Suchergebnisse

Trois peintures de nus étaient exposées dans la galerie d'arts de l'Exposition nationale canadienne de 1927 à Toronto. Leur présence a suscité dans les éditoriaux et les lettres à la rédaction des journaux un débat qui transcendait les peintures proprement dites pour révéler des préoccupations sur la modernité et la négociation du tournant culturel dans les années 1920. L'évolution perçue des moeurs, la culture populaire et le corps de la femme étaient des sujets de malaise. Les questions entourant les défis à l'ordre établi de même qu'aux modes d'aménagement de l'espace et de façonnement de l'identité ont également émergé dans les débats sur la classe, le sexe et l'âge.

Our human evolution and cultural variability is manifest and realized through our bodies. From an evolutionary perspective we are the tool wielding, hairless, 'naked ape' who developed clothing as an adaptive device enabling us colonize the whole globe from our African origins. From a cultural perspective our bodies are decorated and clothed to communicate signs and properties: of gender, age, sexual attractiveness, status, and wealth. Of all the species, humans have made their bodies as a result of evolutionary processes, cultural decisions, and applied techniques. Both 'naked' and even more so 'the nude' are specifically human cultural constructs. Strictly speaking, other animals are neither naked', and even less so 'nude' – only humans are. And within our western Judeo-Christian tradition (though not for the Greeks) 'naked' is something 'minus'; 'nude' is something 'plus' – which helps explain why the Renaissance, which drew upon ancient Greco-Roman models, re-discovered the nude attaching the definitive article 'the' to the condition of nakedness and thus re-creating 'the nude' as an object of aesthetic contemplation. In so doing, a long-standing tension was initiated with the guardians of morality, the holders of ecclesiastical and political power, and the displayed representation of the naked body became both a vehicle through which, and a territory over which, socio-political and ideological battles were fought – indeed over the 'nature' of human beings and of what is 'proper to' humans. If nakedness is culturally variable; 'the nude' is a culturally specific aesthetic construct. ; N/A

American sociologists working in the production perspective have produced a rich body of work on systems of aesthetic-cultural production, distribution, and consumption, but they have paid relatively little attention to the work of art. Aligning with new sociological work that takes the work of art seriously, this article contributes to an aesthetically inflected sociology of the arts: research that includes the work of art as an integral part of the analysis. Substantively, we examine a 19th-century scandal surrounding paintings of nudes. We show that the work of art constitutes crucial evidence for understanding arts scandals. Artworks are connected with social and aesthetic issues by means of their pictorial elements, which are viewed by a public through historically situated 'period eyes'. Each of these elements is needed to spark an arts controversy, and all must be studied in order to understand them.

Abstract
In the West, the 1970s were the decade of rapid sexual liberalization. Similarly, in state-socialist Poland new approaches toward sex and nudity also gained momentum. Female nudes started being printed in the popular press and displayed in gallery rooms. Simultaneously, early feminist artists such as Natalia LL, Teresa Murak, and Ewa Partum experimented with nudity to question gendered discourses and social norms. This article compares popular nude photography exhibitions with the works of women artists to analyze two approaches toward female nudity that developed in 1970s Poland. Thus, it showcases the ambiguities surrounding the project of socialist sexual modernity and highlights conflicting visions of femininity and liberation.

Resent paper is focused on the early modern culture, particularly on the topic of visual art and its confrontation with traditional, pre-modern culture and aesthetic. The author unveils how and why painters of early French modernism had rejected traditional representation of eroticism, typical for pre-modern art, especially for the art of academicism. Thus from their artworks disappeared sublimated, exalted nudity, withdrew nudes modestly hidden under mythological or religious context. In the works of impressionists and postimpressionists naked body was depicted frankly, openly, without any excuse of what was supposed to be decent. Such were the nude women of paintings of Auguste Manet and Amedeo Modigliani who present merely their femininity and sexuality, while symbolizing the liberation from moral norms and heralding sexual revolution of the 20th century. Relaxed, healthy, pink-cheeked girls in Pierre-Auguste Renoir's paintings spread subtle eroticism and the mood of joyful life. Life of Parisian cabarets and brothels come alive through naked or semi-naked female figures which on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas canvases seem as if they are unaware of being watched. Nude bodies in the paintings of such French post-impressionists like Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin were depicted in exotic, oriental ambience and referred to the philosophical background of romanticism. Paul Cézanne's nudes particularly his famous scenes with bathers disclose essential aims of this painter – to reach the essence of the very thing. Transformations of the treatment of nude body by early French modernists help to understand general context of creative changes in visual arts on the edge of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This book gathers together a number of cutting edge contributions about the female body, inside and out, from a large group of psychoanalysts who are at the forefront of new thinking about issues of femininity, the female body, sex and gender. It explores the female body in art, in pregnancy and motherhood, in sexuality and in the life-cycle, and finally the female body as scene of crime. As a result this book covers aspects of female creativity in its many aspects, both productive and generative and where there are difficulties or impediments. The psychoanalysts writing for this book have made an enormous contribution in the past and this book therefore aims to stimulate, challenge and provoke further discussion and new advances in this field.

The nude is a long-established category in western art, but in pre-modern China, images of the naked body were not art and carried the stigma of obscenity. This article uses the paradigm of artification to examine the transplantation of the nude into the Chinese art field during the Republican period (1912–1937). By analysing the discourses of key players and historical materials of Republican art institutions, the article discusses the production, dissemination, intellectualisation and legitimation of the nude, as well as its criticism and appropriation, in the institutionalising and modernising art field. The intense challenges faced by proponents of the nude suggest that conflict and struggle are crucial components of the artification process of a foreign cultural form. The artistic transformation of the nude was intertwined with the process of modernisation in China, and its effects extended beyond art and its field. This article argues that the artification of the nude was not only the establishment of a new category of art, but also prompted a revolution in artistic conventions, a reordering of aesthetic hierarchies, a restructuring of the art field and a modernisation of ways of seeing the body.