by Hugh Honour (1979)
'This stylish and erudite thematic study of the influence Romanticism exerts upon Western culture and particularly the visual arts is the companion volume to Honour's equally valuable New-classicism.... The text is supported by a useful selection of illustrations.... Excellent footnotes and a good index.
Rebecca Solnit
A multidisciplinary compilation of nineteen incisive essays ranges from the formality of traditional art criticism to intimate, lyrical meditations as they explore nuclear test sites, the meaning of national borders and geographical features, and the idea of the feminine and the sublime.
David W. Galenson
From the Publisher: When in their lives do great artists produce their greatest art? Do they strive for creative perfection throughout decades of painstaking and frustrating experimentation, or do they achieve it confidently and decisively, through meticulous planning that yields masterpieces early in their lives? By examining the careers not only of great painters but also of important sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors, Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a profound new understanding of artistic creativity. Using a wide range of evidence, David Galenson demonstrates that there are two fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and that each is associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over a lifetime. Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age. Galenson shows why such artists as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred Hitchcock were experimental old masters, and why Vermeer, van Gogh, Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Orson Welles were conceptual young geniuses. He also explains how this changes our understanding of art and its past. Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators find. By illuminating the differences between them, this pioneering book provides vivid new insights into the mysterious processes of human creativity.
Joshua Shannon
A revealing look at the irrevocable change in art during the 1960s and its relationship to the modern culture of fact This refreshing and erudite book offers a new understanding of the transformation of photography and the visual arts around 1968. Author Joshua Shannon reveals an oddly stringent realism in the period, tracing artists' rejection of essential truths in favor of surface appearances. Dubbing this tendency factualism, Shannon illuminates not only the Cold War's preoccupation with data but also the rise of a pervasive culture of fact. Focusing on the United States and West Germany, where photodocumentary traditions intersected with 1960s politics, Shannon investigates a broad variety of art, ranging from conceptual photography and earthworks to photorealist painting and abstraction. He looks closely at art by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Douglas Huebler, Gerhard Richter, and others. These artists explored fact's role as a modern paradigm for talking, thinking, and knowing. Their art, Shannon concludes, helps to explain both the ambivalent anti-humanism of today's avant-garde art and our own culture of fact.
John Berger
"The principal action in A Painter of Our Time takes place across a stretch of some four years in the life of the fictional Hungarian painter Janos Lavin. The story is told in part by Lavin’s friend John, who resembles John Berger in several ways--not least in his being an art critic during this period--and who has discovered Lavin’s journal in the latter’s studio after his return to Budapest in October, 1956. The text alternates between passages from the journal and the interpolations of John, who fills in the gaps, narrating more fully the events surrounding the reflections recorded in the journal"--Summary taken from enotes website.