Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

This is the first intellectual biography in English of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), one of the most famous eighteenth-century German philosophers and aestheticians who is considered by many to be the father of modern art history. Analyzing Winckelmann`s magnum opus, History of the Art of Antiquity, Potts explains the fundamental importance to art history of this eloquent account of the aesthetic and imaginative Greek ideal in art.

Arts & Photography

Potts, Alex

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), one of the most important figures ever to have written about art, is considered by many to be the father of modern art history. This book is an intellectual biography of Winckelmann that discusses his magnum opus, History of the Art of Antiquity, in the context of his life and work in Germany and in Rome in the eighteenth century. Alex Potts analyzes Winckelmann's eloquent account of the aesthetic and imaginative Greek ideal in art, an account that focuses on the political and homoerotic sexual content that gave the antique ideal male nude its larger resonance. He shows how Winckelmann's writing reflects the well-known preoccupations and values of Enlightenment culture as well as a darker aspect of Enlightenment ideals--such as the fantasy of a completely free sovereign subjectivity associated with Greek art. Potts explores how Winckelmann's historical perspective on the art of antiquity both prefigures and undermines the more strictly historicizing views put forward in the nineteenth century and how his systematic definition of style and historical development casts a new light on the present-day understanding of these notions. According to Potts, Winckelmann goes well beyond the simple rationalist art history and Neoclassical art theory with which he is usually associated. Rather, he often seems to speak directly to our present awareness of the discomforting ideological and psychic contradictions inherent in supposedly ideal symbolic forms.

A study of the sculptural imagination. Alex Potts explores the special qualities of sculpture as a free-standing, three-dimensional entity, and he considers the distinctive demands sculpture places on the viewer. The book begins with the 18th century and proceeds to the end of the 20th.

The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist

Sculpture

In 1977, Max Neuhaus turned a triangle of pedestrian space between 45th and 46th Streets in Times Square into an island of harmonic sound. The rich textures of that sound continue today, emanating from beneath the sidewalk grating, to anonymously reach an individual’s ears as if one has stumbled upon a secret. Known as Times Square, the celebrated installation was restored in 2002 with support from Dia Art Foundation, which further commissioned a site-specific piece, Time Piece Beacon, from Neuhaus in 2006 for its museum in Beacon, New York.
This stunning book―the only volume in print dedicated solely to the work of Neuhaus―takes these two projects as a point of departure from which to consider the singular impact this artist has had in establishing sound as a medium in contemporary art. An interview with Neuhaus is complemented with essays by multidisciplinary scholars who investigate and situate his work within a historical context.

Max Neuhaus

Loock, Ulrich

Joseph, Branden W.

Cox, Christoph

Kotz, Liz

Neuhaus, Max

Pakesch, Peter

Dia Art Foundation

Winckelmann was not just an historian of considerable stature. He was also a very powerful writer who offered an unusually eloquent account of the aesthetic and imaginative charge of the Greek ideal in art. He is particularly revealing as to the political and the homoerotic, sexual content of the fantasies that gave the antique ideal male nude its larger resonance. This book re-examines Winckelmann's canonical status as the so-called father of modern art history, showing how his systematic definitions of style and historical development can cast a new light on present-day understanding of these notions. The complexities of his new historical perspective on the art of antiquity both prefigure and undermine the more strictly historicising views of the Greek ideal put forward in the 19th century. The force of Winckelmann's writing can only be fully understood if it is seen in the context of the distinctive preoccupations and values of Enlightenment culture. It has acquired a new significance, however, as the darker aspect of Enlightenment ideals - such as the fantasy of a completely free sovereign subjectivity associated with Greek art - come more and more to the fore. Winckelmann's writing has a richness and density that take it well beyond the bounds of the simple rationalist art history and Neo-classical art theory with which it is usually associated. He often seems to speak disturbingly directly to our present awareness of the discomforting ideological and psychic contradictions inherent in supposedly ideal symbolic forms.

Yale Univ Pr

This major study offers a new understanding of the aesthetics and politics of postwar European and American art. Questioning the widespread assumption that the most innovative practices were non-representational, it shows how a powerful realist impulse operated alongside a strong commitment to abstraction. Alex Potts makes the case that the ambition to create work that engaged with the everyday and political realities of the world motivated much of the period’s vital experimentation with medium and artistic process.
Experiments in Modern Realism is a refreshingly unorthodox account of the artistic and political impulses shaping the diverse practices that emerged in mid-20th century art. The wide variety of both canonical and lesser-known work it features ranges from free-form paintings by Dubuffet and De Kooning and assemblages by Rauschenberg and Fahlström to actions and happenings by Beuys and Kaprow. Engaging the fields of history, literature, politics, cultural theory, and art history, this book is a remarkably probing analysis of postwar art from one of the most important voices in art history today.

Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making in Postwar European and American Art

An important new study of drawings by one of the most important French artists of the twentieth century
Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) achieved international recognition in the late 1940s for his paintings inspired by children’s drawings, the art of psychiatric patients, and graffiti. Drawing played a major role in the development of his art as he explored on paper new subjects and techniques, experimenting with nontraditional tools and modes of application. Despite his essential role in the postwar avant-garde and his continuous influence on the art of the following decades, Dubuffet has received less attention than other artists of his generation.
Dubuffet’s Drawings, 1935–1962 will be the first major museum exhibition devoted to works on paper by one of the most important French artists of the twentieth century. Featuring more than one hundred drawings representing Dubuffet’s development during his most innovative decades––the 1940s and 1950s––the exhibition will include rarely seen works and major loans from public and private collections in the United States and France. 150 illustrations in color and black-and-white

Dubuffet Drawings 1935-1962

Dervaux, Isabelle

Holben Ellis, Margaret

Butler, Cornelia

Individual Artists

Thames&Hudson

The Bauhaus, the school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, brought together artists, architects and designers--among them Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl--in an extraordinary conversation on the nature of art in the industrial age. Aiming to rethink the form of modern life, the Bauhaus became the site of a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped the world today. Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, published to accompany a major multimedia exhibition, is The Museum of Modern Art's first comprehensive treatment of the subject since its famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938, and offers a new generational perspective on the twentieth century's most influential experiment in artistic education. Organized in collaboration with the three major Bauhaus collections in Germany (the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassic Stiftung Weimar), Bauhaus 1919-1933 examines the extraordinarily broad spectrum of the school's products, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting and sculpture. Many of the objects discussed and illustrated here have rarely if ever been seen or published outside Germany. Featuring approximately 400 color plates, richly complemented by documentary images, Bauhaus 1919-1933 includes two overarching essays by the exhibition's curators, Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, that present new perspectives on the Bauhaus. Shorter essays by more than 20 leading scholars apply contemporary viewpoints to 30 key Bauhaus objects, and an illustrated narrative chronology provides a dynamic glimpse of the Bauhaus' lived history.

Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity

Foster, Hal

MEHRING, Christine

Lupton, Ellen

Mertins, Detlef

Kinchin, Juliet

Huyssen, Andreas

Dickerman, Leah

Bergdoll, Barry

Nisbet, Peter

Buchloh, Benjamin

Jennings, Michael

De Michelis, Marco

Doherty, Brigid

Haxthausen, Charles

Paret, Monty

Schwarz, Frederic

Smith, T’ai

Reference

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

A self-described “un-artist,” Allan Kaprow championed an artistic practice that moved art out of the museum and into the everyday. His works insistently blurred the boundaries between art and life, requiring active participation rather than passive spectatorship, interactive collaboration rather than solitary creation. This richly illustrated volume documents five decades of Kaprow's life and work. Its six essays range across his shifts from painter to environmental artist to the inventor of the Happening and the Activity, while its extensive chronology features scores, letters, posters, photographs, and clippings, most drawn from the Allan Kaprow Papers held by the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Though the forms Kaprow largely invented have lost their shock value and were meant in most cases to be ephemeral, in fact they live on, captured in scores and other surviving documentation, still stretching the boundaries of art in the modern world.

Allan Kaprow--Art as Life

Getty Research Institute

The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present

Ever since antiquity, sculptors have used colored materials and tints to give a lifelike quality to three-dimensional portraits and statues, yet the term "sculpture" tends to evoke images of white marble. This is the first comprehensive study to examine a broad historical range of sculptors' use of polychromy to enliven figural works. This important volume presents five essays on polychromy in Classical Greek through contemporary sculpture, along with individual discussions of over forty extraordinary works, from Old Kingdom Egypt to the present day--including sculptures whose polychromy has only been recently discovered, analyzed, or reconstructed through advanced technical evaluation. Published to coincide with an exhibition on view in the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa from March 6 to June 23, 2008, this catalogue introduces the art lover and specialist alike to many unfamiliar concepts and masterpieces of an alternative history of sculpture. The works are presented not chronologically but in pairings and sequences that inspire insightful connections, tracing aspects of the impulse that through the ages has inspired sculptors to endow otherwise monochrome figures with the color of life.

Pazanelli, Roberta

Collareta, Marco

Østergaard, Jan Stubbe

Oxford University Press

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