In 1546, Michelangelo was a seventy-year-old man living when the average lifespan was well below fifty. He had an entire lifetime’s worth of work to lIn 1546, Michelangelo was a seventy-year-old man living when the average lifespan was well below fifty. He had an entire lifetime’s worth of work to look back on and a reputation he knew would outlive him. He completed the Pieta before age twenty-five and the David before he was thirty. At an age where most of us – even today – would have rested on our laurels, he chose to accept his new papal commission and become the principal architect at St. Peter’s Basilica. With his preternatural abilities still very much intact, he took up his work. William Wallace’s book (Princeton University Press, 2019) is the short, highly readable, and poignant story of the two decades Michelangelo spent working on his last major project.
The first few chapters of the book discuss the projects Michelangelo was finishing up when the Pope summoned him to St. Peter’s, including the Palazzo Farnese and putting the last touches on the tomb of Julius II while the last five chapters focus on construction at St. Peter’s. In 1505, Pope Julius II decided that the Old St. Peter’s which had served Rome for over a millennium should be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. The first architect assigned to the project was Bramante, but progress suffered from a series of uneven fits and starts for forty years until Michelangelo finally took on the job in 1546.
The problems he faced there were staggeringly complex, even for someone half his age. One of the former architects, Antonio da Sangallo, had an ardent group of loyalists who continued to advocate for his design which Michelangelo knew would result in total failure. The people working under him, despite their best intentions, couldn’t reconcile themselves to Michelangelo’s new plans. But slowly - very slowly - he made inroads and started to change minds. Michelangelo was nothing if not a studious micromanager: “he selected and inspected all his materials; arranged for ropes, tackle, and boats; haggled with carters and shippers about fees; and made drawings for even the tiniest, seemingly most insignificant details, before turning the paper over to make calculations, count bushels of grain, draft a letter, and compose poetry.” What makes Michelangelo’s acceptance of this gargantuan project even more touching is that he knew he would never live to see it finished. Despite pouring nearly two decades of his life into it and dying just a few weeks short of his 89th birthday in 1564, the new St. Peter’s wouldn’t be completed until 1626, over sixty years after he died.
Wallace does a wonderful job of focusing on Michelangelo’s assistants and relatives, drawing heavily from the large amount of correspondence he left behind. In doing so, Wallace does severe damage to Giorgio Vasari’s insinuations that Michelangelo was a quiet, brooding misanthrope. His voluminous correspondence shows him to be caring, warm, and downright diplomatic in his dealings with other artisans, friends, and members of his household.
Wallace still holds on to the Romantic notion of the artistic genius, which is unnecessary but nevertheless so thoroughly embedded in popular writing about the “Great Artists,” visual and otherwise. Wallace has done his homework and harnessed his scholarly resources; he doesn’t need to lean on the idea of genius. Understanding and appreciating the tremendous amount of work that went into St. Peter’s is not to diminish the immensity of the achievement. But this is a minor point in an overall stupendously good book. As someone whose art-historical knowledge is – let’s be euphemistic and say “aspirational” at best – I can’t imagine a better introduction to Michelangelo’s late life and work. To think that Princeton University Press is making books like this – smart, scholarly, and yet still accessible to the interested layperson – should excite everyone who takes ideas and history seriously....more
Outside of historians of photography or the occasional cinephile, the name Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) doesn’t ring many bells anymoreOutside of historians of photography or the occasional cinephile, the name Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) doesn’t ring many bells anymore. If anything, he is perhaps recognized in passing for his 1870s collaboration with former California Governor and future Senator Leland Stanford and their mutual interest in trying to tell whether the four feet of a horse ever leave the ground all at once while a horse is at a full canter. Muybridge’s technological innovations revealed that in fact they do – to the surprise of many of his contemporaries. But aside from his fascination with studying the motion of horses, he led a fascinating life. In her book “River of Shadows,” Rebecca Solnit takes Muybridge’s life and accomplishments as a centerpiece, but slowly works outward to the study of his environment of the newly populated Western United States, and then ultimately to the now almost unnoticed impact he has on human perceptions of time and motion.
