Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition

"Human Dispositions explores new conventions for posing and positioning human figures in pictorial, architectural, and theatrical space in Europe in the decades leading up to WWI. The author contends that questions of "disposition" are vital to understanding a key transitional period in the history of Western modernism. Around 1885, avant-garde artists began to present human figures in strictly frontal, lateral, and dorsal postures. The effect, compared with standard, classical representations of the human figure, was both archaic and advanced, in keeping with contemporary theories of evolution and human psychology. These new ways of posing figures was how modern artists challenged long, deeply held assumptions about human consciousness and the human being's privileged status in the world. Featured are three major works: the painting Poseuses (1886-1888) by the French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat; the Beethovenfries mural (1902) by the Austrian Secessionist painter Gustav Klimt; and the ballet L'Après-midi d'un faune (1912) by the Russian dancer and Ballets Russes choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. Each work created an uproar when first presented. They were meant to be manifestos for the new values of a modern world and to overturn the superior, cerebral, moral status of the human subject"--