A vivid account of the atmosphere and culture of postwar Britain, explored through the image of the British Blonde

In the 1950s, American glamour swept into a war-torn Britain as part of a broader transatlantic exchange of culture and commodities. But in this process, the American ideal of the blonde became uniquely British―Marilyn Monroe transformed into Diana Dors.

British Blonde examines postwar Britain through the changing ideals of femininity that reflected the nation’s evolving concerns in the twenty-five years following the Second World War. At its heart are four iconic women whose stories serve as prompts for broader accounts of social and culture change: Diana Dors, the quintessential blonde bombshell; Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain; Barbara Windsor, star of the Carry On films; and the Pop artist Pauline Boty. Together, they reveal how class, social aspiration, and desire reshaped the cultural atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s, complicating gender roles and visual culture in the process.

The history of Western art is saturated with images of the female body. Lynda Nead's The Female Nude was the first book to critically examine this phenomenon from a feminist perspective and ask: how and why did the female nude acquire this status?

In a deft and engaging manner, Lynda Nead explores the ways in which acceptable and unacceptable images of the female body are produced, issues which have been reignited by current controversies around the patriarchy, objectification and pornography. Nead brilliantly illustrates the two opposing poles occupied by the female nude in the history of art; at one extreme the visual culmination of enlightenment aesthetics; at the other, spilling over into the degraded and the obscene. What both have in common, however, is the aim of containing the female body.

Drawing on examples of art and artists from the classical period to the 1980s, The Female Nude paints a devastating picture of the depiction of the female body and remains as fresh and invigorating today as it was at the time of its first publication.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition

List of Images

Introduction

Part 1: Theorizing the Female Nude

1. Framing the Female Body

2. A Discourse on the Naked and the Nude

3. A Study of Ideal Art

4. Aesthetics and the Female Nude

5. Obscenity and the Sublime

Part 2: Redrawing the Lines

6. ‘The Damaged Venus’

7. The Framework of Tradition

8. The Lessons of the Life Class

9. Art Criticism and Sexual Metaphor

10. Breaking Open the Boundaries

11. Redrawing the Lines

Part 3: Cultural Distinctions

12. Sacred Frontiers

13. Pure and Motivated Pleasure

14. Policing the Boundaries

15. Displaying the Female Body

16. Erotic Art: A Frame for Desire.

Bibliography

Index

This highly original collection brings together some of the most important minds in both contemporary art history and theory, and law and legal history. The result is a fascinating discussion of the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image.
The essays draw on the critical procedures of law, art history, and cultural studies in order to create a new interdisciplinary field of visual culture and law. In exploring the hidden interdependence of law and art, the writings refute the generally held conception that law is fixed and rational while the judgment of art is autonomous and ambiguous. Among the topics addressed are the history of the relationship between art and law, the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law, and the complex relations between law, the image, and identity.
With its groundbreaking ideas from a variety of intellectual traditions and disciplines, this book puts law and art into a new and exciting conversation that will introduce a new field of study and spark international debate.
Contributors are: Georges Didi-Huberman, Costas Douzinas, Hal Foster, Peter Goodrich, Piyel Haldar, Martin Jay, Mandy Merck, Lynda Nead, Jonathan Ribner, Katherine Fischer Taylor.

The boundaries of Walter Benjamin's work still resist classification and demarcation. His writings, including the best-known collection, Illuminations, remain an uneasy but thrilling combination of the actual and the mystical, of Marxism and the messianic utopianism.

This collection shows how extraordinarily substantial were the footholds which Benjamin supplied: Irving Wohlfarth takes up the troubling question of historical understanding versus historicism in his essay The Actuality of Walter Benjamin. Also included are essays on Benjamin and the sources of Judaism, feminism and cultural analysis, and images in Benjamin's novels and other writings.

A close look at the work, relationship, and shared influences of two masterful 20th-century artists "The camera," said Orson Welles, "is a medium via which messages reach us from another world." It was the camera and the circumstances of the Second World War that first brought together Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Bill Brandt (1904-1983). During the Blitz, both artists produced images depicting civilians sheltering in the London Underground. These "shelter pictures" were circulated to millions via popular magazines and today rank as iconic works of their time. This book begins with these wartime works and examines the artists' intersecting paths in the postwar period. Key themes include war, industry, and the coal mine; landscape and Britain's great megalithic sites; found objects; and the human body. Special photographic reproduction captures the materiality of the print as a three-dimensional object rather than a flat, disembodied image on the page. Published by the Yale Center for British Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Hepworth Wakefield (February 7-November 1, 2020) Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (November 21, 2020-February 28, 2021) Yale Center for British Art (November 17, 2022-February 26, 2023)

Taking an interdisciplinary approach that looks at film, television, and commercial advertisements as well as more traditional media such as painting, The Tiger in the Smoke provides an unprecedented analysis of the art and culture of post-war Britain. Art historian Lynda Nead presents fascinating insights into how the Great Fogs of the 1950s influenced the newfound fashion for atmospheric cinematic effects. She also discusses how the widespread use of color in advertisements was part of an increased ideological awareness of racial differences. Tracing the parallel ways that different media developed new methods of creating images that variously harkened back to Victorian ideals, agitated for modern innovations, or redefined domesticity, this book's broad purview gives a complete picture of how the visual culture of post-war Britain expressed the concerns of a society that was struggling to forge a new identity. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This highly original collection brings together some of the most important minds in both contemporary art history and theory, and law and legal history. The result is a fascinating discussion of the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image.
The essays draw on the critical procedures of law, art history, and cultural studies in order to create a new interdisciplinary field of visual culture and law. In exploring the hidden interdependence of law and art, the writings refute the generally held conception that law is fixed and rational while the judgment of art is autonomous and ambiguous. Among the topics addressed are the history of the relationship between art and law, the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law, and the complex relations between law, the image, and identity.
With its groundbreaking ideas from a variety of intellectual traditions and disciplines, this book puts law and art into a new and exciting conversation that will introduce a new field of study and spark international debate.
Contributors are: Georges Didi-Huberman, Costas Douzinas, Hal Foster, Peter Goodrich, Piyel Haldar, Martin Jay, Mandy Merck, Lynda Nead, Jonathan Ribner, Katherine Fischer Taylor.