bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Artists' Books: Exercises in Context
Authors: Peixoto Tania
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed:

Curated by Susan Johanknecht and Katharine Meynell, Volumes of Vulnerability

Carol Murphy, The Innocents

Sarah Jacobs, Song of the Data Stream
Art and the Museum
Authors: Tollfree Eleanor
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Francis Haskell The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition

Karsten Schubert The Curator’s Egg: The Evolution of the Museum Concept from the French Revolution to the Present Day

Barbara J. Black On Exhibit: Victorians and their Museums
Everyone who was Anyone
Authors: Somerville Rosa
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds. A Complete Catalogue of his Painting
‘… a fit and appropriate disposition of the parts …’
Authors: Tarr Roger
Published: December 2003

Book reviewed in this article:

Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800
Something distinctly American
Authors: Hartel, Jr. Herbert R.
Published: December 2003

Book reviewed in this article:

Thomas Puttfarken, The Great American Thing: American Art and National Identity, 1915–1935
German Visual Culture 1890–1945
Authors: Rowe Dorothy
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany 1890–1937: Utopia and Despair

Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany 1890–1945

Christiane Schönfeld, Commodities of Desire: The Prostitute in Modern German Literature
The American Apotheosis of Gerhard Richter
Authors: Nugent Jeanne
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977

Benjamin H. D., Gerhard Richter: Paintings 1996–2001

Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting
Defining Hispanidad: Allegories, genealogies and cultural politics in the Madrid Academy's competition of 1893
Authors: Vázquez Oscar E.
Published: December 2003

This essay examines the 1893 competition held by Madrid's San Fernando Academy for the best representation of ‘Spanish Culture symbolized by the grouping of the great men’ throughout the ages. Few late nineteenth‐century academies attempted such a grandiose definition of culture by depicting all great native historical personalities from all major disciplines in a single canvas. More importantly, academicians repeatedly accused contestants of portraying foreign influences in their entries, of corrupting the truly Spanish, even while they, contrarily, pointed to non‐Iberian sources of Spanish culture. Ancient and Renaissance Italy were but two mythologized sites of origins for academicians who debated cultural genealogies and definitions of ‘Hispanidad’. The contest coincided with the fourth centenary of 1492, and the winning panels were intended for Madrid's National Library; hence, the Academy debates are inseparable from the discourses of Spain's imperialist ambitions, or that of rising regional militancy. Yet, there was something more immediate at stake for academicians: the Academy's demise as economic centre of the arts and site of cultural authority. The debates disclose the controversial roles envisioned for this beleaguered institution at the turn of the century. The debates, therefore, like the competition panels themselves, were allegories of contemporary cultural politics.
The Flight from South Kensington: British artists at the Antwerp Academy 1877–1885
Authors: Sheehy Jeanne
Published: December 2003

From the 1870s onwards the majority of painters in the British Isles had some training in the Schools of Art in the government system, administered from South Kensington, London. However, these schools provided only elementary training; more specialized ones like the Royal Academy and the Slade in London had limited places; and there was a general feeling that any serious artistic training had to be completed abroad. Although Paris was the favourite destination, a surprisingly large number went to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Antwerp (British and American students, their origin, age and date of registration are listed), mostly to attend the antique and life classes. At Antwerp time limits in the drawing classes, and an introduction to the Flemish colourist tradition, freed many of them from the excessively high finish insisted upon in the British schools. Unlike the École des Beaux‐Arts in Paris, still fixed in the neo‐classical tradition, the Antwerp Academy also had clothed models, for the benefit of genre painters, and there was also a course in landscape and animal painting. The Academy, combining elements of French, German and Flemish schools, introduced British artists to the broader currents in European painting.
Pushing Marcel Past the Post
Authors: Hopkins David
Published: December 2003

Jones, Amelia Postmodernism and the Engendering of Marcel Duchamp

Judovitz, Dalia Unpacking Duchamp: art in transit
Avant‐Garde and Swish
Authors: Butt Gavin
Published: December 2003

Doyle, Jennifer; Flatley, Jonathan and Muñoz, José Estaban (eds) Pop Out: Queer Warhal
The Sphere: Reading a gender Metaphor in the architecture of modern cults of identity
Authors: Von Falkenhausen Susanne
Published: December 2003

This article investigates the spherical form and its derivatives (ribbed dome, tumulus, grotto) in modern public architecture in terms of the interrelationship of gendered metaphors and the representation of political identities. Starting with Boullée's Temple of Nature/Reason of 1793, it follows the use of these architectural bodies as metaphors during the French Revolution. The smooth sphere, invented by Boullée for the Newton Cenotaph to signify in stereometric abstraction a scientific cosmos, then became a signifier for the Nation, marking the androcentric universality of a new ‘sovereign’– the People – that excluded women. The grotto signified the ‘other’ of revolutionary reason, linked to the symbolical field of a female earth/vulva. Grotto and tumulus then became part of memorial architecture in the nineteenth century as images of national mother earth to which the fallen hero returns. In the 1920s and 1930s sphere, tumulus, grotto and ribbed dome reappeared, representing the enemy systems of mass democracy, Fascism and revolutionary Russia. As images of totality they are nonetheless constructed within the fields of signification that are shaped by the symbolic order of gender difference. Has the degree of metaphorical gender polarization observed in these architectural ‘discourses’ something to do with the fundamentalist tendencies of collective identities?
Cultural Nationalism, Brücke and the German Woodcut: The Formation of a Collective Identity
Authors: Reisenfeld Robin
Published: December 2003

