Word: nudes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fire storm of ridicule and puzzlement set off by the Armory Show, which 300,000 people saw during the course of its run, Duchamp in particular benefited, on the basis of a single picture: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. It became the star freak of the show--its bearded lady, its dog-faced boy. People compared it to a Navajo rug, a cyclone in a shingle factory, an earthquake in the subway. A dull brown painting in a Cubist idiom, its overlapping planes were partly derived from the motion-analysis photos of Etienne-Jules Marey. Its very title...
...picture, the Nude is neither poor nor great, but its fame today is the fossil of the huge notoriety it acquired as a puzzle-picture in 1913. It is lodged in history because it embodied the belief that the new, revolutionary work of art has to be scorned and stoned like a prophet by the uncomprehending crowd. In the cult of the problematic, as distinct from the enjoyable, Duchamp rapidly became a saint, and the Nude is one of his prime relics. So are his "readymades"--a snow shovel or a ceramic urinal designated as works of art, sardonic jokes...
...Nude is not in this show, and neither is Duchamp's even more famous The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass), which is too frail to move from its abode in the Philadelphia Museum and is represented by a Swedish-made replica. Begun in 1915, the Large Glass is, as its title suggests, an elaborate sexual metaphor seeded with puns and techno-images. In the lower panel the nine sad little bachelors, mere tin soldiers in the game of sexual strategy, signal their desire through intervening bits of machinery to the floating "bride" above. As Freud said...
...race, gender and politics came into the study of art history, along with the more familiar ones of iconography, style, subject matter and patronage. The old division between "high" and "decorative" arts ceased to hold. The once "merely" ornamental object came to be as full of meaning as a nude or ducal portrait. The more that was known about the world's art, the more there was to know. An obvious example, which suggests the kind of shifting sands on which "definitive" edifices of art history are built, has been the ongoing reattribution of once accepted Rembrandts by a team...
...book in question, which arrived in stores last week, is American Tragedy by Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth, a TIME correspondent who covered the trial. Schiller is a colorful operator whose exploits include photographing Marilyn Monroe in the nude and providing Norman Mailer with the reporting about Gary Gilmore for The Executioner's Song. Schiller was the one who created and sold Simpson's sanctimonious, self-serving best seller, I Want to Tell You, and thereby raised money to pay Simpson's lawyers. With American Tragedy, he has produced quite a different book, a serious effort that describes the conduct...