Customer Reviews

Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation

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Abigail Solomon-Godeau is clearly a bright and well researched scholar. She takes on the strange task of examining the evolving appearance of the male nude from virile to fey in paintings at the close of the 18th century and into the 19th century and finds in this path of thinking some fascinating insights into the core of feminism. Her premises are sound, her arguments are strong. She has devoted much time and skill into opening the door on a problem that continues to vex us - why are we so terrified to paint the frontal male nude now? Her book slowly unfolds a well documented, well illustrated exploration of why the French Revolution and its aftermath gave impetus to the feminist movement and why, in turn, the male nudes in the paintings of the previous centuries were feminized and subsequenty replaced by female nudes.....a situation that persists into 2001. My only reservations with this book is that it reads so slowly, due to the style of writing. As a Doctoral Thesis this might be expected. But for the art reader it is hellish work wading through much of the verbiage. But, stick to it and you will be handsomely rewarded in the end. This is one very bright lady who has added considerably to a festering question in representational art.

I suspect that buried somewhere in these 264 pages of largely unreadable prose is a rather interesting 20 page essay. I'll confess that I gave up trying to find it about halfway through the book. The insights offered simply weren't worth filtering through the difficult writing style. For a wider-ranging and more readable book, I recommend THE NUDE MALE: A NEW PERSPECTIVE by Margaret Walters.