Body Language: “Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition”

On the first page of Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen explains that her project was “sparked by a simple formal observation: in European art in the decades before 1900, the body language in depictions of the human figure changed.” By “simple,” Butterfield-Rosen means that these changes would be perceptible to anyone strolling through a chronologically sequenced gallery of nineteenth-century art. Painters working in the earlier de