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The Adventures of the Optic Nerve

John Elderfield

in The Promotion of Knowledge: Lectures to Mark the Centenary of the British Academy 1902-2002

This chapter presents the text of a lecture on the role of visual medium in art-historical study. It addresses the relationship of art history to the existential acts of painting and looking at ... More

This chapter presents the text of a lecture on the role of visual medium in art-historical study. It addresses the relationship of art history to the existential acts of painting and looking at painting and describes how the so-called story of modern art has been narrated in the history literature. It also considers how modern histories can accommodate the unfamiliar that is normally part of the story.Less

Behind Animals, Plants and Interlace: Salin’s Style II on Christian Objects

Egon Wamers

in Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations before the Vikings

This chapter examines art-historical classification and style-dating and evaluates their applications in establishing the connections between Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England during the seventh ... More

This chapter examines art-historical classification and style-dating and evaluates their applications in establishing the connections between Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England during the seventh century. It describes the animals and plants in Christian objects and suggests that they are variants of the Germanic Animal Style II defined by Bernhard Salin. The chapter also argues that these objects reflect the relationships between the Anglo-Saxon and Irish ruling elites.Less

Introduction: Slow-Motion Mobiles

Matthew C. Hunter

in Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object

Scottish-born banker James Coutts sat for a portrait with painter Joshua Reynolds in the early 1770s. Painted on a panel of unprimed mahogany, the resulting picture is now a wreck. Flakes tear ... More

Scottish-born banker James Coutts sat for a portrait with painter Joshua Reynolds in the early 1770s. Painted on a panel of unprimed mahogany, the resulting picture is now a wreck. Flakes tear through the forehead, eye, and cheeks; they pierce Coutts’s visible ear and tatter his throat. So problematic was the panel that it was given in the 1850s to Scotland’s national art gallery as a means for teaching a moral lesson to aspiring artists about the dangers of Reynolds’s risky painting techniques. That conception of the first president of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts is difficult to square with familiar assessments. Yet, Reynolds’s chemical experiments were intensively discussed and collected by his votaries. By the mid-nineteenth century, they were seen to bear on painting and photography alike. This introduction argues that the force of Reynolds’s chemical experiments is reducible to neither painting nor photography; instead, it opens a history of “temporally evolving chemical objects”—of materials known and valued for changing visibly in time, while affording conceptual reflection on time. This introduction defines the temporally evolving chemical object and maps the structure of the book as a relay through and beyond British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century.Less

Art History in/as an Age of Combustion

Matthew C. Hunter

in Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object

The conclusion critically examines one possible legacy for the relay of chemical image-making and its fusions with combustion-engine research examined in this book: the Anthropocene. Noting ways in ... More

The conclusion critically examines one possible legacy for the relay of chemical image-making and its fusions with combustion-engine research examined in this book: the Anthropocene. Noting ways in which James Watt and British industrialism have figured in the historiography of an epoch of humanity’s influence on the global climate (and in critiques of the Anthropocene), the conclusion highlights the abiding, art-historical force of tools and concepts rooted in the work of Alois Riegl. Against persisting resistance within art history to interpretations privileging materials and techniques, it concludes by considering the contours and possibilities of an “elemental art history.”Less

Inventing the Baroque: A Critical History of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Debates

Jane O. Newman

in Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque

This chapter first considers the ways in which Benjamin read the Silesian plays precisely not as the “tragic dramas” of John Osborne's English-language translation, but rather as “mourning-play” ... More

This chapter first considers the ways in which Benjamin read the Silesian plays precisely not as the “tragic dramas” of John Osborne's English-language translation, but rather as “mourning-play” texts that differed significantly from ancient tragedy in Benjamin's mind. It then examines the art historical debates pertaining to the Renaissance and the German Baroque and how they articulated a new periodicity of style that involved the collectivity of the nation in important ways. The chapter next turns to contemporary definitions of a specifically literary German Baroque by critics Fritz Strich and Arthur Hübscher. Their discussions mirrored the art historical conversations by striving to locate the essence of a German literary tradition in an autonomous national sensibility and canon of forms. Benjamin's Baroque dipped into and was part of these several discussions of the Baroque as a “heroic” national age.Less

From The Haggadah to The Rubáiyát

Joseph P. Ansell

in Arthur Szyk: Artist, Jew, Pole

This chapter primarily discusses the background and context of Arthur Szyk's most enduring work, The Haggadah. It also provides an analysis of the work and its publication. For much of the 1930s, ... More

This chapter primarily discusses the background and context of Arthur Szyk's most enduring work, The Haggadah. It also provides an analysis of the work and its publication. For much of the 1930s, Szyk had been working on this illustrated and illuminated book — his version of the Haggadah, the prayer book used by the Jews for the celebration of Passover. The holiday of Passover commemorates the liberation and Exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. It is thus a celebration of freedom. The decision to work with this text had both art-historical precedent and contemporary political significance. So that work on The Haggadah could be completed and the many details of its production could proceed smoothly, the Szyks settled in London in 1937. Although the several years he spent with his family in London were occupied primarily with work on The Haggadah, Szyk also worked on two additional and very different major projects: a series of paintings on the history of Poles in America and a set of eight illustrations for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.Less

Looking: Wölfflin’s Comparative Vision

Zeynep Çelik Alexander

in Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design

While the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin was enthusiastic about kinaesthetic knowing in his earliest writings, he increasingly lost faith, eventually relegating it to the negative pole of the ... More

