Ingemination Shiff, Richard
Art history,
September 2014, Letnik:
37, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Understood in its classical sense, an imitation is creative; it freely interprets its source, often inspiring critical interpretation in turn. Although preserving the core of an existing cultural ...thematic, imitation changes the presentation. A succession of imitations constitutes a progressive moral history, at least within a limited cultural tradition, for the inventive variations transcend issues of visual style. Collectively, they signify evolution in the central mythologies and political narratives of the society. It remains an open question whether changes in representation cause an evolution in meaning or merely reflect and illustrate one. Art-historical analysis sometimes moves in the direction of cause (art as a social force), and sometimes illustration (art as the social record). Copying is less complicated. It takes a derivative approach to its source, and its most obvious changes are material effects of the medium, which shift the sensory quality - Cézanne's pencil 'copies' of marble statuary in the Louvre are as different from their models as paper is from stone.
OUR CÉZANNE Shiff, Richard
Source (New York, N.Y.),
07/2012, Letnik:
31/32, Številka:
4/1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article reflects on the writings of the Russian-born American art critic and historian Leo Steinberg (1920-2011), particularly with reference to his views on the French artist Paul Cézanne ...(1839-1906) as articulated in an essay entitled "Resisting Cézanne: Picasso's 'Three Women'" (1978). The author celebrates the freshness and sonority of Steinberg's prose and notes his tendency to annoy and provoke his peers, referring in particular to a long-running debate with the art historian William Rubin (1927-2006) centring around the French term "passage". He goes on to suggest that Steinberg effectively reinvented Cézanne, emphasising the centrality of immediate sensation in his art.
In Marfa, Texas, during the 1980s, Donald Judd installed one hundred boxlike objects, each with the same exterior dimensions-forty-one inches high, with a base of fifty-one by seventy-two inches. ...Structural features of these objects vary, so that each is unique. For example, a unit might be divided by an interior vertical plane or by an interior horizontal, and the division might occur in full or in part.
Distinction, Distraction Critical analysis depends on familiar categorical oppositions of this very kind: material, immaterial; solid, void; closed, open; fixed object, ambient light; the formed, the ...unformed. Even if this had been my first experience of the artillery shed installation and I had been unaware that Judd's rectilinear structures often incorporate interior divisions with a diagonal orientation ? even without this knowledge ? each element of the conceivable type would now seem anticipated, or nearly so.\n By coincidence, Field of Miracles bears resemblance to Judd's installation at Marfa. Working against the rapid drying time of his acrylic medium, Bradford often tears sections of the "graphite" sheets as he flattens them against the support.
Bradford Collins has assembled here a collection of twelve essays that demonstrates, through the interpretation of a single work of art, the abundance and complexity of methodological approaches now ...available to art historians. Focusing on Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, each contributor applies to it a different methodology, ranging from the more traditional to the newer, including feminism, Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and semiotics. By demonstrating the ways that individual practitioners actually apply the various methodological insights that inform their research, Twelve Views of Manet's "Bar" serves as an excellent introduction to critical methodology as well as a provocative overview for those already familiar with the current discourse of art history. In the process of gaining new insight into Manet's work, and into the discourse of methodology, one discovers that it is not only the individual painting but art history itself that is under investigation. An introduction by Richard Shiff sets the background with a brief history of Manet scholarship and suggestions as to why today's accounts have taken certain distinct directions. The contributors, selected to provide a broad and balanced range of methodological approaches, include: Carol Armstrong, Albert Boime, David Carrier, Kermit Champa, Bradford R. Collins, Michael Paul Driskel, Jack Flam, Tag Gronberg, James D. Herbert, John House, Steven Z. Levine, and Griselda Pollock.
UNTIL IT BREAKS Shiff, Richard
Source (New York, N.Y.),
09/2009, Letnik:
29, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Discusses the paintings of the American artist Barnett Newman in light of the art historian Robert Rosenblum's "Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko" (1975), and ...particularly Rosenblum's notion of "the abstract sublime". Focuses on two paintings, "Anna's Light" (1968) and "Uriel" (1955), and takes up a reply Newman gave in a BBC radio interview in 1965 on the meaning of the latter work. Goes on to suggest that for Newman art must be experiential, a learning process, the moral point of which was to act as sensitively as possible when the consequences are unpredictable, especially when the feelings of others will be involved. In a world in which so much is tragically unknowable, Newman believed that people should never fear their own honest judgment. (Quotes from original text)
Cézanne in the Wild Shiff, Richard
Burlington magazine,
09/2006, Letnik:
148, Številka:
1242
Journal Article
This essay focuses on specific intellectual and cultural currents to throw light on a particular aspect of Cezanne's work. It contrasts Roger Marx's observation: "From Cezanne has come the tendency, ...so prevalent today, to express in all fullness the beauty and life of (painting's) materiality" with Cezanne's own remarks on his art and personality as forceful, equating his feelings with the appearance of his representations: "I paint as I see, as I feel, and I have very strong sensations" and a "strong sensation of nature". The essay notes how artists and critics at both ends of the 20C have focused their attention on the relationship in Cezanne's art between nature and representation, medium and materiality. It applies Gauguin's self-identification with wilderness and wildness to Cezanne's art, and suggests our feelings towards it will determine whether we accept Cezanne's material wildness for the aesthetic and ethical value it offers, or regard his situation as a curious by-product of an encompassing modern culture. (Quotes from original text)
