The Pragmatism in the History of Art

by Molly Nesbit

The pragmatism of Charles Peirce and William James and John Dewey exists as it moved, absorbing and absorbed. Conclusions remain provisions, time riding on, perpetually unsettled, nocturnal, opaque. Many questions and conditions remain. They will recur. The future has not eased. In our own lifetime there have been stakes, some old, some new, in continuing to write about the time and place and point of art. It is important to mark them. Pragmatism is above all a way of working, it starts from the present. The Pragmatism in the History of Art traces the questions that modern art history has used to make sense of the changes overtaking both art and life. A genealogy emerges naturally, elliptically. Several generations cross back and forth over the Atlantic. The questions combine with case studies as a story the work of Meyer Schapiro, Henri Focillon, Alexander Dorner, George Kubler, Robert Herbert, T. J. Clark and Linda Nochlin is scrutinized; the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and the films of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard show distinctly pragmatic effects; artists discussed include Vincent Van Gogh, Isamu Noguchi, Lawrence Weiner and Gordon Matta-Clark. The relevance of this material for the art and art-writing of our own time becomes increasingly clear.

Genres: Art, History

128 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2013

Reviews

[Daniel]

Nesbit's prose is vivid and engaging, her thought and analysis goes to many different places, like zigzagging in a maze. Yet, she is always guided by the Ariaden's thread of pragmatism. She lays good foundations explaining Peirce and James's pragmatism, but I feel that for most of the book, it's Dewey's vision that is more important. The centrality of the idea of analysing via the effects and impact of art in the real world, this is what guides discussions on Foucault and Deleuze, on Meyer Schapiro's Marxist analysis of Courbet and Van Gogh, on Focillon and Kubler's multidisciplinary approach to art history, on Nochlin's discussion of why there no great women artists. It's a fast read, but it will invite me to come back and dig deeper into this pragmatic history of art.

[bethany rennard]

this was hard for me to totally invest in and I had to return to library ! need to revisit