Naked: The Nude in America

by Bram Dijkstra

A resplendent presentation of the nude in American art, photography, and popular culture, from the eighteenth century to the present. With more than four hundred color illustrations, this is the most thorough and wide-reaching survey of the representation of the male and female nude in American visual culture yet published. Bram Dijkstra explores the history of the subject from its earliest manifestations in the paintings of John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West to the taboo-shredding imagery of late-twentieth-century artists such as Alice Neel, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eric Fischl, and John Currin. Dijkstra is a cultural historian who refuses to separate "high" and "low" art, charting instead such momentous historical events as the discovery of pubic hair, the invasion of the pin-up queens, "the inexorable rise of the breast," and the puzzling fluctuations of American prudery. Naked also examines the effects of the early twentieth century’s infatuation with Freudian psychoanalysis and the more recent fascination of comic book art with the legacy of Bettie Page and her seemingly ever more muscular daughters. In chronological and thematic order, the book demonstrates the links between the work of some of the most famous names in the history of American painting (Chase, Cassatt, Hopper), sculpture (French, Powers), and photography (Cunningham, Weston), and that of the outlaw hordes of cartoonists, book-cover illustrators, and visual extremists who, particularly during the last half-century, were able to turn the United States into the world’s principal purveyor of erotic fantasies.

Genres: Art, Art History

476 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 2010

About the author

Bram Dijkstra is a professor of English literature. He joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego in 1966, and taught there until he retired and became an emeritus in 2000.

He is the author of seven books on literary and artistic subjects. These include:
Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (1969);
Georgia O'Keeffe and the Eros of Place (1998);
Expressionism in America (2001),
but he is probably best known for two books that have escaped the academic world into the world of popular culture:
Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture (1986); and
Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (1996):
books which discuss vamp imagery, femmes fatales, and similar threatening images of female sexuality in a number of works of literature and art. In comedian Steve Martin's short novel Shopgirl, Martin's heroine claims that Idols of Perversity is her favourite book.

Reviews

[Kate]

"The story itself is not particularly impressive, but the cover image for the magazine based on this story by the painter and illustrator Clyde Caldwell most certainly is. The artist showed the ancient creature in the process of emanating from the prehistoric past, complete with imposing breasts, Conan-like leg muscles and a substantial (though partially concealed) penis, as well as a tiger's predatory head."

"Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror."

"The right sort of man is not marrying the flapper these days...He has had this girl--only a quarter dressed, boneless, spineless, corsetless--in his arms. He has felt the damp and the warmth of her body, smelled the liquor on her breath, wiped the red lip paint of her lips off his own...and if he has the makings of a real husband and father, a real homekeeper and good citizen in him, he doesn't marry her."

Ultimately, then, the body, unclothed and unadorned, is the ground zero of human creativity. But reshape it, fake it, load it down with suggestion, bustle it and stuff it with augmentation and improvement--take away its reality--and it will become the forge of prurience and perverse self-deception. The objectification of the body to market "product" is the true pornography of the twenty-first century. In that sense, much of our most harmless popular culture is pornographic, and much of what we like to identify as pornographic is merely part of a simple human reality we don't want to face because doing so would confront us rather too prosaically with the limitations of our imagination.

[Peter]

This might be the ultimate book on the topic: from Hercules to Superman, the covers of Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, retreat to dreams, paintings, sculptures and photos, illustrations, modernism and the anticlassical body aesthetic, the subconscious and the nude, invasion of the pinup queens (among my favorites) and the inexorable rise of the breast (Tempest Storm, my favorite chapter). What can I say? If you ever wondered in what tradition all those alluring book covers are you simply have to read this book. Then you see the context and the naked truth. Highly recommended!