While the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin was enthusiastic about kinaesthetic knowing in his earliest writings, he increasingly lost faith, eventually relegating it to the negative pole of the opposition that he invented between the Renaissance and the Baroque. In an attempt to keep in check the baroque formlessness of modernity, Wölfflin devised the comparative method. This was part of a revival of comparative looking: the technique was adopted during the Leipzig exhibition of 1871, when two almost identical painting were juxtaposed; at art schools where image pairs were used to indoctrinate students in good taste; at universities where the double art historical slide lecture introduced students to classical texts; and, finally, in a new kind of picture book that emerged in the early twentieth century. According to Paul Schultze-Naumburg whose widely read Kulturarbeiten series juxtaposed examples and counter-examples, comparative looking forced the eye to draw its own inferences without resorting to propositional knowledge. This chapter examines the technique of comparative looking as it was used at the turn of the twentieth century alongside research in experimental psychology to argue that comparative looking was employed as a technique to replace propositional knowledge while stabilizing the uncertainties of kinaesthetic knowing.Less

Toward a Psychology of Art, 1919–32

Louis Rose

in Psychology, Art, and Antifascism: Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich, and the Politics of Caricature

This chapter looks at how Kris' status as a convert to Catholicism temporarily provided him with professional and personal protection. His work abroad with international collectors, museum directors, ... More

This chapter looks at how Kris' status as a convert to Catholicism temporarily provided him with professional and personal protection. His work abroad with international collectors, museum directors, and art patrons supplied a safety net beyond Austria if it became necessary. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art required an expert to catalog its cameo collection, it brought Kris to New York in 1929 to undertake the job. At the same time, Kris kept close track of deteriorating conditions in Austria and employed his contacts to find work abroad for his younger, Jewish colleagues. A liberal royalist in post-imperial Vienna, Kris remained convinced of the irreversible disintegration of Austrian political life. At his first meeting with Ernst Gombrich, he made sure that the young researcher understood fully the uncertainties attached to an art historical career in Vienna.Less

Art, Architecture and Catholicism in La Modification

in Signs and Designs: Art and Architecture in the Work of Michel Butor

This chapter examines the selective history of European art which underpins the cultural and romantic pilgrimages of the character of Léon Delmont in Michel Butor's novel La Modification. It analyzes ... More

This chapter examines the selective history of European art which underpins the cultural and romantic pilgrimages of the character of Léon Delmont in Michel Butor's novel La Modification. It analyzes the symbolic, psychological and reflexive functions of the various clusters of art-historical references that constitute the cultural coordinates both in Léon's conscious thought-processes and in the subconscious workings of his dreams. It argues that the references to the visual arts in the novel not only reflect the preoccupations and situation of the central character but also serve to ‘universalise’ those preoccupations and that situation.Less

Introduction: Eyes and ‘I’s

David Fearn

in Pindar's Eyes: Visual and Material Culture in Epinician Poetry

The introduction sets the following discussions in their scholarly context, with particular attention to other contemporary approaches to lyric both within Classics and in comparative literature and ... More

The introduction sets the following discussions in their scholarly context, with particular attention to other contemporary approaches to lyric both within Classics and in comparative literature and critical theory, as well as to art-historical approaches. Literary approaches to lyric deixis are brought together with art-historical and other literary approaches to visuality, subjectivity, and ecphrasis. Pindar’s immersion in a world of material culture and attention to the world as perceived visually fosters a special poetic creativity. The upshot is a poetics of referentiality, according to which Pindar’s consumers are invited to consider the distance between their own situatedness and the worlds being creatively referred to, through the complex mediation of poetic voices. The sensibilities, attitudes, and experiences being constructed also contribute to a new understanding of the importance of lyric as a culturally valuable resource in fifth-century Greece.Less

Why Artistic Value is not Aesthetic Value

Robert Stecker

in Intersections of Value: Art, Nature, and the Everyday

This chapter argues that artistic value is a distinct kind of value from aesthetic value. Artistic value is a function of, and derived from, a plurality of more basic values, including, but not ... More

This chapter argues that artistic value is a distinct kind of value from aesthetic value. Artistic value is a function of, and derived from, a plurality of more basic values, including, but not confined to, aesthetic value. Artworks are also valued as artworks for their cognitive value, ethical value, art-historical value, interpretation-centered value, and in other ways as well. To understand the artistic value of particular works requires understanding what the artist who makes the work is intending to do in it—what functions it is intended to fulfill or what it is intended to achieve. In order to defend this view, the chapter will show that artistic value is not reducible to aesthetic value.Less

The Grand Narrative and the Grand Narrative Theses

Nicholas Wolterstorff

in Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art

This chapter lays out the grand narrative concerning art in the modern world. The grand narrative concerns the art-historical and sociological significance of the changes in the arts that took place, ... More

This chapter lays out the grand narrative concerning art in the modern world. The grand narrative concerns the art-historical and sociological significance of the changes in the arts that took place, according to the standard story, in the early modern period. The grand narrative claims that the increasing incidence of disinterested aesthetic attention as a way of engaging works of the arts represented the arts coming into their own; and it claims that that mode of engagement, the production of works for that mode of engagement, and those works themselves, are socially other and transcendent. They are an exception to the fragmentation caused by the spread of causal instrumental rationality.Less