| Description |
232 pages : illustrations (1 color) ; 24cm |
| Series |
Essays in art and culture |
|
Essays in art and culture.
|
| Contents |
Introduction: More than a woman -- The portrait of Laura -- The imaginary companion -- Shattered beauty -- The girl of the Golden Mean -- Woman as hieroglyph -- Dark continent -- Skin deep -- Love at last sight -- Mirror, mirror. |
| Summary |
Beauty is not a singular thing, Francette Pacteau tells us, but a generic term for an unspecifiable number of disparate experiences. What these experiences are is the subject of Pacteau's book, an intriguing psychoanalytic study of beauty that looks into the eye of the beholder and to the mind conjuring behind it. Less interested in the contingent object of desire than the fantasy that frames it, Pacteau considers the staging of the aesthetic emotion. Her book is an ambitious attempt to describe the mise-en-scène of beauty within a particular field of representations - that of the beauty of woman. Within this field, which extends from the classical ideals of beauty from Renaissance to the most recent pinups and bionic women, Pacteau analyzes the formulation of beauty in Western culture. -- from back cover |
| Analysis |
Visual arts |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-232) |
| Subject |
Women in art.
|
|
Feminine beauty (Aesthetics)
|
|
Feminism and the arts.
|
|
Psychoanalysis and the arts.
|
|
Men -- Psychology.
|
| LC no. |
00001073 |
| ISBN |
0948462531 : |
|
094846254X : |
|
