"Principles of Art History Writing traces the changes in the way in which writers about art represent the same works. These differ in such deep ways as to raise the question of whether those at the beginning of the process even saw the same things as those at the end did. Carrier uses four case studies to identify and explain changing styles of restoration and the history of interpretation of selected works by Piero, Caravaggio, and van Eyck." -- Back cover

Dialogues with Degas demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Edgar Degas to 20th- and 21st-century ideas and art practices. The first in-depth examination of this major artist's impact on contemporary art, this book explores how contemporary practitioners have used Degas's creativity as a springboard to engage imaginatively and critically with themes of colonialism, gender, race and class. Individual chapters are devoted to dialogues between Degas's art and works produced by Frank Auerbach, Cecily Brown, Xinyi Cheng, Ryan Gander, Maggi Hambling, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Chantal Joffe, Leon Kossoff, R.B. Kitaj, Juan Muñoz, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville, Yinka Shonibare, Cy Twombly and Rebecca Warren. Through close analyses of selected paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, Kathryn Brown explores how Degas's technical and compositional experiments have been extended or challenged in innovative ways. By experimenting with the materials and methods of existing works, contemporary artists generate visual palimpsests that make new demands of the viewer and prompt a reconsideration of ideas that have informed histories of 19th-century French art. The book overturns familiar conceptions of influence by eschewing a genealogical approach and prioritizing, instead, the analysis of non-linear encounters between artworks. This encourages a new conception of the agency of visual artefacts and of the conversations they are capable of entertaining with each other. While this study sheds new light on Degas's art and that of his interlocutors, it also has methodological significance for the writing of art history.

Types of Interpretation in the Aesthetic Disciplines begins from the observation that interpretation, even the special kind represented by interpretation of the arts, is not a homogeneous activity. The many different types of such interpretation vary with respect to objectives and criteria of adequacy and attempts to explain art interpretation in terms of a single, unified logic are therefore bound to fail. Five Swedish scholars and theorists from different disciplines - literary studies, philosophy, and art history - discuss the multiplicity of principles of interpretation and provide a descriptive analysis of the concept of interpretation itself that clarifies the main features of the rationale underlying the interpretation of literature and the arts. Their discussion provides a much-needed bridge between analytical aesthetics and theoretical discussion within the individual aesthetic disciplines. The introduction and concluding remarks by the editors provide both a frame for discussion of the issues and a historical perspective on the debates about interpretation.

Elkins argues that writing is what art historians produce, and, whether such writing is a transparent vehicle for the transmission of facts or an embattled forum for the rehearsal of institutional relations and constructions of history, it is an expressive medium, with the capacity for emotion and reflection. Therefore, it needs to be taken seriously for its own sake: it is the testament of art history and of individual historians, and it is only weakened and slighted by versions of history that imagine it either as uncontrolled dissemination or as objective discovery and reporting.

A fresh contribution to the ongoing debate between Kunstwissenschaft (scientific study of art) and Kunstgeschichte (art history), this essay collection explores how German-speaking art historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century self-consciously generated a field of study. Prominent North American and European scholars provide new insights into how a mixing of diverse methodologies took place, in order to gain a more subtle and comprehensive understanding of how art history became institutionalized and legitimized in Germany. One common assumption about early art-historical writing in Germany is that it depended upon a simplistic and narrowly-defined formalism. This book helps to correct this stereotype by demonstrating the complexity of discussion surrounding formalist concerns, and by examining how German-speaking art historians borrowed, incorporated, stole, and made analogies with concepts from the sciences in formulating their methods. In focusing on the work of some of the well-known 'fathers' of the discipline - such as Alois Riegl and Heinrich W?lfflin - as well as on lesser-known figures, the essays in this volume provide illuminating, and sometimes surprising, treatments of art history's prior and understudied interactions with a wide range of scientific orientations, from psychology, sociology, and physiognomics to evolutionism and comparative anatomy.

This book is a collection of papers delivered at an international conference in September 1996 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art during a major Giacometti retrospective. The contributors are leading curators, art historians and literature specialists. While the relationship between nineteenth- and twentieth-century painters and writers has been the subject of intense interest in recent years, the parallel relationship between sculptors and writers has been largely neglected. These essays seek to redress the balance by looking at a variety of ways in which the conventional barriers between writing and sculpting were broken down by such pioneering figures as Rodin, Degas, Bourdelle, Valéry, Apollinaire, Reverdy, Breton, Bataille, Arp, Picasso and Giacometti. Among the topics discussed are: the many personal and professional contacts, dual artistic talent, 'Ecrits d'artistes', ekphrasis, sculpture as object, the sculptorly representation of the poet, the poetic representation of the sculptor, sculpture as metaphor, proprioception and mental images. Fully illustrated throughout, this book offers new perspectives on familiar masterpieces like Rodin's Gates of Hell, but also opens up less well known subjects like Valéry's sculpture and Breton's Object-Poems. Above all it makes a provocative and original contribution to Word and Image studies.

How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various ‘theories’ and ‘methods’, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general and largely unspoken norms shared by interpreters of many kinds. Ranging widely, though taking writing within the Western tradition of art history as its primary focus, Interpreting Art highlights the norms, premises, and patterns that tend to guide interpretation along the way. Why, for example, is the concept of artistic ‘intention’ at once so reviled and yet so hard to let go of? What does it really involve when an interpretation appeals to an artwork’s ‘reception’? How can ‘context’ be used by some to keep things under control and by others to make the interpretation of art seem limitless? And how is it that artworks only seem to grow in complexity over time? Interpreting Art reveals subtle features of art writing central to the often unnoticed interpretative practices through which we understand works of art. In doing so, the book also sheds light on possible alternatives, pointing to how writers on art might choose to operate differently in the future.

Invisible Cathedrals places Wilhelm Worringer in the foreground of discussions of Expressionism and German Modernism for the first time. These essays not only reveal the complexities of his individual works, such as Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Form Problems of the Gothic (1911), they also examine his lesser-known books and essays of the post-World War I years, the 1920s, and beyond. Invisible Cathedrals offers both a basic introduction to Worringer's writings and their broad influence, and a profound and detailed revisionist analysis of his significance in German and European Modernism. It also provides the most comprehensive bibliography to date of his own work and of the scattered criticism devoted to Worringer in different disciplines. Worringer's works were provocative, widely read, and often reprinted and were highly influential among artists and writers in Germany. As a result, they both raised suspicion in his own academic discipline of art history and excited discussion in other diverse fields, such as literary and social theory, psychology, and film theory. Worringer emerges here not solely as a scholarly commentator on the history of art, but also as an activist scholar who engaged his historical criticism of other periods directly in the production of culture in his own time. Contributors are Magdalena Bushart, Neil H. Donahue, Charles W. Haxthausen, Michael W. Jennings, Joseph Masheck, Geoffrey Waite, and Joanna E. Ziegler.