The Louvre Nude Paintings

• The ideal present for art lovers! Nudity, sensuality and sexuality in the Louvre paintings translated into a fantastic and surprising photographic concept
• The alluring design of the book stems from the wish to create a box suggestive of some artistic secret; covered in black silk, with a ribbon recalling lingerie, it reveals on opening a silky burgundy interior, reminiscent of a boudoir, in which the book is softly resting
• Volume 1 of the Le Louvre Nu/The Louvre Nude series, dealing with the naked body in paintings
• This book won the Golden Pixel Award, the prestigious Austrian award for groundbreaking print products, in the category coffee-table books

The idea for this book was born in the course of a visit through the Louvre, when Catherine Belanger ventured to call the Louvre 'the biggest brothel in the world'. Jointly with author Jean Galard and photographer Lois Lammerhuber, she selected key paintings spanning five centuries to illustrate the fascinating art of depicting nudity and the artists' struggle for acceptance of the nude in art and society. Lois Lammerhuber detaches the nudity, sensuality and sexuality of the paintings from the context of their artistic intention, conceiving them as 'material' in a fictional photography studio and recreating them in his photographs. He resorts to these 'models' to translate them into the language of fashion, nude and advertising photography, reading their body language and interaction in a way reminiscent of artists like Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Horst P. Horst or Herb Ritts - sensual and unexpected.