Description

Around 1900, the human figure was transformed in European art: bodies increasingly assumed expressionless, frontal postures. The art historian Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen explores this development in her book Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition and attributes the new poses to a fundamentally changed conception of the human. She develops her theses on this historical transformation with reference to three works created around the turn of the century. As art historian Beate Söntgen argues in her review, it is the comprehensive theoretical framework of Butterfield-Rosen’s study in particular that renders it relevant to the contemporary field of art history and beyond.