Description
Book SynopsisThe story of the nude in art in our times, told by a popular art historian with a rare gift for sharing her passions and ideas. The representation of the nude in art remained for many centuries a victory of fiction over fact. Beautiful, handsome, flawless - its great success was to distance the unclothed body from any uncomfortably explicit taint of sexuality, eroticism or imperfection. In this newly updated study, Frances Borzello contrasts the civilized, sanitized, perfected nude of Kenneth Clark's classic, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), with today's depictions: raw, uncomfortable, both disturbing and intriguing. Grittier and more subtle, depicting variously gendered bodies, the new nude asks awkward questions and behaves provocatively. It is a very naked nude, created to deal with the issues and contradictions that surround the body in our time. Borzello explores the role of the nude in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, looking at the work of a wide range o
Trade Review'A thoughtful, highly intelligent book, tracking the newly frank, newly naked nude' - RA Magazine
'Titillating, embarrassing and sometimes outright disgusting: here we find art holding a mirror up to our troublesome human nature' - Observer
'A fascinating, often humorous overview of our obsession with the naked body' - Daily Telegraph
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Recycled Nude
1. The Nude: Its Life, Death and Resurrection
2. Body Art: The Journey into Nakedness
3. The Changing Room: Female Perspectives
4. Forgive me, I’m a Painter
5. The Naked Portrait
6. After Rodin, Is There Anything Left To Say?
7. Going to Extremes
