Book details link between bodily movement and movement in paintings

Moving Modernism: The Urge to Abstraction in Painting, Dance, Cinema by Nell Andrew approaches modernism and abstraction through an interdisciplinary lens. The book explores dance, film and painting in order to address and expand definitions of the modernist medium. The author argues that performative modes of art created the link between bodily movement and movement depicted in modernist painting.

Additionally, Andrew rebuilds lost performances and includes new archival research from North America and Europe as well as interviews that further his argument. She looks at major figures and intellectual movements including Loïe Fuller and symbolism; Valentine de Saint-Point and the cubo-futurist and neo-symbolist movements; and early cinematic abstraction from Edison and the Lumières to Hans Richter and Marcel Duchamp.

Andrew is an associate professor of art history in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences’ Lamar Dodd School of Art and co-director of UGA’s Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop. She teaches and researches in the fields of modern art and the historical avant-garde, dance history and early film.