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Ingres's Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line (Yale Publications in the History of Art)

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This provocative book - the first full-length feminist and sociohistorical study of Ingres's art - explores the meanings behind the fluid, distorted, and sensualized bodies that populated these works. Carol Ockman traces the shift in late eighteenth-century French art from the neoclassical representation of the heroic male to the sensualized, homoerotic male nude to the nineteenth-century emphasis on the female nude. She explores the problems posed by the increasing identification of the sensual with the female body, demonstrating that both neoclassicism and modernism sanction an ideal that conjoins the sensual and feminine with the deformed and bestial.

Ockman illuminates how Ingres used his distinctive serpentine line to eroticize both male and female bodies and how the reception of these images throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries invoked both pleasure and horror. She explodes the Victorian myth that it was inappropriate for women to appreciate erotic art by introducing us to a circle of women who commissioned, collected, and also wrote about the sensualized works of artists such as Canova and Ingres.

Extending historical analysis to contemporary debates about representations of the eroticized female body, Ockman explores current feminist resistance to the disturbing equations between the female body and deformity. Through analyses of works by Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, and others, she concludes that women artists and theorists today, by exposing the psychology behind such equations, have appropriated the pleasure and horror evoked by Ingres's eroticized bodies for their own ends.