Throughout his career, Gustav Klimt completed hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings of delicate beauty, many of them featuring the female form. Designed to imitate an artist's sketchbook, this gorgeous volume reproduces Klimt's most beautiful erotic sketches and watercolors. The experience of viewing them will awaken the senses and afford the reader the guilty pleasure of leafing through an artist's most private visions.

This instructive book presents excellent line drawings and annotations of anatomical structure for the beginning artist. Explaining the subject in simple terms and with an extensive series of illustrations, the author identifies body parts and demonstrates physical activities through his sketches. Following notes on proportion and drawing, chapters cover the human skeleton, head and neck, torso, arm, hand, leg, foot, and muscles of the body. Numerous illustrations show various views of the same structures and actions in order to impress construction and form upon the student.

Posing Sex: Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art views the long and provocative tradition of representing the sexual act in Western art as an occasion for challenging assumptions about personhood. It is uncontroversial that what Singer dubs the "sex image," the artist's posing of human figures in the act of coitus, is an enduring compositional armature for artists from antiquity to the present. Singer, however, makes the quite controversial claim that this aesthetic practice, in literature and painting especially, serves as a powerful metier for exploring how the mind is continuous with the sensuously lively body rather than its rationalistic antagonist. Singer draws upon a rich philosophical tradition-from the Greek Stoics, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hegel to contemporary theorists of perception and aesthetic agency-to show how the stakes of aesthetic experience epitomized in the sex image are essentially ethical. Referencing a broad range of image-based artworks-literary, painterly, and cinematic-Singer illustrates the proposition that "posing sex" broadens the scope of our knowledge about how feeling reciprocates with reason-giving.

The cultural milieu in the "Age of Goethe" of eighteenth-century Germany is given fresh context in this art historical study of the noted writers' patroness: Anna Amalia, Duchess of Weimar-Sachsen-Eisenach. An important noblewoman and patron of the arts, Anna Amalia transformed her court into one of the most intellectually and culturally brilliant in Europe; this book reveals the full scope of her impact on the history of art of this time and place. More than just biography or a patronage study, this book closely examines the art produced by German-speaking artists and the figure of Anna Amalia herself. Her portraits demonstrate the importance of social networks that enabled her to construct scholarly, intellectual identities not only for herself, but for the region she represented. By investigating ways in which the duchess navigated within male-dominated institutions as a means of advancing her own self-cultivation - or Bildung - this book demonstrates the role accorded to women in the public sphere, cultural politics, and historical memory. Cumulatively, Christina K. Lindeman traces how Anna Amalia, a woman from a small German principality, was represented as an active participant in enlightened discourses. The author presents a novel and original argument concerned with how a powerful woman used art to shape her identity, how that identity changed over time, and how people around her shaped it - an approach that elucidates the power of portraiture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.

Celebrated photographer Robert Mapplethorpe challenged the limits of censorship and conformity, com- bining technical and formal mastery with unexpected, often provocative content that secured his place in history. Mapplethorpe's artistic vision helped shape the social and cultural fabric of the 1970s and 80s and, following his death in 1989 from AIDS, informed the political landscape of the 1990s. His photographic works continue to resonate with audiences all over the world. Throughout his career, Mapplethorpe preserved studio files and art from every period and vein of his production, including student work, jewelry, sculptures, and commercial assignments. The resulting archive is fascinating and astonishing. With over four hundred illustrations, this volume surveys a virtually unknown resource that sheds new light on the artist's motivations, connections, business acumen, and tal- ent as a curator and collector.

Facing China is an exploration of the portrait arts in China from the dynastic to the modern and contemporary, in painting, sculpture, photography and video. The book focuses on truth and memory in the portraiture process, from encounters between subject, portrait and artist, to broader familial, social and political arenas. It also examines the influence of location on portrait production, reception and display, from tombs, ancestral shrines, temples, gardens, and palace halls to public and private spaces. Featuring 150 fine illustrations, with 100 in colour, Facing China has much to say to specialists in the field as well as general readers interested in Chinese art.

Art and Pornography presents a series of essays which investigate the artistic status and aesthetic dimension of pornographic pictures, films, and literature, and explores the distinction, if there is any, between pornography and erotic art. Is there any overlap between art and pornography, or are the two mutually exclusive? If they are, why is that? If they are not, how might we characterize pornographic art or artistic pornography, and how might pornographic art be distinguished, if at all, from erotic art? Can there be aesthetic experience of pornography? What are some of the psychological, social, and political consequences of the creation and appreciation of erotic art or artistic pornography? Leading scholars from around the world address these questions, and more, and bring together different aesthetic perspectives and approaches to this widely consumed, increasingly visible, yet aesthetically underexplored cultural domain. The book, the first of its kind in philosophical aesthetics, will contribute to a more accurate and subtle understanding of the many representations that incorporate explicit sexual imagery and themes, in both high art and demotic culture, in Western and non-Western contexts. It is sure to stir debate, and healthy controversy.

In this innovative guide, master art instructor William Maughan demonstrates how to create a realistic human likeness by using the classic and highly accurate modelling technique of chiaroscuro developed by Leonardo daVinci during the High Renaissance. Maughan first introduces readers to the basics of this centuries-old technique, showing how to analyse form, light and shadow; use dark pencil, white pencil and toned paper to create full range of values; use the elements of design to enhance likeness; and capture a sitter's gestures and proportions. He then demonstrates, step by step, how to draw each facial feature, develop visual awareness and render the head in colour with soft pastels.