The Bride Stripped Bare: The Artist and the Female Nude in the Twentieth Century

Dust jacket notes: "The Bride Stripped Bare is a study of thirteen twentieth-century artists, and of the erotic and affective sensibilities expressed in their work. Matisse's odalisques and Picasso's demoiselles, Bonnard's bathers, Balthus's Lolitas and de Kooning's harpies all appear in this provocative and original book, as do the nudes of Maillol, Schiele, Modigliani, Pascin, Lachaise, Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud, and Philip Pearlstein. By exploring the relationship between artist and model - as well as the artist's relationships with the other women in his life, with historical images of the nude, whether the results yield the near-portraiture of Freud or the violent abstraction of Picasso. The complex relationship between art and biography is also considered, particularly in the work of Bonnard and Schiele, whose marriages radically altered their treatments of the nude. While artists such as Philip Pearlstein may proclaim that 'content is not interesting,' and Matisse insisted, 'I do not create a woman, I make a picture,' many of the best and most advanced artists of the century have painted or sculpted - often obsessively - the female nude. With passion and insight, Janet Hobhouse shows how no other subject addresses as directly or as fundamentally the questions of who we are and how we love."