The Spectacular Body explores the ways in which the human body―especially the female body―was visualized by artists in late nineteenth-century Paris. Focusing on the work of Degas, it deals with issues of sexuality, gender, and visual representation to illuminate the underlying meanings of the famed Impressionist's depictions of women in his series of bathers, dancers, and prostitutes.Engaging in feminist polemic, Anthea Callen investigates why at this particular time the female figure became such a highly charged icon for masculine projections of fascination with and revulsion over the body. She explains how the gender politics of Degas' culture made it inevitable that he represent masculine desire―and anxieties about masculine identity evoked by such desire―through an apparently detached masculine scrutiny of the female body. Callen shows how Degas' pictorial stance was structurally unresolved, caught between a controlling, distanced, quasi-scientific observation on the one hand, and a disruptive and more unmediated, more psychically loaded engagement with the body on the other. Locating Degas' art within his own historical era, she discusses how socio-scientific ideas of health and disease, hygiene and dirt, prostitution, criminality, sexuality, class, race, and other issues were played out in his work. Using visual analysis as a deconstructive tool, she discusses Degas' choice of medium, composition, spatial organization, pose, color, and light and shade, showing that his technical unorthodoxy combined with scientific discourse in his art to make his work a paradigm of artistic and urban modernity.

The Spectacular Body: Science, Method, and Meaning in the Work of Degas

Arts & Photography

Callen, Anthea

Individual Artists

Yale University Press

Beginning in 1800, Looking at Men explores how the modern male body was forged through the intimately linked professions of art and medicine, which deployed muscular models and martial arts to renew the beau idéal. This ideal of the virile body derived from the athletic perfection found in the classical male nude. The study of human anatomy and dissection in both art and medicine underpinned a modern gladiatorial ideal, its representations setting the parameters not just of ‘normal’ virile masculinity but also its abject ‘other’. Through the shared violence of human dissection and martial arts, male artists and medics secured their professional privilege and authority on the bodies of ‘roughs’. First and foremost visual, this process has literary parallels in Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde. While embodying signs of dominant power and signalling differences of race, class, gender and sexuality, the virile masculine ideal contained its shadow, the threat of loss, of a Darwinian ‘degeneration’ that required vigilant intervention to ensure the health of nations. Anthea Callen’s lively and intelligent study casts a new eye on contributions by many lesser-known artists, as well as more familiar works by Géricault, Courbet, Dalou and Bazille through to Eakins, Thornycroft, Leighton and Tonks, and includes images that draw on photography and the popular visual cultures of boxing, wrestling and bodybuilding. Callen reassesses ideas of the modern male body and virile manhood in this exploration of the heteronormative, the homosocial and the homoerotic in art, anatomy and nascent anthropology.

Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body

History & Criticism

Women artists of the arts and crafts movement, 1870-1914

Women artists of the arts and crafts movement, 1870-1914

Pantheon Books

The chapters are Design Education for Women; Ceramics; Embroidery and Needlework; Lacemaking; Jewellery and Metalwork; Woodcarving, Furniture and Interior Design; and Hand-printing, Book-binding and Illustration. With illustrations of each craft and photographs of some of the women artists.

Women Artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, 1870-1914

Works by Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, and other artists are examined to reveal the elements of composition, light, color, form, and visual effects that mark the impressionist movement in painting

Techniques of the Impressionists

Graphic Design

Chartwell Books

Courbet

Courbet, Gustave

Jupiter Books

Angel in the studio: Women in the arts and crafts movement 1870-1914

Astragal Books

In The Work of Art, Anthea Callen analyzes the self-portraits, portraits of fellow artists, photographs, prints, and studio images of prominent nineteenth-century French Impressionist painters, exploring the emergence of modern artistic identity and its relation to the idea of creative work. Landscape painting in general, she argues, and the “plein air” oil sketch in particular were the key drivers of change in artistic practice in the nineteenth century―leading to the Impressionist revolution. Putting the work of artists from Courbet and Cézanne to Pissaro under a microscope, Callen examines modes of self-representation and painting methods, paying particular attention to the painters’ touch and mark-making. Using innovative methods of analysis, she provides new and intriguing ways of understanding material practice within its historical moment and the cultural meanings it generates. Richly illustrated with 180 color and black-and-white images, The Work of Art offers fresh insights into the development of avant-garde French painting and the concept of the modern artist.

The Work of Art: Plein Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France

Reaktion Books

TECHNIQUES OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS (A QUARTO BOOK)

Tiger Books International

Gary Allen Pty. Ltd.

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Books by Callen, Anthea