Bathers, Bodies, Beauty

“It is a pleasure to hear Nochlin thinking aloud even where she is deliberately inconclusive. Particularly absorbing is her examination of Trouville, a liminal dream-kingdom which in the 1860s rapidly became both Paris by the sea and a potentially perilous vantagepoint from which the sublime vastness of the Atlantic Ocean might be glimpsed. A sceptic could point out that she reads a lot into Monet’s ambiguous use of perspective in his Hotel des Roches Noires of 1870, but it is a rare pleasure to encounter anyone thinking seriously about Monet at all. Similarly, the motif of the bather (in the sense of bath-taker rather than swimmer) provides a springboard for a highly original reading of Pierre Bonnard, another artist often dismissed as a woolly-headed sensualist… [Nochlin has a] knack for looking at canonical artists from fresh perspectives.”—Keith Miller, The Times Literary Supplement