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The Art of Art History - A Critical Anthology by
What is art history? Why, how and where did it originate, and how have its aims and methods changed over time? The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century,debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be. This anthology is a guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field''s most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky, Heidegger, Lisa Tickner,Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, Mary Kelly, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, Louis Marin, Margaret Iversen and Nestor Canclini are brought together, and Donald Preziosi''s introductions to each topic provide background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake.His own concluding essay is an important and original contribution to scholarship in the field. From the pre-publication reviews: ''Until now, anthologies about the history of art have tended to be worthy yet inert, plotting a linear evolution from the great precursors (Vasari, Winckelmann) to the founding fathers of the modern discipline (Wolfflin, Riegl, Panofsky) to the achievements and refinements of today''s scholarship.The texts that Donald Preziosi has brought together provide something far more challenging: the juxtapositions and alignments between individual essays point the reader towards unresolved problems, ongoing debates, and paths not takenor not taken yet. In place of the consoling tale of intellectualprogress, the collection defamiliarizes the whole field, and opens up a space for radical reflection on its basic procedures and assumptions. Definitely the best introduction to art history currently available.'' Professor Norman Bryson, Harvard University ''Donald Preziosi has prepared an anthologyfrom the Greek, a collection of flowersof art history. His bouquet contains representatives from the discipline''s two-hundred year history, arranged in standard and innovative methodological categories. Within each, the readings selected providestimulating congruencies and contradictions that will inspire productive debate and contemplation. But what makes this anthology more than an arresting assemblage is the author''s critical stance toward what he has wrought. His introduction and concluding chapter write around and under the subjectspresented, emphasizing the ''art'' of art history, its kinship with modernity''s post-Enlightenment project, and its collaboration with the rise of nationalism. Thus the discipline''s past is probed and questioned and made relevant for its present and future. The whole thereby addresses, withouthealing or concealing, the disciplinary ruptures of modernism. The book might also have explored further nature of art history''s history within the emergent discourse of post-colonialism and the globalization of culture Yet the many new perspectives it does offer help to re-present the discipline for its readers, students, teachers, and curators, for other areas of humanistic inquiry, which are being subject to similar critiques, and for artists and the larger art community, for whom history, narrative, and anaccounting of art''s past have once again become vital issues'' Professor Robert S. Nelson, Professor of Art History and Chair, Committee for the History of Culture, University of Chicago ''Rather than focusing on its Vasarian moment or on the later academic institutionalization of art history in the 19th and 20th centuries, Donald Preziosi, in The Art of Art History, constructs a reading of this hegemonic and reductive practice of making ''the visible legible'' as one that isinextricably tied to the museographic paradigm of late 18th and early 19th centuries. This shift, he sees as equivalent in importance to the brought by the ''invention'' of perspective. But the author goes further than to underline the implication of art history with the premises of modernity, hemakes a strong case, in a vivid and inspiring prose, for a tighter equation between art history and modernity: an equation grounded in his insightful considerations (and meteoric formulations) of the epistemological setting, rhetorical operations political (colonialist) aims and schizophrenic yetall-invasive aestheticization of knowledge that, in the last two centuries, have fashioned what we will no longer dare to call the discipline of art history. The result is a flamboyant book that offers anything but a celebratory reading of art history. It does not constitute an articulation of canonical texts or an up-to-date menu of art historical currents, methods, or trends. Yet it manages to avoid none of these dimensions. Art history is notenvisages as the learned discourse of modernity on a specific class of objects nor is it reduced to a genealogy of outstanding artist-subjects and their volatile constellations of contemporary subjects-readers. It becomes a practice wherein objects and subjects relate and relations oftencrystallize, under the unrecognized aegis of the fetish, this Other of art, since Preziosi concisely defines art as ''the anti-fetish fetish''. Far from the fantastic neutrality that is traditionally found in the format of such an historiographic endeavour, Preziosi frames his selection of text andthreads through them with an array of different strategic voices, superimposed (to stress a spatial figure he is keen to discern) in order to elaborate a strong polemic position that situates art history as an enduring and well disguised fictional genre. In the process, the author courageouslytakes on the paradox that is at the core of his project: to introduce students to the coming out o art history... as art, one that is not necessarily meant to be our coming out of it but that certainly well establishes our motives to continue to shake its grounds and its multi-storied apparatus.'' Professor Johanne Lamoureux, University of Montreal.
The Dictionary of Art by
Boasting well over 6,000 contributors from 12 countries, the Dictionary offers its readers authoritative and comprehensive global coverage. A resource for both art and cultural studies, the Dictionary serves as a unique guide to all the visual arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, drawing, printmaking, as well as the decorative arts. The Dictionary ranges far both geographically and historically; it features unparalleled coverage of Africa, Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Mongolia, China, India, the Islamic world, Japan, Korea, Native North America, Pacific and Aboriginal Australia, Pre-Columbian America, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Ancient Near East, and Ancient Rome. Providing depth as well as breadth, The Dictionary of Art examines important art forms and key issues of design, taste, function, and patronage, illuminating them in light of the cultural context in which they developed.
African-American Art by
From its origins in early eighteenth century slave communities to the end of the twentieth century, African-American art has made a vital contribution to the art of the United States. African-American Art provides a major reassessment of the subject, setting the art in the context of the African-American experience. Here, Patton discusses folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts alongside fine art, sculptures, paintings, and photography during the 1800s. She also examines the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism during the 1960s and 70s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 90s. New evidence suggests different ways of looking at African-American art, confirming that it represents the culture and society from which it emerges. Here, Patton explores significant issues such as the relationship of art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums, the growth of black universities, critical theory, the impact of artists collectives, and the assortment of art practices since the 1960s. African-American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole.
Native North American Art by
An innovative survey of Native North American art history which fully incorporates substantive new research and scholarship, and examines such issues as gender, representation, the colonial encounter, and contemporary arts. By encompassing both the sacred and secular, political and domestic,the ceremonial and commercial, it shows the importance of the visual arts in maintaining the integrity of spiritual, social , political, and economic systems within Native North American societies. This exciting new investigation explores the indigenous arts of the US and Canada from the early pre-contact period to the present day, stressing the conceptual and iconographic continuities over five centuries and across an immensely diverse range of regions. The richness of Native American art isemphasized through discussions of basketry, wood and rock carvings, dance masks, and beadwork, alongside the contemporary vitality of paintings and installations by modern artists such as Robert Davidson, Emmi Whitehorse, and Alex Janvier.
Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century by
This is the first comprehensive survey of an important and increasingly popular field. Because each of the contributors is an expert on his or her own national art, it is also the first to present a genuinely Latin American viewpoint. 17 scholars, critics and curators provide an exciting and challenging new assessment of twentieth-century Latin American art. The wider public and scholars alike will welcome the full and authoritative treatment of the different histories and cultural traditions that have given each country its own character.
Major artists such as Wifredo Lam, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Fernando Botero are seen in a wider context, and the exploration of the rich and important heritage of previously overlooked countries such as Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Paraguay and Bolivia will be a revelation to many. Springing from complex cultural roots, Latin American art is fresh, varied and often startling in its originality. Its range and quality are here represented in over 300 outstanding images.
