Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

A project central to recent feminism has been the critique of images of the female body. The long tradition of the nude in Western art has been deconstructed by feminists as a masculine practice of objectifying women through the illustration of fantasies of possession, fear, or contempt. Saunders, a curator at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, has put together an accessible, profusely illustrated clarification of this argument for readers unfamiliar with the work of the relevant theoreticians--John Berger, Laura Mulvey, Sherry Ortner, etc. Chapter titles ("Active versus Passive," "The Fetishized Female," "Nature versus Culture") indicate the main themes. The 133 well-chosen reproductions range from fifteenth-century paintings to advertising photos to contemporary works by feminist artists engaged in reclaiming the female nude as a locus of positive power. Excellent for general-audience collections. Bibliography; index. --Gretchen Garner