Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition

Product Description
How artists at the turn of the twentieth century broke with traditional ways of posing the bodies of human figures to reflect modern understandings of human consciousness.\nWith this book, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen brings a new formal and conceptual rubric to the study of turn-of-the-century modernism, transforming our understanding of the era’s canonical works. Butterfield-Rosen analyzes a hitherto unexamined formal phenomenon in European art: how artists departed from conventions for posing the human figure that had long been standard. In the decades around 1900, artists working in different countries and across different media began to present human figures in strictly frontal, lateral, and dorsal postures. The effect, both archaic and modern, broke with the centuries-old tradition of rendering bodies in torsion, with poses designed to simulate the human being’s physical volume and capacity for autonomous thought and movement. This formal departure destabilized prevailing visual codes for signifying the existence of the inner life of the human subject.\nExploring major works by Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky— replete with new archival discoveries—
Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition combines intensive formal analysis with inquiries into the history of psychology and evolutionary biology. In doing so, it shows how modern understandings of human consciousness and the relation of mind to body were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses.
Review \n"Butterfield-Rosen's Seurat chapter should be mandatory reading for students of nineteenth-century art. . . . a breakthrough."
-- Alex Weintraub ―
Art in America\n"Butterfield-Rosen is an academic, and her prose is the densely rich stuff of academic art history. It is also insightful, illuminating, and philosophically robust... Butterfield-Rosen's impressive mastery over disparate bodies of knowledge and fastidious attention to the privileged place of art in reconceptualizing modern understandings of humanness will appeal to intellectually inclined readers."
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Booklist\n“Right at the helm of new writing about the twentieth-century body stands Butterfield-Rosen’s brilliant, precise, meticulous study of gestures and stances, dispositions, movements, and postures. In Seurat, Klimt, and Nijinsky, she identifies a veritable feedback between viewer and work, between modernism and the science and beliefs it drew on and reshaped. This book is a dazzling achievement whose scope and importance reach far beyond art history.”
-- Stefanos Geroulanos, coauthor of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe\n“Butterfield-Rosen’s strategy of examining the disposition of poses in order to contribute to histories of the self is nothing short of a brilliant, and her discussion of the trafficking between abstract concepts and concrete practices is rigorous, original, and convincing. This is an area in which the discipline of art history is in a privileged position to contribute to a broader history of ideas, and she makes skillful use of the weapons in an art historian’s arsenal, including formal and iconographic analysis.” \n-- Zeynep Çelik Alexander, author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design\n“Butterfield-Rosen provides an unprecedented and compelling exploration of how the representation of the human body was reimagined and reconceptualized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European art. A lucid and exhilarating book.”
-- Jonathan Crary, author of Suspensions of Perception\n“What is most distinctive about Butterfield-Rosen’s important study is the scope of its ambition, joining fascinating close readings with a genealogy of the very foundations of art historical analysis. It turns to the basic claim of European art history that it is of deep cultural significance how the human body is represented. While demonstratin