Reviews for Literary Critics

The average rating for Literary Critics based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-27 00:00:00 Dennis Mcewan This is a book for someone who sees Hercules and the Lion and thinks "look at how the artist is evoking the body's movement with the movement in the cloak" and not "I like the gold pubes!" Bits: "The drift of all popular art is towards the lowest common denominator, and, on the whole, there are more women whose bodies look like a potato than like the Knidian Aphrodite." On Sacred and Profane Love: "Titian has even broken the line of the arm by a cast of crimson drapery exactly where it would have been broken by time." "(One of Courbet's nudes) was intended to provoke and succeeded imperially, for Napoleon III struck at her with his riding crop." "The skin was to Rubens almost what the muscles had been to Michelangelo." "Roots and bulbs, pulled up into the light, give us for a moment a feeling of shame. They are pale, defenceless, unself-supporting. They have the formless character of life which has been both protected and oppressed. In the darkness their slow, biological gropings have been contrary to the quick, resolute movements of free creatures, bird, fish or dancer, flashing through a transparent medium, and have made them baggy, scraggy and indeterminate. Looking at a group of naked figures in a Gothic painting or a miniature, we experience the same sensation. The bulb-like women and root-like men seem to have been dragged out of the protective darkness in which the human body had lain muffled for a thousand years."

Review # 2 was written on 2020-07-12 00:00:00 Richard Kraft Just over one year ago I slowly walked through the "Art of the Ancient World" collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with a previous girlfriend. Filled with many nude portraits and stone sculptures, it represented pretty much everything that did not interest either of us. I'm not sure why but this type of art never appealed to me; I now realize I just needed to take a closer look. Our largely negative attitude toward the nude inspired me to discover if I couldn't unearth the underlying reasons. Clark takes you into a whole different world. Having never studied any type of art, the deep complexity this field has to offer took me wholly by surprise. Studying the evolution of beauty has utterly changed my perception of the human body as well as the modern representation of beauty. This came as very welcome relief (PUN) as the modern evolution of the nude, though different in its representation of past periods, shares many of its patterns. Digital post production has given artists an unparalleled, newfound power that today at least accentuates extremes, as a harrowing look at the modern pornography industry easily confirms. But just as in the past, the pendulum might swing back and this new power might be grounded in more subtle directions that would prevail for a time until some new, novel fashion speeds things forward. To take the opposite approach, leaning on the history of the rise (too easy) of the female hip as an example, this recent extremism may just be the beginning of an astoundingly unsubtle expression. A Study in Ideal Form has given me a new lens through which to enjoy this complex evolution.