Bøger af Lauren Jimerson

Pliny, Michigan is a town like no other in America. With the peaceful Iroquois River flowing through it, Pliny is a diverse but poor village built on the traditions of ancestry, marriage and inheritance in which the old families used to hold power and rank. Siobhan June is a successful author from an old family. After returning back to her childhood home for her great-grandmother's funeral, she is commissioned by the Pliny Historical Society to write a biography of the city. In her pursuit of writing a worthwhile book, she stumbles on to a murder mystery that awakens a deeply rooted ancient magic that is associated with the river, Pliny, and even Siobhan herself.

While sexuality and the nude were prime subjects for male artists in the early twentieth century, for female artists, revealing sexual desire on canvas was deemed unacceptable. Painting her pleasure examines three remarkable women who defied this convention. Marie Vassilieff (1884-1957), Émilie Charmy (1878-1974), and Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) probed sexuality in a forthright manner and questioned gender identity in their representations of the human form. They depicted the nude in a sexually dissident way, ushering in new subject matter for female artists - the male nude, the Black body, the pregnant nude and nude self-portrait. Treating these subjects was an act that defied the foundations of the nude practice and the tradition of art itself. As a result of their unorthodox practices, each artist encountered censorship. Attention to Vassilieff, Charmy and Valadon offers rare female insights from a time when most women's voices were stifled. Examining their work sheds light on the complex ways in which women responded to the evolution of gender roles and sexual mores. These rebellious women painters contravened social decorum, challenged traditional and avant-garde artistic practices and partook in the making of the modern nude.