Art History: The Basics

Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction to the second edition
1. Art histories and art theories
	Introduction
	What is art?
	What is art history?
	The classical concept of ‘art’
	Plato’s idea of mimesis
	Issues arising from art as imitation
	Medieval art and its interpretation
	Art as imitation in the Renaissance
	Giorgio Vasari and the origins of western art history
	Early writing on art
	Academies and the ‘Hierarchy of Genres’
	Winckelmann, art history and the western Enlightenment
	Art as an expression of the ‘will to create’
	Aesthetic comparison and contrast
	Connoisseurship and art history
	The limits of connoisseurship
	Bell’s theory of ‘significant form’ 18
	The theory of art as expression
	Objections to Collingwood’s theory
	Art as abstraction or idea
	Art understood as ‘family resemblance’
	The Institutional Theory of Art
	Art history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
	Art history and the 1930s diaspora
	British art history, the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes
	The ‘New Art History’
	Beyond the ‘New Art History’
	Summary
	Further reading
2. Formalism, modernism and modernity
	Introduction
	Formalist art theories and the avant-garde
	The formal components of painting and design
	Abstraction as process
	Formal language, abstraction and sculpture
	Observations on formal analysis
	Formalism as art practice and art theory
	Roger Fry and a British formalist tradition
	Avant-garde art and ‘the crisis of taste’
	Greenberg and the dominance of modernist theory
	Modernism and the White Cube hang
	Objections to Greenberg’s modernism
	Art after Greenberg
	Summary
	Further reading
3. Marxist and social art histories
	Introduction
	Who was Karl Marx?
	Art as ideology
	Contextual analyses
	David and the Paris Salon
	Reactions and responses to the Horatii
	The Horatii as political metaphor
	Iconography and iconology
	Iconology and ‘intrinsic meaning’
	Art, alienation and ‘species being’
	Art as commodity and a ‘deposit of a social relationship’
	Superstructure and infrastructure
	Art and agency – ‘life creates consciousness, not consciousness life’
	David’s Horatii as a revolutionary manifesto
	The Horatii as a canonical painting of the French Revolution
	Tendency and social commitment – what should art and artists do?
	Malevich’s Black Square and the ‘zero of forms’
	Social interpretation and meaning
	Art and the ‘social command’: Soviet Socialist Realism and its legacies
	Social realism in Europe
	Critical theory, the ‘Frankfurt School’ and Gerhard Richter
	T. J. Clark and a British Marxist tradition
	New social and political constellations
	Summary
	Further reading
4. Semiotics and poststructuralism
	Introduction
	Introducing language and linguistics
	Ferdinand de Saussure
	Charles Sanders Peirce
	Developments of semiosis
	Art and semiotics
	Signs and representations of reality
	Modalities of the sign
	Challenging ‘reality’
	Whose ‘reality’?
	Structural analysis
	Syntagmatic analysis of images
	Discourse and power
	Discourse and ‘metanarratives’
	Paradigmatic oppositions
	Binary oppositions and art
	Markedness
	Figurative language
	Social semiotics
	Poststructuralism and its critics
	Summary
	Further reading
5. Psychoanalysis, art and the fractured self
	Introduction
	Freud, psychoanalysis and psycho-sexual development
	The Oedipus complex
	The psyche’s tripartite structure
	Instinctual energies, creativity and sublimation
	Surrealism and psychoanalysis
	Gombrich and psychoanalysis
	Klein, Stokes, Fuller and the ‘infant–mother’ paradigm
	Lacan: the mirror stage; the symbolic, the imaginary and the real
	Feminist challenges to the Freudian and Lacanian psyche
	Creativity, sadism and perversion
	A Freudian postscript: from symptoms to symbols
	Art and abjection
	Abjection, ambivalence and contemporary art
	Summary
	Further reading
6. Representations of gender, sex and sexualities
	Introduction
	Defining sex, gender and sexuality
	Classical representation of the human form
	Visualising gender difference
	Gender, status and power
	Challenges to gender boundaries
	Viewing the nude
	The gaze: the pleasure of looking
	Mary Cassatt’s challenge to the male gaze
	Caught in the act: subverting the pleasure of the gaze
	Feminism and art history
	Feminist interventions in art
	Expanding feminism
	Contemporary art history and feminism
	Gender perspectives on contemporary art
	Developments in gender studies
	New paradigms of gender, sex and sexuality
	Queer theory and LGBTQIA+
	Beyond gender: the body as sensorium and spectacle
	Summary
	Further reading
7. Art and art histories since the 1960s
	Introduction
	Art and ‘paradigm shifts’
	Duchamp’s readymades
	American hegemony and a new order
	Death of the author
	Art, objecthood and theatricality
	Art as commodity and concept
	The Institutional Theory of Art
	Limitations of the Institutional Theory
	Lyotard and the death of the ‘metanarratives’
	New countercultures for the 1960s and 1970s
	Photography, cultural reproduction and oppositional postmodern cultures
	Approaching the postmodern and late modern: how soon is now?
	The contemporary as ‘critical pluralism’
	Visual cultures and ‘double-coding’
	Baudrillard and the four orders of the simulacra
	‘The End of History’?
	Relational Aesthetics
	Summary
	Further reading
8. Postcolonialism, globalisation and art histories
	Introduction
	Western-centrism within art history
	Global cultural and artistic interactions
	Western artistic appropriations and ‘Primitivism’
	The struggle for independence and decolonisation
	Edward Said and Orientalism
	Postcolonialism and postcolonial studies
	Globalisation
	Legacies and continuities: empire, coloniality and the subaltern
	Interpreting cultural interaction and exchange
	Identity, agency and place
	Globalising art history and global contemporary art
	Afterword from Oceania
	Summary
	Further reading
Resources
	Galleries and museums: collections online
	Galleries, museums, virtual tours and videos
	Digital archives, essays and glossaries
	Other resources, magazines, journals, dictionaries and encyclopaedias
	Sources of images
Glossary of terms
Bibliography
Index