Brücke's 1913 Chronik, the single ‘official’ document of the German Expressionist group's history, records the importance of print‐making and particularly the woodcut in the formation of the artist group's innovative and experimental avant‐garde style. Significantly, the document denies the group's immediate French influences and omits mention of Brücke's early reliance upon Jugendstil sources. Instead, their account points to the German medieval woodcut as the group's inspiration, thereby simultaneously linking Brücke to the German artistic tradition while drawing upon the woodcut's ideological associations of national and spiritual renewal. Whereas scholars commonly point to the appropriation of so‐called ‘primitivist’ art as the means by which Brücke arrived at their avant‐garde style, this paper argues for the significance of the woodcut medium in the formation of Brücke's collective identity and mature painting style. The paper examines how Brücke masked their Jugendstil origins to take credit for the rediscovery of the late medieval and Early Renaissance woodcut, and drew upon the nineteenth‐century reception of the woodcut as an icon of Germanness in order to assert their ‘cultural difference’ from French art.
For the Sake of Appearances
Authors: Wrigley Richard
Published: December 2003

Siegfried, Susan L. The Art of Louis Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France
Beware Beautiful Women: The 1920s shopwindow mannequin and a physiognomy of effacement
Authors: Gronberg Tag
Published: December 2003

French advertising theory of the first decades of this century posited the shopwindow fashion mannequin as one of the most advanced and modern forms of publicité. The veristic wax dummies on display in barbershop windows and old–fashioned shop vitrines were now outmoded (it was claimed), replaced by a more streamlined ‘stylized’ mannequin. Such modern mannequins were acknowledged as an intrinsic component of the fashion industry, and in particular of Parisian haute couture. This stylization of the female body took a variety of forms, the gilding in gold or silver of the mannequin’s ‘skin’, for example. The most important distinguishing feature of the modern mannequin, however, was identified as its facelessness, an eradication which was deemed necessary to the effective display of haute‐couture garments. This essay outlines the kinds of looking associated with the 1920s stylized mannequin in order to explore the significance of a gaze predicated on the emphatic erasure of the female face. It argues that the Surrealists’ fascination with the shopwindow dummy reveals the extent to which advertising theory of the period (as manifested by these ‘new’ mannequins) was concerned not only with modes of marketing, but also with defining and orchestrating a modern urban gaze.
A Ruin: Jacques–Louis David’s Sabine women
Authors: Desbuissons Frédérique
Published: December 2003

The Exhibition of the Sabines (1799–1805) is a lost work of Jacques‐Louis David, which belongs to a genre that today we call ‘installation’: an artistic device, formed by the relationship of several objects arranged in a three‐dimensional space. This work has been widely neglected by historians, who have often viewed it as no more than a secondary manifestation of the painter’s activities: this independent exhibition, for which a fee was charged, would only be an accessory element, contributing to the context of reception for what constituted the work of art as properly defined, the painting of the Sabines. Nonetheless, it remains possible to consider, taking into account contemporary sources, the material organization of the exhibition as the creation of a (fictive) artistic environment arranged three‐dimensionally, resulting from the relationships which are established between the painting, a mirror (whose identification as a ‘psyche’ remains undecided) and the presence of viewers. This creation was productive of both formal (aesthetic) effects and symbolic meanings, which authorize us to speak in terms of the ‘oeuvre’. One of the most fundamental characteristics of this atypical object is the fact that it has not been conserved. Its temporal existence limits its appearance to a theatrical representation or, in contemporary terms, to a performance or to another kind of temporary intervention: installation, oeuvre in situ, happening, etc.
Adjusting to Hard Times: Dutch art during its period of crisis and restructuring (c. 1621–c. 1645)
Authors: Israel Jonathan
Published: December 2003

During the 1620s, 1630s and early 1640s there was a marked tendency in Dutch painting, well known to art historians, towards smaller, more modest pictures and more sober colouring. This period, sometimes called the ‘monochrome phase’, and the subsequent shift back to larger, more splendid and more highly coloured painting in the late 1640s, can arguably be explained in general historical terms, in terms that is of the specific context of the Dutch Republic, its society and economy between 1621 and the early 1640s. The great advantage of such an essentially ‘historical’ general explanation of the phenomenon is that it can explain many more accompanying features of the ‘monochrome phase’ than is possible by using a strictly art‐historical approach, which would attribute the shift essentially to ‘changes in taste’, or is possible by using an essentially economic theoretical explanation that would attribute the shift to ‘product innovation’. Thus, the general historical explanation can also embrace the cessation of large public commissions in the 1620s, the temporary decay of Dutch flower painting and, above all, the specific timing of the onset of the monochrome phase in a way that the other explanations cannot.
Other Stories
Authors: Overy Paul
Published: December 2003

