Gerdts William H. The Great American Nude: A History in Art

Praeger Publishers, 1974. — 232 p.Throughout their History, Americans have had a highly ambiguous, always fascinating attitude toward nude subjects in art. In this intelligent, witty book, William H. Gerdts traces the history of this conflict between morality and artistic freedom from the colonial paintings of Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley to the renaissance of the nude in the work of Tom Wesselmann, the pop artist, and Philip Pearlstein, the new realist, whose passionately scrutinized nudes seem to have been topographically explored rather than seen. The nude tiptoed into American art during the colonial period in allegorical and religious guise. The Indian in nature’s garb (symbolic of primitive savagery), the half-clothed Mary Magdalene, and naked Truth Revealed made shy entrances from time to time in canvases of the period, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that the nude—in the form of a luxuriously sensual Danae—received a first triumphant succes de scandale on American soil. Moving deeper into the nineteenth century, the author explores the impact of the Victorian era on such neoclassical sculptors as Horatio Greenough, whose partially draped statue of George Washington was received with general disapproval. In spite of public prudishness, however, the mid-nineteenth century produced a multitude of sculptors, both male and female. Some of their modest nudes—some superb, others hilarious—still dominate American parks and squares and have, for better or worse, profoundly influenced our conception of public ornament.