The Artist, the Censor and the Nude ~ Hardback ~ Glenn Harcourt

Part monograph, part historical analysis, and part feminist critique, this hybrid book examines the art and politics of The Nude in various cultural contexts. Responding to books of canonical Western art that have been pirated and censored in Iran, artist Pamela Joseph creates a series of paintings that whimsically appropriate the censored versions in order to create entirely new works.By comparing images of Roman statues, sultry odalisques, their censored Iranian versions, and Joseph's paintings, the rigorous, culturally-measured analysis of art historian Glenn Harcourt elucidates both cross-cultural censorship of bodily images and the development of abstraction in art. Historical enlightenment abounds: thecensored image of Duchamp s Fountain reflects on controversies from its original display in 1919; Picasso s Orientalism leads to the Iranian censor s pixilated color-study, further abstracted by Joseph, but also blurred out by Fox News. Manet s Olympia is unbound yet contained by three different views of female sexuality, and censored Renaissance paintings echo Duchamp s infamous graffiti on an image of The Mona Lisa.From the foreword by Francis Naumann: Censorship in the arts differs from culture to culture and, in most cases, only causes the audience these censors are attempting to protect to wonder exactly what is being kept from them and why, resulting in a thought process that can often be more stimulating than a view of the unaltered work. Pamela Joseph provides a biting and severely critical, while at the same time uniquely humorous commentary on the futility of censorship in the arts, no matter in what form it is practiced.""Author BiographyPamela Joseph: Pamela Joseph is an internationally exhibiting multi-media artist based in the Colorado hotspot for arts and culture, Aspen CO. Her work has been described as "well-executed, powerful and edgy" by the Colorado Council on the Arts, who awarded Joseph a Visual Arts Fellowship in 2001, and an artist who "epitomizes Aspen's penchant for the avant-garde." Over 13 years, her art carnival Sideshow of the Absurd garnered outstanding reviews and record-breaking crowds at ten museums. For 2003 and 2004, she was selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Solo exhibitions include those at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs, McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, Erie Art Museum, Gallery 101Walsh at Georgetown University, Art and Cultural Center of Hollywood (Hollywood, FL), Jonson Gallery of the University of New Mexico Art Museums in Albuquerque, William J. Bachman Gallery at the Center for Visual and Performing Arts in Munster, Indiana, and Francis M. Naumann Fine Art Gallery in New York, as well as galleries in Paris, Barcelona and Beijing. Her long running multi-media installation, Sideshow of the Absurd, is the subject of a film by Tina DiFeliciantonio and Jane C. Wagner, which premiered in April 2015 at the Aspen Shortsfest and is currently being shown to acclaim in Filmfests nationwide. Glenn Harcourt: Glenn Harcourt writes about the history of art and visual culture. He has advanced degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Yale. A contributor to various Los Angeles-based arts journals, as well as "Representations," the "Archive Journal," and other publications, Harcourt has also been shortlisted twice for the prestigious Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. He is currently working on several projects related to the status of the body as an object of medical inquiry, including a collaborative graphic novel on the sixteenth-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius. His most recent study, "Pathological Anatomy and Self-Portraiture" appeared in the Spanish history of science journal Dynamis. Francis M. Naumann: Francis M. Naumann is a scholar, curator, and art dealer, specializing in the art of the Dada movement and the Surrealist periods. Over his long career he has lectured at Parsons School of Design and contributed essays to dozens of art journals. Naumann, who is a scholar of Duchamp and the ready-made for over the last forty-years, is known for several books, including "Marcel Duchamp, Artist of the Century" (MIT Press, 1989), which he coedited with Rudolf E. Kuenzli; a book on Man Ray, and an edition of Duchamp's collected letters. His collection of essays about Duchamp "The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp" (2010) has been praised by, among others, Calvin Tomkins, art critic for The New Yorker: "Naumann's consistently fresh approaches to Duchamp s work and Duchamp s life, set down in agile and jargon-free prose, make these collected essays the single most informative book you will find on the endlessly fascinating artist."" The Artist, the Censor and the Nude Release Date Australia: August 15th, 2017