The Bride Stripped Bare: The Artist and the Female Nude in the Twentieth Century - Hardcover

Hobhouse, Janet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555842178 ISBN 13: 9781555842178

Publisher: Grove Pr, 1988

Synopsis

Dust jacket notes: "The Bride Stripped Bare is a study of thirteen twentieth-century artists, and of the erotic and affective sensibilities expressed in their work. Matisse's odalisques and Picasso's demoiselles, Bonnard's bathers, Balthus's Lolitas and de Kooning's harpies all appear in this provocative and original book, as do the nudes of Maillol, Schiele, Modigliani, Pascin, Lachaise, Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud, and Philip Pearlstein. By exploring the relationship between artist and model - as well as the artist's relationships with the other women in his life, with historical images of the nude, whether the results yield the near-portraiture of Freud or the violent abstraction of Picasso. The complex relationship between art and biography is also considered, particularly in the work of Bonnard and Schiele, whose marriages radically altered their treatments of the nude. While artists such as Philip Pearlstein may proclaim that 'content is not interesting,' and Matisse insisted, 'I do not create a woman, I make a picture,' many of the best and most advanced artists of the century have painted or sculpted - often obsessively - the female nude. With passion and insight, Janet Hobhouse shows how no other subject addresses as directly or as fundamentally the questions of who we are and how we love."

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Thirteen male artists who have painted or sculpted female nudes are the focus of this brilliant, shrewdly debunking, lushly illustrated study. Hobhouse, biographer of Gertrude Stein ( Everybody Who Was Anybody ) and arts contributor to Newsweek , claims that Picasso's showmanship kept him "safe and unknowable" in erotic pictures devoid of intimacy. She has little use for Matisse's ethereal concubines or Maillol's remote icons, and in Jules Pascin's passive young girls she discerns the artist's refusal to engage his emotions. Other painters who used the female nude to explore recurrent themes get higher marks, among them Modigliani, whose models embodied the tension between the abstract and the real, and Schiele, in whose work the contrast between clothing/nakedness symbolizes the theme of emergence or coming into being. Feminist in spirit, Hobhouse's perceptive survey demonstrates that the human body most fully serves art when the artist responds to the whole truth of a person.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This generously illustrated study examines the work and lives of 13 major artists, all male, who renewed and reinterpreted the nude. Hobhouse theorizes that in painting nudes these artists lay bare their own psyches; the result, distilled from a more complex whole, portrays their icy/boiling, restless/passive relationships with the women who inspired them. Humor, eroticism, narration, bewilderment, passssion, spirituality, voyeurism, power, poetry, reverence, petrifactionthese readings are all valid, because for these artists, the mystery of sexuality remains unfathomable. Recommended for all who enjoy art. Lucy Breslin, Portland, Me.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 1555842178
• ISBN 13: 9781555842178
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288