Julian Zinovieff. Signals, August 1964–March 1996

Guy Brett. Exploding Galaxzies: The Art of David Medalla

Lynda Nead. Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures
Fine Art and Coarse Art: the Image of Roman Priapus
Authors: Stewart Peter
Published: December 2003

This paper is concerned with the Gaeco‐Roman phallic god Priapus, specifically with the representation of his cult image in Roman literature and art. Latin priapic verse portrays him as an inferior god with an inferior cult image; this is sometimes presented as the very opposite of fine art: hardly art at all. It is coarse in both senses of the word. Artistic representations also serve to construct this image for the rustic, earth‐bound god, who, in sharp contrast with more noble deities, is rarely liberated from the poor fabric of his ‘statue’. This image has generally been taken at face value: it is assumed that the Roman countryside was full of simple peasant figures of the god, which are now, inevitably, lost. While this might be true, the portrayal of Priapus in art and literature is poor evidence for such a ‘reality’. These are sophisticated images for a self‐consciously sophisticated audience. It may be that this portrayal of Priapus served a specific function, establishing him as a foil to the civilization of a hellenized, early–imperial Rome.
Paul Nash: Outline– the Immortality of the ‘I’
Authors: Hendon Paul
Published: December 2003

Using selected paintings as examples, I propose the importance of Nash’s autobiography Outline to an understanding of his work. Through the perspectival figure of anamorphosis I explore the use of conceptual and perceptual distortion in Nash's painting and writing, concentrating on narratives of retrospection, identity and representation. I claim that Nash was aware of the disruptive aspects of his autobiographical and critical narratives, and that his writing formed an integral part of the metaphysical ‘equations’ that his work set out to solve.
Art After Beauty: Retrieving Aesthetic Judgement
Authors: Gaiger Jason
Published: December 2003

Thierry de Duve. Kant after Duchamp
Undermining the Archive
Authors: Prettejohn Elizabeth
Published: December 2003

Dianne Sachko Macleod. Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity
As I Was Going to St Ives, Again
Authors: Stephens Chris
Published: December 2003

Tate Gallery. St Ives 1939–64: Twenty Five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery
With a Pretty Whisper: Deception and Transformation in David’s Cupid and Psyche and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses
Authors: Vidal Mary
Published: December 2003

Although generally dismissed as superficial, David’s late Cupid and Psyche discloses intellectual and moral aims. Comparisons with the image’s literary model, Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, and with the symbolic system of Speculative Freemasonary, bring out David’s turn to an allegorical, heuristic didacticism in his late years. As in Apuleius’s parallel stories of Lucius and Psyche, the erotic subject and disjunctive style of the painting alternately hide and convey a delayed experience of spiritual metamorphosis. Completed when the artist was seventy years old and in exile, Cupid and Psyche is David’s meditation on the difficult journey of life and the passage towards death.
Changing of the Guard
Authors: Kool‐Want Christopher
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Régis, Michel, ed. Géricault

Guilbaut, Serge, ed. Théodore, Géricault, The Alien Body: Tradition in Chaos

Whitney, Wheelock, ed. Géricault in Italy
Place de L’Europe and the Privileging of Site
Authors: Lewis Adrian
Published: December 2003

Book reviewed in this article:

Wilson‐Bareau, Juliet, Manet, Monet and the Gare Saint‐Lazare
Crossing Class Lines: Art in Danger?
Authors: Gaughan Martin
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Dube, Wolf‐Dieter and Barron, Stephanie, German Expressionism: Art and Society 1909–1923

Gutsman, W. L., Art for the Workers: Ideology and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany
The Art Market and the History of Socialist Realism
Authors: Reid Susan E.
Published: December 2003

Book reviewed in this article:

Cullerne Brown, Matthew, Socialist Realist Painting
Production versus Destruction: Art, World War I and art history
Authors: Lambourne Nicola
Published: December 2003