Muybridge was born along the shores of the Thames in 1830. When he was twenty, he came to the United States, eventually finding himself in San Francisco as a bookseller. In 1860, he suffered a massive head injury in a stagecoach accident near Fort Worth, Texas. Afterwards, some friends and acquaintances claimed that they experienced in him a significant personality change during which he grew more introverted and less observant of social customs and mores (what we euphemistically would call “eccentric”). This has led later neurophysiologists to believe that Muybridge’s injury may have been akin to the orbitofrontal cortex lesion that Phineas Gage suffered just twelve years earlier in 1848. It was shortly after his accident that Muybridge began to develop a fascination for photography. His first exhibitions of his work largely consisted of nature photography – mostly in the Yosemite Valley. These images are among the first which would earn him worldwide recognition.
One of the recurrent themes Solnit explores is how the West, rife with self-mythologization and constant reinvention, was the perfect place to go and completely reconstruct oneself. Muybridge engaged in this with a series of name changes throughout his career. Born Edward James Muggeridge, he went on to later use Muggridge and Muygridge, finally settling on Muybridge only in the 1860s. During a trip back home to England in 1882, he changed the spelling of his first name to Eadweard. I can’t help but think of the smirk that must have crossed his face when looking for a name under which to display his early photography: Helios. During the late 1860s and 1870s, Muybridge immersed himself in photography, twice accompanying Carleton Watkins where he made gigantic plates of the natural scenery around him. He also took countless photographs of San Francisco landscapes and cloud banks.
It wasn’t until the middle part of his career that Muybridge became increasingly interested not just in photography itself, but in how photography manipulated human perceptions of time and space. Around this time, he was approached by Leland Stanford to ask whether his favorite horse, Occident, ever lifted all four of his legs off the ground. He was able to take photographs of Occident at speeds of about 1,000 per second (or one picture every 1/1,000 of a second). He went on to engage in time and motion studies of just about anything one could imagine, from human nude figures to “amputee walking with crutches” to “legless boy climbing in and out of chair.” In 1880, Muybridge invented what he called a zoopraxiscope, a spinning disc with a number of apertures bored into it, that if spun quickly enough, appeared to result in a continuous, moving image. Now not only was he an accomplished photographer, but also one of the pioneers of early cinema.
In 1926, twenty-two years after Muybridge’s death, Virginia Woolf wrote in response to the bourgeoning world of cinema, “The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.” One of the major criticisms of cinema was that it consisted of a flood of images which the eyes were forced to take in faster than the mind could possibly process. Whether or not Muybridge anticipated such a massive, consciousness-shifting change in the gradual conversion from a text-based culture to an image-driven one is unknown. But it’s an irrevocable one, and one that he played a major part in.
Solnit’s prose is readable and engaging enough, but not as compelling as I would have thought considering the wide amount of popular praise her books frequently get. In some ways, Solnit uses Muybridge as a tool to talk about wider themes of America in the nineteenth century, which is quite a feat for a book that is barely 250 pages in length. Sometimes it’s unclear precisely which theme she is trying to exemplify with a given point. Nevertheless, Solnit reintroduces the reading public to a figure whose contributions have forever shaped the ways in which time and space transform themselves, revivified, on the living screen. There isn’t a lot of new scholarly ground being tread in the book, or many new interpretive vistas being explored regarding Muybridge’s life or work. Sometimes a popular, narrative-driven history re-centering a neglected figure from the past just hits the spot, and this is exactly what makes this book so thoroughly enjoyable....more
While still conspicuously ignorant of the subjects, museum acquisitions, museology in general, and the debates concerning (re)appropriation of “culturWhile still conspicuously ignorant of the subjects, museum acquisitions, museology in general, and the debates concerning (re)appropriation of “culturally significant objects” all fascinate me. James Cuno manages to cover all these bases in this book whose major question is: Do modern states have the right to demand the return of objects that may be deemed to have cultural, aesthetic, or national value? And if they do, what reasons validate this demand?
