Figures of Thought: Poseuses and the Controversy of the Grande Jatte -- Beethoven's Farewell: The Creative Genius "in the Claws of the Secession" -- The Mise-en-scène of Dreams: L'Après-midi d'un faune.

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. With 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. Exploring 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.

"An examination of the paintings Monet made en plein air alongside his artist colleagues, and the meaning and impact that this practice had on his fellow impressionists"--

Pierrot, a theatrical stock character known by his distinctive costume of loose white tunic and trousers, is a ubiquitous figure in French art and culture. This richly illustrated book offers an account of Pierrot’s recurrence in painting, printmaking, photography and film, tracing this distinctive type from the art of Antoine Watteau to the cinema of Occupied France. As a visual type, Pierrot thrives at the intersection of theatrical and marketplace practices. From Watteau’s Pierrot (c. 1720) and Édouard Manet’s The Old Musician (1862) to Nadar and Adrien Tournachon’s Pierrot the Photographer (1855) and the landmark film Children of Paradise (1945), Pierrot has given artists a medium through which to explore the marketplace as a form for both social life and creative practice. Simultaneously a human figure and a theatrical mask, Pierrot elicits artistic reflection on the representation of personality in the marketplace.

Nijinsky's Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances is the first in-depth literary study of Vaslav Nijinsky's life-writing. Through close textual analysis combined with intellectual biography and literary theory, Nicole Svobodny puts the spotlight on Nijinsky as reader. She elucidates Nijinsky's riffs on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, equating these intertextual connections to "marking" a dance, whereby the dancer uses a reduction strategy situated between thinking and doing. By exploring the intersections of bodily movement with verbal language, this book addresses broader questions of how we sense and make sense of our worlds. Drawing on archival research, along with studies in psychology and philosophy, Svobodny emphasizes the modernist contexts from which the dancer-writer emerged at the end of World War I. Nijinsky began his life-writing—a book he titled Feeling—the day after the Paris Peace Conference opened, and the same day he performed his "last dance." Nijinsky's Feeling Mind begins with the dancer on stage and concludes as he invites readers into his private room. Illuminating the structure, plot, medium, and mode of Feeling, this study calls on readers to grapple with a paradox: the more the dancer insists on his writing as a live performance, the more he points to the material object that entombs it.

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen examines two fictional artists by James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow respectively. It brings together Joyce and Lawrence in their common concern with the modern artist and modern art. Taking the two major artist characters of the two works, this study establishes that Joyce and Lawrence, irrespective of major background, educational, artistic and philosophical differences, converge on the person, character, artistic vision and working methods of the modern artist. This study makes little effort at looking at these fictional artists as alter egos of Joyce and Lawrence; it treats them as modern artists in their own right. It attempts to give them somewhat a critical “right of existence” of their own.

In Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation—an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.