Studies on the theme of art and World War I routinely focus on art produced during the conflict; it is suggested in this article that the wartime destruction of art is also worthy of art‐historical attention. Destruction was as much, if not more, of a concern at the time and the damage done to historic monuments in north‐eastern France, along the line of the Western Front, was the subject of a large literature during and after the war. This contemporary literature raises particular problems of interpretation, however, as it was all of a propagandist nature; in the absence of disinterested evidence, the simple approach of asking ‘what happened’ is not possible and the content of the propaganda becomes more interesting than its truth value. The damage caused by German shells to French Gothic cathedrals supplied opportunities for an exchange of traditional Franco‐German cultural hostilities, this time with apparently concrete examples. The propaganda and counter‐propaganda concerning the bombardment of Reims Cathedral is taken as an example here, with a comparison of French accusations of German barbarism with German accusations of a cynical French use of the church for military purposes – the fight was on for the title of the most truly ‘cultured’ nation. As much of the propaganda was written by architectural historians, including medieval specialists Emile Mâle and Paul Clemen, the story of the destruction of art was told in art‐historical terms, with the dropping of shells on a cathedral characterized as the destruction of French Gothic by stylistically jealous Germans. It is argued here that, given the extent of contemporary interest in and use of war damage to art and architecture, to ignore this more negative feature of the relationship between art and war in favour of the more positive aspects of production and reconstruction is to give an imbalanced view of the concerns of the time.
The Authority of Prints: an early modern perspective
Authors: MacGregor William B.
Published: December 2003

This article addresses some of the circumstances, and consequences, of the peculiar authority invested in copperplate prints in the early modern period. At issue are a whole range of kinds of agency and efficacy that were active in early modern thinking about printed images – ones which neither ‘aura’ (what mechanical reproduction, by Walter Benjamin’s lights, was supposed to rob) nor William M. Ivins Jr.’s account of prints as ‘exactly repeatable pictorial statements‘ adequately captures. Sustained attention is paid to the radical recombinability of prints and the competing oeuvres and authorships (constructions inseparable from discrete collections of a printmaker’s output) that arose from this fact. A second area of preoccupation is the interalization of printmaking technologies and the proliferation of a set of intaglio metaphors used to conceptualize how sensations were recorded in the mind and retrieved as units of knowledge. The experience of prints figured as both cause and effect of these early modern habits of thought. If the mind was thought to be like an engraved copper plate or a sheet of paper imprinted with figures, it is asked, what of the interface with its material referents? What might be thought to happen when people with print‐ or plate‐like minds looked at printed images? Prints by Abraham Bosse and Clause Mellan supply partial answers.
Cubism in the Shadow of Marx
Authors: Antliff Mark
Published: December 2003

Book reviewed in this article:

David Cottington Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant‐Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905–1914
Danto’s Philosophy of Art History
Authors: Gaiger Jason
Published: December 2003

Book reviewed in this article:

Arthur C. Danto After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History
Aestheticizing the Ancestral City: antiquarianism, topography and the representation of London in the long eighteenth century
Authors: Peltz Lucy
Published: December 2003

To assert its distinction, modernity has always looked backwards as well as forwards. During the eighteenth century London underwent a steady process of transformation as numerous ancient buildings were demolished in the name of urban improvements. As these modernizations went forward a concomitant rise of antiquarian sentiment prompted a plethora of engraved representations which aimed to keep the past in view. This essay considers the evolution, dissemination and reception of such cumulative antiquarian representations from the nostalgia for Hollar’s bird’s‐eye view of pre‐Fire London to the moral judgements implied in John Thomas Smith’s later etchings of dilapidated and impoverished sites of antiquity. By charting the changing aesthetics and interests of this genre, this essay discusses the ambiguous relationship between the publishing of antiquarian representations and the status and preservation of the sites that they depicted. It also asks whether the circulation of such representations helped to ground urban identity at a time when the city was in a constant and disorienting state of change.
Peripheral Visions: alternative aspects and rural presences in mid‐eighteenth‐century London
Authors: McKellar Elizabeth
Published: December 2003

This essay moves beyond the traditional concentration on the formation of polite identities in the classical townscape of the West End to offer an alternative vision of London constituted of multiple, distinct environments. Using the examples of the spa resorts at Hampstead and Islington, it argues that we need to extend our notion of the ‘urban’ in this period to include these semi‐rural locations. Through an analysis of textual and visual sources it presents the city as a complex and heterogenous landscape incorporating an ‘edge’ in which cosy suburban villages and farms were intermixed with industrial enterprises, shanty settlements and out‐of‐town leisure developments. Far from being marginal the periphery played a significant role in town life, and London in this period can be seen as the prototype of the fractured modern connurbation.
Gender and Shame in Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden
Authors: Clifton James
Published: December 2003

An analysis of the gestures of Adam and Eve in Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden and their contrapuntal relationship to each other indicates that they depict the primeval couple’s shame according to traditional gender stereotypes. According to these stereotypes, the man, as a primarily rational being, experiences intellectual (or spiritual) shame and thus covers his face (or head) as the seat of reason, whereas the woman, as a primarily carnal being, experiences sexual shame and thus covers her erogenous zones. Overlapping and reinforcing this interpretation is another, grounded in anthropology, which argues that the representations of Adam and Eve are informed by Mediterranean concepts of honour and shame.
Metaphor and the Self‐Portrait: Frances Hodgkins’s Self‐Portrait: Still Life and Still Life: Self‐Portrait
Authors: Eastmond Elizabeth
Published: December 2003

