The human body is without doubt the most enduring subject of art. For more than 20,000 years artists have been making use of bodily images. Part art history, part social history, this is an exploration of the sexual and psychological significance of the use of the human nude in visual art.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Gill, a TV producer of art documentaries in Britain (he directed Kenneth Clark's Civilization ), here takes on an ambitious subject, last dealt with in Clark's monumental The Nude. He brings a knowing eye and a quantity of non-pedantic scholarship to bear on the representation of the human form from the earliest cave drawings to the fragmented, often ideological images of today. He is at his best on early and late art, entering imaginatively into the worlds of the cave artists and of erotic turn-of-the-century artists like Klimt and Schiele, who heralded contemporary sexual obsessions. On Greek and Renaissance art, those periods of maximum idealization of the body, he has nothing much new to offer. Inevitably there are some highly controversial images here, though Gill's commentary, like his approach to the jacket art (he had the late Robert Mapplethorpe photograph it specially for the book), is always calm and reasonable. The hundreds of pictures--all, alas, in black-and-white only--are well keyed to the text, and the result is a painless series of art appreciation lectures from a civilized teacher.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Aside from the illuminating discussion in the first chapter about the commissioned creation of the arresting Robert Mapplethorpe photograph on the cover (done before the recent controversy, and curiously not reproduced in the book itself), this physically drab accumulation from secondary sources has none of the clarity of Kenneth Clark's classic The Nude (1956). Gill, a film producer ( Civilization , Alistair Cooke's America), does deal with materials from the last three decades but adds little to the discussion other than examples. Although Gill is evenhanded about male and female in his text, LC assigned a specific subject heading only for the female. The illustrations are uniformly wretched.
- Jack Perry Brown, Ryerson and Burnham Libs., Art Inst. of Chicago
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Jack Perry Brown, Ryerson and Burnham Libs., Art Inst. of Chicago
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful book,
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This review is from: Image of the Body: Aspects of the Nude (Hardcover)
I ran across this book in a used bookstore, and found it one of the most enjoyable reads I have encountered in a good while. The one flaw I found in it is that I thought it takes the PC line of the development of modern 20th century art a bit too inquestioningly. From about 1860 onward the thrust of the Advant Garde was aimed at, in Gill's words, and here he quotes the original artists, - the destruction of the traditions of Western art. But he never really explains what, if anything, they hoped to accomplish by it.
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