Otto Kurz - Böcker

“This is the first English translation of a brief, scholarly, and brilliantly original work which sets out to examine the links between the legend of the artist, in all cultures, and what E.H. Gombrich, in an introductory essay, calls ‘certain invariant traits of the human psyche.’”—Denis Thomas, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts“This book gathers together various legends and attitudes about artists, ancient and modern, East and West, and gives fascinating insights into attitudes toward artistic creation.  It impinges on psychology, art history and history, aesthetics, biography, myth and magic, and will be of great interest to a wide audience in many fields…. A delightful and unrivalled study.”—Howard Hibbard“Thought provoking and valuable…. To all those interested in psychiatry and art from the perspectives of history, criticism, or therapy and to the wide audience concerned with the psychology of aesthetics and of artistic creation.”—Albert Rothenberg, American Journal of PsychiatryErnst Kris was a psychoanalyst who wrote on a wide variety of subjects, including art.  Otto Kurz was librarian of the Warburg Institute in London.

This selection of twenty-one essays by Professor Kurz is a unique introduction to the art and culture of Europe and the Near East from the Renaissance onwards. His examination of the flow of artistic ideas and artefacts from Europe to the Islamic world is an important contribution to the study of the spread of Western European influence in this period; at the same time the reader is made aware of the extent of European borrowings from Islamic civilization, and the importance of a shared classical heritage. Characterized by an extensive acquaintance with both European and Islamic works of art, Professor Kurz's research in this field remains of fundamental importance. This volume also includes a number of important articles on several major figures in Renaissance and Baroque art, and a study of the patronage of the Emperor Rudolf II, previously available only in a Czech translation. The preface by Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich is both an introduction and a memoir. A bibliography of Otto Kurz's publications and an index are included. The volume is illustrated with 191 plates.

This second volume of Professor Kurz's studies completes the comprehensive selection in Vol. I with a further thirty articles, published over forty years, and showing the extraordinary breadth of the author's interests. It begins with eight studies on Classical, Byzantine and Islamie art, continues to the Renaissanee and Baroque in Italy and Northern Europe, and ends with an entertaining section on the restoration, misattribution and faking of works of art. In these two volumes all of Professor Kurz's major studies are now available. Whether they throw fresh light on an old problem, or bring to attention an unnoticed work, they remain stimulating, and always highly intertaining. A sixteen-page memoir of Otto Kurz by Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich is included here as a preface to this second volume.