"Inventing Modernity" is a collection of essays by art historian and New York University Professor Emeritus Linda Nochlin, featuring her seminal texts. The essays—artists and critics (Gustave Courbet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, Robert Gober, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Meyer Schapiro, and others)—are united under one cover by Nochlin's approach to modernism. This is not a universal narrative embodied in specific forms, but—in Charles Baudelaire's formula—the artist's ability to be modern, that is, to be present in their own time. Each section of the book touches on a specific sociocultural aspect and motif recurring in many of Nochlin's works: political revolution as a utopian possibility, corporeality, the ideology of race and colonialism, and subjectivism in art.