The theme of the nude has always exercised a particular fascination on artists and viewers alike, and the representation of the human form has inspired some of the finest works in art history. This volume, which aims to offer a fascinating visual survey of the nude, features over 200 paintings, sculptures, and drawings-often celebrated masterpieces-and examines a period spanning over two hundred years. The book features works by the most important artists of the last two centuries including Canova, Ingres, Courbet, Cézanne, Klimt, Picasso, Magritte, Dalí, Giacometti, Bourgeois, Gormley, Abramovic, Acconci, Beecroft, and Barney.
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About the Author
Peter Weiermair is director of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy. He has curated over 400 exhibitions and has published numerous books and articles on modern and contemporary art.
Alison Smith is a lecturer in art history at Sotheby's Institute in London.
Alison Smith is a lecturer in art history at Sotheby's Institute in London.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
hmmmm,
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This review is from: The Nude: Ideal and Reality--Painting and Sculpture (Paperback)
The book contains a collection of artistic painted nudes from the late 19th century to the present, along with a collection of short essays by various authors, which range from the incoherently unreadable to the thoughtfully provoking. While a couple of the essays are indeed educational and enjoyable to read at least one is a display of insane academic jargon that defies serious efforts at understanding. Of particular interest is an essay on the nude performance pieces of the '70s, where for example, a nude woman would come out and kill a chicken as a symbol of opressed womanhood. One comes away however wondering if the author really understands how ridiculous this sort of thing is to the ordinary person.
Lacking is any explanation of how the paintings selected for reproduction were chosen, or how they fit into the authors explantions of how the genre of the nude has evolved in the last century. The reader is left with a sense of how much the artistic poetry of the nineteenth century has been lost, but no closer to understanding how this loss happened or what might be done about it. Of course there are always those who see the 20th century as an improvement, but looking throught the selected paintings its difficult to come away without a sense of loss at recent history.
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