Volume 49, Number 6 · April 11, 2002
Nudes Without Desire
By Janet Malcolm
Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949–50
Catalog of the exhibition by Maria Morris Hambourg
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 14–April 21, 2002; the Art Institute of Chicago, June 1–October 6, 2002; and the San Francisco Museumof Modern Art, May–July 2003
Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Bulfinch/Little, Brown, 95 pp., $75.00
Dancer: Photographs of Alexandra Beller by Irving Penn
Catalog of the exhibition with an introduction by Anne Wilkes Tucker and an essay by Sylvia Wolf
an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, January 12–May 12, 2002; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 17– June 16, 2002; and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, September 18–October 20, 2002
Nazraeli, 65 pp., $50.00
In the mid-Sixties, a most entertaining solution to a biographical mystery was offered by Mary Lutyens. The mystery concerned the six-year-long unconsummated marriage of John Ruskin and Effie Gray, which was annulled in 1854, after Effie revealed to her father that Ruskin had still not '[made] me his Wife.' 'He alleged various reasons,' Effie wrote: 'Hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason..., that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April.' In a statement Ruskin wrote for his lawyer during the annulment proceedings, he corroborated Effie's account: 'It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it.'
Review, 3584 words
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