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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: I have recently joined a figurative drawing class and find this book very encouraging and insightful. We live in a world that instant gratification becomes the key to everything we do. Drawing teaches us to slow down and see things the way they are. As a beginner for drawing, this book answers many questions about figurative drawing: why we draw, why we like to draw nude and how drawing can help me see many things I miss out in this fast paced world.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in drawing and art in general.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent coverage of art modelling
Review: In this age of photography, there is still a healthy subculture of models and artists who hold drawing the nude figure in the highest regard. Peter has numerous recent interviews with both models and artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. His book covers the experience of the art model particularly well. If you have ever wondered what it is like to get up in front of a bunch a strangers and model in the nude, there are good insights here. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent coverage of art modelling
Review: In this age of photography, there is still a healthy subculture of models and artists who hold drawing the nude figure in the highest regard. Peter has numerous recent interviews with both models and artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. His book covers the experience of the art model particularly well. If you have ever wondered what it is like to get up in front of a bunch a strangers and model in the nude, there are good insights here. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Join the Group
Review: Steinhart's subtitle should be expanded to "why we draw the human figure," which would explain his title and better account for the content of the book, three-fourths of which concerns figure-drawing groups. The remaining chapters are independent essays on learning to draw, field sketching, how composing a picture differs from representational drawing, the impossibility of drawing for a living, and a final unrewarding speculation on artistic sensibility.
The heart of the book is a deeply felt and insightful set of reflections on the author's long experience with figure-drawing groups in the San Francisco Bay area. This includes a useful sketch of the history of nude modelling, and exemplary attention to the model as an equal partner in the figure-drawing experience.
As someone who has spent the better part of the last ten years in a weekly group of the sort Steinhart is describing, I can vouch for the accuracy of his account. The book has many wise things to say about the manifold challenges of depicting the human form on a sheet of paper. Our experiences do not always coincide. For Steinhart, figure drawing both is (Chapter 11) and isn't (Chapter 2) about sex, in a dance of desire that is more erotically charged than my own history of learning to see the human form. I didn't recognize his view "that artists tend to draw themselves in the model's pose," and to inflict their own physical needs on the forms they depict (p. 144). His use of art history to reinforce his arguments is highly selective.
However, if you want to learn what it would be like to participate in a figure-drawing group, or to compare your own experience with that of a stimulating and knowledgeable companion, you will find this volume hard to put down.
Rating:
Summary: A Profile of Those Who Draw
Review: The Undressed Art is a solid book for those interested in the why's drawing. It profiles both the people who draw and those who are drawn, making them two sides of the same picture. Even though I found it fascinating, I wish he had included more anecdotes. This book comes alive when the author narrates someone in the act of drawing, or visits a drawing group and includes scraps of dialogue, or decribes his wife hanging one of his own drawings on the refrigerator. The best chapter covered models and modeling, maybe because the focus was so much on people. Steinhart is so good at writing about people and their actions (maybe because he was trained as a naturalist?) that I longed for more of it. Good book, worthwhile.
Rating: 
Summary: complete trash
Review: This book was a waste of time to read. the guy just rambled on about how drawing is so important to people and how people don't respect accurate drawings. it's full of quotes by people who draw realistically and completely trash abstract art, cubists and abstract expressionists in particular. it has a bit of art history how the camera made drawing useless to many people, a huge part of the book is about models and modelling and how they are so important. mostly filler.
this book is sort of newage-ish and i felt like this guy was trying to set the world straight by explaining how meaningful figure drawing is. that is the general tone of the book. at points, the book gets ridiculous. at one time the guy says "humans are the only animal to draw." and then tries to back that claim up by trying to negate the people who got elephants to draw. (he does not succeed.)
in the chapter one, the author says: "one of the major current debates among artists is over whether accomplished draftsmen like ingres or durer or michelangelo or caravaggio used optical devices to trace projected images. some leading exponents of the theory are, perhaps not coincidentally, abstractionists whose own drafting skills are limited." what's funny about this statement is that the drawing on the front page is by david hockney, one of the "leading exponents" of that same theory. in fact, hockney has a book out called "secret knowledge" in which he tries to prove (unsuccessfully) that old masters used a camera obscura to draw as accurately as they did!!! even more confounding is that later in the book he himself will claim that leonardo used an optical device to aid him in drawing!
do yrself a favor, and don't buy this book. buy a sketchpad and some pencils with that cash to find out what drawing is for yrself. you will get a lot further than this guy, whose self-portrait in the back inside cover is a shame for someone who has been drawing as long as he says
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