Entries (RSS) Linda Nochlin - The Body in Pieces - The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity
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By the end of the eighteenth century a sense of anxiety and crisis began to preoccupy European writers and artists in their relationship to the heroic past, from antiquity on, which constituted the European intellectual tradition. Artists felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of past heroic accomplishments, its domineering influence, even of their own past accomplishment, and this was soon reflected in artistic representation. The partial image, the ‘crop’, fragmentation, the ruin and mutilation - all expressed nostalgia for the grief and loss of a vanished and unreclaimed totality, a utopian wholeness. The ‘crop’ constituted a distinctly modern view of the world, the essence of modernity itself. In The Body in Pieces, Linda Nochlin traces these developments as they have been expressed in representations of the human figure fragmented, mutilated and fetishized, by looking at work produced by artists from Neo-claccicism to Romanticism and modern art, from Fuseli to the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists and beyond. A leading critic and art-historian and pioneer in the field of feminist art history, Linda Nochlin is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her many books include Women, Art and Power and other Essays (1989), The Politics of Vision (1991) and Representing Women (1999). Price (ZA) R179.00 |
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