Naked

by Dijkstra, Bram

• ISBN13: 9780847833665
• ISBN10: 0847833666
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-26
• Publisher: Rizzoli Intl Pubns

Summary

The nude has been a constant and enduring theme in American art despite our country's Puritan beginnings. From early academic nudes in a European tradition by John Trumbull and Benjamin West to the more candid and unapologetically naturalist nudes of Thomas Eakins and the sensual figures of John Singer Sargent, and from the Pop humor of a Tom Wesselmann to the wit and historical irony of Alice Neel and John Currin, the nude human form is a recurrent obsession of American artists. Author Bram Dijkstra is a cultural historian rather than an art critic, refusing to separate "high" and "low" art, charting instead such momentous historical events as "the inexorable rise of the breast" during the 1950s, and the puzzling fluctuations of American prudery. Naked also examines the effects of the early twentieth century's infatuation with Freudian psychoanalysis and the more recent fascination of comic book art with the legacy of Bettie Page and her seemingly ever more muscular daughters. In chronological and thematic order, the book demonstrates the links between the work of some of the most famous names in the history of American painting (Hopper, Cassatt, Flagg), sculpture (Weir), and photography (Cunningham, Weston), and that of the outlaw hordes of cartoonists, book-cover illustrators, and visual extremists who, particularly during the last half-century, were able to turn the United States into the world's principal purveyor of erotic fantasies--whose determined moral strictures only served to fuel its artists' attacks upon the visual status quo

Author Biography

Bram Dijkstra is professor emeritus of comparative literature and cultural history at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of numerous books, including American Expressionism, Art and Social Change, 1920–1950 and Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture.