The Painted Body

New York: Skira / Rizzoli, 1984. Hardcover. VG/VG. Burgundy cloth boards with orange lettering on front cover and spine, black dust jacket with color illustration and white lettering, 138 pp, profusely illustrated in color. "Man is distinguished from animals by a self-retouching impulse, an urge to remake his own body. This book surveys and illustrates the different kinds of body decoration, such as painting, make-up, tattooing, and scarring, which have been practiced all over the world from prehistoric times to the Body Art and cosmetics of today. The social implications are spelled out in detail. The conclusion of this unusual study, based on a wealth of evidence from all six continents, is both aesthetic and anthropological. There is no body but the painted or decorated body, because it has always benn the focus of an imaginative revision and renewal, and still is; and there is no painting but body painting, in the sense that our whole system of pictorial representation is haunted by the graphic impulse to mark the human flesh. So that with body painting we reach back to the origins of imaginative creation and track it down to its initial and most intimate nerve center; the skin of living men and women." -Book jacket.