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The Melancholy Art
Michael Ann Holly
€ 46.10
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Description for The Melancholy Art
Hardback. Series: Essays in the Arts. Num Pages: 224 pages, 41 halftones. BIC Classification: ABA; AC. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 244 x 161 x 18. Weight in Grams: 588.
Melancholy is not only about sadness, despair, and loss. As Renaissance artists and philosophers acknowledged long ago, it can engender a certain kind of creativity born from a deep awareness of the mutability of life and the inevitable cycle of birth and death. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the intellectual history of the history of art, The Melancholy Art explores the unique connections between melancholy and the art historian's craft. Though the objects art historians study are materially present in our world, the worlds from which they come are forever lost to time. In this eloquent and inspiring book, Michael Ann Holly traces how this disjunction courses through the history of art and shows how it can give rise to melancholic sentiments in historians who write about art. She confronts pivotal and vexing questions in her discipline: Why do art historians write in the first place? What kinds of psychic exchanges occur between art objects and those who write about them? What institutional and personal needs does art history serve? What is lost in historical writing about art? The Melancholy Art looks at how melancholy suffuses the work of some of the twentieth century's most powerful and poetic writers on the history of art, including Alois Riegl, Franz Wickhoff, Adrian Stokes, Michael Baxandall, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida. A disarmingly personal meditation by one of our most distinguished art historians, this book explains why to write about art is to share in a kind of intertwined pleasure and loss that is the very essence of melancholy.
Product Details
Publisher
Princeton University Press United States
Number of pages
224
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2013
Series
Essays in the Arts
Condition
New
Weight
589g
Number of Pages
224
Place of Publication
New Jersey, United States
ISBN
9780691139340
SKU
V9780691139340
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Michael Ann Holly
Michael Ann Holly is the Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute and teaches in the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College. Her books include Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image and Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History.
Reviews for The Melancholy Art
Enchanting.
Holland Cotter, New York Times Nostalgic and plaintive, this title's examination of the work of art historians is an enjoyable literary exercise that will foster discussion among art historians and their students.
Library Journal To consider melancholy in art beyond the limits of despondency, loss, and grief is a refreshing way to induce a different space and energy between the past of the artwork and the viewer's present. In these erudite essays, art historian Michael Ann Holly makes case for works of art
'these beautiful orphans'
that reinvest in melancholia as the signifier and the signified.
Greta Aart, Cerise Press In support of her argument, Holly marshals a wealth of erudition indicative of formidable trans-historical, interdisciplinary expertise... With the utmost refinement, Holly's own poetic resonance echoes from artful analogy and suggestive imagery.
Giovanna Costantini, Leonardo Reviews While the driving power of melancholy remains unclear, many readers will be intrigued by this highly personal take on the profession.
Choice Holly's elegant and thoughtful book focuses on the encounter of the viewer with the work of art.
Kathryn Murphy, Apollo Magazine Exemplary.
Ivan Gaskell, Brooklyn Rail The Melancholy Art is both an apt embodiment of contemporary disciplinary conundrums and a deeply moving account of one art historian's personal attempt to reckon with the impossibility - the futility - of 'closing the gap between words and images.'... Holly clearly exemplifies both senses of the term in this memorable and indeed rather haunting text... The value of The Melancholy Art is precisely in simultaneously manifesting such a conundrum and in refusing to fall into the fundamentalist trap of either attributing or denying real agency to artworks. All our 'art history' books should be so brave.
Donald Preziosi, CAA Reviews
Holland Cotter, New York Times Nostalgic and plaintive, this title's examination of the work of art historians is an enjoyable literary exercise that will foster discussion among art historians and their students.
Library Journal To consider melancholy in art beyond the limits of despondency, loss, and grief is a refreshing way to induce a different space and energy between the past of the artwork and the viewer's present. In these erudite essays, art historian Michael Ann Holly makes case for works of art
'these beautiful orphans'
that reinvest in melancholia as the signifier and the signified.
Greta Aart, Cerise Press In support of her argument, Holly marshals a wealth of erudition indicative of formidable trans-historical, interdisciplinary expertise... With the utmost refinement, Holly's own poetic resonance echoes from artful analogy and suggestive imagery.
Giovanna Costantini, Leonardo Reviews While the driving power of melancholy remains unclear, many readers will be intrigued by this highly personal take on the profession.
Choice Holly's elegant and thoughtful book focuses on the encounter of the viewer with the work of art.
Kathryn Murphy, Apollo Magazine Exemplary.
Ivan Gaskell, Brooklyn Rail The Melancholy Art is both an apt embodiment of contemporary disciplinary conundrums and a deeply moving account of one art historian's personal attempt to reckon with the impossibility - the futility - of 'closing the gap between words and images.'... Holly clearly exemplifies both senses of the term in this memorable and indeed rather haunting text... The value of The Melancholy Art is precisely in simultaneously manifesting such a conundrum and in refusing to fall into the fundamentalist trap of either attributing or denying real agency to artworks. All our 'art history' books should be so brave.
Donald Preziosi, CAA Reviews