The Nude in American Painting, 1950–1980
The Nude in American Painting, 1950–1980
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In the years following Willem de Kooning's exhibition of the Woman paintings in 1953, a younger generation of American painters turned to the subject of the nude. Challenging received ideas concerning the proper course of modernist painting, these works reasserted one of the most important themes of twentieth-century visual culture: the body within representation. This study focuses on selected nudes by seven noted American painters, including Larry Rivers, Tom Wesselman, Sylvia Sleigh, and Joan Semmel, and examines the complex range of issues and ideas associated with the nude in postwar American culture. In a period that witnessed the shaping of sexual liberation by the Kinsey reports, the publication of Playboy, and the feminist critique of sexism and identity, the nude, David McCarthy argues, served as an ideal subject for painting's engagement with the most important issues of its historical moment.
- Only book on the nude in postwar American painting
- Combination of art history and American studies
Reviews & endorsements
"...McCarthy's book is a welcome and absorbing addition to the scholarship on the 20th-century American art, as it sheds some much-needed light on painters who are still frequently overlooked and the cultural milieu to which they responded by retaining and exploring the figure in their work." Randall Griffey, American Studies
"David McCarthy...writes eloquently on a challenging topic: the presence of the (largely female) nude in American painting between 1950 and 1980." Commercial Appeal
Product details
June 1998Hardback
9780521593168
267 pages
260 × 184 × 21 mm
0.86kg
63 b/w illus.
Unavailable - out of print February 2013
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Ambition, 'perversity', and tradition Larry Rivers
- 3. Modernism, surveillance, and the photographic
- 4. Of playboys, pinups, and 'the great American nude' Tom Wesselmann
- 5. Eros as protest Neil Welliver and Alfred Leslie
- 6. Feminist revisions Sylvia Sleigh and Joan Semmel
- 7. Conclusion.
