SOURCE: Nead, Lynda. “Getting Down to Basics: Art, Obscenity and the Female Nude.” In New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, edited by Isobel Armstrong, pp. 199-221. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

In the following essay, Nead describes the eighth edition of Clark's The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art as a book which studies the art of the nude from Greek antiquity to European modernism, and goes on to study the ideals of the nude applying the philosophies of Clark and Immanuel Kant.

This essay is concerned with the ways in which the categories of ‘art’ and ‘obscenity’ are defined and differentiated and the critical place of representations of the female nude within this cultural process.

More than any other subject, the female nude connotes ‘Art’; it is the most important icon of Western culture, a kind of hieroglyph which expresses civilization and accomplishment.

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