The Body in Pieces

The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity

By Linda Nochlin

1995

First Published

3.74

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1H57M

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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 a heroic past. The grandness of that history no longer fit into the framework of the present, and artists felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of past heroic accomplishment. This was soon reflected in artistic representation, from Fuseli on. The partial image, the "crop," fragmentation, ruin, and mutilationall expressed grief and nostalgia for the loss of a vanished totality, a utopian wholeness. Often such feelings were expressed in deliberate destructiveness, which became the new way of the notion of the modern. In The Body in Pieces, the noted critic and art historian Linda Nochlin traces these developments by looking at work produced by artists from Neoclassicism and Romanticism to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, and beyond. 59 illustrations.

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Author

Linda Nochlin

Author · 14 books

Linda Nochlin was an American art historian, university professor and writer. A prominent feminist art historian, she was best known as a proponent of the question "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", in an essay of the same name published in 1971. Her critical attention has been drawn to investigating the ways in which gender affects the creation and apprehension of art, as evidenced by her 1994 essay "Issues of Gender in Cassatt and Eakins". Besides feminist art history, she was best known for her work on Realism, specifically on Gustave Courbet. Complementing her career as an academic, she served on the Art Advisory Council of the International Foundation for Art Research. In 2006, Nochlin received a Visionary Woman Award] from Moore College of Art & Design.