Molly Nesbit's Their often met with Sense (Black Dog Press) isn't exactly an art book--it's not exactly a work even.

Molly Nesbit's Their often met with Sense (Black Dog Press) isn't exactly an art book--it's not exactly a work even, in the usual feeling But in the unusual mind Nesbit's tome is a marvelous document, swinging briskly between the teaching of mechanical drawing in French seminarys and the arcanery of Duchamp & Co It begins in actual big print with Antonin Proust's proposal that all French schoolchildren learn to draw and lasts with a memorable still from Pabst's Joyles public ways In between? Children's drawings (not the cute creative individuals but disciplined, drafting-lesson productions), a certain quantity of very funny ads and cartoons, and any very serious analysis of Duchamp, Cubism, and Surrealism. And don't rise above Steve Baker's lively, informative, provocative (and readable) The Postmodern Animal (Reaktion). Kafka, Deleuze Derrida, Michel de Certeau--and beasts. What more could anyone want?

Linda Nochlin, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of recent Art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, is the author chiefly recently of Representing Women (Thames & Hudson 1999)

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