This article explores strategies of metaphor in relation to self‐representation in two paintings by Frances Hodgkins, a major contributor to British Modernism in the 1930s and 1940s. Iconographically linked, the two works present a variety of objects which speak of notions of the ‘self’. Shoes, scarves, flowers, a handbag and – most intriguingly – a blank mirror, are described with Hodgkins’s sensuous painterliness in a kind of rebus arrangement. Discussion of Hodgkins’s late work has usually focused on its connections with French School colour and style, with its symbolism ignored. I argue that this aspect of her work is particularly important in a reading of these works which so boldly, and so unusually, in the context of British and wider European art of the time, use metaphor, rather than figuration, as their mode of identity construction. How one of these ‘self‐portraits’ has been used and mis‐used in various contexts is also investigated. I conclude by arguing that the works have more in common with contemporary literary culture, particularly with the aesthetic expressed in the novels of Virginia Woolf, than they do with contemporary visual culture.
‘Whose colour was no black nor white nor grey, But an extraneous mixture, which no pen Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may’: Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios
Authors: Grimaldo Grigsby Darcy
Published: December 2003

While painting Massacres of Chios in 1824, Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal that ‘The mulatto will do very well.’ This paper asks why a ‘mixed‐blood’ would figure in a picture painted on behalf of the Greek War of Independence and argues that Chios must be understood as material evidence of the history of France's imperial aspirations, as a vestige of its confusions as well as its experiments. To broaden the geopolitical horizon of interpretation of Chios is to appreciate the extent to which global politics were performed and remembered in the studio space of an ambitious, insecure and sexually preoccupied young French male painter.
‘Monet makes the world go around’: art history and ‘The Triumph of Impressionism’
Authors: Callen Anthea
Published: December 2003

Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism: Catalogue raisonné

Steven Z. Levine, Monet, Narcissus and Self‐Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self

Paul Hayes Tucker with George T.M. Shackleford and MaryAnne Stevens, Monet in the Twentieth Century
Holdin’ Them Up
Authors: De Souza Pauline
Published: December 2003

Book reviewed in this article:

Gilane Tawadros, Sonia Boyce: Speaking in Tongues
Satirizing the Senses: the representation of perception in Goya's Los Caprichos
Authors: Schulz Andrew
Published: December 2003

This essay examines a previously neglected aspect of Los Caprichos (1799): the depiction of the sense organs, particularly eyes and mouths. By considering Goya's representation of perception in relation to eighteenth‐century epistemology, I argue that this somatic iconography constitutes a fundamental component of the mechanics of satire in the prints. The aim of this approach is to examine the intellectual tools that Goya's contemporaries would have brought to bear on the images, and, in doing so, to re‐evaluate the artist's relation to the Spanish Enlightenment. Although Goya's working process is not a principal focus, attention is paid to the evolution of the representation of the senses in the drawings and proofs that led to the final prints.
Egon Schiele's Treescapes. Work and world: unframing the autonomous landscape
Authors: Smith Kimberly A.
Published: December 2003

An Austrian Expressionist known primarily for his portraits and self‐portraits, Egon Schiele was also a prolific landscape painter. Focusing on the Kantian notions of autonomy and disinterested pleasure, this article considers a series of treescapes painted between 1911 and 1913 in which Schiele systematically undermines the processes of framing which make possible not only the modern landscape but the work of art as an object of aesthetic contemplation. Challenging the frame's capacity to delineate neatly between work and world, these images refuse the retreat into aestheticization demanded of the independent landscape and insist instead on the fluidity of the relationship between painting and beholder. Conforming therefore to a Nietzschean notion of passionate spectatorship, the treescapes should also be considered in the context of Vienna's notorious Sprachkrisis, which posited the failure of language to express the unsayable. The essay proposes that Schiele's disintegration of the frame's integrity by calling attention to its usually invisible mechanisms may be seen as an attempt to establish an image‐based system of communication when language has become suspect as a viable means of interchange.
An Anthropologist Looks at Art
Authors: Hooper Steven
Published: December 2003

Book reviewed in this article:

Gell, Alfred Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory
Mapping the Modern
Authors: Gronberg Tag
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Gee, Malcolm (ed.) The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society from 1800 to the present
Sade/David
Authors: Padiyar Satish
Published: December 2003

In this essay I bring together a work, Jacques‐Louis David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae (1799–1814), with a problematic, that of the manifestations of the Law and the possibilities of its derogation. It is possible, I presume, to examine these two radically distinct sets of materials through each other. The visual disposition – or homoerotic enchainment – of bodies in David’s image may illuminate the workings of the Law; while the discourse on the Law, or social order, may open out the significance of the work of art, and in particular what I will describe as the possibility of its ‘critical perversity’. To link David with Sade, as if by contamination, will open out a space within which to elaborate the notion of a perverse enchainment of bodies in post‐revolutionary France. If the productive corrolary of this historical moment of crisis – in politics, philosophy – was the emergence of the aesthetic and a radically redefined Kantian subject, how might we now think of David as a Kantian subject‐in‐crisis – one whose ineffable political jouissance may be located in the perverse metonymic displacements which alone compensate for the formal incoherence of the image, Leonidas?
La Mort posthume: Maurice Heine and the poetics of decay
Authors: Cox Neil
Published: December 2003

