The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss
The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss

Author: Richard Shone

Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Published: 2013-04-05

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0500771499

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An exemplary survey that reassesses the impact of the most important books to have shaped art history through the twentieth century Written by some of today’s leading art historians and curators, this new collection provides an invaluable road map of the field by comparing and reexamining canonical works of art history. From Émile Mâle’s magisterial study of thirteenth-century French art, first published in 1898, to Hans Belting’s provocative Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, the book provides a concise and insightful overview of the history of art, told through its most enduring literature. Each of the essays looks at the impact of a single major book of art history, mapping the intellectual development of the writer under review, setting out the premises and argument of the book, considering its position within the broader field of art history, and analyzing its significance in the context of both its initial reception and its afterlife. An introduction by John-Paul Stonard explores how art history has been forged by outstanding contributions to scholarship, and by the dialogues and ruptures between them.

The Art of Art History
The Art of Art History

Author: Donald Preziosi

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 600

ISBN-13: 0199229848

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This anthology is a guide to understanding art history through critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts, focusing on the past two centuries.

Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018
Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018

Author: Peter Schjeldahl

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 1683355296

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Hot Cold Heavy Light collects 100 writings—some long, some short—that taken together forma group portrait of many of the world’s most significant and interesting artists. From Pablo Picasso to Cindy Sherman, Old Masters to contemporary masters, paintings to comix, and saints to charlatans, Schjeldahl ranges widely through the diverse and confusing art world, an expert guide to a dazzling scene. No other writer enhances the reader’s experience of art in precise, jargon-free prose as Schjeldahl does. His reviews are more essay than criticism, and he offers engaging and informative accounts of artists and their work. For more than three decades, he has written about art with Emersonian openness and clarity. A fresh perspective, an unexpected connection, a lucid gloss on a big idea awaits the reader on every page of this big, absorbing, buzzing book.

What Do Pictures Want?
What Do Pictures Want?

Author: W. J. T. Mitchell

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-12-23

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 022624590X

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Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum

A Companion to Medieval Art
A Companion to Medieval Art

Author: Conrad Rudolph

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 1040

ISBN-13: 1119077729

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A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.

Tidying Up Art
Tidying Up Art

Author: Ursus Wehrli

Publisher: Prestel Pub

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 47

ISBN-13: 9783791330037

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Tidying Up Art is an attempt at bringing a bit of clarity into our lives just where it makes no sense at all! Ursus Wehrli, a popular stand-up comedian, rearranges famous works of art, sweeps all unwanted things out of the way and lines everything up in neat rows: after all, being tidy is a virtue.

The Methodologies of Art
The Methodologies of Art

Author: Laurie Schneider Adams

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-03-09

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0429974078

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Since the nineteenth century, when art history became an established academic discipline, works of art have been 'read' in a variety of ways. These different ways of describing and interpreting art are the methodologies of artistic analysis, the divining rods of meaning. Regardless of a work's perceived difficulty, an art object is, in theory, complex. Every work of art is an expression of its culture (time and place) and its maker (the artist) and is dependent on its media (what it's made of). The methodologies discussed here (formal analysis, iconology and iconography, Marxism, feminism, biography and autobiography, psychoanalysis, structuralism, race and gender) reflect the multiplicity of meanings in an artistic image. The second edition includes nineteen new images, new sections on race, gender, orientalism, and colonialism, and a new epilogue that analyzes a single painting to illustrate the different methodological viewpoints.

The New Art History
The New Art History

Author: Jonathan P. Harris

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 041523008X

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In this excellent book, Jonathan Harris explores the fundamental changes which have occurred both in the institutions and practice of art history over the last thirty years.

Bacon and the Mind
Bacon and the Mind

Author: Martin Harrison

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2019-09-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0500970971

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The first in a series of books that sheds new light on Francis Bacon's art and motivations, published under the aegis of the Estate of Francis Bacon Bacon and the Mind sheds light on Francis Bacon’s art by exploring his motivations, and in so doing opens up new ways of understanding his paintings. It comprises five essays by prominent scholars in their respective disciplines, illustrated throughout by Bacon’s works. Christopher Bucklow argues compellingly that Bacon does not depict the reality of his subjects, but rather their reality for him—in his memory, in his sensibility, and in his private world of sensations and ideas. Steven Jaron’s essay questions the psychological implications of Bacon’s habitual language, his obsession with “the wound,” vulnerability, and the nervous system. Darian Leader’s essay “Bacon and the Body,” presents the latest of his fresh and stimulating insights into the artist. The focus in John Onians’s “Francis Bacon: A Neuroarthistory” is the effect of Bacon’s unconscious mental processes in the creation of his paintings. “The ‘Visual Shock’ of Francis Bacon: An Essay in Neuroaesthetics” is a newly edited and now fully illustrated re-presentation of an article by Semir Zeki, previously accessible only as an online academic paper.

The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

Author: Rosalind E. Krauss

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1986-07-09

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780262610469

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Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.