Customer Reviews

The Nude: Ideal and Reality--Painting and Sculpture

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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.