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As one common story goes, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, had no idea that there was any shame in their lack of clothes; they were perfectly confident in their birthday suits among the animals of the Garden of Eden. All was well until that day when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and went scrambling for fig leaves to cover their bodies. Since then, lucrative businesses have arisen to provide many stylish ways to cover our nakedness, for the naked human body now evokes powerful and often contradictory ideas—it thrills and revolts us, signifies innocence and sexual experience, and often marks the difference between nature and society. In A Brief History of Nakedness psychologist Philip Carr-Gomm traces our inescapable preoccupation with nudity. Rather than studying the history of the nude in art or detailing the ways in which the naked body has been denigrated in the media, A Brief History of Nakedness reveals the ways in which religious teachers, politicians, protesters, and cultural icons have used nudity to enlighten or empower themselves as well as entertain us. Among his many examples, Carr-Gomm discusses how advertisers and the media employ images of bare skin—or even simply the word “naked”—to garner our attention, how mystics have used nudity to get closer to God, and how political protesters have discovered that baring all is one of the most effective ways to gain publicity for their cause. Carr-Gomm investigates how this use of something as natural as nakedness actually gets under our skin and evokes complicated and complex emotional responses. From the naked sages of India to modern-day witches and Christian nudists, from Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga, A Brief History of Nakedness surveys the touching, sometimes tragic and often bizarre story of our relationships with our naked bodies.
A richly illustrated and extremely enjoyable reference book on the historical evolution of the nude. From the Paleolithic "great mothers" to the Greek athletes, from the Venus of Urbino by Titian to Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, from the Odalisque by Boucher to those by Ingres, to the Amazons of Helmut Newton and the desolate, lifeless bodies of Andres Serrano, the nude is the theme of artistic representation par excellence. The nude body as the incarnation of perfect beauty and the suspicions concerning its sensuality imposed by Christian culture; the renewed triumph of ancient beauty in the Renaissance and the study of anatomy; the visual licentiousness of the eighteenth century and the photographic nude; ideal beauty, eroticism, pornography; the nude also as representation of the ugly and its flaunted truthfulness in the art of the twentieth century; the nude that itself becomes a work of art in the avant-garde of the post-WWII period, with performance, body art and experimental theater. These threads of the narration make for a deeply informative historical exploration of the nude in Western art, all conducted around a rich apparatus of images.
A gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume—essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks—permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.
History of the nude in the art of Egypt, India, China/Japan, Greece/Rome, Middle-East, American Indians, Africa¿plus every period of Western art from medieval to present. The first comprehensive full-color book on the topic¿also the first one written from a naturist perspective. The interdisciplinary approach pays some attention to related literature and music. 700+ illustrations. Compiled from 20 years of columns in Naturally magazine. Signed and numbered limited edition of 500. Contents and sample pages can be viewed at www.paullevalley.com.
Bertolotti explores the history of nude photography, from the first academic snapshots all the way to the most audacious avant-gardists. Organized chrono-thematically and accompanied by socio-cultural analysis, this book includes the works by Germaine Krull, Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Araki, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jean-Loup Sieff.
The Nude explores some of the principal ways that paintings of the nude function in 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 is a terrain on whose surface is written a summation of Western history: its glory but also its degradation.
In 1929, a small group of men and women threw off their clothes and began to exercise in a New York City gymnasium, marking the start of the American nudist movement. While countless Americans had long enjoyed the pleasures of skinny dipping or nude sunbathing, nudists were the first to organize a movement around the idea that exposing the body corrected the ills of modern society and produced profound benefits for the body as well as the mind. Despite hostility and skepticism, American nudists enlisted the support of health enthusiasts, homemakers, sex radicals, and even ministers, and in the process, redefined what could be seen, experienced, and consumed in twentieth-century America. Naked gives a vibrant, detailed account of the American nudist movement and the larger cultural phenomenon of public nudity in the United States. Brian S. Hoffman reflects on the idea of nakedness itself in the context of a culture that wrestles with an inherent sense of shame and conflicting moral attitudes about the body. In exploring the social and legal history of nudism, Hoffman reveals how anxieties about gender, race, sexuality, and age inform our conceptions of nakedness. The book traces the debates about distinguishing deviant sexualities from morally acceptable display, the legal processes that helped bring about the dramatic changes in sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the explosion in eroticism that has increasingly defined the modern American consumer economy. Drawing on a colorful collection of nudist materials, films, and magazines, Naked exposes the social, cultural, and moral assumptions about nakedness and the body normally hidden from view and behind closed doors.
A fresh, fascinating appraisal that is the first study of the nude in photography as seen through the social customs, manners and taboos that shaped the art. 20 full-color and 200 black-and-white photographs.
It is said that history is written by the winners. However, the “winners” aren’t always the best historians. Enter David Haviland, to set the record straight. In his quirky, inimitable style, Haviland separates fact from fiction regarding some of history’s most well-known people and events, such as: Lady Godiva: By far, history’s most famous nudist equestrian. But how nude was she, really? And how did this same legend give rise to the term “Peeping Tom”? The Boston Tea Party: What was the cause of this famous “party” that wasn’t really a party? (Hint: If you guessed a rise in taxes, you’re dead wrong!) World War I: How did a directionally challenged chauffeur spark the Great War? Queen Victoria: Nowadays, the word “Victorian” is synonymous with stuffy prudishness. But would a prude pose nude for a provocative portrait, or become “close” with a young Indian servant? In The Not-So-Nude Ride of Lady Godiva, Haviland untangles fallacy, farce, and misrepresentation of historic proportions. The end result is a wholly fascinating, highly educational compendium of historical folly that will entertain readers young and old!