"Degas and the Nude" is the first book in a generation to explore the artist's treatment of the nude from his early years in the 1850s and 1860s, through his triumphs in the 1880s and 1890s, all the way to his last decades when the theme dominated his artistic production in all media. With essays by leading American and French critics, it provides a new interpretation of Degas' evolving conception of the nude, situating it in the subject's broader...

"In the early twentieth century, the traditional relationship between the sexes was challenged by a number of social, economic, and philosophical changes. It was above all the incipient development towards gender equality and sexual liberation that upset the restrictive moral conventions of the nineteenth century. Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka--then the three most outstanding painters of Viennese Modernism--approached the subject...