Adrian Rifkin – författare

Ingres Then, and Now is an innovative study of one of the best-known French artists of the nineteenth century, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Adrian Rifkin re-evaluates Ingres' work in the context of a variety of literary, musical and visual cultures which are normally seen as alien to him. Re-viewing Ingres' paintings as a series of fragmentary symptoms of the commodity cultures of nineteenth-century Paris, Adrian Rifkin draws the artist away from his familiar association with the Academy and the Salon.Rifkin sets out to show how, by thinking of the historical archive as a form of the unconscious, we can renew our understanding of nineteenth-century conservative or academic cultures by reading them against their 'other'. He situates Ingres in the world of the Parisian Arcades, as represented by Walter Benjamin, and examines the effect of this juxtaposition on how we think of Benjamin himself, following Ingres' image in popular cultures of the twentieth century. Rifkin then returns to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to find traces of the emergence of bizarre symptoms in Ingres' early work, symptoms which open him to a variety of conflicting readings and appropriations. It concludes by examining his importance for the great French art critic Jean Cassou on the one hand, and in making a bold, contemporary gay appropriation on the other.Ingres Then, and Now transforms the popular image we have of Ingres. It argues that the figure of the artist is neither fixed in time or place - there is neither an essential man named Ingres, nor a singular body of his work - but is an effect of many, complex and overlapping historical effects.

A distinguished group of art historians reflect on the work of Michael Baxandall, in terms of its importance for their own formation, its location in the development of a new art history, and its influence on the broader languages and theories of contemporary cultural theory.

This book is a reassessment of the role of Ingres studies in the writing of nineteenth-century art history. The title Fingering Ingres refers to a remark of Jean Cassou, the French art critic, political militant and founding director of the Musee National d'Art Moderne, in which he wrote of Ingres' 'caressing' his materials with the tip of his 'finger-nail'. The volume pays tribute to Ingres' historiographical enigma in bringing together a set of essays that scratch at and perhaps puncture the surface of his received framings. Ranging from the scrupulous study of Ingres' incapacity to allow himself a finished oeuvre, to the artificial construction of his conflict with Delacroix, to a radical re-thinking of his role in cultural modernity, the essays pick out the textures of a crucial mytheme of nineteenth-century French art. Combining scholarship from different generations of the contemporary critical, social and semiotic histories of art,Fingering Ingres offers a freshly virtuoso and deconstructive approach to the art-historical genre of the artist's monograph.