A leading feminist art historian on the nude body, from impressionism to postmodernism.To some viewers, Renoir’s Great Bathers is the very picture of female sensuality and beauty. To others, the sentimentalized, sexualized prettiness of the image embodies a whole tradition of masculine mastery and feminine display. Still others find in the bathers a feminine fantasy of bodily liberation. Juxtaposing these opposing points of view, Linda Nochlin deftly uncovers the dissonances surrounding artistic representation of the female form from the nineteenth century to the present.Nochlin begins by focusing on the painterly preoccupation with bathing, whether at the beach, in lakes and rivers, in public swimming pools, or in bathtubs. Why, she asks, did the nude figure, posed in or near water, become such a dominant trope in the history of Western art? Covering artists from Manet, Cezanne, Bonnard, and Picasso to late-twentieth-century and contemporary figures such as Philip Pearlstein, Anselm Kiefer, Alice Neel, and Jenny Saville, Nochlin develops a rich interpretative collage of the layered meanings ascribed to bodies in intimate settings. She concludes with a powerful essay on aging, infirmity, and death.A deeply personal book—Nochlin herself is depicted in more than one of the paintings she discusses, and her discussion of old age is inspired by her own looming mortality—Bathers, Bodies, Beauty draws on a lifetime of loving, hating, and wrestling with art to reveal both the visceral disappointments and supreme joys of seeing it from a feminist perspective.
