Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, "Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

The University of Chicago Press Podcast · Apr 21, 2022 · 1h 2m

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…