Critical Terms for Art History


Robert S. Nelson - 1996
    But questions about the categories of "art" and "art history" acquired increased urgency during the 1970s, when new developments in critical theory and other intellectual projects dramatically transformed the discipline. The first edition of Critical Terms for Art History both mapped and contributed to those transformations, offering a spirited reassessment of the field's methods and terminology.Art history as a field has kept pace with debates over globalization and other social and political issues in recent years, making a second edition of this book not just timely, but crucial. Like its predecessor, this new edition consists of essays that cover a wide variety of "loaded" terms in the history of art, from sign to meaning, ritual to commodity. Each essay explains and comments on a single term, discussing the issues the term raises and putting the term into practice as an interpretive framework for a specific work of art. For example, Richard Shiff discusses "Originality" in Vija Celmins's To Fix the Image in Memory, a work made of eleven pairs of stones, each consisting of one "original" stone and one painted bronze replica. In addition to the twenty-two original essays, this edition includes nine new ones—performance, style, memory/monument, body, beauty, ugliness, identity, visual culture/visual studies, and social history of art—as well as new introductory material. All help expand the book's scope while retaining its central goal of stimulating discussion of theoretical issues in art history and making that discussion accessible to both beginning students and senior scholars.Contributors: Mark Antliff, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Stephen Bann, Homi K. Bhabha, Suzanne Preston Blier, Michael Camille, David Carrier, Craig Clunas, Whitney Davis, Jas Elsner, Ivan Gaskell, Ann Gibson, Charles Harrison, James D. Herbert, Amelia Jones, Wolfgang Kemp, Joseph Leo Koerner, Patricia Leighten, Paul Mattick Jr., Richard Meyer, W. J. T. Mitchell, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, William Pietz, Alex Potts, Donald Preziosi, Lisbet Rausing, Richard Shiff, Terry Smith, Kristine Stiles, David Summers, Paul Wood, James E. Young

Gustav Klimt: 1862-1918


Gilles Néret - 1992
    In his own time, Kilmt (1862-1918) was a highly successful painter, draftsman, muralist, and graphic artist; in the intervening years, iconic works such as The Kiss have been elevated to nothing less than cult status. Klimt's unfading popularity attests to the appeal of not only his aesthetic sensibilities but also that of the recurrent universal themes in his work: love, feminine beauty, aging, and death. He once wrote, "I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me...ought to look carefully at my pictures." With this overview of Klimt's work, readers will delight in taking up that challenge.About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art


Jennifer Doyle - 2013
    She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. Confronting the challenge of writing about difficult works of art, she shows how these artists work with feelings as a means to question our assumptions about identity, intimacy, and expression. They deploy the complexity of emotion to measure the weight of history, and to deepen our sense of where and how politics happens in contemporary art. Doyle explores ideologies of emotion and how emotion circulates in and around art. Throughout, she gives readers welcoming points of entry into artworks that they may at first find off-putting or confrontational. Doyle offers new insight into how the discourse of controversy serves to shut down discussion about this side of contemporary art practice, and counters with a critical language that allows the reader to accept emotional intensity in order to learn from it.

The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century


Émile Mâle - 1899
    It looks at French religious art in the Middle Ages, its forms, and especially the Eastern sources of sculptural iconography used in the cathedrals of France. Fully illustrated with many footnotes it acts as a useful guide for the student of Western culture.

Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History


Stephen F. Eisenman - 1994
    This classic textbook examines the artistic movements and achievements of that time.

Egon Schiele, 1890-1918: The Midnight Soul of the Artist


Reinhard Steiner - 1994
    After a short flirtation with Klimt's style, Schiele soon questioned the aesthetic orientation to the beautiful surface of the Viennese Art Nouveau with his rough and not easily accessible paintings. Many contemporaries found his expressive nudes and self-portraits, with their strange movements and morbid colours, to be ugly and even morally objectionable - criticism which culminated in criminalizing the painter as "obscene" and resulted in 1912 in an indictment and short jail sentence. However, not even his harshest critics could dispute however the artist's extraordinary drawing talent.

The Medium is the Massage


Marshall McLuhan - 1967
    Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward in the dense and poorly organized Understanding Media. McLuhan's ideas about the nature of media, the increasing speed of communication, and the technological basis for our understanding of who we are come to life in this slender volume. Although originally printed in 1967, the art and style in The Medium is the Massage seem as fresh today as in the summer of love, and the ideas are even more resonant now that computer interfaces are becoming gateways to the global village.

Methods and Theories of Art History


Anne D'Alleva - 2005
    This book provides the art history student with an introduction to the range of theoretical perspectives used in looking at and analyzing art. It covers a broad range of approaches, presenting individual arguments, controversies, and divergent perspectives.The book begins by introducing the concept of theory and explains why it is important to the practice of art history. Each of the six chapters that form the core of the book presents a group of related approaches that are then discussed in turn and applied to one or more works of art. The book ends with some practical ideas about writing theory-based art history essays.

The Pursuit of History


John Tosh - 1984
    The essential introduction to the practice of history - revised with new features to ensure it is even more popular with students.Tosh is consistently the best-selling Longman History textbook.The last 3 editions have achieved total sales of over 83,000 copies.The use of photos of significant people and events help make the text more lively.New layout and design enables readers to understand themes more quickly.

Orientalism


Edward W. Said - 1978
    This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.

Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock


Kirk Varnedoe - 2006
    He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in "Art and Illusion," another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death. With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works.

Archaeology Essentials: Theories, Methods and Practice


Colin Renfrew - 2007
    Long-established techniques are carefully explained as well as exciting new methods as the authors describe the ways in which archaeologists seek to explain and interpret the remote past of humankind

Art Since 1960


Michael Archer - 1997
    This revised and expanded edition is brought up to date with discussions on the more comprehensive globalization of art since the mid-1990s, which can be seen in the growth of the exhibition calendar and the number of new contemporary art museums opening around the world. With over thirty additional illustrations and an updated timeline and bibliography, this book will prove indispensable to anyone interested in the evolution of modern art.

Subculture: The Meaning of Style


Dick Hebdige - 1979
    Hebdige [...] is concerned with the UK's postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads and punks.' - Rolling StoneWith enviable precision and wit Hebdige has addressed himself to a complex topic - the meanings behind the fashionable exteriors of working-class youth subcultures - approaching them with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus that combines semiotics, the sociology of devience and Marxism and come up with a very stimulating short book - Time OutThis book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era - The New York Times

Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship


Claire Bishop - 2012
    Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawe? Althamer and Paul Chan.Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.