Open University Set Books

Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas

Product Description
This popular anthology of twentieth-century art theoretical texts has now been expanded to take account of new research, and to include significant contributions to art theory from the 1990s.

• New edition of this popular anthology of twentieth-century art-theoretical texts.
  
• Now updated to include the results of new research, together with significant contributions from the 1990s.
  
• Includes writings by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures.
  
• The editors provide contextual introductions to 340 texts.
  
• Complements Art in Theory 1648-1815 and Art in Theory 1815-1900 to create a complete survey of the theories underpinning the development of art in the modern period.

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

Product DescriptionSynopsis
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 (Wölfflin, 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 intellectual progress, 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 provide stimulating 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 subjects presented, 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, without healing 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 an accounting 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 is inextricably 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, he makes 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 yet all-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 not envisages 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 often crystallize, 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 and threads 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 courageously takes 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.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 intellectual progress, 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 provide stimulating 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 subjects presented, 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, without healing 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 an accounting 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 is inextricably 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, he makes 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 yet all-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 not envisages 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 often crystallize, 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 and threads 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 courageously takes 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.

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Bachelors (October Books) (October Books)

Product DescriptionSynopsis
These essays on nine women artists are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?". In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement's misogyny. Rosalind Krauss resists that claim, for these "bachelors" are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. The artists presented include Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Sherrie Levine, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler and Francesca Woodman.These essays on nine women artists are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?". In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement's misogyny. Rosalind Krauss resists that claim, for these "bachelors" are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. The artists presented include Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Sherrie Levine, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler and Francesca Woodman.

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Critical Terms for Art History

Synopsis
In addition to the 22 original essays, this edition includes 9 new ones 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 it accessible.

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The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (Cambridge Paperback Library)

Product Description
The eighteenth century saw a radical change in the depiction of country life in English painting: feeling less constrained by the conventions of classical or theatrical pastoral, landscape painters attempted to offer a portrayal of what life was really like, or was thought to be like, in contemporary England; and this inevitably involved a new approach to the depiction of the rural poor. John Barrell's influential study shows why the poor began to be of such interest to painters, and examines the ways in which they could be represented so as to be an acceptable part of the décor of the salons of the rich. His discussion focuses on the work of three painters: Thomas Gainsborough, George Morland and John Constable. Throughout the book, Barrell draws illuminating comparisons with the contemporary literature of rural life and with the work of other painters. His terse and vigorous account has provided a landmark for social historians and literary critics, as well as historians of art.

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Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women's Practice (Art History Special Issues)

Product Description
This thought-provoking book explores the increasing visibility of women?s art in Britain, Europe and America.

• Considers the work of American artists Martha Rosler and Kara Walker, Irish artist Alice Maher, British artists Lubaina Himid, Christine Borland, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker, Gillian Wearing and Rachel Whiteread, and the international performance group, moti roti.


• Features specially-commissioned interviews with some of these artists.


• Covers diverse media, from sculpture and painting through to photography, installations, video and performance.

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The Lives of the Artists Volume 1

Product Description
These biographies of the great quattrocento artists have long been considered among the most important of contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art. Vasari, who invented the term "Renaissance," was the first to outline the influential theory of Renaissance art that traces a progression through Giotto, Brunelleschi, and finally the titanic figures of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael. This new translation, specially commissioned for the World's Classics series, contains thirty-six of the most important lives and is fully annotated.

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Stories of Art

Product DescriptionSynopsisFrom the Back CoverAbout the Author
This original history of art opens up the questions that traditional art history usually avoids. Written by an acclaimed author, the book includes Western and non-Western artworks and diagrams of how artworks might connect through a single individualStories of Art is Elkins's intimate history of art. Concise and original, this engaging book is an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks from which we were all taught. As he demonstrates so persuasively, there can never be one story of art. Cultures have their own stories - about themselves, about other cultures - and to hear them all is one way to hear the multiple stories that art tells. But each of us also has our own story of art, a kind of private art history made up of the pieces we have seen, and loved or hated, the effects they had on us, and the connections that might be drawn among them. Elkins opens up the questions that traditional art history usually avoids. What about all the art not produced in Western Europe or in the Europeanized Americas? Is it possible to include Asian art and Indian art in "the story"? What happens when one does? To help us find answers, he uses both Western and non-Western artworks, tables of contents from art histories written in cultures outside the center of Western European tradition, and strangely wonderful diagrams of how artworks might connect through a single individual.

True multiculturalism may be an impossibility but art lovers can each create a "story of art" that is right for themselves.Stories of Art is James Elkins's intimate history of art. Concise and original, this engaging book is an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks from which we were all taught. As he demonstrates so persuasively, there can never be one story of art. Cultures have their own stories - about themselves, about other cultures - and to hear them all is one way to hear the multiple stories that art tells. But each of us also has our own story of art, a kind of private art history made up of the pieces we have seen, and loved or hated, the effects they had on us, and the connections that might be drawn among them.

Elkins opens up the questions that traditional art history usually avoids. What about all the art not produced in Western Europe or in the Europeanized Americas? Is it possible to include Asian art and Indian art in "the story"? What happens when one does? To help us find answers, he uses both Western and non-Western artworks, tables of contents from art histories written in cultures outside the center of Western European tradition, and strangely wonderful diagrams of how artworks might connect through a single individual. True multiculturalism may be an impossibility, but art lovers can each create a "story of art" that is right for themselves.James Elkins is Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of many books. Among is books are Pictures and Tears, How to Use Your Eyes, and What Painting Is, all published by Routledge.

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