Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Exposed

.
Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin, [Two Standing Female Nudes], ca. 1850
.
Bill Brandt, Nude, Campden Hill, London, 1949

André Kertész, Distortion #6, 1932

Eugène Durieu, [Seated Female Nude], 1853-54
(Love this one.)

Brassaï, Nude, 1931-34

Thomas Eakins, [Thomas Eakins and John Laurie Wallace on a Beach], ca. 1883

Edward Weston, Nude on Sand, Oceano, 1936 (printed 1954)

All on view now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the exhibition Naked Before the Camera. From Roberta Smith's review in the New York Times:

The progress of the naked body through photography is the subject of [this] resonant and illuminating if sometimes fraught exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art....

Made mostly in Europe and the United States between 1850 and the present, the selection is rife with both unfamiliar names and old standbys — Nadar, Eakins, Muybridge, Brassaï, Mapplethorpe — and also with strange, unexpected and sometimes unsettling gems. (An 1860 image of a hermaphrodite, for example, from no less than Nadar.)...

Over all [the curator's] selections show how photographs of the body have intersected with the histories of painting, medicine, forensics, erotica, commerce, Surrealism and feminism, and how they hint at the advent of Conceptual, appropriation and performance art.
Through Sept. 9; more info here.

No comments: