Inventing Modernity. Essays on Contemporary Art

“Inventing Modernity” is a collection of essays by art historian and honorary professor at New York University Linda Nochlin, featuring her seminal texts. The protagonists of these essays—artists and critics (Gustave Courbet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, Robert Gober, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Meyer Schapiro, and others)—are united under one cover by the approach to modernism that Nochlin adheres to. This is not a universal narrative embodied in specific forms but, following Charles Baudelaire's formula, the ability of the artist to be contemporary, that is, to exist in their time. Each section of the book addresses a specific sociocultural aspect and motif that resonates throughout many of the researcher's works: political revolution as a utopian possibility, corporeality, the ideology of race and colonialism, subjectivism in art.