Description: Why did the male nude become an object of spectacle and erotic display in French painting and sculpture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? And why have art historians turned a blind eye to the "crisis" at this historical turning point in the representation of masculinity, away from idealized models to that of androgynous and feminized male nudes? Why was the male nude later eclipsed in art by the female nude? In this pioneering and compelling book, the author explores how the beautiful male body dominated neoclassical visual culture, and why it spoke so powerfully to male spectators. Whether in the guise of virile heroes or languishing adolescents, in both familiar and now-obscure works of art, the imagery of ideal masculinity raises important questions about the fashioning of masculinity itself, as evident in contemporary mass culture as in the elite culture of the past. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and critical theory, as well as art and cultural history, Solomon-Godeau proposes a radical reassessment of neoclassical visual culture.
Description: Literature on Schinkel has grown enormously since the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1981, but this is the first book that deals with his education and training. No one seems to have seen that Schinkel was actually a son of the late Enlightenment.
Description: This book traces the challenge posed to the academic canon by the emergent avant-garde of the early and mid-nineteenth century, the significant shies in the development of the avant-garde through the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, and its eventual incorporation as a form of modern canon by the eve of World War II.
