News Art Blog

When you get down to the bare facts, there’s no genre of art older than that of the nude. The bare human figure—male and female, but more often female—commands attention as much as it makes us turn away in modesty or, worse, shame. The duality of that “truth” of the nude as well as our reaction to it is the slippery subject of Being Nude: The Skin of Images by Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari (translated by Anne O’Byrne and Carlie Anglemire). Nancy and Ferrari argue for “something true right at the skin, skin as truth” as the exposing of flesh “reveals is that there is nothing to be revealed, or that there is nothing other than revelation itself, the revealing and what can be revealed, both at once.” At times a hard philosophical road to slog, Being Nude gives you a multidimensional, multimedia, multigenerational musing on the nude that may not lay all the facts perfectly bare, but will leave you looking at and thinking about the nude in a different way than ever before. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Naked Truth About the Nude in Art."

As kids, my siblings and I would flip through old family albums and marvel over old pictures of family members in their youth. More than just thicker hair and thinner waistlines changed with time. You could really see an evolution of self over time—more confident, more resigned, more resilient—depending on the individual. In The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years, which runs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, through December 31, 2012, artists working in that same medium of photography show not only how they and their loved ones change over time, but also how America and its people have changed over time. The Serial Portrait serves as a family album of unfamiliar and familiar faces, but all related to us as Americans. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Photographers Used the Serial Portrait toReveal Themselves, and America."



[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, for the image above and other press materials related to the exhibition The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years, which runs through December 31, 2012.]

The duality is right there in her name: Francesca Woodman. Woodman, daughter of two successful artists and a promising photographer herself, cherished childhood memories of family trips to Tuscany and returned to Italy as a college student to study art. The exhibition Francesca Woodman, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York through June 13, 2012, gives the young artist, who committed suicide in 1981 at just 22 years of age, her biggest retrospective yet, with 120 photographs, artist books, and recently discovered short videos presenting the width and depth of her short but full life and career. At the same time, Isabella Pedicini’s Francesca Woodman: The Roman Years: Between Flesh and Film examines just how “Italian” the Italian-American photographer truly was and how Woodman took the two cultures embedded in her name and created a single, transcendent art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Francesca Woodman Turned Two Cultures into One Art."

[Image: Francesca Woodman. Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 14 x 14.1 cm. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman. © 2012 George and Betty Woodman.]

[Many thanks to the Guggenheim Museum, New York, for providing me with the image above and essays from the catalog to the exhibition Francesca Woodman, which runs through June 13, 2012. Many thanks also to Contrasto Books for providing me with a review copy of Francesca Woodman: The Roman Years: Between Flesh and Film by Isabella Pedicini (translated from the Italian by Margaret Spiegelman).]