The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford History of Art)

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.

The Art of Art History is a unique 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.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 528-568) and index.

Donald Preziosi is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His publications include Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science and Minoan Architectural Design.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Making the Visible Legible, Donald Preziosi

Chapter 1. Art as History

Introduction

Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History, Whitney Davis

Patterns of Intention, Michael Baxandall

Chapter 2. Aesthetics

Introduction

What is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant

The Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant

Philosophy of Fine Art, G. W. F. Hegel

Chapter 3. Style

Introduction

Principles in Art History, Heinrich Wolfflin

"Form", Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description, David Summers

Style, Meyer Schapiro

Style, Ernst Gombrich

Chapter 4. History as an Art

Introduction

Leading Characteristics of the Later Roman Kunstwollen, Alois Riegl

Images from the Regions of the Pueblo Indians, A. Warburg

Warburg's Concept of Kunstwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics, Edgar Wind

Retrieving Warburg's Tradition, Margaret Iversen

Chapter 5. Mechanisms of Meaning: Iconography and Semiology

Introduction

Semiotics and Iconography, Hubert Damisch

Semiotics and Art History, Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson

Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition, E. Panofsky

Toward A Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds, Louis Marin

Chapter 6. Modernity and its Discontents

Introduction

Sculpture in the Expanded Field, Rosalind Krauss

What Is an Author?, Michel Foucault

The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Craig Owens

Mapping the Postmodern, Andreas Huyssen

Chapter 7. The Gendered Subject

Introduction

The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission, Nanette Salomon

Sexuality and/in Representation: Five British Artists, Lisa Tickner

No Essential Femininity, Mary Kelly and Paul Smith

Postfeminism, Feminist Pleasures, and Embodied Theories of Art, Amelia Jones

Chapter 8. Deconstruction and the Limits of Interpretation

Introduction

The Temptation of New Perspectives, Stephen Melville

The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger

The Still Life as a Personal Object, Meyer Schapiro

Restitutions of the truth in pointing [pointure], Jacques Derrida

Chapter 9. The Other: Art History and/as Museology

Introduction

Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order, Timothy Mitchell

Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, Carol Duncan

The Recalcitrant Object: Culture Contact and the Question of Hybridity, Annie E. Coombes

Nestor Garcia Canclini

Donald Preziosi

Afterword, Notes, Bibliographic Essay, Biographical Notes, Text Acknowledgements, List of Illustrations, Glossary, Index