Image of the Body - Hardcover

Gill, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385260725 ISBN 13: 9780385260725

Publisher: Doubleday, 1990

Synopsis

Gill, a film producer and director (Kenneth Clark's Civilization, Alistair Cooke's America ), traces the subject from the first figures of the cave people to contemporary feminist reworkings, revealing the changing attitudes of society with respect to such issues as the position of women and the struggle between freedom and authority. The excellent art is unfortunately reproduced entirely in b&w, but the unusually interesting text is some compensation. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Gill, a TV producer of art documentaries in Britain (he directed Kenneth Clark's Civilization ), here takes on an ambitious subject, last dealt with in Clark's monumental The Nude. He brings a knowing eye and a quantity of non-pedantic scholarship to bear on the representation of the human form from the earliest cave drawings to the fragmented, often ideological images of today. He is at his best on early and late art, entering imaginatively into the worlds of the cave artists and of erotic turn-of-the-century artists like Klimt and Schiele, who heralded contemporary sexual obsessions. On Greek and Renaissance art, those periods of maximum idealization of the body, he has nothing much new to offer. Inevitably there are some highly controversial images here, though Gill's commentary, like his approach to the jacket art (he had the late Robert Mapplethorpe photograph it specially for the book), is always calm and reasonable. The hundreds of pictures--all, alas, in black-and-white only--are well keyed to the text, and the result is a painless series of art appreciation lectures from a civilized teacher.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Aside from the illuminating discussion in the first chapter about the commissioned creation of the arresting Robert Mapplethorpe photograph on the cover (done before the recent controversy, and curiously not reproduced in the book itself), this physically drab accumulation from secondary sources has none of the clarity of Kenneth Clark's classic The Nude (1956). Gill, a film producer ( Civilization , Alistair Cooke's America), does deal with materials from the last three decades but adds little to the discussion other than examples. Although Gill is evenhanded about male and female in his text, LC assigned a specific subject heading only for the female. The illustrations are uniformly wretched.
- Jack Perry Brown, Ryerson and Burnham Libs., Art Inst. of Chicago
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0385260725
• ISBN 13: 9780385260725
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1000