Cuno’s short answer is that states don’t have this right at all. Instead, he sees the rise of these cultural reappropriation laws as a way of shoring up nationalist pretentions. His argument seems strong. Two of his chapters, “The Turkish Question” and “The Chinese Question,” examine this assertion in detail. For example, when the Ba’athists took control in Iraq in 1968, they adopted strict laws of cultural appropriation in concert with their virulently nationalist rhetoric. “Their intention was to create a ‘national-territorial consciousness resting upon the particular history of Iraq and, equally significantly, of what the regime, or a powerful circle within it, presented as the history of the Iraqi people.’ Central to this effort was an official drive to foster archaeology as a way of making people aware and proud of ‘their ancient past,’ including that of the pre-Islamic era. At the same time, the Party encouraged local folklore for the purpose of inspiring communities with a sense of internal Iraqi unity, and emphasizing Iraq’s uniqueness among the nations of the world at large” (p. 58-59). In other words, at least on the level of political propaganda, the purpose of these new laws was not to maintain and preserve ancient artifacts, but rather a proxy for a relatively new country to build a sense of cultural and national identity.
Much the same thing happened to the young Turkey while trying to survive the birth pangs of early Ataturkism and subsequent westernization. “The emergence and the development of archaeology in Turkey took place under constraints that are deeply rooted in history. Confrontation between the traditional Islamic framework and the Western model, the endeavor to survive as a non-Arabic nation in the Middle East while the empire was disintegrating, the hostile and occasionally humiliating attitude of Europeans, and growing nationalism have all been consequential in this development … The pace that archaeology took in Turkey is much more related to the ideology of the modern Republic than to the existing archaeological potential of the country” (p. 83, a direct quote from Mehmet Ozdogan’s article “Ideology and Archaeology in Turkey”). In a similar way, the Elgin Marbles served as political symbols critical to the identity and “national spirit” of the modern nation-state of Greece, not just as archaeological artifacts.
The claim to national identity is also a common one, and one that Cuno rejects with equal fervor. We are so used to the argument that this object or that belongs here or there because of the important part it plays in making a people who they are. However, these objects are often so removed in historical time that the number of things these artists shared with the supporters of cultural appropriation shared is vanishingly small. Look at contemporary Egyptians. They share neither a common language, a body of customs, a religion, or law with ancient Egyptians, yet we are still urged to believe that one is an integral part of the identity of the other – presumably because of geographical proximity. That dynamic thing we call culture has worked over dozens of centuries to produce these widely divergent changes. The claims of contemporary Egyptians on the cultural artifacts of ancient Egypt seem tenuous at best. The ever-presence of boundary-crossing and the impermanence of cartography both speak to the capriciousness that is “cultural identity.”
Cuno argues for what he calls “partage,” the provision of archaeological and historical expertise in return for the partitioning of important discovered objects. One of the only other alternatives would be to potentially let these objects onto the black market, where they would certainly lack the curatorial and historical expertise they would be afforded in a museum.
While Cuno effectively cottons on to an important lesson of the last few centuries – that the modern nation-state will stop at nothing to traduce any obstacle that gets in the way of imparting its influence - he does go out of his way to paint many of these states as heterogeneous and uniform in their power, which is misleading at best. Not all nascent nations practiced nationalism, either on an ideological or pragmatic level, with equal vim and vigor.
As convincing as Cuno’s arguments were, I often found myself reversing the cultural tables and asking myself what I would do if, for whatever counterfactual historical reason, an original copy of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution had found its way into the halls of the Kremlin or the Forbidden City. Could Americans who argue against cultural reappropriation laws have the intellectual courage to say, with a straight face, that it doesn’t matter that these objects are not permanently housed in the United States? Then again, we’re much closer in historical time – in language, heritage, culture, and mores – to the people that created this country than the contemporary Chinese are to Shang-era potters or the contemporary Greeks are to those brilliant artisans who created the Elgin Marbles, which may further complicate an already intricate argument.
Whatever your opinion on the issues, provided you had one prior to exposure to this book, it will make you re-think how art, identity, cultural appropriation, and museum-building are all intimately connected. It does a wonderful job at raising intelligent questions about how these concepts are linked. ...more
In “The Melancholy Art,” Michael Ann Holly charts an entire constellation of concerns in relation to art-historical (and art-historiographical) writinIn “The Melancholy Art,” Michael Ann Holly charts an entire constellation of concerns in relation to art-historical (and art-historiographical) writing. Her grasp of philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis is every bit as sophisticated as her grasp of art history (her area of formal academic training). It takes a certain kind of pensiveness and humility to criticize your entire field – for that’s partially what this book sets out to do – with Holly’s active, voracious, but always judicious, interdisciplinarity.
First, a note on the book itself. I ordered the hardback edition directly from Princeton. It has an especially beautiful cover with a close-up of Giovanni Bellini’s “Christ Carrying the Cross.” The book is printed on thick, glossy paper with a generous number of black-and-white reproductions, ranging from Freud’s couch in Vienna to a picture of Reimenschneider’s “Altar of the Holy Blood.” Whoever put the book together was smart in seeing how the format and design of the book could wonderfully sing in tandem with its actual content.
The content is just as beautiful. It’s a collection of five highly interrelated essays, all centering around the intimacy, existential quality, and experience of the aesthetic with an emphasis on how these have been treated in art history writing in the past. At its heart, these essays are meant to, as I said above, criticize in several penetrating ways some contemporary assumptions about art history and the writing of it. Holly argues that art history has an unfortunate inclination toward overt positivism that focuses on analytical reconstruction, and often has a wonderful self-confidence that it can completely and totally represent the work in question, its content, context, and significance; these assumptions will be familiar to anyone familiar with nineteenth-century historiography.
Holly suggests our art-historical encounter with objects is just as full of melancholy, loss, displacement, and gaps that can never be fully bridged – and, most importantly, that acknowledging this will make for a truer, more authentic historiography. She quotes Frank Ankersmit’s “Sublime Historical Experience”: “How we feel about the past is no less important than what we know about it – probably even more so” (p. 7). The object relations theory of Melanie Klein is used to smartly situate the experience all art historians find themselves in: analyzing and attempting to reconstruct something ( i.e., Klein’s “object”) that is inevitably lost and unable to be reconstructed.
Above all, I think Holly is concerned with making the writing of art history phenomenologically and existentially rigorous, to reinvigorate it with a kind of élan vital that positivism saps from it, and that only a pensive melancholy can even partially restore. She wants art historians to recognize loss for what it is and for what it means, instead of trying to cheaply paper over it with the meretricious claims of sentimentalism. Above all, art historians must know that their task is an impossible one: that of working toward a goal that can never be fully completed or realize. We will always have something to say about that diptych, or this altarpiece. Meaning abides and never exhausts itself – and this is the source of our melancholy.
Holly quotes one of Whitney Davis’ articles on Winckelmann, a quote more than deserving of full repeat here, for it sums up the entire spirit of Holly’s project: “The history of art is lost, but art history is still with us; and although art history often attempts to bring the object back to life, finally it is our means of laying it to rest, of putting it in its history and taking it out of our own, where we have witnessed its departure. To have the history of art as history - acknowledging the irreparable loss of the objects – we must give up art history as a bringing-to-life, as denial of departure. If it is not to be pathological, art history must take its leave of its objects, for they have already departed anyway” (p. 21).
If I have one small criticism of the book, it is that she does not seem to recognize the expansiveness of its implications. I quoted her quoting Frank Ankersmit above, not an art historian but a historiographer, so she knows that these ideas have already been touched upon. Dominick LaCapra, Hayden White, Cathy Caruth, and other historiographers have written on similar topics. However, while acknowledging her intellectual debts, she makes unique contributions of her own, but never applies them outside of art history, when they are extremely applicable. Without ever becoming insular, she keeps the explicit implications for her work within the realm of art history, and the result is a work of undiminished thoughtfulness, rigor, and melancholy in its own right. ...more
“Visual Shock” purports to be nothing less than a history of art controversies in American culture. Its scope is extensive, dating all the way back to“Visual Shock” purports to be nothing less than a history of art controversies in American culture. Its scope is extensive, dating all the way back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and the construction of the Washington Monument, coming up through the more recent contretemps over work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. The chapters are organized topically, and cover much of the ground that you would expect such a comprehensive history to deal with: the introduction of modern art into the United States, public sculpture, murals, the politicization of art and art funding, and even changing aspects of American museology.
