Saul Leiter (1923-2013) has been hailed as one of the great pioneers of 20th century colour photography. His body of work spans more than 70 years and is in the collections of many important museums. With the landmark publication of his monograph "Early Color" (2006) his work at last came to the fore. The book was followed by numerous exhibitions, the largest of which was a major retrospective at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (2012). In 2013, Thomas Leach made In No Great Hurry, a full-feature documentary film about Saul Leiter and his work. But Leiter was more than a great photographer; he was and always had been a prolific painter, though this side of his creative life received far less attention. One strand among his paintings is noticeable: the art of painting over prints of nudes that he himself photographed and printed. This publication reproduces over eighty such painted nudes, created over a period of over forty years. This long overdue book sheds light on the vitality and originality of Saul Leiter s art and his mastery of colour. "

"The Nude lies at the centre of Western art. From the beginning of photography it has attracted photographers, many of whom have imitated the forms and postures portrayed by painters. There are a few moments when a photographer has abandoned derivative styles and allowed the viewer to see the body in completely new manner. This occured in America in the work of Edward Weston and in Britain in the work of Bill Brandt. It now occurs in the photographs of Lee Friedlander. ver the last fifteen years, Friedlander has been working with a number of models to create his own way of seeing and photographing the female nude. Little of this work has ever appeared. The photographs are both highly intimate and coolly detached. The frequently surprising perspectives are balanced by the mundane backdrops of ordinary life, the real domestic interiors of the models. his book is published on the occasion of an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and confirms Friedlander's stature as one of the greatest photographers of his generation. He appears to have taken a primary theme of Western art and re-invented it."

A gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume—essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks—permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.

The nude has inspired artists for centuries and continues to inspire us today. Alongside a historical study of the nude in painting, this book introduces oil paint and gives advice on techniques when using this challenging and rewarding medium. Capturing the beauty of form and the delicate colours of the figure, it celebrates the powerful images that examine human relationships, personality and psychology. The topics included are instructions on materials, the colour palette and stretching your own canvas; the practicalities of working with a model in the studio; colour-mixing exercises that explore colour relationships and temperature, and finally step-by-step examples that demonstrate the progression of a painting. This beautiful and essential guide to painting the nude in oils is aimed at oil painters including beginners, more experienced, untutored groups, individual artists and art historians and is beautifully illustrated with 152 colour images.

The Nude explores some of the principal ways that paintings of the nude function in the conflicted terrain of culture and society in Europe and America from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, as set against questions about human sexuality that emerge around differences of class, gender, age, and race. Author Richard Leppert relates the visual history of how the naked body intersects with the foundational characteristics of what it is to be human, measured against a range of basic emotions (happiness, delight, and desire; fear, anxiety, and abjection) and read in the context of changing social and cultural realities. The bodies comprising the Western nude are variously pleasured or tormented, ecstatic or bored, pleased or horrified. In short, as this volume amply demonstrates, the nude in Western art is a terrain on whose surface is written a summation of Western history: its glory but also its degradation.

The representation of the nude in art remained for many centuries a victory of fiction over fact. Beautiful, handsome, flawless its great success was to distance the unclothed body from any uncomfortably explicit taint of sexuality, eroticism or imperfection. In this newly updated study, Frances Borzello contrasts the civilized, sanitized, perfected nude of Kenneth Clarks classic, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), with todays depictions: raw, uncomfortable, both disturbing and intriguing. Grittier and more subtle, depicting variously gendered bodies, the new nude asks awkward questions and behaves provocatively. It is a very naked nude, created to deal with the issues and contradictions that surround the body in our time. Borzello explores the role of the nude in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, looking at the work of a wide range of international artists creating contemporary nudes. Her fascinating text is complemented by a profusion of well-chosen, unusual and beautifully reproduced illustrations. The story begins with a tale of life, death and resurrection an investigation into how and why the nude has survived and flourished in an art world that prematurely announced its demise. Subsequent chapters take a thematic approach, focusing in turn on Body art and Performance art, the new perspectives of women artists, the nude in painting, portraiture and sculpture and in its most extreme and graphic expressions that intentionally push the boundaries of both art and our comfort zone. The final chapter illustrates radical developments in art and culture over the last decade, focusing in particular on artworks by women, trans artists and artists of colour. Borzello links these works to their art-historical and political predecessors, demonstrating the continually unending capacity of the nude to disrupt traditional hierarchies and gender categories in life and art.

Artists have always been fascinated with portraying the nude: the beauty and nuances of the human figure are endlessly absorbing. This practical and inspirational book celebrates and continues that enduring and beautiful tradition by encouraging you to discover your own talent and style. Philip Tyler looks in detail at the key skills and themes, such as perception, proportion, composition, colour and facture, that the artist needs. He then investigates ideas and styles, and encourages you to interpret the nude so your paintings have those elusive qualities of vitality and relevance, which can turn a painting into a masterpiece. He explores the practical, technical and philosophical problems of drawing and painting the nude, with exercises to support each lesson and over 300 images illustrate the text. Aimed at both novices and art graduates, this practical and inspirational guide is illustrated throughout with 320 colour images and there are exercises to support the fifty lessons.

This book, a sensuous evocation of images of the reclining nude, claims a female-identified pleasure in looking. Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin are re-imagining images of female beauty, display, (auto)eroticism, and intimacy. The reclining nude is compelling, for female-identified artists in the ethically adventurous, politically complex feminist issues it engages.

Rembrandt’s extraordinary paintings of female nudes—Andromeda, Susanna, Diana and her Nymphs, Danaë, Bathsheba—as well as his etchings of nude women, have fascinated many generations of art lovers and art historians. But they also elicited vehement criticism when first shown, described as against-the-grain, anticlassical—even ugly and unpleasant. However, Rembrandt chose conventional subjects, kept close to time-honored pictorial schemes, and was well aware of the high prestige accorded to the depiction of the naked female body. Why, then, do these works deviate so radically from the depictions of nude women by other artists? To answer this question Eric Jan Sluijter, in Rembrandt and the Female Nude, examines Rembrandt’s paintings and etchings against the background of established pictorial traditions in the Netherlands and Italy. Exploring Rembrandt’s intense dialogue with the works of predecessors and peers, Sluijter demonstrates that, more than any other artist, Rembrandt set out to incite the greatest possible empathy in the viewer, an approach that had far-reaching consequences for the moral and erotic implications of the subjects Rembrandt chose to depict. In this richly illustrated study, Sluijter presents an innovative approach to Rembrandt’s views on the art of painting, his attitude towards antiquity and Italian art of the Renaissance, his sustained rivalry with the works of other artists, his handling of the moral and erotic issues inherent in subjects with female nudes, and the nature of his artistic choices.