Faculty Books

Barnstorming the PrairiesBarnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest
2015,University Of Minnesota Press
Jason Weems, author


Barnstorming the Prairies offers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood’s iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision’s fundamental contribution to regional identity—to Midwesternness as we understand it.

TheMarbleIndexThe Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain
2015, New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Malcolm Baker, author

Providing the first thorough study of sculptural portraiture in 18th-century Britain, this important book challenges both the idea that portrait necessarily implies painting and the assumption that Enlightenment thought is manifest chiefly in French art.  By considering the bust and the statue as genres, Malcolm Baker, a leading sculpture scholar, addresses the question of how these seemingly traditional images developed into ambitious forms of representation within a culture in which many core concepts of modernity were being formed.  The leading sculptor at this time in Britain was Louis Francois Roubiliac (1702–1762), and his portraits of major figures of the day, including Alexander Pope, Isaac Newton, and George Frederic Handel, are examined here in detail.  Remarkable for their technical virtuosity and visual power, these images show how sculpture was increasingly being made for close and attentive viewing.  The Marble Index eloquently establishes that the heightened aesthetic ambition of the sculptural portrait was intimately linked with the way in which it could engage viewers familiar with Enlightenment notions of perception and selfhood.

FameandFriendshipFame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust in Eighteenth-Century Britain
2014, London: Paul Holberton Publishing
Malcolm Baker, author

No literary figure of the 18th-century was more esteemed than the poet Alexander Pope, and his sculpted portraits exemplify the celebration of literary fame at a period when authorship was being newly conceived and the portrait bust was enjoying new popularity. Accompanying an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor (The Rothschild Collection), this publication explores the convergence between authorship, portraiture, and the sculpted image in particular, by bringing together a wide range of works that foreground Pope’s celebrity status.

Pope took great pains over how he was represented and carefully fashioned his public persona through images, published letters and the printed editions of his works. Examined alongside some of the most celebrated painted portraits of the poet, will be a selection of the printed texts which Pope planned with meticulous care. The core of the publication will consist of eight different versions of the same portrait bust by the leading sculptor of the period, Louis François Roubiliac. Read More →

Renaissance Love

Renaissance Love: Eros, Passion, and Friendship in Italian Art Around 1500
2014, Deutscher Kunstverlag
Jeanette Kohl, co-edited

Love is not blind. On the contrary, love is highly visual and the visual arts above all others have the capacity to enflame its passion – an idea that goes back to Leonardo da Vinci. This volume, ‘Renaissance Love: Eros, Passion, and Friendship in Italian art around 1500’, presents the view of internationally renowned specialists in a collection of studies devoted to the intermeshing of art, love, and attraction. The essays not only provide valuable insights into contemporary research on the subject, but also afford new and surprising perspectives on Italian Renaissance art; in their scholarly approach to the topic they are a long-overdue contribution to the interdisciplinary discourse on love in Italian culture around 1500.

Featured authors: Hans Aurenhammer, Stephen J. Campbell, Elisa de Halleux, Giancarlo Fiorenza, Jeanette Kohl, Marianne Koos, Alessandro Nova, Christopher J. Nygren, Jill Pederson, Ulrich Pfisterer and Adrian W.B. Randolph.

Literatur und FetischismusLiteratur und Fetischismus: Das Bild des Schleiers zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne (Literature and Fetishism: The Veil-Motif from Enlightenment to Modernity)
2014, FINK: MUNICH
Johannes Endres, author

European eighteenth-century discourse saw the advent of two concepts, which have been central to our understanding of man’s relationship to the world and himself ever since: the proclamation of the autonomous artwork and the stigmatization of un-enlightened attitudes towards reality as ›fetishistic‹. The book argues that this is not a coincidence. Thus, it explores the discourse on and the phenomenon of fetishism in its major historical manifestations in ethnology, religious philosophy, social and economic theory, and finally psychoanalysis from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Particular interest is paid to the metaphorical transfer of the veil motif between images and text, including the comparison of both media in the history of aesthetics from Lessing over Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche up to Benjamin and Warburg. The history of modern art thus appears as a revision of a teleology that implies an evolutionary escape of man from its fetishistic beginnings.