Somewhere Between Art History and Phenomenology

Michael Ann Holly is Starr Director Emerita of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute (Director from 1999-2016) and professor of art history in the graduate program at Williams College. Co-founder (with Mieke Bal) of the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester, she was also Chair of the Art and Art History Department there for thirteen years. In addition to many essays on the history of art, Holly is the author of several books on the subjects of the historiography and critical theory in the history of art – Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Cornell, 1984), Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Cornell, 1996), The Melancholy Art (Princeton 2013) and co-editor of Visual Theory (ed. with Norman Bryson and K. Moxey, HarperCollins,1991), Visual Culture (ed. with Bryson and Moxey, New England Press, 1994), The Subjects of Art History (ed. with Mark Cheetham and Moxey, Cambridge, 1998), Aesthetics and Visual Studies (ed. with Moxey, Yale, 2002), and What is Research in the Visual Arts?(ed. with M. Smith, Yale, 2008). She has received many grants, including a Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Humanities fellowships, a Mellon fellowship, a CASVA senior fellowship, a Getty Senior Fellowship (twice), among several others. She has served as book editor of the Art Bulletin and is a trustee emerita of the National Humanities Center. Her most recent published essay appears in the Jasper Johns, Mind/Mirror retrospective catalogue, ed. Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf (Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art (New Haven, 2022).

No one writing art history, theory, or criticism is like Michael Holly. Even though she has worked for years at the professional center of the discipline, she has carefully nourished a line of thinking that leads toward something different. Here you’ll find a voice like Thomas Merton or Simone Weil, at once aware of contemporary philosophy and attuned to an inner voice. This is a lovely meditation on the wonder of painting, blending “intellectual inquiry and individual insight,” mingling mid-20th century phenomenology with the “solitude, silence, and solace” of 15th and 16th century painting. The book is a tonic for a discipline often overheated with the current moment.

• Acknowledgements Prologue: Meandering ReflectionsChapter 1. Look at PicturesChapter 2. Phenomenology: Painting, Poetry, ProseChapter 3. At the Still Point of the Painted WorldChapter 4. Back of the Painted BeyondChapter 5. Why does that Wolf have Red on his Lips?Epilogue: Solitude, Silence, SolaceSelected Bibliography