Pictorial Nominalism : On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade

by De Duve, Thierry

• ISBN13: 9780816648597
• ISBN10: 081664859X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

Beginning with the instance in 1912 when Marcel Duchamp wrote in a note to himself, "No more painting, get a job," Thierry de Duve reviews in Pictorial Nominalism the implications of the readymade for art and representation. Arguing that the readymade belongs to that moment in the history of painting when both figuration and the practice of painting become "impossible," de Duve presents a psychoanalytically informed account of the birth of abstraction. Differing considerably from such thinkers as Clement Greenberg and Peter Burger, de Duve demonstrates that the readymade is the link between painting in particular and art at large.

Author Biography

Thierry de Duve, a native of Belgium, is an art historian. Dana Polan is professor of cinema and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. John Rajchman is professor of art at Columbia.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vi
John Rajchman
1. Art and Psychoanalysis, Again?	1	(18)
2. Passages	19	(38)
3. Theoretical Interlude	57	(10)
4. Revelations	67	(29)
5. Resonances	96	(23)
6. Color and Its Name	119	(24)
7. The Readymade and Abstraction	143	(21)
8. Transitions	164	(29)
Notes	193	(20)
Index	213