From Canvas to Canon: Six Texts That Shaped Art History
Amy Mechowski led us through the course with a format of her giving a lecture on the book and the author then inviting a speaker who has reacted to the work either via art or writing. This was a really good grounding in art historical thinking and the format led you to think more widely around the subject.
The books were :
* Giorgio
Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” 1550
* Charles
Baudelaire's “The Painter of Modern Life” 1863
* Ernst
Gombrich’s “The Story of Art” 1950
* Walter
Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 1936
* Linda Nochlin’s
“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 1971
* John Berger’s
“Ways of Seeing” 1972
* Jenny Graham
from the University of Plymouth who discussed how Vasari created the canon of
artists and established the idea of what an artists should be. She then talked
about how later artists have related to the book.
* Emma Cousin, an
artist, who creates modern pieces in conversation with the past and whose work
often emerges from the idea of being an observing Flaneur
* Maria Gimeno,
an artist, who does performances where she cuts into Gombrich’s book and
inserts sections on female artists in reaction to the fact he included no women
in his book until the last edition. I so want to see one of these performances.
* Clare Strand,
an artist, who created an art work where her husband in England placed a clear
grid over an image and marked up the tone in each square from 1 to 10 he then
transmitted those numbers and placement to here in Paris and she recreated the
work from those numbers. This explored the idea of mechanical reproduction.
* Patricia Cronin,
an artist, who work to put women into gallery spaces and is now focusing on the
idea of Aphrodite and has researched an enclave of female sculptors in Rome in
the 19th century.
* Joshua Sperling,
the biographer of Berger who out “Ways of Seeing” into the context of his life
and other work.
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