THE BODY IN PIECES. THE FRAGMENT AS A METAPHOR OF MODERNITY

By the end of the eighteenth century a sense of anxiety and crisis began to preoccupy European writers and artists in their relationship to the heroic past, from antiquity on, which constituted the European intellectual tradition. Artists felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of past heroic accomplishment, its domineering influence, even of their own past accomplishment, and this was soon reflected in artistic representation. The partial image, the ‘crop’, fragmentation, the ruin and mutilation – all expressed nostalgia and grief for the loss of a vanished and unreclaimed totality, a utopian wholeness. The ‘crop’ constituted a distinctively modern view of the world, the essence of modernity itself.

In The Body in Pieces, Linda Nochlin traces these developments as they have been expressed in representations of the human figure fragmented, mutilated and fetishized, by looking at work produced by artists from Neo-classicism to Romanticism and modern art, from Fuseli to the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists and beyond.