An exhilarating, fiercely honest, ultimately devastating book, The Furies confronts the claims of family and the lure of desire, the difficulties of independence, and the approach of death.Janet Hobhouse's final testament is beautifully written, deeply felt, and above all utterly alive.
"The book is a study of thirteen twentieth-century artists, and of the erotic and effective sensiblities expressed in their work. Matisse's odalisques and Picasso's demoiselles, Bonnard's bathers, Balthus's Lolitas and de Kooning's harpies. By exploring the relationship between artist and model the author examines what such artists seek to express through the form of the nude, whether the result is closer to portraiture, as in the work of Lucian Freud, or violently abstract, as in Picasso. The complex relationship between biography and art is also considered in the work of Bonnard and Schiele, whose marriages radically changed their treatment of the nude."--BOOK JACKET