The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology

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.

Contents:

Art history : making the visible legible by Donald Preziosi
Reflections on the imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture by Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Winckelmann divided : mourning the death of art history by Whitney Davis
Patterns of intention by Michael Baxandall
What is enlightenment? ; The critique of judgement by Immanuel Kant
Philosophy of fine art by G.W.F. Hegel
Principles of art history by Heinrich Wölfflin
“Form,” nineteenth-century metaphysics, and the problem of art historical description by David Summers
Style by Meyer Schapiro
Style by Ernst Gombrich
Leading characteristics of the late Roman “Kunstwollen” by Alois Riegl
Images from the region of the Pueblo Indians of North America by Aby Warburg
Warburg’s concept of “Kulturwissenschaft” and its meaning for aesthetics by Edgar Wind
Retrieving Warburg’s tradition by Margaret Iversen
Semiotics and iconography by Hubert Damisch
Semiotics and art history : a discussion of context and senders by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson
“Et in Arcadia ego” : Poussin and the elegiac tradition by E. Panofsky
Toward a theory of reading in the visual arts : Poussin’s “The Arcadian shepherds” by Louis Marin
Sculpture in the expanded field by Rosalind Krauss
What is an author? by Michel Foucault
The allegorical impulse : toward a theory of postmodernism by Craig Owens
Mapping the postmodern by Andreas Huyssen
The art historical canon : sins of omission by Nanette Salomon
Sexuality andbyin representation : five British artists by Lisa Tickner
No essential femininity by Mary Kelly and Paul Smith
Postfeminism, feminist pleasures, and embodied theories of art by Amelia Jones
The temptation of new perspectives by Stephen Melville
The origin of the work of art by Martin Heidegger
The still life as a personal object : a note on Heidegger and van Gogh by Meyer Schapiro
Restitutions of the truth in pointing [“pointure”] by Jacques Derrida
Orientalism and the exhibitionary order by Timothy Mitchell
The art museum as ritual by Carol Duncan
Inventing the “postcolonial” : hybridity and constituency in contemporary curating by Annie E. Coombes
Remaking passports : visual thought in the debate on multiculturalism by Néstor García Canclini
The art of art history by Donald Preziosi