Stunning. Simply stunning.

[ambitious_wench]

Warning: This is a very large image, and contains nudity. It is stunning in its beauty, however, and I believe that my readers (most of them, anyway,) will appreciate it as a thing of gentle, delicate beauty)

Copies falling into the hands of utter laymen should not be misunderstood -- we beg you to realize that in the realm of art the undraped body is an essential -- that it is the basis of practically all design and all decoration. The young ladies who have posed for these pictures have done so in sincerity and as an aid to artistic development -- they are entitled to respect. Even if you are not one of the inner circle devoting their whole lives to art, try to look at these pictures only in the light of understanding and appreciation of the beauty given to the world by its Creator. This magazine was founded on a basis of cleanliness and seeking after truth -- its editors believe that in the perfect human body is the hope of a greater America for the future, a pure, clean womanhood and masculine minds of understanding and sympathy." (quoted from: Edwin Bower Hesser's Arts Monthly Pictorial, September 1926)

Comments

[djfiggy.livejournal.com]

Interesting.
But, how would we go about defining what a perfect body is? What criteria does one look for?

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

Perfect body?

*snerk*

I find that very hard to define. I've come to appreciate all sorts of body type--and I think that the only common denominator is for females is a classic hourglass shape. Size isn't that important, really. I've seen lovely, generous bodies with delicious curves that I found enchanting.

What does it for me in that photo is the grace and tenderness between the three of them, and the composition is truly remarkable. The eye travels down from the standing woman on the right, to the seated woman on the left. And then the eye travels from her face back up the scale again, and I wonder what the woman on the right is looking at.

Here in the US, we tend to classify beauty as youthful in appearance. If any of those women have given birth, they've worked very hard to hide the fact.

Which is sad, really, because women who have lived a while and "been there, done that" exude a different sort of attractiveness, I think.

Women with generous purportions are overlooked--"No fat chicks" mentality. I find that horribly negating to abundant women.

How's that for a side-stepping answer?

Auntie Ambitious.

[djfiggy.livejournal.com]

Perfect, you know I was just trying to be difficult :)

[nostos.livejournal.com]

I like this, very very much. In its imperfection, because contrary to the above poster I don't feel that this person is searching for the perfect, the human (female and male) body is so very beautiful, so very intense (testoterone fueled, I know it, or at least humanly, DNA fuelled, if that makes any sense).

[nostos.livejournal.com]

even if he claims implicitly that he searches for beauty

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

I think in all sincerety, he is. Remember, though, that we all react to the naked human form differently. Oddly, I don't find this image erotic--not at all. But it does evoke a deep response to the tenderness in it. And that could easily be called attraction, I think.

[nostos.livejournal.com]

'Oddly, I don't find this image erotic' neither do I, and I agree with you; a definite sense of tenderness. Eroticism isn't what I meant by testosterone fuelled - rather, just that humans tend to perceive the human body as beautiful, or can see beauty in anything, naturally, when there isn't any natural (heavy, heavy word; nature includes, I think, I hope, not-DNA) beauty there. I mean to say: that we bring beauty to things because it's in our natural hard wiring (I hate using technological terms for people, but at the moment I can't think of anything else) to do so.

Anyway all of this is just the academic bs that I bring to the image, when the image is all that matters. I have to agree, it's definitely a tender, delicate one.

[texas-tiger.livejournal.com]

Beautiful.