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2 books match the query 'Nude in art'

cover of Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism

Fuseli and the Modern Woman

Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism

Edited by David Solkin

Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022

A catalog accompanying the first exhibition devoted to a fascinating group of drawings by one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most idiosyncratic, original, and controversial artists. 

Best known for his notoriously provocative painting The Nightmare, Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) cultivated a reputation for eccentricity, with vividly stylized images of supernatural creatures, muscle-bound heroes, and damsels in distress. While these convinced some viewers of the greatness of his genius, others dismissed him as a charlatan, or as completely mad.

By bringing together more than fifty of his works, this volume offers unprecedented access to see one of the finest draftsmen of the Romantic period at his most innovative and exciting. Visitors to the show and readers of the lavishly illustrated catalog will further be invited to consider how Fuseli’s drawings of women, as products of the turbulent aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, speak to concerns about gender and sexuality that have never been more relevant than they are today.

The exhibition showcases drawings brought together from international collections, including the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand, and other European and North American institutions.
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cover of The Impossible Nude

The Impossible Nude

François Jullien

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The undraped human form is ubiquitous in Western art and even appears in the art of India and Japan. Only in China, François Jullien argues, is the nude completely absent. In this enthralling extended essay, he explores the different conceptions of the human body that underlie this provocative disparity.

Contrasting nakedness (which implies a diminished state) with nudity (which represents a complete presence), Jullien explores the traditional European vision of the nude as a fixed point of fusion where form joins truth. He then shows that the absence of the nude in Chinese art evinces an understanding of the human body as changeable and transitory. Viewed in light of each other, these differing concepts allow for a new way of thinking about form, the ideal, and beauty, enabling us to delve deeper into the relationship between art and the ideas that lie at its roots. Beautifully illustrated and gracefully translated into English for the first time, The Impossible Nude will fascinate anyone interested in art history, Chinese art, or aesthetics.

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