One of the problems with the book is that whole libraries have been written on any one of these subjects. Reading Kammen’s book, I was reminded of a distinction all too familiar to computer scientists: that of data and information. Data is raw, unprocessed, unfiltered, and if some serious work isn’t done on it, pretty useless. Information on the other hand, has had some sort of heuristic applied to it in such a way that it now can communicate something important. Unfortunately, Kammen’s book is all data and almost no information.
The sheer number of names, projects, commissions, provincial politicians, and kvetching letters to the editor that the reader encounters is impressive enough. You get quick, superficial accounts of Karen Finley, Judy Chicago’s famous “Dinner Party,” Chris Ofili, the huge metal pieces of Richard Serra, the bombastic denunciations against modern art by McCarthyist Michigan Congressman George Dondero, the protest art of the sixties and seventies, and the palpable drive for museums to put on more and more extreme exhibits, often sacrificing the quality of art shown, for the sole purpose of pulling in more money. Most of these take up perhaps a few pages – barely enough to introduce the reader to the piece being considered - before Kammen moves on to something else that catches his attention.
Even given Kammen’s distracting lack of narrative drive and insistence on including everything under the sun, there are some recurring themes and questions. When should taxpayer dollars be expended on art, and when shouldn’t they be? Should nudity or the “ability to offend” a section of the viewing public have any relevance to this question? (Kammen, to his credit, does include some interesting polling of the general public on these questions, but as with most everything else, he covers it breathlessly in a few sentences and quickly moves on.) He also discusses several commissions during the Great Depression, and some of the factors that determined how the public reacted to them – this was one of the most successful parts of the book.
One is left with the underwhelming and unsurprising conclusion that most of the public is at best befuddled and at worst disgusted by modern art. However, instead of building critically on that observation or going one step beyond what any relatively informed reader could have already told you, he leaves it there. The level of analysis or integrative thought behind the whole project is sorely lacking, which goes back to what I said about data and information earlier. Writing a book like this consists just as much in knowing what you’re not going to include as what you are, and that filter just doesn’t seem to be there.
On a more prosaic note, in the early chapters, pictures are included when necessary – for those of you who can’t visually conjure Hiram Powers’ “The Greek Slave” from memory (I know some of you are out there). However, Kammen also refers to the work of several names I mentioned above, and no pictures are included. Perhaps he couldn’t get the relevant artist’s or museum’s permission, but this is too sizable an oversight in a book that deals with art, much of which the reader may never have seen. For both this reason and others discussed above, it may be best to completely overlook this unless you’re looking for the most general, cursory discussions of the topic. And even then, I’m sure you can find something better than this. ...more
It is now a common assumption in the art-historical world that much of early Christian art (particularly from the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries) It is now a common assumption in the art-historical world that much of early Christian art (particularly from the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries) portrays the Roman Emperor as some sort of demigod and intercessor between our world and that of the divine, imbued with ultimate power. This is what the author called "Emperor Mystique." In fact, this idea might even shore up the even more commonly held belief that the Church and the state were united for much of the middle ages. In "The Clash of Gods," Mathews critically examines this assumption and comes to what I thought were some fascinating conclusions.
According to Mathews, it is largely the work of three scholars that is responsible for the rise of the Emperor Mystique: art historian Andre Grabar, medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, and archaeologist Andreas Alfoldi. Along with collectively contributing to the Emperor Mystique, they come from Czarist Russia, Wilhelmine Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire respectively, and all harbored a great love for imperial greatness and yearned, in some way, for its return. In order to do this, they all retroactively read signs of vanished empire into the early Christian art they were studying. As Mathews says, "The need to interpret Christ as an Emperor tells us more about the historians involve d than it does about Early Christian art" (16). The scholarly apparatus that Mathews brings to bear on his argument is impressive. The vast majority of the book looks at individual pieces of art, arguing for an interpretation against that of the Emperor Mystique, none of which I will recapitulate here. It could even be convincing, but I will confess to not knowing enough about the art of the period in question to say one way or another.
