Since the advent of cinema, visual art has tended to be perceived as if it were in motion. Artists now create less often in fresco or carved stone and more on film and tape, on the dance stage, or in the ever changing, ever moving medium of clothes. In this remarkable collection, Anne Hollander ranges over art of the twentieth and other centuries with unusual depth of historical insight to explore these rich, diverse visual treasures and the underlying themes that connect them.

Anne Hollander is an independent art historian, critic, and historian of dress. A Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and former President of PEN American Center, she is the author of three other books, Sex and Suits (1994), Moving Pictures (1989), and Seeing through Clothes (California, 1993).

"Over the past two decades, the art historian Anne Hollander has made a unique contribution to American letters with her bold studies of the evolution of costume and of its relationship to the other arts. . . . Most of the pieces in Feeding the Eye range far beyond the immediate scope of the works they originally chronicled, and the author's erudition and style give the collection a luminous unity."—Francine du Plessix Gray, New York Times Book Review

"A volume that sparkles with insight, learning and cohesiveness."—Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Only a learned and daring intelligence could produce these dazzling essays on clothes, painting, literature, movies, and much more."—Elizabeth Hardwick

Included in the Los Angeles Times Book Review’s "Best Nonfiction of 2000".