificent sculptures of Michelangelo and Rodin, the modern nudes of Modigliani and Picasso, the famous Muybridge sequence photographs of the human figure in motion.
The Nude explores some of the principal ways that paintings of the nude function in the conflicted terrain of culture and society in Europe and America from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, as set against questions about human sexuality that emerge around differences of class, gender, age, and race. Author Richard Leppert relates the visual history of how the naked body intersects with the foundational characteristics of what it is to be human, measured against a range of basic emotions (happiness, delight, and desire; fear, anxiety, and abjection) and read in the context of changing social and cultural realities. The bodies comprising the Western nude are variously pleasured or tormented, ecstatic or bored, pleased or horrified. In short, as this volume amply demonstrates, the nude in Western art is a terrain on whose surface is written a summation of Western history: its glory but also its degradation.
Artists have always been fascinated with portraying the nude: the beauty and nuances of the human figure are endlessly absorbing. This practical and inspirational book celebrates and continues that enduring and beautiful tradition by encouraging you to discover your own talent and style. Philip Tyler looks in detail at the key skills and themes, such as perception, proportion, composition, color, and facture, that the artist needs. He then investigates ideas and styles, and encourages you to interpret the nude so your paintings have those elusive qualities of vitality and relevance, which can turn a painting into a masterpiece.
"This book provides a timely reappraisal of one of the most enduring subjects in the history of art - the naked body. Beginning with reflections on what denuding entails and means, the volume then shifts to a consideration of body politics in the context of Black political empowerment, disability, and queer and Indigenous politics of representation. Themes including the animal nude, the male nude, and nudity in childhood are also considered. The final section examines the nude from the perspective of the artist and the artist's model. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, screen studies, and trans studies"--
A gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by A...
Smith reveals how images of the nude were used at all levels of Victorian culture, from prestigious high-art paintings through to photographs and popular entertainments; and discusses the many views as to whether these were legitimate forms of representation or, in fact, pornography and an incitement to unregulated sexual activity.