BOOK REVIEW / 'Erotique violee',: 'Power and Beauty: Images of Women in Art' - eds Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot: Tauris Parke, 32 pounds

Man Ray's 'Erotique violee', 1933, a portrait of Meret Oppenheim, the surrealist Swiss artist, which plays with the ambiguities between technology, gender, standardisation and individual sexuality. From Power and Beauty: Images of Women in Art, eds Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Tauris Parke pounds 32), an analysis of representations of the female form (largely European, largely by men) from Cranach to Dali. An interesting collation of images, although the text is sometimes feeble and glib: whether madonnas or witches, such images have allegedly 'perpetuated the notion of a fundamental incapacity in women, surrendering, passive, dressed up for men's pleasure'.

(Photograph omitted)