Ideal and Reality The Image of the Body in 20th-Century Art from Bonnard to Warhol Hardcover - 1994

From the publisher

A comprehensive survey of the image of the human body in 20th-century art, featuring drawings, gouaches, pastels, and watercolors by 200 artists.

In the course of the 20th century, the body has become the focus of the conflict between norms and deviation, order and excess -- the symbol of a constantly changing concept of human beauty. Covering a broad segment of the history of art in our century, Ideal and Reality focuses on the tradition of figural representation and the artist's approach to the image of the nude human body.

The selection provides not only a survey of the various approaches to the representation of the body in drawing, but also documents the erotic fascination with which artists have viewed the body. This fascination is evident in the early years of the century in powerful works by Klimt, Schiele, Rodin, and Matisse, in which the drawing came to represent the immediate expression of erotic desire. The successive phases of the modern era -- from Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Neoclassicism, and New Objectivity to the figural work of artists on the fringe of the contemporary art scene -- reflect the stages in the evolutionary process that has changed the artists image of the body over the past 100 years.