Greek mythology tells the story of Actaeon, who surprised Artemis while she was bathing. As punishment for seeing her in the nude, the goddess transformed him into a stag, and the hapless hunter was torn to pieces by his own hounds.
After Ovid included the tale of Diana and Actaeon in his Metamorphosis, the subject was treated in a variety of inventive ways in works from the Renaissance to Classicism. Starting here, this volume goes on to span a broad range, with nearly three hundred color illustrations of art from antiquity to the present day. In general, they all deal with the topic of desire and the nexus of gender and sexuality, including beauty, truth, ecstasy, and death. The works selected testify to the eye’s ambivalent fascination with the nude body—that is, with both the erotic and eroticizing attraction of the libidinous view of the exposed, beautiful body, and the consternation that can be triggered in a viewer by the sight of shamelessly exposed genitals.
 
Exhibition schedule: museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf, October 25, 2008–February 15, 2009
 
Artists (selection):
Marina Abramovic, Nobuyoshi Araki, Francis Bacon, Pierre Bonnard, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Cézanne, Judy Chicago, Lucas Cranach the Younger, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Otto Dix, Marlene Dumas, VALIE EXPORT, Eric Fischl, Artemisia Gentileschi, Ferdinand Hodler, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gustav Klimt, Pierre Klossowski, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pablo Picasso, Nicolas Poussin, Rembrandt, Gerhard Richter, Auguste Rodin, Peter Paul Rubens, Thomas Ruff, Egon Schiele, Cindy Sherman, Titian, Veronese, Andy Warhol, Francesca Woodman
 
 Exhibition schedule: museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf, October 25, 2008–February 15, 2009