books

cover_issue_1323_de_DEEn Face. Seven Essays on the Human Face
2012, Marburg
Jeanette Kohl, co-edited

This thematic issue of the German art history journal kritische berichte gathers analytical approaches to the ‘phenomenon face’ from different disciplines: neurophysiology, philosophy of the body, cultural history, surgery, medieval history, and the history of art. In their contributions, the authors examine the face as medium and material, as mise-en-scene and matter, as mirror and membrane, producer and recipient – as a cultural construction and a human determinant. The essays are spurred by their author’s profound involvement with the questions: WHAT IS A FACE? What did and what does it mean, culturally, socially, psychologically, physiologically, aesthetically, historically? What might it look like in the future? What are our assumptions about what a face represents, what it means to lose one’s face, or live with someone else’s face. Often enough, we think of faces as identities. But, what does a face tell about ‘us’ – individually, culturally, and as a species? Perception and imagination, the belief in images and image making, they all overlap in the face. The book’s trans-disciplinary approach is a first step toward a cultural history of the face. It includes essays by Jean-Claude Schmitt, Bernard Andrieu, Sigrid Weigel, Georges Didi-Huberman, Claudia Schmoelders, Jonathan Cole, and an interview with the facial surgeon Rainer Schmelzeisen.

NicodemusTessinNicodemus Tessin the Elder. Architecture in Sweden in the Age of Greatness
2009, Brepols Publishers
Kristoffer Neville, author

Nicodemus Tessin the Elder was an architect, gentleman, and founder of the artistic dynasty that was immensely influential at the Swedish court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was architect to the crown, to the nobility, and to the city of Stockholm, and he supplied buildings for a wide range of functions, from palaces to banks, courthouses, and fortifications. His unusually extensive travels in the Netherlands, Italy, France and Germany provided him with a comprehensive picture of contemporary European architecture, which he drew on as he synthesized a new group of buildings that would attract international attention as models for princely architecture. His productivity required a new approach to architecture, and he was part of the first generation of architects in northern Europe to develop the architectural studio, distinguishing the design process from the business of building, and in the process recreating himself as the modern architect.

Paris-as-GameboardParis As Gameboard: Man Ray’s Atgets
2002, Ex. cat. New York: The Wallach Gallery
Susan Laxton, author

Soon after moving to France, Man Ray began collecting the works of his forebear Eugene Atget, whose pictures surveyed Paris in the late 19th and early 20th century. Here, for the first time, these images of the urban landscape are considered through a Surrealist frame collectively, as a peripatetic surrealist text comparable to André Breton’s Nadja and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant.

 

FiguredinMarbleFigured in Marble: the Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture
2001, London and Los Angeles: V&A Publications and J.Paul Getty Museum (shortlisted for Apollo Book of the Year 2001)
Malcolm Baker, author

This work is a study of 18th-century British sculpture, illustrated with sculptures from both the V&A and the J. Paul Getty Museum and also many impressive pieces from private collections and churches. The book starts suggesting new ways of looking at 18th-century sculpture and exploring its relationship to themes that have figured prominently in recent discussions on British painting. The relationship between painting and sculpture, and the links between making and viewing, are themes that are explored throughout the book. The chapters are arranged in five sections, each prefaced by a brief introduction, forming groups of case studies which illustrate approaches to: writing sculptural histories; design, making and materials; categories and genres; and finally, settings, collecting and display.

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