One thing that I can say is that Mathew's argument seems to exhort the reader into an either/or reaction toward the three aforementioned scholars. As Peter Brown, the Princeton professor of the post-Constantinian Christian world, said in a review of the same book, Mathews thinks that "either representations of Christ betray artistic conventions that must mirror faithfully the visual content of contemporary court ceremonials and imperial representations - and, further, must communicate the overbearing message associated with such ceremonials and representations - or they communicate, often, the exact opposite."
Another tacit assumption of the book that Mathews does nothing to repudiate is that the thesis would, in some ways, suggest that we dismiss not only the Emperor Mystique, but also the entire body of scholarship of Kantorowicz, Grabar, and Alfoldi. Grabar and Alfoldi might not be as read today, but Kantorowicz's "The King's Two Bodies" is still considered an indispensable text in historical medieval theology. I certainly do not want to suggest that the book is a hatchet job. It is not. I think Mathews achieves something lastingly important by giving us a book-length treatment that resists what is still, in some quarters, a widely held assumption. I would just regret to see this book read as something more than an unfortunate interpretive misreading that was made by a group of otherwise superb, astoundingly learned scholars. ...more
This book is a set of five essays in response to Ranciere’s earlier work “The Ignorant Schoolmaster.” All of these pieces are tied together by RancierThis book is a set of five essays in response to Ranciere’s earlier work “The Ignorant Schoolmaster.” All of these pieces are tied together by Ranciere’s attempt to overcome the dyad so often associated with modernist aesthetics of passive spectator/active seer. The title essay extends the concept set forth in “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” by suggesting that the knowledge gap between the educated teacher and the student should be given up in place for an “equality of knowledge.” The goal of this is not to turn everyone into a scholar, however. As Ranciere says, “It is not the transmission of the artist’s knowledge or inspiration to the spectator. It is the third that is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect” (15). This is by far the most cogent and understandable of the essays in the collection, and it offers an interesting suggestion in rethinking the space between the actor and viewer, teacher and student, or any other relationship. However, it struck me as the kind of idea most at home in the world of theory, one that might not be well-translated into praxis.
The second essay, “The Misadventures of Critical Thought,” Ranciere criticizes the traditional role of the spectator by claiming that it, even though a mode of criticism itself, it “reproduces its own logic.” He looks at photos from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Vietnam, by Martha Rosler and Josephine Meckseper. Some people do not want to view these graphic photographs, however that very refusal perpetuates and continues the logic of the war in the first place. Therefore, a critical stance toward the image needs to shift away from this approach toward the uncoupling of two logics, “the emancipating logic of capacity and the critical logic of collective inveiglement” (48).
The last essay, “The Pensive Image,” sustains a further opening up between the formalist opposition of the active and passive. Ranciere argues for a shift – again, what he argues to be an emancipating shift – away from the “unifying logic of action” toward “a new status of the figure” (121). The end of pensiveness (of being, literally, “full of thought”) lies between narration and expression, one the mode of the active artist, the other of the passive spectator who fixes upon the artistic vision in order to impart to it a kind of reality.
Like a lot of (post)modern Continental writing, Ranciere’s writing can be elliptical, and his arguments somewhat hard to follow, perhaps because they are difficult to sustain, however engaging. I chose this because it was short enough and seemed like a suitable introduction to his body of work. The essays were interesting and provocatively argued, but sometimes they seemed less than original: for example, the title essay really seems to add nothing to the old breaking apart of the bipolar opposition of active and passive in theatre, art, and political conscientiousness; it recapitulates it nicely, but imports nothing new to the conversation. Those looking for ways to re-imagine issues in contemporary aesthetics will find something new here (as well as penetrating discussions of the poetry of Mallarme and the films of Abbas Kiarostami), but it will unnecessarily frustrate the casual reader. ...more
Many non-fiction genres sometimes find it difficult to navigate between two audiences: the rank neophytes who need a basic grounding in the topic at hMany non-fiction genres sometimes find it difficult to navigate between two audiences: the rank neophytes who need a basic grounding in the topic at hand, and those who already have a thorough knowledge of those fundamentals. It is those of us who are in the middle who sometimes have difficulty finding the right book for them. Edward Lucie-Smith provides some of those big, overarching ideas that are essential for those building on the basics, but the sheer number of painters and sculptors that he throws at the reader is a little disorienting, especially when you’re still trying to discern what ties Morris Louis, Frank Stella, and Helen Frankenthaler all under the category of “post-painterly abstraction.” Maybe it’s just my compulsion to over-categorize and draw connections between all the artists that detracted from the book.
The introduction to the book was really promising, and draws a lot of lines of continuity between the art of pre- and post-World War II. Lucie-Smith argues, for example, that whereas it is often thought that Modernism came to some sort of end not long after this time, the techniques, aesthetics, and materials used to make the art never changed, and therefore this art remained, in many ways, Modernist. The first few pages of each chapter also give some great intellectual background to each of the major movements, i.e., abstract expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, p/op art, and photorealism. But after this, the reader is met with page after page of artists who appear quickly and just as quickly disappear never to be heard from or seen again, with usually just one painting or sculpture to represent an entire artist’s oeuvre. Well-known artists like Henry Moore and Frank Stella get two photographic plates, and no one gets more than that. Quickly afterward, I got lost in a welter of names with which I was barely familiar or not familiar at all. What I appreciated most about this book is that I was introduced to many new names that I didn’t know before, and now know to keep an eye out for them. ...more
Even though the Nikolaus Pevsner’s name launched an entire series of books on modern design and architecture, one would hardly be able to guess it froEven though the Nikolaus Pevsner’s name launched an entire series of books on modern design and architecture, one would hardly be able to guess it from reading this volume alone, which was written by Pevsner himself and originally published in 1968.
Aside from the illustrations, most of which are in black and white, there are not many good things to be said about this book. Pevsner’s approach covers architecture, furniture, jewelry, and the decorative arts from around the mid-nineteenth century and ends with the very beginning of the Bauhaus, with an interesting section on the Art Nouveau. Beginners will find Pevsner’s approach especially unhelpful, as he does not provide an overarching approach to any of the periods that he covers: instead of starting with some of the broad themes of, say, Art Nouveau, he jumps right into some of the pieces that he wants to discuss. In addition to this, Pevsner’s choices of artists and designers seem arbitrary. Much of the text is simply written description of things that are readily obvious by looking at the illustrations. He does, however, provide some biographical information of the people he discusses which goes some way in contextualizing the information he has to offer.
I would recommend against this book in general, particularly for someone who is looking for a general, thematic approach to the periods covered. ...more
I debated over and over whether to give this book three stars or four, and finally decided on the latter. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I read tI debated over and over whether to give this book three stars or four, and finally decided on the latter. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I read this as a stand-alone book, not a companion piece to the PBS series of the same name, as I’m not sure that I’d be able to stand Schama’s endless attempts to dramatize and eulogize everything, implying that there is somehow meaning in even the most minute detail of the canvas, not the mention the personal lives of the artists.
Schama devotes forty or fifty pages a piece to eight artists presented in chronological order: Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko. The text is interlarded with the most sumptuous full-plate color representations of some of the artists’ most well-known and recognized work. One of the biggest advantages of the book is that, while technical aspects of the individual pieces of art are discussed, they are not put in a vacuum: Schama simultaneously emphasizes cultural, political, and social factors which facilitate a greater and fuller understanding of what he’s talking about.
Depending on the reader (or, so I hear, the viewer of the eponymous PBS series), you will find Schama’s prepossessing gregariousness and endless apotheosizing somewhat disconcerting. I certainly did. But at the same time, I recognize that if this is what it takes to get someone who has never previously cared about art into a museum to leave astounded and wanting to come back, then it has ultimately performed its job quite nicely. Introductory art educators or those who wish to gain a fundamental familiarity with the above artists will benefit most from this book. But those who already have this knowledge, as well as how the biographical information and the artwork interact with one another, will learn precious little. I must say, though, that the dozens upon dozens of color plates make the book well worth its $50 price tag (though from the looks of things, it’s available for less than half that on Amazon). ...more
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