Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Acting Director of the Williams Graduate Program in Art History, will speak about her new book Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition (University of Chicago Press, 2021). The book examines how modern artists departed from the conventions of posing the human figure, thus destabilizing the prevailing visual codes for signifying the existence of the inner life of the human subject. Combining formal analysis with inquiries into psychology and evolutionary biology, the talk will focus on major works by George Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and Vaslav Nijinsky.