Feeding The Eye: Essays

A new book on the nourishing powers of visual art-film, painting, dance, and clothes.

Since the advent of cinema more than a hundred years ago, visual art has tended to be perceived as if it were in motion, and as the century ends, we notice that artists create less often in fresco or carved stone and more on film or tape, on the dance stage or in the ever changing, ever moving medium of clothes. In this remarkable collection of writing that ranges over art of the past century with unusual depth of historical insight, the noted critic Anne Hollander explores these rich, diverse visual treasures and the underlying themes that connect them.

Feeding the Eye opens with a wonderful array of "modern legends"-essays on celebrated figures from Balanchine to Cartier-Bresson, from Kafka to Chanel, from Isadora Duncan to Simone de Beauvoir-who have helped to define our world. Other sections of the book are devoted to the arts of dressing or decorating the human body-Hollander is particularly celebrated for her bold and original interpretations of this theme-and to classic, often misinterpreted artists of the cinema: Chaplin and Garbo, among others. Hollander concludes by asking us to consider how great paintings of the past continue, in many different ways and contexts, to startle us with "the tonic effect of acute optical experience, which is the whole world's natural birthright."