Books & ideas

Collectors, Dealers and Artists

Marion Amblard — 2020-02-06T08:33:54Z

Being the capital of the arts in western Europe in the 18^th century, Rome was also an important centre for art dealing. An innovative, interdisciplinary approach allows to investigate different aspects of this particular art market in the age of the Grand Tour.

Kara Walker's Fons Americanus at Tate Modern

Vanina Géré — 2019-10-10T07:00:00Z

Visual artist Kara Walker's Fons Americanus is this year's commissioned work for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. While addressing the current debates regarding memorials, it goes beyond a mere rewriting or righting of history.

Notre-Dame: Heritage Emotions

Nicolas Delalande — 2019-05-02T06:00:00Z

Flames, disbelief, dread. A cathedral burns and tears flow. But why does our architectural heritage and its disappearance move us so greatly? The sociologist Nathalie Heinich offers some answers.

Grand Tourism: Educational Journeys in 18th Century Europe

Marion Amblard — 2018-10-29T08:00:00Z

The Grand Tour was a journey on the European continent undertaken by 17^th and 18^th-century British aristocrats to perfect their education. This book reveals the importance, within this trip, of a city until now overlooked by scholarship: Turin, a political and cultural crossroad.

The Avant-Garde System

Pamela Bianchi — 2017-02-16T08:00:00Z

In a desire to write a total history, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel proposes a novel sociocultural and transnational approach to the artistic avant-gardes. Beyond a mere history of styles, the avant-gardes appear in her book as genuine political and social events, caught in complex networks of influence.

Bourdieu the Heresiarch

Philippe Saunier — 2015-09-28T07:00:00Z

To understand the symbolic revolution Manet launched, it is necessary to break with traditional representations of art history. This requires an intellectual revolution in its own right. Thus behind Manet, there lurks another heresiarch: Bourdieu himself.

Art History in the Time of Nationalism

William Diebold — 2014-09-22T07:30:00Z

Between the start of the Franco-Prussian War and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, art historians in Germany and France were studying the Italian Renaissance and the Gothic monuments of the Middle Ages. Passini's recent book analyses the role of French and German nationalism in the shaping of art history.

Mark Rothko, Painter in the Making

Fabrice Flahutez — 2014-02-27T08:00:00Z

Some rare and hitherto unpublished writings by Rothko provide invaluable insight into the making of one of the iconic painters of the 20^th century, placing him squarely in the historical and artistic context of 1930s and '40s America.

Interweaving Eastern and Western Perspectives

Christian Joschke — 2013-05-02T08:44:48Z

In Florence and Baghdad, Hans Belting writes a new history of the human gaze based on its symbolic value in relation to the image. His starting point is the cultural transfer between the East and the West, leading to the invention of perspective in the 16^th century. The author examines two different forms of cultures of the gaze and lays the groundwork for a global art history.

Challenging Mainstream Art

Cristelle Terroni — 2012-01-13T12:05:40Z

Towards the end of the 1960s the dematerialized forms of conceptual art transformed the modes of art production. The advent of art works which could be printed and reproduced in the pages of magazines changed the nature of these publications: artists' magazines thus became an alternative space for artistic production.