Centred around an early suite of poems by the little‐known Sade scholar and fellow traveller of Surrealism, Maurice Heine (1884–1940), this paper reveals the impact on artists (including Georges Braque) and poets of a series of spectacular exhibitions of Coptic ‘mummies’ in Paris. An account of Albert Gayet’s Antinoë excavations and exhibitions at the Musée Guimet is constructed, and this is used to explore the cultural meanings of the archaeological museum around 1900. The paper is a contribution to the study of a particular form of Orientalism, as well as an exploration of late Symbolism, one cultural territory out of which the Surrealist movement emerged. It argues that fascination with eroticised death and decay led, in Heine’s case, to an exploration of the powers and limitations of poetic language. Heine’s work is contrasted with more redemptive aesthetic representations of death in Nerval and Holbein, as interpreted by Julia Kristeva. It is suggested that Heine’s exhaustion of language in the evocation of death, and his almost political interrogation of the museum, make sense of his later contributions to Surrealism through his study of Sade.
Collaborations in the Workshop
Authors: Thomas Anabel
Published: December 2003

Book reviewed in this article:

Patricia Lee Rubin and Alison Wright with Nicholas Penny, Florence in the 1470s
The Place of the King in the City: Urban Morphology in Ancien‐Régime France
Authors: Gretton Tom
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Richard L. Cleary, The place royale and Urban Design in the Ancien Régime

Rochelle Ziskin, The Place Vendôme: Architecture and Social Mobility in 18th‐century Paris
Painting and the Politics of Persecution: Representing the Jew in Fifteenth‐Century Mantua
Authors: Katz Dana E.
Published: December 2003

According to modern historical literature, Marquis Francesco II Gonzaga of Mantua (1484–1519) tolerated and protected his Jewish subjects. Francesco permitted Jewish moneylenders to carry arms to defend themselves from Christian attack, and absolved the Jews from wearing the compulsory ‘rsquo;Jewish badge’. This paper explores the politics of tolerance in Quattrocento Mantua through an analysis of two fifteenth‐century Mantuan altarpieces associated with Marquis Francesco and the prominent Jewish moneylender Daniele da Norsa: the 1496 Madonna della Vittoria by Andrea Mantegna and the anonymous Madonna and Child with Saints and Norsa Family (c. 1499). Central to my investigation are the ideological implications embedded in the image of the Christian as dominant and virtuous, and the Jew as dominated and pernicious. By examining the subtle ways in which both Mantuan altarpieces diverge from pictorial tradition, I demonstrate how these paintings rhetorically articulated identity and difference within a symbolic language of violence.
A Discourse of Originality in Late Ming Chinese Painting Criticism
Authors: Burnett Katherine P.
Published: December 2003

Late Ming painting critics promoted the discourse of originality in active exchange with literary, philosophical, societal and economic developments. Although this discourse was culturally pervasive, it was transparent, thus unidentified until recently. As this paper argues, a set of key terms signals the discourse. Important texts by late Ming critics newly translated here show how originality was advocated in judging artistic merit. The result is a new way to interpret the painting of early seventeenth‐century China.
Festival and Revolution: the Popular Front in France and the press coverage of the strikes of 1936
Authors: Dell Simon
Published: December 2003

This essay traces the press coverage of the strike wave of 1936 which greeted the first Popular Front government in France. The strikes were represented in the press as both revolutionary events and joyous festivals, yet it is the festive image of the strikes which has persisted in most accounts of the Popular Front. However, the essay argues that this festive imagery emerged and circulated in a particular fashion: the imagery of the strikes was constituted by the evolving relationship between the strikers and the workers’ organizations, and the festive imagery only appeared as the workers’ organizations progressively gained control of the strike movement and attempted to curb it. Thus, the imagery of the joyous strikes operated within this suppression of militancy, as the figuring of relations between workers served to obscure the other relations defining the strikes.
Artisans, Artists and Intellectuals
Authors: Campbell Erin J.
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Francis Ames‐Lewis The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist

Philip Jacks Artists and Literati at the Medican Court

Emma Baker Changing Status of the Artist
The End of Innocence
Authors: Malvern Sue
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Jonathan Fineberg The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist

Jonathan Fineberg Discovering Child Art. Essays on Childhood, Primitivism and Modernism
Sculpture and Art History
Authors: Miller Sanda
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Andrew Causey Sculpture since 1945

Keith Aspley, Elizabeth Cowling and Peter Sharratt From Rodin to Giacometti

Phillip Lindley Sculpture Conservation

Tom Flynn The Body in Sculpture

Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft Sculpture and its Reproductions

Philip Rawson Sculpture

James Hall The World as Sculpture
‘Where any View of Money Exists ...’. Illusion and collusion in the contemporary field of British Art
Authors: Cook Roger
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Rita Hutton and John A. Walker Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi

Julian Stallabrass High Art Lite
Pathways of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century
Authors: Hoffman Eva R.
Published: December 2003

This paper will focus on the role of the portable arts in cross‐cultural interchange between Islamic and Christian realms from the tenth to the twelfth century. I will argue here for an expansion of the study of portable arts beyond the traditional focus on sites of production to the consideration of the arenas in which works were circulated and viewed. Instead of asking where objects came from, the question will be how objects were used and perceived interculturally? What were the implications of portability? Portability allowed objects to extend beyond themselves, as mediators for and as sites of interchange. I will explore how identities and the meanings of these objects – the way they were defined and redefined – were tied to and shaped by their portability.
Spanish Herod, Dutch Innocents: Bruegel’s Massacres of the Innocents in Their Sixteenth‐century Political Contexts
Authors: Kunzle David
Published: December 2003

This article approaches the famous Bruegel painting by establishing possible precursors for the politicization of the Massacre of the Innocents in European drama and art. With the wars, the theme moves, suddenly popular, from Italy to the north. I argue that there are, in fact, two distinct compositions of the subject by Bruegel the Elder, the other being much less well known but probably derived from him (both were later much copied), which I place with new evidence in the context of Spanish repression, and other politicized versions of the theme by other Flemish artists. By indicating the severity of the repression well before the arrival of Alva in 1567, I show that arguments in favour of the one autograph version (Hampton Court) having a contemporary application do not depend on a later dating, and that any resemblance of the commander of the massacre to the Duke of Alva in the Vienna version and other copies, is due to their having been done a ‘safer’ generation later. Other relevant political works by Bruegel are adduced, notably the Census and Preaching of St John. A consciousness of Spanish tyranny and slaughter is carried into the later part of the century, via anti‐Spanish cartoons, paintings of (non‐biblical) killing and plundering and other Massacres of the Innocents, notably and climactically those by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, which must have been affected by his childhood experience of the Siege of Haarlem in 1573.
Mimesis and Memory in the Narthex Mosaics at the Nea Moni, Chios
Authors: Barber Charles
Published: December 2003

Recent studies have privileged ritual and liturgy as keys to the interpretation of Byzantine art. These texts provide a modern audience with a means of imagining the relationship between viewer and viewed, implying an overcoming of the distinction between the object and the one looking. It is a seductive and comprehensive form of analysis with a lengthy and distinguished pedigree. This essay questions this interpretive strategy by arguing against the privileging of this verbal performative text over its visual counterpart. Working from the example of the eleventh‐century mosaic decoration in the Nea Moni on Chios, this paper argues that ritual practice, verbal and visual representation each offer distinct and equivalent means of knowing the subject of their forms of representation. As such, it becomes possible to question the validity of the claim that ascribes the origin of the work of art to the prior liturgical text.
Meret Oppenheim – or, These Boots Ain’t Made For Walking
Authors: Powers Edward D.
Published: December 2003

Meret Oppenheim’s point‐blank rejection of the sexy sobriquet André Breton conjures up for her fur teacup –Breakfast in Fur– and again, for her pair of boots – by her simply called Das Paar, but by him Undressing– a war of words more importantly veiling a battle of the sexes. At stake is not only Oppenheim’s spectacularly ambivalent relationship to the Freudian theorizing which informs Breton’s titles, and in turn, Surrealism far more generally. For even disavowing Freud in word, yet she avows the quintessential stuff of his fetish in deed, or more accurately, in fur and feet. But also at stake is a kind of literalism – an immediate, self‐referential quality to the bodily material support of her objects – which both sets them apart from the endlessly metaphorical play of man‐made Surrealist objects of these years, and even anticipates contemporary Feminisms.
Confrontations with Radical Evil: the ambiguity of myth and the inadequacy of representation
Authors: Zucker Steven
Published: December 2003

The unprecedented violence at the end of World War II prompted a number of Abstract Expressionists to abandon mythology as a means to explore contemporary evil. Myth, as used by these American artists, was essentially a synthesis of psychoanalytic theory, and cultural and physical anthropology, offering a structure with which contemporary events could be expressed without resorting to the illustrative documentation of the Regionalists or the Surrealists. The critical literature that treats the early New York School dismisses myth as a preparatory phase which was replaced by the purer forms of the painters’ signature abstraction by 1946 and 1947. Absent is an evaluation of the motives which led these artists actively to repudiate myth as a means to explore evil. An examination of this rejection of the last traces of narrative must also take into account the function and limitations of myth in early postwar American art.

