Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
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. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
