Ideal and reality

"Ideal and Reality - The Image of the Body in 20th-Century Art covers a broad segment of the history of art in our century. Its central concerns are the tradition of figural representation and the artist's approach to the image of the nude human body."--BOOK JACKET. "The exhibition provides not only a survey of the various distinctive approaches to the representation of the body in drawing and the many innovative advances beyond established solutions but also documents the erotic fascination with which artists have viewed the body. This fascination is evident in the early years of the century in powerful works by Klimt, Schiele, Rodin and Matisse, in which the drawing came to represent the immediate expression of erotic desire."--BOOK JACKET. "The successive phases of the modern era - from Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Neoclassicism and New Objectivity to the figural work of artists on the fringe of the contemporary art scene - reflect the stages in the evolutionary process that has changed the artist's image of the body over the past 100 years."--BOOK JACKET.