In this study, Alan Paskow first asks why fictional characters, such as Hamlet and Anna Karenina, matter to us and how they emotionally affect us. He then applies these questions to painting, demonstrating that certain paintings beckon us to view their contents as real. As emblematic of the fundamental concerns of our lives, paintings, he argues, are not simply in our heads but in our world. Paskow also situates the phenomenological approach to the experience of painting in relation to con...

The concept of chiasm has played major role in continental philosophy, where it has referred to various phenomenological and hermeneutic structures of reversibility, intertwining, and encounter. In Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics, fourteen international contributors representing various fields of expertise analyze this central concept and its significance for contemporary cultural theory. The authors discuss the work of major philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Habermas...

Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky is a seminal work that explores the relationship between art, spirituality, and the emotional impact of color and form. Written during a time of profound artistic experimentation and upheaval, this book lays the groundwork for abstract art and articulates Kandinsky's vision of how art can transcend the material world to evoke deeper spiritual experiences.In the first part of the book, Kandinsky discusses the philosophical foundations of ...

What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, What Art Is challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as o...

Depicting Canada’s Children is a critical analysis of the visual representation of Canadian children from the seventeenth century to the present. Recognizing the importance of methodological diversity, these essays discuss understandings of children and childhood derived from depictions across a wide range of media and contexts. But rather than simply examine images in formal settings, the authors take into account the components of the images and the role of image-making in every...

This unique, richly illustrated book confronts the elusive questions: how, and why, do we look at art? Beginning with an enigmatic fragment of yellow jasper - all that is left of the face of an Egyptian woman who lived 3,500 years ago - Philippe de Montebello, longest-serving director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and art critic Martin Gayford met and talked on two continents and in six countries in art galleries, churches and museums. Whether they were in the Louvre or the Prado, the...

In The Reformation of the Image, Joseph Leo Koerner examines the images used in Protestant church services during the period of their definition by Martin Luther. Focusing on Lucas Cranach the Elder's famous altarpiece for the City Church in Wittenberg, and drawing on a mass of other Lutheran images - some of which have never been published before - he elucidates a founding moment in European history when words were made the model for all communication. In determining why images p...

In this intriguing book, E.H. Gombrich, who was one of the world’s foremost art historians, traces how cast shadows have been depicted in Western art through the centuries. Gombrich discusses the way shadows were represented—or ignored—by artists from the Renaissance to the 17th century and then describes how Romantic, Impressionist, and Surrealist artists exploited the device of the cast shadow to enhance the illusion of realism or drama in their representations. First published to acco...

Artistic representations of landscape are studied widely in areas ranging from art history to geography to sociology, yet there has been little consensus about how to understand the relationship between landscape and art. This book brings together more than fifty scholars from these multiple disciplines to establish new ways of thinking about landscape in art.

Art criticism is spurned by universities, but widely produced and read. It is seldom theorized and its history has hardly been investigated. The State of Art Criticism presents an international conversation among art historians and critics that considers the relation between criticism and art history and poses the question of whether criticism may become a university subject.Contributors include Dave Hickey, James Panero, Stephen Melville, Lynne Cook, Michael Newman, Whitn...

Drawing on art, media, and phenomenological sources, Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image challenges much recent thought by proposing a fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the ethical. In philosophy, cultural studies and art, relationships between visuality and the ethical are usually theorized in negative terms, according to the dyadic logics of seeing on the one hand, and being seen, on the other. Here, agency and power are assumed to operate either on the s...

What is art? What is it to understand a work of art? What is the value of art? Robert Stecker seeks to answer these central questions of aesthetics by placing them within the context of an ongoing debate criticizing, but also explaining what can be learned from, alternative views. His unified philosophy of art, defined in terms of its evolving functions, is used to explain and to justify current interpretive practices and to motivate an investigation of artistic value.Stecker defin...