The Nude in American Painting, 1950–1980

In the years following Willem de Kooning’s exhibition of the Woman paintings in 1953, a younger generation of American painters turned to the subject of the nude. Challenging received ideas concerning the proper course of modernist painting, these works reasserted one of the most important themes of twentieth-century visual culture: the body within representation. This study focuses on selected nudes by seven noted American painters, including Larry Rivers, Tom Wesselman, Sylvia Sleigh, and Joan Semmel, and examines the complex range of issues and ideas associated with the nude in postwar American culture. In a period that witnessed the shaping of sexual liberation by the Kinsey reports, the publication of Playboy, and the feminist critique of sexism and identity, the nude, David McCarthy argues, served as an ideal subject for painting’s engagement with the most important issues of its historical moment.

• Only book on the nude in postwar American painting • Combination of art history and American studies

1. Introduction; 2. Ambition, ‘perversity’, and tradition Larry Rivers; 3. Modernism, surveillance, and the photographic; 4. Of playboys, pinups, and ‘the great American nude’ Tom Wesselmann; 5. Eros as protest Neil Welliver and Alfred Leslie; 6. Feminist revisions Sylvia Sleigh and Joan Semmel; 7. Conclusion.