Moving Pictures is a bold and provocative interpretation of Western art that links the great tradition of North European painting to modern cinema, and suggests how paintings, prints, and moving pictures are interconnected modes of art that in comparable ways depict moments in the narrative flow of human life. Beginning with the great masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—Van Eyck, Dürer, Bruegel—and moving through the history of European art to the advent of movies and the modern era, Anne Hollander explores certain artistic impulses and traditions that have taken account of the arbitrary, random way vision sorts out dramatic elements in a given situation, that have understood the disorderly way visual phenomena strike the eye, and that have used mobile imagery to, as she puts it, set the viewer's psyche in motion. These impulses and traditions were present in European art all along; later the camera, especially the movie camera, was well suited to take up the same artistic task, since its work is done with and by moving light, by the constant shift of scale and focus, and by an appreciation of the emotional and expressive power of light striking the forms within a picture frame. A related theme of Moving Pictures concerns the relation between originals and prints, and between high and popular art. Many of the West's greatest works of art have found their way into the hearts of viewers through the medium of reproduction; printed black-and-white illustrations, born in Northern Europe in the fifteenth century, supplemented paintings and recreated them for thousands and thousands of people. The sources of cinema, as well, lie in the dynamic relation between original visual ideas and repeated copies of them; movies, like all reproductions, the author argues, have a special broad-based power to invite private fantasy, to provoke memory and association, and to evoke an unmediated personal response from the viewer. Here, too, movies have inherited and then perpetuated a great visual and popular tradition. Moving Pictures, like the author's previous work, offers a strikingly original and powerful new way of assessing the artistic, emotional, and psychological power of paintings and pictures—and of understanding our own deepest responses to them. Anne Hollander is an art historian who has taught and lectured at universities and museums. A Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, she is a contributor to many national magazines and the author of a widely acclaimed book on the representation of the human image in Western art, Seeing through Clothes. With more than 300 illustrations Jacket painting: The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Brussels, Musée des Beaux Arts. Courtesy of Scala/Art Resource, New York. Jacket design by Sue Keston Praise for Anne Hollander's Seeing through Clothes "Searching and audacious... This extraordinary book radically alters the way we see. It will be catalogued in libraries, I guess, under Art History... Is there a Dewey Decimal System provision for 'Seeing,' subcategory 'Original, Essential'?" — Walter Clemons, Newsweek "Grandly written and grandly conceived... Her book makes our experience of art more interesting and more significant; it becomes part of our education... There is a penetrating wit, a willingness to see through to elements underlying what we thought we could take for granted. Seeing through Clothes is a classic, a book of rare wisdom." — Richard Howard, The Nation "Hollander's language is rich, evocative, and beautifully crafted... Her style, with its periodic swings into rapture, recalls the great tradition of art-critical emotionalism that stretches back to Ruskin and Diderot. The adjectives are stitched into place with the precision and delicacy of a lace trimming; the book as a whole is structured with the formal assurance of abstract architecture." — David Kunzle, University of California at Los Angeles "The book on art for this year... a mine of ideas and observation on the complex heritage of Western pictorial art as it is present in the clothed and nude human image." — Choice. Motion pictures aesthetics; Art and motion pictures; Popular culture; European Art