The Nude: The Cultural Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western Modernity

by Leppert,Richard

• ISBN13: 9780813343501
• ISBN10: 081334350X
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2007-01-02
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Nude: The Cultural Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western Modernity explores some of the principal ways that paintings of the nude function on the conflicted terrain of culture and society in Europe and America from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, as set against questions about human sexuality that emerge around differences of class, gender, age, and race. Author Richard Leppert relates the visual history of how the naked body intersects with the foundational characteristics of what it is to be human, measured against a range of basic emotions - happiness, delight, and desire; fear, anxiety, and abjection - and read in the context of changing social and cultural realities. The bodies comprising the Western nude are variously pleasured or tormented, ecstatic or bored, pleased or horrified. In short, as this volume amply demonstrates, the nude in Western art offers a site in which can be found a summation of Western history: its glory but also its degradation. Compellingly written and extensively illustrated, this text is ideal for courses in the history and appreciation of Western art as well is cultural studies. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Richard Leppert is Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in the department of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. His numerous books include Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body, and, most recently, Essays on Music, an edition of selected essays by Theodore W. Adorno.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction: The State of Being without Clothes-in Art	p. 1
Outlining the Territory	p. 1
Seeing and the Social Practice of Making Sense	p. 3
Seeing to Know/Knowing to See	p. 5
Limits of Engagement	p. 7
What's Nude?	p. 8
Who's Got the Look?	p. 11
Needing to See	p. 15
Fooling	p. 16
Deception and Erotic Desire	p. 18
The Perplexing Sight of Men	p. 20
Representing the Young: Innocence, Nakedness, and the Adult Imaginary	p. 27
Children and the Adult Imaginary	p. 28
Innocence and Contradiction	p. 40
Recalibrating the Moral Compass	p. 44
Whose Gaze?	p. 47
Boys and Their Future	p. 57
Race and the Phallus	p. 66
Youth, Death, and Sanctioned Desire	p. 69
The Female Nude: Surfaces of Desire	p. 81
Originating in Sin	p. 81
Cold Comforts	p. 87
Turning the Tables (1)	p. 91
Figments of an Imagination	p. 102
Colonizing the Body	p. 113
Inviting Revenge	p. 122
Nude as Prostitute	p. 126
Looking Back	p. 143
For the Self	p. 149
One Couple	p. 157
The Male Nude: Identity and Denial	p. 161
Where to Look	p. 161
Saintly Looks	p. 167
Christ/Man	p. 172
Claims and Contradictions	p. 180
Body Reversal?	p. 185
Genital Confrontation	p. 188
The Bath	p. 194
Measured Difference: Matters of Black and White	p. 198
The Evil Other	p. 204
Studio	p. 212
Turning the Tables (2)	p. 221
Anti-Narcissism and Zones of (Dis)Pleasure	p. 226
Afterword	p. 235
The Matter of Looking	p. 235
Naked Transgression	p. 239
The Body and Photography	p. 240
Erotics?	p. 243
Bathed in Desire	p. 249
Notes	p. 259
Works Cited	p. 291
Index	p. 309
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