The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology

by Donald Preziosi (Editor), Paul Smith (Contributor), Johann Joachim Winckelmann (Contributor)

The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century, debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be.
The Art of Art History is a unique guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky, Heidegger, Lisa Tickner, Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, Mary Kelly, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, Louis Marin, Margaret Iversen, and Nestor Canclini are brought together, and Donald Preziosi's introductions to each topic provide background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake. His own concluding essay is an important and original contribution to scholarship in the field.

Contents:

Art history : making the visible legible by Donald Preziosi
Reflections on the imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture by Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Winckelmann divided : mourning the death of art history by Whitney Davis
Patterns of intention by Michael Baxandall
What is enlightenment? ; The critique of judgement by Immanuel Kant
Philosophy of fine art by G.W.F. Hegel
Principles of art history by Heinrich Wölfflin
"Form," nineteenth-century metaphysics, and the problem of art historical description by David Summers
Style by Meyer Schapiro
Style by Ernst Gombrich
Leading characteristics of the late Roman "Kunstwollen" by Alois Riegl
Images from the region of the Pueblo Indians of North America by Aby Warburg
Warburg's concept of "Kulturwissenschaft" and its meaning for aesthetics by Edgar Wind
Retrieving Warburg's tradition by Margaret Iversen
Semiotics and iconography by Hubert Damisch
Semiotics and art history : a discussion of context and senders by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson
"Et in Arcadia ego" : Poussin and the elegiac tradition by E. Panofsky
Toward a theory of reading in the visual arts : Poussin's "The Arcadian shepherds" by Louis Marin
Sculpture in the expanded field by Rosalind Krauss
What is an author? by Michel Foucault
The allegorical impulse : toward a theory of postmodernism by Craig Owens
Mapping the postmodern by Andreas Huyssen
The art historical canon : sins of omission by Nanette Salomon
Sexuality andbyin representation : five British artists by Lisa Tickner
No essential femininity by Mary Kelly and Paul Smith
Postfeminism, feminist pleasures, and embodied theories of art by Amelia Jones
The temptation of new perspectives by Stephen Melville
The origin of the work of art by Martin Heidegger
The still life as a personal object : a note on Heidegger and van Gogh by Meyer Schapiro
Restitutions of the truth in pointing ["pointure"] by Jacques Derrida
Orientalism and the exhibitionary order by Timothy Mitchell
The art museum as ritual by Carol Duncan
Inventing the "postcolonial" : hybridity and constituency in contemporary curating by Annie E. Coombes
Remaking passports : visual thought in the debate on multiculturalism by Néstor García Canclini
The art of art history by Donald Preziosi

Genres: Art, Art History, History, Nonfiction, Academic, Textbooks, Philosophy

608 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 1998

Reviews

[Ciro]

It's a good project, essential really, and one I haven't seen sourced so well or comprehensively before — a historiographic narrative of the field. The primary sources are mostly comprehensive, with a lot of essentials, and Preziosi's running commentary puts them all in a compelling framework. It would be an excellent basis for a foundational course in an AH major.

I'd like to see more in a later edition about how the traditional methods of art history are breaking down in the face of new media, but I suppose the discourse on new media would have to improve dramatically before that sort of thing would be possible.

[Erin]

I read this in my Art Criticism class this past semester, and it's definitely not a book that you can just read cover to cover. At least not in my opinion. It's more suited for using as a reference. The way it's arranged is clever, though, because each chapter contains a certain amount of articles, and they build upon each other and relate to each other depending on the topic of the chapter. I could give it a higher rating, but it wasn't really enjoyable for me. On a scholarly level, I am sure it would receive 5 stars. Certainly you should have this on your bookshelf if you're studying art history.

[Jason]

You will want to read this in a class. The essays included in this anthology are what crafted the study of art since the 18th century. Preziosi accomplished the purpose of creating a somewhat chronological progression of art historical writing while simultaneously grouping essays by methodology. This means that one might find themselves comparing essays from the 18th century, turn of the 20th century, and the 1990s. Yet, it is effective at allowing the reader to see the progression of the study of art and, I would say, essential for the understanding of art and art history from a post-modern perspective.

[AskHistorians]

Great for an introduction to written art history and its many theoretical forms. Starts off with Vasari and his biographical approach, and covers ideas including formalism, connoisseurship, iconography, and postmodernism. For a much more in-depth review of the area, the Art in Theory trilogy edited by Harrison and Wood is fantastic, but Preziosi's is a more digestible text, especially if you don't have an art history background.

[Penelope]

This is a very dense text. We read the entire book cover to cover in my Art Historical Theories and Methods class, and it would have been difficult to grasp all of the concepts without the professor's explications during lectures/discussions.
There is no discussion of psychoanalysis or marxism. Otherwise it covers quite a variety of art historical theories/methods.

[Martin Ridgway]

Another reader, it's actually not a bad one and was a set book for the first year of the Open University's art history MA. As usual for a reader, there are good and bad extracts (all fairly long, there are no half-page nibbles) but overall it gives some useful background to how people have thought about a range of topics.

[Mark]

The best anthology of art history methodologies currently available.

[Nina]

This book is a great and comprehensive collection of texts relevant in art history. The author groups the texts by themes in chapters. Each chapter is introduced with a text by Preziosi reflecting on the choice of texts, the connections between the texts within the chapter as well as between this and other chapters, and the relevance of them in a greater art historical context. These introductions are well-written, thoughtful and a great way to provide context.
The choice of texts within a chapter often reads like a discussion of a chosen topic, and Preziosi made choices that provide different perspectives and critique of earlier texts.

A very interesting read and very useful for an art history student who wants to get a comprehensive entrance into art theory. The book can serve as a stepping stone to the original texts, which for this publication have been mostly shortened and edited.

[Kirra]

70-year-old white men's take on churches, shoes, and boobs.

[Jayme Horne]

This is a great guide to help you understand art history and the avenues one can explore to investigate it more deeply.

[Jessie]

I feel like the selection of essays could have been better.

[Katie Lees]

i am both a man and a woman according to Whitney Davis...

[Alison]

Finishing this book felt like getting to the top of a particularly difficult mountain.

[Julianne]

tough to get through, but worth it in the end