The nude in American painting, 1950-1980

by David McCarthy

This study focuses on selected nudes by seven noted American painters, including Larry Rivers, Tom Wesselmann, Sylvia Sleigh and Joan Semmel, and examines the complex range of issues and ideas associated with the nude in postwar American culture. In a period that witnessed the shaping of sexual liberation by the Kinsey reports, the publication of Playboy, and the feminist critique of sexism and identity, the nude, David McCarthy argues, served as an ideal subject for the return of painting to an engagement with the most important issues of its historical moment.