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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 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."
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 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."
Hardcover
First published October 7, 1999
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About the author
Anne Hollander
16 books21 followersAnne Helen Loesser Hollander was an American historian whose original work provided new insights into the history of fashion and costume and their relation to the history of art. She published numerous books on the history of fashion, modernity, and the body including Seeing Through Clothes and Sex and Suits.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 24, 2020
Hollander is one of my favorite cultural critics. Everything she writes is frothing with insight, and so much charming camp. It's not so much what she says, as it is how she says it. Fashion writers who write with style are my favorite. It feels cliche to say, but this collection of essays was so ahead of its times. I wish that everyone had Hollander's insight about clothing and fashion. What a more beautiful world we would live in.
It feels wrong to paraphrase her ideas because they're so wonderfully presented so I'll just share some of my favorite quotes:
On the purpose of clothing: “Clothes exist to remind the self of the body, and to create a worldly body for each person” (12)
What fashion accomplishes: “Fashion keeps present to the public eye the fact that normative human arrangements are always under unexpected threat from unstable human impulses, sexual expression being the main one appropriate for an art using bodies as its theme” (106)
On androgyny in fashion: Androgyny harkens to a repressed past: “Much of our present female mannishness and feminized manhood is a nostalgic reference to the effects that were fashionable for men and women in those pioneering days, rather than a new revolutionary expression of the same authentic kind” (Hollander 2000:150)
Women’s fashion as metaphor: “Female dress has also imitated all sorts of animals, machines, extraterrestrials, bric-a-brac, furniture, ships, plants, and little children – and all sorts of foreigners, performers, and historical character of both sexes. During those same two hundred years, male fashion has made no such moves, sticking firmly to a first-order, evolutionary, “natural development” (168)
Fashion as visual art: “Dress works as any visual art does, drawing on unconscious fantasy to create material projections that sustain imaginative health” (169)
Adult humanity is artificial: “Yet the idea that an artificial femininity is created by assuming artificial elements of dress is very current, masking the fact that all adult humanity is created that way. People submit to joining the human race by putting on awkward, ridiculous, and demanding clothes, just like Adam and Eve; and of course, our first parents’ garments were exactly alike. When it comes to sexual awareness, we have really been transvested from the start. It’s plain that male and female dress have the same function: to create a fictional body that is the right image of a state of mind and that perpetually tells its story to its owner, even when only God is present. Getting dressed is something done to satisfy an inward desire to be rightly completed by clothes.” (173)
It feels wrong to paraphrase her ideas because they're so wonderfully presented so I'll just share some of my favorite quotes:
On the purpose of clothing: “Clothes exist to remind the self of the body, and to create a worldly body for each person” (12)
What fashion accomplishes: “Fashion keeps present to the public eye the fact that normative human arrangements are always under unexpected threat from unstable human impulses, sexual expression being the main one appropriate for an art using bodies as its theme” (106)
On androgyny in fashion: Androgyny harkens to a repressed past: “Much of our present female mannishness and feminized manhood is a nostalgic reference to the effects that were fashionable for men and women in those pioneering days, rather than a new revolutionary expression of the same authentic kind” (Hollander 2000:150)
Women’s fashion as metaphor: “Female dress has also imitated all sorts of animals, machines, extraterrestrials, bric-a-brac, furniture, ships, plants, and little children – and all sorts of foreigners, performers, and historical character of both sexes. During those same two hundred years, male fashion has made no such moves, sticking firmly to a first-order, evolutionary, “natural development” (168)
Fashion as visual art: “Dress works as any visual art does, drawing on unconscious fantasy to create material projections that sustain imaginative health” (169)
Adult humanity is artificial: “Yet the idea that an artificial femininity is created by assuming artificial elements of dress is very current, masking the fact that all adult humanity is created that way. People submit to joining the human race by putting on awkward, ridiculous, and demanding clothes, just like Adam and Eve; and of course, our first parents’ garments were exactly alike. When it comes to sexual awareness, we have really been transvested from the start. It’s plain that male and female dress have the same function: to create a fictional body that is the right image of a state of mind and that perpetually tells its story to its owner, even when only God is present. Getting dressed is something done to satisfy an inward desire to be rightly completed by clothes.” (173)
September 6, 2019
I thought when I got this book that I probably wouldn't like it very much and that it would be a slog. After all, it's a collection of essays written by a woman I've never heard of about books I've never read and people I've never heard of either.
And I ended up loving the hell out of this book. Hollander is an excellent reviewer. This book is a masterclass in how to review a book--she is so acerbic and cutting when she doesn't like something (and, boy, is she pedantic about word usage), and her compliments when she likes something mean so much next to that. The way she has so much to say about the topic of each book makes the review more than just commentary on another author but her own essay about that subject.
Most of the chapters are book reviews, and I find that the independently written essays are the weakest part of the book (with the exception of the essays about the Little Women books and movies; I disagree with many of her conclusions there, but those 2 essays are really interesting).
She's really into dance, art, and clothes, so many of the essays deal with those topics.
Caveat: two essays about sexuality and gender do not hold up very well decades later.
And I ended up loving the hell out of this book. Hollander is an excellent reviewer. This book is a masterclass in how to review a book--she is so acerbic and cutting when she doesn't like something (and, boy, is she pedantic about word usage), and her compliments when she likes something mean so much next to that. The way she has so much to say about the topic of each book makes the review more than just commentary on another author but her own essay about that subject.
Most of the chapters are book reviews, and I find that the independently written essays are the weakest part of the book (with the exception of the essays about the Little Women books and movies; I disagree with many of her conclusions there, but those 2 essays are really interesting).
She's really into dance, art, and clothes, so many of the essays deal with those topics.
Caveat: two essays about sexuality and gender do not hold up very well decades later.
September 25, 2015
One of my favorite things about Anne Hollander is that her writing on fashion is not beholden to the end-game canons of art history that get drilled into your head in art school. In fact, she often uses her knowledge of fashion to point out that shifts in style (and by extension, decorative and fine arts) are far from inevitable, the way they're often taught.
She's also not swayed by contemporary fads in political correctness to discuss historical moments in a way that would land her always on the progressive side of social issues. Sometimes in the middle of an essay this will make me pause and think... is Hollander homophobic? Partial to christianity? Conservative? But I think the deeper point is that her arguments are empathetic to the attitudes of the period she's describing.
Lastly, I love how insistent she is that fashion is constantly motivated by erotics.
She's also not swayed by contemporary fads in political correctness to discuss historical moments in a way that would land her always on the progressive side of social issues. Sometimes in the middle of an essay this will make me pause and think... is Hollander homophobic? Partial to christianity? Conservative? But I think the deeper point is that her arguments are empathetic to the attitudes of the period she's describing.
Lastly, I love how insistent she is that fashion is constantly motivated by erotics.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews