Marcia Pointon
Marcia Pointon is Professor Emerita in History of Art at the University of Manchester.
Pointon, Marcia
Pointon, Marcia
United States of America
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Description: Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830–1908
The human body, particularly the female body in the nineteenth century, is central to Western painting. Images such as Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades and Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe are so well known that the question of how the gendered body functions in them is often overlooked. In this feminist art-historical study of the body in general and the nude in particular, Marcia Pointon explores the narrative structures of a series of major European and American paintings and other images, mapping her interpretations on the historiography of nineteenth-century painting and employing an innovative theoretical methodology to demonstrate how the visual representation of gendered bodies works to articulate power relations that are to be understood in terms of the symbolic and the psychic as part of the historical.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal. *
Print publication date January 1990 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780521385282
EISBN 9780300272024
Illustrations 48
Print Status out of print
Description: Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00062
Eighteenth-century England possessed a thriving portrait culture: likenesses of particular individuals exhibited at the Royal Academy or in the interiors of public institutions, such as guildhalls and charity foundations, as well as in private houses, were part of a network of visual communication that encompassed print-collecting, popular performance, and figurative acts of speech.

In this original and stimulating book, Marcia Pointon demonstrates how portraiture provided mechanisms both for constructing and accessing a national past and for controlling a present that appeared increasingly unruly. Through detailed historical analyses of particular aspects of portrait representation – images of criminals, the fashions and rituals around the masculine culture of hair and wigs, the gendering of childhood in celebrated paintings like Penelope with or 'Pinkie' – Pointon establishes the rich and complex ways in which portraiture reflected eighteenth-century England. How 'the head' was hung – whether it be a matter of the disposition of an actual body or the image of that body – was determined by social rules of posture and decorum, by artistic convention and commercial practice, and literally by the ways in which patrons chose to arrange particular portraits on walls – paintings that served ritual and symbolic as well as decorative functions.

Hanging the Head makes a major contribution to our understanding of portraiture as a cultural and political phenomenon in eighteenth-century Britain. It will be of great interest to art historians and to those concerned with the history of material culture, to museums specialists and to all concerned with literature, politics, and visual culture in eighteenth-century England.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date January 1998 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300073683
EISBN 9780300249798
Illustrations 291
Print Status out of print
Description: Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836
PORTRAITURE WAS THE ROYAL ACADEMY’S source of sustenance and its pervasive poison. Blamed for the failure of history painting and viewed as a sign of...
PublisherPaul Mellon Centre
Related print edition pages: pp.93-109
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00023.013