Stephen Bann – författare

With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their "Realistic Manifesto," constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of EI Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman,many of which have never before been available in English,and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.

Stephen Bann examines the arguments for the centrality of French modernist painting. He begins by focusing particularly on the notion of the modernist break, as it has been interpreted with regard to painters like Manet and Ingres. He argues that ‘curiosity’, with its origins in the seventeenth-century world-view can be a valid concept for understanding some aspects of contemporary art that contest the modern, suggesting ways of sidetracking the modern by adopting a lengthier historical view.

Originally published in 1984, The Clothing of Clio is concerned with the wide variety of ways in which the past was represented in Britain and France in the nineteenth century. This was a period of unprecedented historical-mindedness, in which novelists, poets, painters, collectors, as well as historians, took the past as their subject matter. Dr Bann argues that the concrete vision of the past should be studied across the whole field of representation. He shows that, with the advent of the nineteenth century, there comes into existence a historical poetics - a set of linguistic procedures in the broadest sense employed to communicate and enhance the 'reality' of the past - which can be understood primarily through techniques of rhetorical analysis. This highly original and provocative study will interest a wide range of readers including professional historians and historiographers, as well as any serious reader concerned with the broad cultural issues of nineteenth-century Europe.

Just over a century after his death, Walter Pater's critical reputation now stands as high as it has ever been. In the English-speaking world, this has involved recovery from the widespread neglect and indifference which attended his work in the first half of the twentieth century. In Europe, however, enthusiastic disciples such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the German-speaking world and Charles Du Bos in France, helped to fuel a growing awareness of his writings as central to the emergence of modernist literature. Translations of works like Imaginary Portraits, established his distinctive voice as an aesthetic critic and his novel, Marius the Epicurean, was enthusiastically received in Paris in the 1920s and published in Turin on the eve of the Second World War. This collection traces the fortunes of Pater's writings in these three major literatures and their reception in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

Just over a century after his death, Walter Pater's critical reputation now stands as high as it has ever been. In the English-speaking world, this has involved recovery from the widespread neglect and indifference which attended his work in the first half of the twentieth century. In Europe, however, enthusiastic disciples such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the German-speaking world and Charles Du Bos in France, helped to fuel a growing awareness of his writings as central to the emergence of modernist literature. Translations of works like Imaginary Portraits, established his distinctive voice as an aesthetic critic and his novel, Marius the Epicurean, was enthusiastically received in Paris in the 1920s and published in Turin on the eve of the Second World War. This collection traces the fortunes of Pater's writings in these three major literatures and their reception in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was one of Scotland's leading twentieth century public intellectuals, and famously one of its most brilliant and combative correspondents. His letters raise issues of particular and widespread interest both within Scotland and further afield. His correspondence with Stephen Bann, the English poet and academic have a very special place in this context. These letters present in a clear and commensurable form the development of his ideas about poetry and art, and increasingly about sculpture and gardening, over this critical five year period of his creative life.

These letters to (and from) Finlay's friend, the English poet and scholar, Stephen Bann, centre on the initial development of the garden at Stonypath, near Edinburgh, later to become the world renowned 'Little Sparta'. They cover Finlay's turn away from poetry towards sculpture and garden design, and the thinking behind, and consequences of, this development. This book, edited, introduced and annotated by Bann himself as was Midway, its companion volume of letters, completes the portrait of the man who is now recognized not only as a great poet, but also as a major artist and one of the most original garden designers of modern times."...Bann's superb two volume set of Finlay's correspondence...These handsomely printed volumes, amply footnoted, with biographical and historical commentary leading readers up and down the stony path, are an extended conversation with one of twentieth-century Britain's most unexpected artists." -Times Literary Supplement Read the full review here

This multifaceted book reviews the vast range of types of printmaking that flourished in France during the 19th century. Studies of this period’s printmaking tend to be confined to histories of individual processes, such as lithography or steel engraving. This study surveys the field as a whole and discusses the relationships between the various media in the context of an overall “visual economy.”Lithography, etching, and engraving are all examined through new research on noteworthy artists of the period, including Hyacinthe Aubry-Lecomte, Léopold Flameng, Ferdinand Gaillard, Aimé de Lemud, Nadar, and Charles Waltner. Rather than simply tracing the rise of Modernism in the 19th century, Distinguished Images reconstitutes the period’s cultural milieu through a series of case studies written with an eye to overarching forces at play. The result is the most original analysis of printmaking to appear in many years—a striking new account of a system in which printmaking, printmakers, and art critics played heretofore unrecognized or misunderstood roles.