An assessment of these limitations is undertaken by intrepreting the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, David Smith and other Abstract Expressionists in the context of Hannah Arendt’s coeval political philosophy and especially her early conception of radical evil. Additionally, the writings of Theodore Adorno, Pär Lagerkvist, Herman Melville, Barnett Newman, Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner offer a relevant context within which to analyse the dynamics that transformed the American use of the archaic from a celebration of the irrational into a condemnation of its moral ambiguity. Myth was not simply shed to make way for the breakthrough abstractions of the artists but was rejected because of its ideological dangers. In the postwar era, myth had become untenable.
The Eye of the Expert: Walter Benjamin and the avant garde
Authors: Schwartz Frederic J.
Published: December 2003

In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ of 1935/36, Walter Benjamin considers the effects of new conditions of production and commerce on the response to visual stimuli and on the structure of works of art, contrasting reception characterized by ‘aura’ with that characterized by ‘distraction’, the gaze of the (bourgeois) art lover with that of the working ‘expert’. This essay represents Benjamin’s theory of a new and positive form of mass spectatorship; in it he seeks to rise to the challenge of conservative critiques of culture, finding revolutionary potential and cognitive value in seemingly debased modes of apperception. By focusing on the notion of the ‘expert’, this article seeks to plot new coordinates by which to map the complex conceptual work involved in Benjamin’s influential theses. The ‘expert’ was a key figure in the radical retheorization of cultural values in Weimar Germany, one implicated in the crisis of the traditional intelligentsia as well as in the processes of professionalization that affected fields from the arts to the sciences. Benjamin and those close to him in the Constructivist avant garde felt the pressures of new conditions of intellectual work, and traces of this can be found in the essay. There is also evidence of another process affecting the nature of thought in modernity: as objects of knowledge came to be approached within the parameters of narrowly defined professional concerns, both the origins and uses of the knowledge produced inevitably tended to fall into the blind spots of professional vision. By studying his contact with and borrowings from bodies of professional expertise, this article will question the extent of Benjamin’s awareness of changing conditions of knowledge in the twentieth century.
Specific Opposition: Judd’s art and politics
Authors: Raskin David
Published: December 2003

Donald Judd was a sceptic. He objected to impositions on free thinking, especially when set modes of belief interfered with good art or civil liberties. Accurate knowledge about the world, he believed, could only be acquired by subjecting traditionally held beliefs, values and habits of mind to empirical testing. In discussing Judd’s works of art in the context of his empirical aesthetics and anarchist politics, I draw from some eleven archives, addressing, in secession, his materialist scepticism, formal and political anarchy, and Cold War pacifism. In so doing, I show the interdependence of Judd’s art and politics, and explain how both are hostile to conventions of power.
Beware of Domestic Objects: Vocation and equivocation in 1936
Authors: Harris Steven
Published: December 2003

This article focuses on the competing conceptions of surrealism held in the 1930s by Salvador Dalí and André Breton, which were centred on the notions of paranoia‐criticism and automatism. The article is oriented around the production of a number of surrealist objects and paintings in which these differences were articulated, and includes a discussion of the ways in which paranoia‐criticism and automatism were theorized in the 1930s. It includes as well a discussion of the surrealists’ critical relation to modern art, which is exemplified by the surrealist object, and of the way in which gender played a determining role in the conflict between the conceptions of surrealism offered by Dalí and Breton.
Infinite Recess: perspective and play in Magritte’s La Condition Humaine
Authors: Wargo Eric
Published: December 2003

The paintings of Rene Magritte, with their unsettling of common‐sense relationships among objects, images and words, have been compared by many critics to the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The 1933 painting La Condition Humaine, for instance, depicts a painting that exactly covers a ‘real’ landscape outside a window – thus raising questions about the ‘location’ of perception and thought. But Magritte’s uncanny use of perspective, and his depictions of spaces that have ambiguous depth, suggest that an equally helpful interpretive framework to that of Wittgenstein may be that of psychoanalysis, particularly the object‐relations theory of D.W. Winnicot and the latter’s concept of ‘transitional phenomena’. La Condition Humaine, for example, exemplifies how, by both negating and affirming the opacity of the picture plane, perspective transforms the painting into a transitional object that is both ‘there’ and ‘not there’ simultaneously. Many of the painter’s works, his ‘window’ series in particular, suggest approaching Albertian perspective itself as a question of object‐relating, the simultaneous search for autonomy and ontological security through play. An understanding of how Magritte’s ambiguous spaces suggest both security as well as open‐ended possibility can help to link his work not only with the traditions of Renaissance perspective and its modernist critics, but also with the aesthetic of the sublime and its iconography of colossal, indifferent nature. Sublimity may be interpreted psychoanalytically as nostalgia for the scale of childhood experience – for the world viewed as an enormous room in which small objects assume monumental physical and symbolic proportions.
Boxing Stories
Authors: Neil Ken
Published: December 2003

Books reviewed in this article:

Carter Ratcliffe Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965–1975

David Hopkins After Modern Art: 1945–2000
The Bounds of Eroticism
Authors: Rogers Mary
Published: December 2003

Book reviewed in this article:

Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions. On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture