Volume 47, Number 9 · May 25, 2000
Dreams of the Body
By P.N. Furbank
Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David After the Terror
by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Yale University Press, 374 pp., $50.00
There has been a lot of interest in recent years in the painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), the inspirer of neoclassicism. I am thinking particularly of Thomas Crow's brilliant Emulation,[1] which examines the human tensions and rivalries within David's all-male studio, and of Michael Fried's suggestive Absorption and Theatricality,[2] which explores the relationship of painter to viewer. Similarly there has been much discussion of the role of the male nude in neoclassical art, one of the subjects discussed in Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's book. The life class was so central to official academic training in eighteenth-century France that a male nude was simply referred to as an académie. 'Typically,' Crow writes, 'the student constructed his painting from a sitting or reclining studio pose, the identity of the model being minimally transformed by a few classical props or sometimes only by the name of a classical hero as a title.'
Review, 3666 words
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