Klimt

This is a book that many of us might like to have on our coffee tables – beautifully produced, not too heavy and full of pictures of pretty ladies, many of them with no clothes on. Its purpose is to show not only how artists have viewed the female body from the Renaissance to the present but also to explain how this body has been used to express both emotion and the attitudes of the day. Take Hiran Powers’s 1845 marble sculpture of a naked woman in chains, entitled ‘The Greek Slave’. This appeared after Britain had abolished slavery but before the American Civil War had put an end to

If Modernism is a jungle, how do you navigate a path through its thickets? Some explorers — Peter Gay and Christopher Butler among them — have been fool-hardy enough to attempt an overall map, identifying factors common to a half century of music, art and literature. But the borders remain disputed and light cast on one area only leaves another consigned to the shadows. Philip Hook, however, has been less ambitious, confining himself to one patch of special interest: the painting and sculpture of the decade preceding the first world war. Although this may sound like familiar territory, it’s widely regarded, in Hook’s words, as ‘quite possibly the most important