Art as Existence : The Artist's Monograph and Its Project

by Guercio, Gabriele

• ISBN13: 9780262513203
• ISBN10: 026251320X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-30
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

Winner, Jackets and Covers Category, 2007 AAUP Book Jacket and Journal Show. The narrative of the artist's life and work is one of the oldest models in the Western literature of the visual arts. In Art as Existence, Gabriele Guercio investigates the metamorphosis of the artist's monograph, tracing its formal and conceptual trajectories from Vasari's sixteenth-century Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects(which provided the model and source for the genre) through its apogee in the nineteenth century and decline in the twentieth. He looks at the legacy of the life-and-work model and considers its prospects in an intellectual universe of deconstructionism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism. Since Vasari, the monograph has been notable for its fluidity and variety; it can be scrupulous and exact, probing and revelatory, poetic and imaginative, or any combination of these. In the nineteenth century, the monograph combined art-historical, biographical, and critical methods, and even added elements of fiction. Guercio explores some significant books that illustrate key phases in the model's evolution, including works by Gustav Friedrich Waagen, A. C. Quatremere de Quincy, Johann David Passavant, Bernard Berenson, and others. The hidden project of the artist's monograph, Guercio claims, comes from a utopian impulse; by commuting biography into art and art into biography, the life-and-work model equates art and existence, construing otherwise distinct works of an artist as chapters of a life story. Guercio calls for a contemporary reconsideration of the life-and-work model, arguing that the ultimate legacy of the artist's monograph does not lie in its established modes of writing but in its greater project and in the intimate portrait that we gain of the nature of creativity.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. viii
Acknowledgments	p. xii
Introduction: The Artist's Monograph as a Project	p. 2
Life and Works
Vasari's Lives and the Dialectic of the Model	p. 24
Circa 1800: The Artist's Monograph Becomes a Genre	p. 34
One Artist Only
Narratives: Endurance and Metamorphosis	p. 48
Waagen's Study of the Van Eycks	p. 61
The ôWhoö Question	p. 69
The Oeuvre
Unity and Multiplicity in Raphael's Works	p. 74
Passavant's Rafael	p. 91
Resonances of the Idea of the Oeuvre	p. 107
The Ascendancy of Biography
Three Books on Michelangelo	p. 112
Delécluze's David	p. 127
Justi and the Indivisible Remainder of Velázquez's Singularity	p. 134
Sites of Identity
Oeuvre and Biography: A Difficult Balance	p. 148
Clément's Géricault	p. 156
The Truth of the Art and the Truth of the Facts	p. 167
Crowe and Cavalcasselle's Investigation of the Creative Process	p. 180
Engendering Presence
A Unifying Perspective of Inquiry	p. 194
öConstructive Art Criticismö in Berenson's Lotto	p. 197
Toward a Definition of the Artistic Personality	p. 212
Reinterpreting the Separateness of the Artworks	p. 219
Fluctuations and Decline
A State of Uncertainty	p. 226
The Twentieth-Century Monograph	p. 228
Reasons for Its Decline	p. 251
Reconsidering the Project
Present Prospects	p. 262
Avenues of Transfiguration	p. 263
Revived Overtures	p. 283
Notes	p. 294
Index	p. 366
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.