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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 have also elicited vehement criticism. They were considered against-the-grain, anti-classical, even ugly and unpleasant. However, Rembrandt chose conventional subjects, keeping 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 the author examines Rembrandtâ...
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.
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The 17th century saw a tremendous thematic and technical development in the realm of painting as artists experimented with realism and anatomical exactitude, and gave free expression to themes of sensuality. This is especially apparent in Velazquez' "Venus at Her Mirror", also known as "The Rokeby Venus". In this text Andreas Prater uses the much-studied and imitated painting to trace Venus's depiction in art through the centuries. Prater begins by offering a detailed examination of Velazquez' masterpiece. He delves into its numerous levels of meaning as well as its impact on the nude paintings of its day. He also looks at the painting's history, including its attempted destruction by a suffragette in 1919. Velazquez' self-admiring Venus is compared to her depictions in other well-known works by admiring artists, including da Vinci, Giorgione, and Titian, as well as in works by later artists such as Manet and Cabanel, and into the modern world of advertising. These comparisons provoke intriguing perspectives on the evolution of eroticism, feminism, and Christianity in art, and offer an understanding of the influence that one artist and one work can have on generations that follow.
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.
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.
A catalogue of male nude paintings exhibited at Homeworks, Pimlico Road, London from 15.11.1983 until the end of January 1984.
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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.