In The Group Portraiture of Holland, art historian Alois Riegl (1858-1905) argues that the artists of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holland radically altered the beholders relationship to works of art. Group portraits by artists such as Rembrandt and Frans Halls reflect an egalitarian viewpoint not found in the more hierarchically structured Italian works of the same period. First published in 1902 and here in English for the first time, the book opened up areas of inquiry that continue to engage scholars today.
Alois Riegl's art history has influenced thinkers as diverse as Erwin Panofsky, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, and F'lix Guattari. One of the founders of the modern discipline of art history, Riegl is best known for his theories of representation. Yet his inquiries into the role of temporality in artistic production-including his argument that art conveys a culture's consciousness of time-show him to be a more wide-ranging and influential commentator on historiographical issues than has been previously acknowledged. In Time's Visible Surface, Michael Gubser presents Riegl's work as a sustained examination of the categories of temporality and history in art. Supported by a rich exploration of Riegl's writings, Gubser argues that Riegl viewed artworks as registering historical time visibly in artistic forms. Gubser's discussion of Riegl's academic milieu also challenges the widespread belief that Austrian modernism adopted a self-consciously ahistorical worldview. By analyzing the works of Riegl's professors and colleagues at the University of Vienna, Gubser shows that Riegl's interest in temporality, from his early articles on calendar art through later volumes on the Roman art industry and Dutch portraiture, fit into a broad discourse on time, history, and empiricism that engaged Viennese thinkers such as the philosopher Franz Brentano, the historian Theodor von Sickel, and the art historian Franz Wickhoff. By expanding our understanding of Riegl and his intellectual context, Time's Visible Surface demonstrates that Riegl is a pivotal figure in cultural theory and that fin-de-si'cle Vienna holds continued relevance for today's cultural and philosophical debates.
This book provides a lively and stimulating introduction to methodological debates within art history. Offering a lucid account of approaches from Hegel to post-colonialism, the book provides a sense of art history's own history as a discipline from its emergence in the late-eighteenth century to contemporary debates.
Argues that the modern subject did not emerge from psychoanalysis or existential philosophy but rather within early-twentieth-century Viennese portraiture.
Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. Suspensions of Perception is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle. Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters—Manet, Seurat, and Cezanne—who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices. Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.
Beholding considers the spatially situated encounter between artwork and spectator. It argues that artworks created for specific places or conditions structure a reciprocal encounter, which is completed by the presence of a beholder. These are works which demand the 'beholder's share', but not, as Ernst Gombrich famously claimed, to sustain an illusion. Rather, Beholding reconfigures Gombrich's notion of the beholder's share as a set of 'licensed' imaginative and cognitive projections. Each chapter frames a particular work of art from the remit of a complementary theoretical text. The book establishes a transhistorical notion of the spatially situated encounter, and considers the role of the architectural host in bringing the beholder's orientation into play. The book engages a diverse range of practices: from Renaissance painting and group portraiture to intermedia practices of installation and performance art. Written within the broad remit of reception aesthetics, the book proposes a phenomenological theory of beholding, argued through an in-depth examination of artworks and their spatial contexts, selected for their explanatory potential. These various encounters allocate different constitutive roles to the beholder, bringing not only spatial and temporal orientation into play, but also a repertoire of anticipated ideas and beliefs.
Focusing on the art of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and his colleagues Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Frédéric Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fellow Men argues for the importance of the group as a defining subject of nineteenth-century French painting. Through close readings of some of the most ambitious paintings of the realist and impressionist generation, Bridget Alsdorf offers new insights into how French painters understood the shifting boundaries of their social world, and reveals the fragile masculine bonds that made up the avant-garde. A dedicated realist who veered between extremes of sociability and hermetic isolation, Fantin-Latour painted group dynamics over the course of two decades, from 1864 to 1885. This was a period of dramatic change in French history and art--events like the Paris Commune and the rise and fall of impressionism raised serious doubts about the power of collectivism in art and life. Fantin-Latour's monumental group portraits, and related works by his friends and colleagues from the 1850s through the 1880s, represent varied visions of collective identity and test the limits of association as both a social and an artistic pursuit. By examining the bonds and frictions that animated their social circles, Fantin-Latour and his cohorts developed a new pictorial language for the modern group: one of fragmentation, exclusion, and willful withdrawal into interior space that nonetheless presented individuality as radically relational.
In Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875-1905: An Institutional Biography, Diana Cordileone applies standard methods of cultural and intellectual history for close readings of Riegl?s published texts, several of which are still unavailable in English. Further, the author compares Riegl?s work to several of the early works of Friedrich Nietzsche that Riegl is known to have read before 1878. Using archival and other primary sources this study also illuminates the institutional conflicts and imperatives that shaped Riegl?s oeuvre. The result is a multi-layered philosophical, cultural and institutional history of this art historian?s work of the fin-de-si?e that demonstrates his close relationship to several of the significant actors in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, an epoch of innovation, culture wars and political uncertainty. The book is particularly devoted to explaining how Riegl?s theories of art were shaped by debates outside the purview of the academic art historian. Its focal point is the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry, where he worked for 13 years, and it presents a new interpretation of Riegl based upon his early exposure to Nietzsche.
This book examines some of the mechanisms which are currently conceived as affording individual security. The idea of security includes emotional and financial components. These interconnect so that such common concepts as 'trust' in someone and 'care taking' include both ideas of emotional and financial support. State policies on security rest on perceptions of two other institutions, the family and insurance, both of which are subject to change. At one time the extended family was seen as a major security-providing institution, but the contemporary nuclear family is more fragile. The concept of insurance originally entailed ideas of community and mutual aid; however, the institution has developed, in its modern private form, as a profit-driven entity. This book addresses various uses of state power in providing security for individuals, and outlines different ways in which this can be done.
