Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now
A selection of key essays on art from the nineteenth century to the present day by one of the most influential voices in art history.

This illustrated collection of essays brings together some of art historian Linda Nochlin’s most important writings on modernism and modernity from across her six-decade career. Before the publication of her seminal essay on feminism in art, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” she had already firmly established herself as a major practitioner of a politically sophisticated and class-conscious social art history. Nochlin was part of an important cohort of scholars writing on modernity, determined to rethink the narratives of the subject under the pressure of contemporary events such as student uprisings, the women’s liberation movement, and the Vietnam War, with the help of politically engaged literary criticism that was emerging at the same time.

Nochlin embraced Charles Baudelaire’s conviction that modernity is meant to be of one’s time—and that the role of an art historian was to understand the art of the past not only in its own historical context but according to the urgencies of the contemporary world. From academic debates about the nude in the eighteenth century to the work of Robert Gober in the twenty-first, whatever she turned her analytic eye to was conceived as the art of the now. Including seven previously unpublished pieces, this collection highlights the breadth and diversity of Nochlin’s output across the decades, including discussions on colonialism, fashion, and sex.

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Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now
A selection of key essays on art from the nineteenth century to the present day by one of the most influential voices in art history.

This illustrated collection of essays brings together some of art historian Linda Nochlin’s most important writings on modernism and modernity from across her six-decade career. Before the publication of her seminal essay on feminism in art, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” she had already firmly established herself as a major practitioner of a politically sophisticated and class-conscious social art history. Nochlin was part of an important cohort of scholars writing on modernity, determined to rethink the narratives of the subject under the pressure of contemporary events such as student uprisings, the women’s liberation movement, and the Vietnam War, with the help of politically engaged literary criticism that was emerging at the same time.

Nochlin embraced Charles Baudelaire’s conviction that modernity is meant to be of one’s time—and that the role of an art historian was to understand the art of the past not only in its own historical context but according to the urgencies of the contemporary world. From academic debates about the nude in the eighteenth century to the work of Robert Gober in the twenty-first, whatever she turned her analytic eye to was conceived as the art of the now. Including seven previously unpublished pieces, this collection highlights the breadth and diversity of Nochlin’s output across the decades, including discussions on colonialism, fashion, and sex.

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Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now

Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now

Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now

Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now

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Overview

A selection of key essays on art from the nineteenth century to the present day by one of the most influential voices in art history.

This illustrated collection of essays brings together some of art historian Linda Nochlin’s most important writings on modernism and modernity from across her six-decade career. Before the publication of her seminal essay on feminism in art, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” she had already firmly established herself as a major practitioner of a politically sophisticated and class-conscious social art history. Nochlin was part of an important cohort of scholars writing on modernity, determined to rethink the narratives of the subject under the pressure of contemporary events such as student uprisings, the women’s liberation movement, and the Vietnam War, with the help of politically engaged literary criticism that was emerging at the same time.

Nochlin embraced Charles Baudelaire’s conviction that modernity is meant to be of one’s time—and that the role of an art historian was to understand the art of the past not only in its own historical context but according to the urgencies of the contemporary world. From academic debates about the nude in the eighteenth century to the work of Robert Gober in the twenty-first, whatever she turned her analytic eye to was conceived as the art of the now. Including seven previously unpublished pieces, this collection highlights the breadth and diversity of Nochlin’s output across the decades, including discussions on colonialism, fashion, and sex.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780500293706
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Publication date: 03/08/2022
Pages: 448
Product dimensions: 7.10(w) x 9.60(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Linda Nochlin was the Lila Acheson Wallace professor of modern art emerita at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Her publications include The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity; Women, Art and Power and Other Essays; The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society; Courbet; Misère: The Visual Representation of Misery in the 19th Century; and Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader. Her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” is considered one of the most in influential texts in modern art history.

Aruna D’Souza is an editor, writer, and curator. Her book Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7

How Linda Nochlin Made it Modern Aruna D'Souza 8

Revolutions in Art and History

1 1848: The Revolution in Art History 18

2 Meyer Schapiro's Modernism 29

3 Courbet, David, and the Imaginative Afterlife of the French Revolution 36

Bodies of Modernity

4 Pissarro, Cézanne, and the Eternal Feminine 47

5 Renoir's Men: Constructing the Myth of the Natural 60

6 Body Politics: Seurat's Poseuses 67

7 Camille Corot: The Nude without Qualities 81

Abstracting the Body

8 Bonnard's Bathers 90

9 The World According to Gober 103

10 "Sex is so Abstract": The Nudes of Andy Warhol 115

Othering Art History

11 Sex and the "Sepoy Mutiny": The Intersection of Race and Gender in the Colonial Imaginary 125

12 Learning from Black Male 134

13 The Imaginary Orient 140

Abstraction and Realism

14 Kelly: Making Abstraction Anew 160

15 The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law 175

16 The New Realists 199

17 Picasso's Color: Schemes and Gambits 207

Museums and Vision

18 Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies 239

19 The Museum as Bildungsroman: My Life in Art, Trash, and Fashion 261

20 Matisse and its Other 273

21 The Naked and the Dread: Reviewing the Modern Nude 286

Genre and Form

22 Impressionist Portraits and the Construction of Modern Identity 296

23 Francis Bacon and the Fear of Narrative 325

24 Academic Art and the Death of Narrative 332

25 Camille Pissarro: The Unassuming Eye 346

26 Death and Gender in Manet's Still Lifes 357

Art as/and Work

27 The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913 368

28 Van Gogh, Renouard, and the Weavers' Crisis in Lyons 377

20 Seurat's Grande Jatte: An Anti-Utopian Allegory 396

30 The Cribleuses de He: Courbet, Millet, Breton, Kollwitz, and the Image of the Working Woman 415

Further Reading 438

Picture Credits 440

Text Sources and Credits 442

Index 444

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