About Emmelyn
New York, NY
Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen is an art historian with special interest in intersections of art history with histories of biology and psychology. Her first book Modern Art & the Remaking of Human Disposition (University of Chicago Press, 2021), shows how new concepts of thought and consciousness in Europe circa 1900 were materialized in art through new approaches to body language. She is currently at work on two books, one about the influence of art on the evolutionary thinking of Charles Darwin, and another on family, human fertility, and brother/sister siblinghood in the first-wave feminist era. She lives in New York and is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.
Sisters: The Sibling Arts of Camille Claudel and Bronislava Nijinska is a double portrait of the sculptor Camille Claudel (1864–1943) and the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska (1891–1972). The book’s diptych narrative, built around close analysis of their two respective masterworks––Claudel’s sculpture Clotho (1893) and Nijinska’s ballet Les Noces (1923)––also tells two family histories, probing the mutually complicated artistic dialogue that each woman conducted with her artist-brother (the writer Paul Claudel and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky). Both halves of the book explore how the abstract circumstance of brother-sister siblinghood, and the specific, intimate artistic and personal relations between the sibling pairs, helped to crystallize a set of deep philosophical questions that emerge in both Claudel’s and Nijinska’s works about the interworking of fate, human fertility, and gender. In broadest terms, the book proposes that the condition of siblinghood has deep implications for understanding the stakes of artmaking in the modernist, first-wave feminist era––when the biology of kinship, the politics of human reproduction, and the equality of the sexes were being rethought simultaneously.