Making it Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now

A selection of key essays by one of the most influential voices in art history, including seven previously unpublished pieces. This illustrated, edited collection of essays brings together for the first time some of the pioneering art historian Linda Nochlin’s most important writings on modernism and modernity from across her six-decade career. Before the publication of her seminal tract on feminism in art, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Nochlin had already firmly established herself as a major practitioner of a politically sophisticated and class-conscious social art history, with her writings on modernism being transformative to the discipline. Nochlin embraced Charles Baudelaire’s conviction that modernity 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 18th century to the work of Robert Gober in the 21st, whatever she turned her analytic eye to was very much conceived as the art of the now - the art we need to look at to navigate the complexities and contradictions of the present.

Table of Contents:
How Linda Nochlin Made it Modern by Aruna D’Souza Revolutions in Art/History 1848: The Revolution in Art History Meyer Schapiro’s Modernism Courbet, David, and the Imaginative Afterlife of the French Revolution Bodies of Modernity Pissarro, Cézanne, and the Eternal Feminine Renoir’s Men: Constructing the Myth of the Natural Body Politics: Seurat’s Poseuses Camille Corot: The Nude without Qualities Abstracting the Body Bonnard’s Bathers The World According to Gober “Sex is so Abstract”: The Nudes of Andy Warhol Othering Art History Sex and the “Sepoy Mutiny”: The Intersections of Race and Gender in the Colonial Imaginary Learning from Black Male The Imaginary Orient Abstraction and Realism Kelly: Making Abstraction Anew The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law The New Realists Picasso’s Color: Schemes and Gambits Museums and Vision Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies The Museum as Bildungsroman: My Life in Art, Trash, and Fashion Matisse and its Other The Naked and the Dread: Reviewing the Modern Nude Genre and Form Impressionist Portraits and the Construction of Modern Identity Francis Bacon and the Fear of Narrative Academic Art and the Death of Narrative Camille Pissarro: The Unassuming Eye Death and Gender in Manet’s Still Lifes Art as / and Work The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913 Van Gogh, Renouard, and the Weaver’s Crisis in Lyons Seurat’s Grande Jatte: An Anti-Utopian Allegory The Cribleuses de blé: Courbet, Millet, Breton, Kollwitz, and the Image of the Working Woman