Abstract from book jacket.
This volume considered representations of masculinity and femininity in late 19th century French painting and drawing. The book begins with a discussion of Caillebotte's iconoclastic and assertively modern male figures, and then turns to the new obsession with male body-building, extensively promoted by photography and popular magazines. Tissot's Women of Paris series provides a catalogue of images of modern, urban femininity—decorative, seductive, yet tinged with menace—while Seurat's Young Woman Powdering Herself is the focus of a discussion of contemporary views of the ‘woman at the toilette'. Renoir's nostalgic fantasy of full-bodied, earthy femininity appears to be in stark contrast to the curiously androgynous figures in Cezanne's late bather paintings. The author argues that even these works reveal the ubiquitous stamp of the period's anxious and rigid definition of sexual difference.
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