Linda Nochlin was Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Her many books include the 1972 classic Realism.
It is a pleasure to hear Nochlin thinking aloud even where she is
deliberately inconclusive. Particularly absorbing is her
examination of Trouville, a liminal dream-kingdom which in the
1860s rapidly became both Paris by the sea and a potentially
perilous vantagepoint from which the sublime vastness of the
Atlantic Ocean might be glimpsed. A sceptic could point out that
she reads a lot into Monet’s ambiguous use of perspective in his
Hotel des Roches Noires of 1870, but it is a rare pleasure to
encounter anyone thinking seriously about Monet at all. Similarly,
the motif of the bather (in the sense of bath-taker rather than
swimmer) provides a springboard for a highly original reading of
Pierre Bonnard, another artist often dismissed as a woolly-headed
sensualist… [Nochlin has a] knack for looking at canonical artists
from fresh perspectives.
*Times Literary Supplement*
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