Studies in Art Historiography
About the Book Series
The aim of this series is to support and promote the study of the history and practice of art historical writing focussing on its institutional and conceptual foundations, from the past to the present day in all areas and all periods. Besides addressing the major innovators of the past it also encourages re-thinking ways in which the subject may be written in the future. It ignores the disciplinary boundaries imposed by the Anglophone expression 'art history' and allows and encourages the full range of enquiry that encompasses the visual arts in its broadest sense as well as topics falling within archaeology, anthropology, ethnography and other specialist disciplines and approaches. It welcomes contributions from young and established scholars and is aimed at building an expanded audience for what has hitherto been a much specialised topic of investigation. It complements the work of the Journal of Art Historiography.
Messerschmidt's Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History
1st Edition
By Michael Yonan
June 30, 2021
This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) known as his "Character Heads." These are busts of human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to ...
Rethinking Australia’s Art History: The Challenge of Aboriginal Art
1st Edition
By Susan Lowish
June 30, 2021
This book aims to redefine Australia’s earliest art history by chronicling for the first time the birth of the category "Aboriginal art," tracing the term’s use through published literature in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Lowish reveals how the idea of "...
Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875-1905: An Institutional Biography
1st Edition
By Diana Reynolds Cordileone
March 31, 2021
In Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875-1905: An Institutional Biography, Diana Cordileone applies standard methods of cultural and intellectual history for close readings of Riegl’s published texts, several of which are still unavailable in English. Further, the author compares Riegl’s work to several of ...
Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet
1st Edition
By Nathan Timpano
December 18, 2020
This book takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing modern Viennese visual culture, one informed by Austro-German theater, contemporary medical treatises centered on hysteria, and an original examination of dramatic gestures in expressionist artworks. It centers on the following ...
The Academy of San Carlos and Mexican Art History: Politics, History, and Art in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
1st Edition
By Ray Hernandez-Duran
December 18, 2020
The first substantial Mexican colonial art historiography in English, this book examines the origin of the study of colonial art in Mexico as a symptom of the development of modern museum practice in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico City. Also an intellectual history, this study recognizes the role of...
Monographic Exhibitions and the History of Art
1st Edition
Edited
By Maia Wellington Gahtan, Donatella Pegazzano
September 30, 2020
This edited collection traces the impact of monographic exhibitions on the discipline of art history from the first examples in the late eighteenth century through the present. Roughly falling into three genres (retrospectives of living artists, retrospectives of recently deceased artists, and...
Time in the History of Art: Temporality, Chronology and Anachrony
1st Edition
Edited
By Dan Karlholm, Keith Moxey
June 30, 2020
Addressed to students of the image—both art historians and students of visual studies—this book investigates the history and nature of time in a variety of different environments and media as well as the temporal potential of objects. Essays will analyze such topics as the disparities of power that...
Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-Garde
1st Edition
By Jeremy Howard, Irena Bužinska, Z.S. Strother
June 30, 2020
Hailed as a brilliant theoretician, Voldemārs Matvejs (best known by his pen name Vladimir Markov) was a Latvian artist who spearheaded the Union of Youth, a dynamic group championing artistic change in Russia, 1910-14. His work had a formative impact on Malevich, Tatlin, and the Constructivists ...
Comparativism in Art History
1st Edition
Edited
By Jaś Elsner
October 21, 2019
Featuring some of the major voices in the world of art history, this volume explores the methodological aspects of comparison in the historiography of the discipline. The chapters assess the strengths and weaknesses of comparative practice in the history of art, and consider the larger issue of the...
A Theory of the Tache in Nineteenth-Century Painting
1st Edition
By Øystein Sjåstad
September 11, 2019
Without question, the tache (blot, patch, stain) is a central and recurring motif in nineteenth-century modernist painting. Manet's and the Impressionists’ rejection of academic finish produced a surface where the strokes of paint were presented directly, as patches or blots, then indirectly as ...
Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire
1st Edition
By Ahmet A. Ersoy
September 11, 2019
While European eclecticism is examined as a critical and experimental moment in western art history, little research has been conducted to provide an intellectual depth of field to the historicist pursuits of late Ottoman architects as they maneuvered through the nineteenth century’s vast inventory...
British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840
1st Edition
By Maureen McCue
September 11, 2019
As a result of Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy, Old Master art flooded into Britain and its acquisition became an index of national prestige. Maureen McCue argues that their responses to these works informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections ...