Michel Thévoz, Der bemalte Körper. Zürich: ABC Verlag, 1985. German translation of Le corps peint. Genève: Editions d'Art Albert Skira, 1984. Burgundy linen hardcover with illustrated dust jacket, 139 pp.
Cover illustration: Actress Masayo Utsunomiya in Yôichi Takabayashi's great 1982 movie Irezumi: Spirit of Tattoo. Illustrated throughout with b/w and full color photographs.
Language: German
The always painted body
In this abundantly illustrated essay, Michel Thévoz shows that the human body has always been 'painted' and decorated. The body has never ceased to be the primary medium for painting. The book offers great insights into diverse types of body adornment, from prehistoric body painting, wild tattoos and scarification, to make-up, children's grimacing, and the transposition of paint to the epidermis of canvas.
Certain distinct general functions of body decoration can be identified:
- Body painting, ephemeral in nature and linked to festivals, ceremonies, and magical practices, takes us into the sacred realm, transgressing taboos and manifesting psychic dispositions repressed or deemed psychotic in Western culture.
- Enduring marks like tattoos or scarifications inscribe the community's cultural order and the individual's social status on the body.
- With writing and state formation, inscription moved from the body to parchment. The body, though intact, underwent cosmetic retouching to align with its image, balancing concealment and admission. However, body marks persist in marginal domains: tattoos of convicts and adventurers, actors' make-up, children's grimacing.
- Modern art's evolution can be seen as a return to the body as the original canvas, especially in Body Art and Transvestism.
Condition
A very good + copy in a very good dj.
Content
- Vorwort / Foreword
Der vorgeschichtliche Körper / The prehistoric body - Der wilde Körper / The wild body
- Das Spiegelstadium / The mirror stage
- Die Auferstehung des Fleisches / The resurrection of the flesh
- Quellenverzeichnis / List of sources
- Namenregister / Index of names
- Verzeichnis der Abbildungen / Index of illustrations
On Michel Thévoz
Michel Thévoz was born in Lausanne in 1936. A philosopher and art historian close to Dubuffet, he was curator of the Collection de l'Art Brut from its foundation in 1976 until 2001. He has published some thirty works, notably on the art of madmen, suicide, spiritualism, infamy, the reflection of mirrors, the pathology of the frame and the “Waldensian syndrome”.