Die Schönheit, Mit Bildern geschmückte Zeitschrift für Kunst und Leben, Einundzwanzigster Jahrgang (Vol. XXI) de Giesecke, Richard A. (Herausgegeben, Publisher) - 1925

Dresden: Verlag der Schönheit, 1925. Very Good condition. Minor soil and some small brown speckles (light foxing) on the cover. SEE PHOTOS. Square and tight. Hinges are perfect. Corner of rear free endpaper has been torn away. Previous owner's name on the front pastedown endpaper. Hardcover. 7" wide by 9.75" tall (18 cm x 25 cm). Illustrated with hundreds of photos, paintings, drawings, silhouettes and sculptures -- mostly of naked young girls and boys, women and men. A few plates in full-color (see PHOTOS for some examples). Text in German. Bound in the original linen with an attractive art nouveau design in colors (gold, blue, and black) on the front cover. According to Karl Toepfer, "Publications of the Verlag der Schönheit… perhaps the largest of all Nacktkultur publishing houses, concentrated on linking nudism with a modern aestheticism, with an art of bodily display and expression… [P]erhaps its most significant publication was the journal DIE SCHÖNHEIT, founded in 1903 by Karl Vanselow (1876-1959), the husband of Olga Desmond. From its beginning, DIE SCHÖNHEIT presented nudism as an extension of modernism in the visual and performing arts. In prewar issues of the journal, which Vanselow edited until 1914, symbolist and Jugendstil paintings of nude bodies, particularly the immensely popular illustrations of mythic primeval Nordic nudity by Fidus, appeared almost as models for dramatic poses assumed by nude bodies of both sexes in photographs. The journal pioneered in the publication of photographs that depicted men and women nude together… After the war, however, DIE SCHÖNHEIT's editors placed much more confidence in photography's ability to establish its own themes. Images from film, theatre, and especially dance filled many of the journal's pages, along with photographs devised by artists quite conscious of modernist currents in that medium. DIE SCHÖNHEIT published photographs by Lotte Herrlich and Magnus Weidemann, but it consistently perceived the power of nude modern dance to intensify the aesthetic significance of nudism and the artistic exposure of the body… Other issues celebrated the solo nude dances of Claire Bauroff or of the female members of the Loheland, Menzler, or Hagemann schools..." [quote from EMPIRE OF ECSTASY : NUDITY AND MOVEMENT IN GERMAN BODY CULTURE, 1910-1935].. First Edition (1. Auflage). Hardcover. Very Good condition. 596pp. + viii (index).