Overview

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. 

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9780226745046

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Reviews

Focusing on a handful of artworks in this original, deeply researched, elegantly written book, Butterfield-Rosen weaves an intertextual and intermedial web around each. Going back and forth between the delightfully winding path of the text and the numerous images that accompany it, the reader slowly learns to see these artworks in a completely new light. This book is certain to appeal to humanists beyond the confines of art history. --Zeynep Celik Alexander, author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition is original, creative, erudite, soundly argued, and convincingly substantiated. It constitutes an important intervention in the history of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European art, offering a subtle linkage between aesthetic theory and socio-psychological conceptions of selfhood. --Juliet Bellow, author of Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde

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. --Zeynep Celik Alexander, author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition is original, creative, erudite, soundly argued, and convincingly substantiated. It constitutes an important intervention in the history of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European art, offering a subtle linkage between aesthetic theory and socio-psychological conceptions of selfhood. --Juliet Bellow, author of Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde

Author Information

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen is the associate director of the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts and New York City.

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