Norman Bryson – författare

In this classic Reaktion title, Norman Bryson analyses the origins, history and logic of still-life, one of the most enduring forms of Western painting. From Roman wall-painting to Cubism, and from seventeenth-century Dutch still-life to Bryson’s conclusion that the persisting tendency to downgrade the genre of still-life is profoundly rooted in the historical oppression of women, Looking at the Overlooked is Norman Bryson is at his brilliant best.

This 1982 book, now recognised as a classic, has done perhaps more than any other single work to change the face of art criticism in the twentieth century. Whereas previous books on French painting looked only at the history of painting as an evolution of artistic styles (baroque, rococo, neo-classical, and so on), Norman Bryson examines the evolution of narrative styles: the kinds of stories paintings tell, the ways they communicate their information, the different techniques of presenting the body as an instrument for incorporating textual messages. The procedure is applied to a number of painters: LeBrun, Watteau, Greuze, David and others, and the author demonstrates that the relation of formal and 'literary' elements was regarded by painters and critics in the eighteenth century as the primary issue to be confronted in the production of a painting.

In this highly original book Norman Bryson applied 'structuralist' and 'post-structuralist' approaches to French Romantic Painting. He considers the work of David, Ingres and Delacroix as artists who found themselves within an artistic tradition that had nothing creative to offer them.

Bakhtin and the Visual Arts assesses the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas as they relate to painting and sculpture. First published in the 1960s, Bakhtin's writings introduced the concepts of carnival and dialogue or dialogism, which have had significant impact in such diverse fields as literature and literary theory, philosophy, theology, biology and psychology. In his four early aesthetic essays, written between 1919 and 1926, and before he began to focus on linguistic and literary categories, Bakhtin worked on a larger philosophy of creativity, which was never completed. Deborah Haynes's in-depth 1995 study of his aesthetics, especially his theory of creativity, analyses its applicability to contemporary art theory and criticism. The author argues that Bakhtin, with such categories as answerability, outsideness and unfinalizability, offers a conceptual basis for interpreting the moral dimensions of creative activity.

In The Rhetoric of Purity, Mark Cheetham explores the historical and theoretical relations between early abstract painting in Europe and the notion of purity. For Gauguin, Serusier, Mondrian and Kandinsky - the pioneering abstractionists whose written and visual works Cheetham discusses in detail - purity is the crucial quality that painting must possess. Purity, however, was itself only a password for what Cheetham defines as an 'essentialist' philosophy inaugurated by Plato's vision of a perfect, non-mimetic art form and practised by the founders of abstraction. The essentialism of late nineteenth-century French discussion of 'abstraction', Cheetham argues, also infects the work of Mondrian and Kandinsky. These visions of abstraction are central to the development of Modernism and are closely tied to the philosophical traditions of Plato, Hegel and Schopenhauer. As a conclusion, Cheetham provides a postmodern reading of Klee's rejection of the rhetoric of purity and claims that Klee's refusal speaks to contemporary concerns in visual theory and culture. By acting as an antidote to the seductive appeal of purity in art and society, Cheetham's final critique of the trope of purity seeks to preserve the possibility of visual discourse itself.

Mark Dion (b.1961) is an American artist who, in making his art, metamorphoses into explorer, biochemist, detective and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments and museum caches of the great historical naturalists - following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics. His research and magical collections are presented in installational still lifes that combine taxidermic animals with lab equipment artefacts, like walk-through Wunderkammers and life-sized cabinets of curiosity.Lias Graziose Corrin, Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, surveys Dion's most significant works and his ongoing investigations into natural history's obsession with categorizing nature. Critic and theorist Miwon Kwon talks to the artist about the interface between ecology and culture and the phenomenon of site-specific art. Norman Bryson, Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, makes an iconographical analysis of The Library for the Birds of Antwerp, an indoor sculpture Dion constructed for 18 live African finches in 1993. The artist has selected a text by novelist Jon Berger, one of the first post-war thinkers to analyze the position of animals in a capitalist society. The book also features Dion's own provocative, witty and often lyrical writing on nature and his role as an artist engaged in environmental issues.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in problems of theory and method in the field of art history. Semiology, phenomenology, feminism, analytical philosophy and Marxism have all contributed to a lively debate among art historians and have helped to stimulate new research. This volume draws together some of the authors who have been most prominent and influential in recent methodological debates and enables them to develop their views. The contributions include Norman Bryson on semiology and the limits of meaning; Arthur C. Danto on description and pictorial perception; Rosalind Krauss on language; Linda Nochlin on gender and power; Michael Podro on depiction; David Summers on image and metaphor; Richard Wollheim on the role of spectator. Each of these major contributions is subjected to critical scrutiny by other well-known figures in the field. A unique volume which will establish itself as a key reference point for the discussion of art historical method.

First published in 1983, Teaching the Text explores the issue of teaching and the question of theory and its relation to practice. The chapters reflect the reality of teaching in a university English department, both for teachers and students, making clear the criteria of teaching, not only through the variety of contributors and approaches but also through the range of different texts and subjects offered.The subjects covered include Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, The Duchess of Malfi, Milton’s use of language, and William Collins’ ‘Ode to Evening’. There are essays on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, on Emerson and Hawthorne, and on Dorothy Richardson’s novels. Also discussed are Robert Musil’s Törless, Sartre’s La Nausée and the work of Gabriel García Márquez.

In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power. Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art. With more than 150 illustrations, this book provides new and brilliant insight into this period that will captivate readers.