An anthology of essays on the interpretation of contemporary art. Contributors include Marcelin Pleynet, Wystan Curnow, Stephen Bann, William Allen, David Carrier, Yve-Alain Bois, Paul Smith, David Reason, and Michael Newman.

Interpreting Contemporary Art

Bann, Stephen

Arts & Photography

Harpercollins

yellow cloth-covered boards, clean text block and pictorial dj. Essays on contemporary art from art critics dealing with specific paintings, sculptures, photographs, more..

Westview Press

Experimental painting: construction, abstraction, destruction, reduction

Studio Vista

The nineteenth century was a remarkable period in art history during which the practices of painting, printmaking, and photography intersected in new and unexpected ways. Massive changes in the technology of reproduction took place, and France in particular became a leading testing ground for new printing and photographic techniques. This abundantly illustrated book investigates for the first time the complex and lively interactions between painting, printmaking, and photography in France during the 1800s. Cultural historian Stephen Bann explores why rising reproductive media did not supplant traditional modes and how, instead, printmakers, photographers, and painters influenced and inspired each other's work, together creating a visual culture of unique richness and breadth. The book focuses especially on pictorial reproduction involving painting, printmaking, and photography in combination. Bann includes in the discussion the interweaving careers of Ingres and such contemporary painters as Vernet and Delaroche, such printmakers as lithographer Nicolas Charlet and engraver Luigi Calamatta, and such pioneering photographers as Niépce, Daguerre, and Robert Bingham. Setting the nineteenth-century issues of reproduction in the context of art history and theory, Bann also offers insights into the nature of art reproduction in our own era of radically changing reproduction technology.

Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse

An authoritative and elegant study of the theme of repetition in early modern painting Today serial imagery dominates all forms of visual media, from advertising to conceptual sculpture. In this innovative project, the authors show that the phenomenon of repetition appears as a radical element in early modern painting, long before its embrace by 20th-century high modernism. In works by Ingres, Delaroche, Gérôme, Corot, Millet, Monet, Cézanne, Degas, and Matisse, the reader can compare closely related versions of some of the most familiar imagery of the 19th and early 20th centuries. By making multiples of closely related subject matter in their paintings, the authors argue, these painters challenged an aesthetic based on the notion of an inimitable, unique masterpiece. Through beautiful illustrations and essays by leading scholars, this book ultimately shows how the 19th-century invention of photography and film—with their intrinsic attributes of repetition—did not diminish the traditional medium of painting but rather propelled it in new directions.

Shiff, Richard

Weiss, Jeffrey

Kelly, Simon

Stuckey, Charles F.

Walters Art Museum

Mexico Citybased artist Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) has assembled a group of paintings depicting Saint Fabiola, a 4th-century saint who gave up all earthly possessions and devoted herself to the practice of Christian asceticism. All of the pictures in the collection are based on an original worknow lostby the 19th-century French artist Jean-Jacques Henner. Alÿs's collection of Fabiola portraits, numbering in the hundreds and painted by amateurs and professionals alike, is the focus of this intriguing book. Not only does it examine the artist’s exploration of collecting practices, but the publication also offers an unusual window into aesthetic, sociological, and anthropological values of the past century.
In addition to cataloguing each of the Fabiola works, the book includes Saint Jerome’s eulogy for Fabiola (the primary source for Fabiola’s biography), followed by an interpretive text on evolving hagiographies and saints’ vitae, an analysis of the role of iconographic imagery in the practice of Catholicism, and art historical essays that focus on Alÿs’s practice.

Francis Alÿs: Fabiola: An Investigation

MORGAN, David

Cooke, Lynne

Buskirk, Martha

Laningham, Susan

Dia Art Foundation

This multifaceted book reviews the vast range of types of printmaking that flourished in France during the 19th century. Studies of this period’s printmaking tend to be confined to histories of individual processes, such as lithography or steel engraving. This study surveys the field as a whole and discusses the relationships between the various media in the context of an overall “visual economy.”
Lithography, etching, and engraving are all examined through new research on noteworthy artists of the period, including Hyacinthe Aubry-Lecomte, Léopold Flameng, Ferdinand Gaillard, Aimé de Lemud, Nadar, and Charles Waltner. Rather than simply tracing the rise of Modernism in the 19th century, Distinguished Images reconstitutes the period’s cultural milieu through a series of case studies written with an eye to overarching forces at play. The result is the most original analysis of printmaking to appear in many years—a striking new account of a system in which printmaking, printmakers, and art critics played heretofore unrecognized or misunderstood roles.

Distinguished Images: Prints and the Visual Economy in Nineteenth-Century France

With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their "Realistic Manifesto," constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of EI Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman—many of which have never before been available in English—and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.

The Tradition Of Constructivism

Grand Central Publishing

Stephen Bann examines the arguments for the centrality of French modernist painting. He begins by focusing particularly on the notion of the modernist break, as it has been interpreted with regard to painters like Manet and Ingres. He argues that ‘curiosity’, with its origins in the seventeenth-century world-view can be a valid concept for understanding some aspects of contemporary art that contest the modern, suggesting ways of sidetracking the modern by adopting a lengthier historical view.

Ways Around Modernism (Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts)

Routledge

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bann, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bann, Stephen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bann, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Interpreting Contemporary Art

Interpreting Contemporary Art

Experimental painting: construction, abstraction, destruction, reduction

Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France

The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse

Francis Alÿs: Fabiola: An Investigation

Distinguished Images: Prints and the Visual Economy in Nineteenth-Century France

The Tradition Of Constructivism

Ways Around Modernism (Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts)

Ways Around Modernism (Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts)