This provocative book shows how Art Nouveau artists & designers explored & exploited the idea of the erotic in their creative endeavors.

In the 1960s, the fascination with erotic art generated a wave of exhibitions and critical discussion on sexual freedom, visual pleasure, and the nude in contemporary art. Radical Eroticism examines the importance of women’s contributions in fundamentally reconfiguring representations of sexuality across several areas of advanced art—performance, pop, postminimalism, and beyond. This study shows that erotic art made by women was integral to the profound changes that took place in American art during the sixties, from the crumbling of modernist aesthetics and the expanding field of art practice to the emergence of the feminist art movement. Artists Carolee Schneemann, Martha Edelheit, Marjorie Strider, Hannah Wilke, and Anita Steckel created works that exemplify these innovative approaches to the erotic, exploring female sexual subjectivities and destabilizing assumptions about gender. Rachel Middleman reveals these artists’ radical interventions in both aesthetic conventions and social norms.

Essential Art Nouveau features short thematic sections and a wonderful selection of images - some well-known with others previously unpublished - to evoke the very essence of this extraordinary style. Major influences such as Rococo, the natural world and the exoticism of the Orient are reflected in the colourful plates, and earlier pieces are placed against their Art Nouveau counterparts to provide a fascinating visual history. Every page bears testimony to the daring flamboyance of the style - shown on buildings, in paintings and in sculpture, and going right into the home, on furniture, cutlery, glassware, ceramics, jewellery and textiles.

Exploring an intriguing aspect of the artist's work, this book examines Gustav Klimt's fascination with the ancient world. Gustav Klimt's 1907 publication of his illustrated edition of Lucian's ancient work Dialogues of the Courtesans was the first time he exhibited his erotic art to the public, and it led to his denouncement by censors disturbed by the work's graphic content. This volume revives Klimt's masterful book, which pairs his erotic drawings with Wiener Werkstätte design, and which arguably resulted in the Art Nouveau era's most beautiful book. Klimt and Antiquity also compares the red- and black figure Attic vases dating from the 5th century with Klimt's art. It presents Klimt's antiquity-inspired art as a dialogue between contemporary and ancient art, between genders, and between women's roles in times of antiquity and modernity. Essays explore Klimt's interest in ancient art; the ancient role of the courtesan; and the phenomenon of the Greek symposium as fertile ground for Greek art.

Different eras and civilisations have treated erotic images with varying acceptance and different concepts of erotica and these tendencies are reflected within the works themselves. From ancient statues devoted to fertility to Renaissance engravings designed to encourage procreation within marriage, erotic art has always held an important place in society. Here, for the first time, 1,000 authentic images of erotic art have been brought together, spanning the centuries and civilisations to demonstrate the evolution of the genre. In an era such as ours when eroticism is abundant in advertising and the media, this book gives a refreshing insight into the background of erotic imagery, highlighting the artistic value of beautiful works of eroticism executed with skill.