Description
Book SynopsisLinda Nochlin explores the contradictions and dissonances that mark experience as well as art. Her book confronts the issues posed in representations of the body in the art of impressionists, modern masters, and contemporary realists and post-modernists.
Trade ReviewIt is a pleasure to hear Nochlin thinking aloud even where she is deliberately inconclusive. Particularly absorbing is her examination of Trouville, a liminal dream-kingdom which in the 1860s rapidly became both Paris by the sea and a potentially perilous vantagepoint from which the sublime vastness of the Atlantic Ocean might be glimpsed. A sceptic could point out that she reads a lot into Monet’s ambiguous use of perspective in his
Hotel des Roches Noires of 1870, but it is a rare pleasure to encounter anyone thinking seriously about Monet at all. Similarly, the motif of the bather (in the sense of bath-taker rather than swimmer) provides a springboard for a highly original reading of Pierre Bonnard, another artist often dismissed as a woolly-headed sensualist… [Nochlin has a] knack for looking at canonical artists from fresh perspectives. -- Keith Miller * Times Literary Supplement *
