ABSTRACT
During the last year of Joanna Frueh's life, she struggled with what might be left to say – and more specifically what might be left for her to say – about the Nude. As an art historian and cultural commentator, Joanna had earlier written on the topic yet now there was no longer an inner art critic framing her way of thinking, though there persisted a profound feminist and art historian, performance artist, and, most uniquely for the purposes of understanding her thoughts in this ‘Soliloquy’, her own personal experience as a Nude over the decades, notably in photographs taken by Russell Dudley (her second husband), Frances Murray Jones (with whom she'd shared over three decades in their artist/muse relationship), and Jill O'Bryan. More often than not, Joanna was an artist as well as the subject/muse/Nude in the photographs, as she shared in the creativity of the settings, costumes, poses and, of course, the countenance she consciously presented of her own worldview, through her own body's contours, gestures, and high fashion. Over the decades of the evolution of Joanna's embodied scholarly interests, which she often expressed in reflexive memoirs, images of her body, and performances, she focused on and developed three themes, which acted as filters for her observations as well as her inspired character-building practices in life: pleasure, beauty and the concept she called ‘soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body’.
