Germaine Greer : The Beautiful Boy

THE BEAUTIFUL BOY by noted writer, critic and feminist Germaine Greer is one of the more refreshing art volumes to grace the shelves in the past decade. Yes, this is a lavishly illustrated portfolio of paintings, drawings and photographs of boys before they become men, but the point of departure here is that Greer is examining a perception process among women paralleling the historic depiction of the beautiful boy. This, then, is an historic survey, but it is also a psychosocial treatise written with careful attention to detail, wry humor, and joyful discovery. This book deserves a very wide audience. Setting the mood for her lovely thought process, Greer opens her introduction with these words: "Part of the purpose of this book is to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure. The nineteenth century denied women any active interest in sex, which was only to be found in degenerate types. By the end of the twentieth century female appetite for sexual stimulus had been recognized and platoons of male strippers mobilized to take commercial advantage of it. That health appetite should now be refined by taste. If we but lift our eyes to the beautiful images of young men that stand all about us, there is a world of complex and civilized pleasure to be had. Delight in the boy can only be sharpened by the pathos and irony of his condition of becomingness. What we see in life is gone before we have had time to appreciate it. It is only in art that the compelling evanescent charm of boyhood can be preserved against the ravages of time." Greer then proceeds to present her illustrated point of view of the prominence of the boy nude as the epitome of beauty, drawn from life long before the idealized female nudes were depicted from artists' imagination. She studies the sculpture and paintings of the Greeks, the paintings of the Baroque and Renaissance, the Romantic period, and the Contemporary art which now includes photography. In each period she manages to suffuse the images with her inimitable thoughts of the slow development of Feminisim in a way that every reader at last can understand. No preaching here, just a gradual unveiling of opportunites for women (and men alike) to really SEE the male body in that transient period between chubby child and muscular postpubescent man. She summarizes: "If, as I have argued, art is fundamentally narcissitic and elegiac, the female artist could only celebrate herself when young by painting and photographing younger women......When the body a woman artist is contemplating is so obviously not and never hers, because it is male, her approach is necessarily conflicted, even confrontational. Simple sensuality is able to function as a medium through which to see and celebrate the child but not, it seems, the man. The boy is the forgotten middle term. The boy Eros would bring the sexes to a reconciliation, if we would only acknowledge him." Couple these words of wisdom with first class color reproduction and printing of art both familiar and unfamiliar and we have a book that should appeal to the entire art loving community - feminists, gay men, scholars, and students at all stages in creating art. THE BEAYTIFUL BOY is a beautiful book!

The book is well-crafted, with strong character development and an authentic voice. The pacing keeps readers invested, and the prose flows smoothly, making it a satisfying read. It has received positive feedback for its honest portrayal of personal growth and emotional depth.

Fantastic pictures of handsome boys. A great piece of photographic pictures and well documented

The pictures are beautiful, for sure, yet the text is as wonderful.

I was expecting a book on Art History - something along the lines of traditions of representation, changing concepts of beauty, in different periods of history - the kind of study that's already been done a million times on women. And there is a little of that. However, the bulk of the book is a disturbing psuedo-feminist essay that I found beyond disgusting. I avoided writing this review for weeks because I would start rehearsing this long-winded take-down of how vile this essay was and just be like, "No, no... it doesn't need a rebuttal... do NOT obsess over this..." But it still really bugs me, so I'll just give it a quick little summary. Imagine the most insane, sadistic, dehumanizing speeches in some of De Sade's ugliest books (the mother in Philosophy of the Bedroom, for example) - and now put those speeches in the mouth of a women who means them most sincerely, thinks she's being clever, and honestly believes that speaking in this incredibly dehumanizing and cruel way about men and boys is somehow empowering to women. To call her view of males miandrist, hostile, degrading, cruel, dehumanizing... those are the words excessively nice people - Amy Grant and Florence Henderson types - would come up with if you asked them to review it. A truly honest review would use words like, dementia, psychosis, delusion. In short: It's the King in Yellow of sex essays - It's a deeply disturbing book and you'll be better off NOT reading it. As for the Art book I thought I was getting - as other people said, the paintings are very small, low res and difficult to see. In America, if a painting is in the public domain, you can just scan it right out of a library book without paying to license an image from a professional archive. I'm pretty sure that's what they did, and they just kept the photos really small to try to cover up the fact that they didn't pay for them. There WAS a tiny bit of what I was looking for - for example, discussions of the various representations of characters like Cupid or Hercules at various times in history - conventions and changes in conventions over time. There WAS a bit of that, and that was what I wanted. But it was very disorganized. Things were totally out of order chronologically - painters weren't always credited and years weren't always given. Still, there was a LITTLE bit of good stuff there, but it was mixed right in with the crazy. The BEST thing you can say for this book is that it will give you leads for artists and traditions to look up in better books. One other thing - the word "boy" is applied bizarrely and liberally. Basically anybody under the age of 35 is considered a boy. It looked like the book meant boy to mean teen to early twenties - you know, young male. But it's just anybody male who vaguely qualifies as "young."

kinda like a history of art. there is not much real nude pix most of it is paintings. showing you the art through the years.

Germaine Greer does it again, and disappoints us once more with her bitterly distorted interpretation of the common place and obvious while presenting herself as the discoverer of something new and interesting. While at once extolling the beauty of growing boys she at once reveals her resentment at the reality of the adult male body, oddly dismissive of the fact that those boys will be such men in very short order indeed. We cannot remain puerile to suit embittered women unable to hold a sensible place in adult society. Trying to maintain their beauty as an ideal is doing boys no justice whatsoever. More work on their transition into manhood would have given this work some value beyond its shallow, superficial, low-end coffee-table presentation.

Terrific book. For me it's about the perception of beauty, the yet un-empowered nude male, necessarily young, or it wouldn't be beauty. Thank you for this great book.