Originally given as the 26th Walter Neurath memorial lectures, this small book is thought provoking treaties on modern art and the condition of modernity. Written by one of the leading experts on women's art, feminist art, Impressionism, and Post Impressionism, Linda Nochlin gives us a concise view on the breaking of the solidity that characterized European art and thought in previous generations. The text is accompanied by vivid black and white images.

[from the book's flap]

THE BODY IN PIECES: THE FRAGMENT AS A METAPHOR OF MODERNITY
LINDA NOCHLIN

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. The grandness of that intellectual tradition could no longer fit into the framework of the present, and artists felt over­ whelmed by the magnitude of past heroic accomplishment.

Beginning with artists such as Fuseli, this was soon reflected in artistic representation. The partial image, the “crop,” fragmentation, ruin and mutilation - all expressed nostalgia and grief for the loss of a vanished totality, a utopian wholeness. Often, such feelings were expressed in deliberate destructiveness and this became the new way of seeing: the notion of the modern. The “crop” constituted a distinctively modern view of the world, the essence of modernity itself.

The French Revolution was not only an historical event that instituted and canonized deliberate fragmentation, but also in some cases the reverse: Jacques-Louis David and other Neo-classical artists tried, at least allegorically and metaphorically, to repair the broken link with the perceived wholeness of the past.

In The Body in Pieces, Linda Nochlin traces these devel­opments as they have been expressed in representations of the human figure - fragmented, mutilated and fetishistic - by looking at work produced by artists from Neo-classicism and Romanticism to the Impressionists, the Post-Impres­ sionists, the Surrealists and beyond.

A leading critic and art-historian, and pioneer in the field of feminist art history, Linda Nochlin is Professor of Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her many books include Women, Art and Power and other essays and The Politics of Vision.

Please Note: This is the original hardback edition, not the later paperback.