Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The human body, particularly the female body in the nineteenth-century, is central to Western painting. Images such as Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades and Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe are so well known that the question of how the gendered body functions in them is often overlooked. In this detailed feminist art-historical study of the body in general and the nude in particular, Marcia Pointon explores the narrative structures of a series of major European and American paintings and other images, mapping her interpretations on the historiography of nineteenth-century painting and employing an innovative theoretical methodology to demonstrate how the visual representation of gendered bodies works to articulate power relations that are to be understood in terms of the symbolic and the psychic as part of the historical.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Reading the body: historiography and the case of the nude
• 2 Psychoanalysis and art history: Freud, Fried and Eakins
• 3 Liberty on the Barracades: Woman, politics and sexuality in Delacroix
• 4 Biography and the body in late Renoir
• 5 Interior portraits
• 6 Guess who's coming to lunch? allegory and the body in Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

This challenging book discusses intersubjectivity between painter, subject and viewer over the issue of gender in Western painting, concentrating mostly on the naked female body, the ``range of viewing possibilities'' its depiction creates, and how these ``acts of interpretation'' relate to the artist's political and psychosexual meaning. Pointon's prose often leaves the reader frustrated and dismayed: ``The ways in which images work in terms of sexual oppression are determined by the relations between the viewing positions of spectators as gendered subjects and the viewing subjects as constructed in images through forms of visual rhetoric.'' The author puts a Freudian spin on Thomas Eakins's operating room tableaux, The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic , she arbitrates views of Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades as whore and heroine, and she determines the allegorical status of the naked picnicker in Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe . Though there are insights aplenty, this collection of essays is crowded with peripheral facts and citations, the claustrophobic feeling exacerbated by Pointon's ( History of Art: A Student's Handbook ) narrow focus on a small number of works. Black-and-white illustrations. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

The six essays of this slender volume offer a critical assessment both of the nudes in famous 19th-century paintings (e.g., Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe, Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades, and Eakins's The Agnew Clinic) and of their well-known, late 20th-century interpreters (e.g., K. Clark, J. Berger, M. Fried, and T. J. Clark). The rise of gender studies has brought new possibilities to study of the body, ever an object of intense interest. In art history the traditional aestheticized nude, male and female, has happily been superseded by the policitized, psychologized, and deconstructed body. Pointon brings to bear on her readings of the naked figure not only a thorough knowledge of 19th-century history and art, but also a familiarity with a broad range of theoretical work, resulting in a number of original insights. Theory has not displaced the canonical images, which are well reproduced within the text. The language of theory in which the book is written will, however, make it difficult to read for those who have not been initated into its mysteries. A. J. Wharton Duke University