Stephen Bann

Elizabeth A. Kaye specializes in communications as part of her coaching and consulting practice. She has edited Requirements for Certification since the 2000-01 edition.

Frankenstein, Creation, and Monstrosity

Construction, Abstraction, Destruction, Reduction

Experimental Painting

John E. Bowlt

A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation

Russian Formalism

Stephen Bann examines the arguments for the centrality of French modernist painting. He begins by focusing particularly on the notion of the modernist break, as it has been interpreted with regard to painters like Manet and Ingres. He argues that ‘curiosity’, with its origins in the seventeenth-century world-view can be a valid concept for understanding some aspects of contemporary art that contest the modern, suggesting ways of sidetracking the modern by adopting a lengthier historical view.

Ways Around Modernism

Robert Pinget

The Apocrypha

Krishan Kumar

Utopias and the Millennium

Our view of modernism in the arts has been largely shaped by the prominence of painting and, in particular, by a succession of major painters working in Paris—from Courbet and Manet to the Cubists. Moreover, modernist aesthetics has come to be equated with the concept of formalism, which has been both advocated and attacked in the critical roster of the twentieth century. Adrian Stokes offered a singular critical voice challenging us to think differently about modernism. Guided by his personal interpretation of the early Renaissance and by insights derived from psychoanalytic theory, Stokes developed his own style of communicating the truths of aesthetic experience. The essays in The Coral Mind make Stokes required reading for anyone with a serious interest in British modernism; psychoanalysis and art; alternatives to Clement Greenberg's account of modernism; the relevance of architecture, sculpture, and ballet to our understanding of twentieth-century art; “writerly” art criticism; and the concept of “research” in art history. Contributors include David Carrier, Martin Golding, Michael Ann Holly, David Hulks, Étienne Jollet, Stephen Kite, Peter Leech, Alex Potts, Richard Read, Janet Sayers, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Paul Tucker.

Adrian Stokes's Engagement with Architecture, Art History, Criticism, and Psychoanalysis

The Coral Mind

Just over a century after his death, Walter Pater's critical reputation now stands as high as it has ever been. In the English-speaking world, this has involved recovery from the widespread neglect and indifference which attended his work in the first half of the twentieth century. In Europe, however, enthusiastic disciples such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the German-speaking world and Charles Du Bos in France, helped to fuel a growing awareness of his writings as central to the emergence of modernist literature. Translations of works like Imaginary Portraits, established his distinctive voice as an aesthetic critic and his novel, Marius the Epicurean, was enthusiastically received in Paris in the 1920s and published in Turin on the eve of the Second World War. This collection traces the fortunes of Pater's writings in these three major literatures and their reception in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe

Ian Hamilton Finlay

The revealing letters of probably the most significant Scottish public intellectual and artist of the late 20th century.

Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann 1964-69

Midway

Yves Abrioux

Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer will be an indispensable source for readers interested in any aspect of his work.

A Visual Primer

Eugen Gomringer

Vera Röhm

Both a sculptor and a photographer, German-born Vera Röhm is best known for her unorthodox approach to visual art. Using a repertoire of only elementary geometrical shapes, Röhm’s incisions, mutilations, and cross-sections of various materials evoke the very real challenges of restoration and reconstruction. Vera Röhm is the first comprehensive collection of this contemporary artist’s work to be presented to an English-speaking public. It explores the changing shape of Röhm’s art in such installations as Integrations and Shadow Objects, as her photographs of the Jaipur Observatory, and works such as the cube series bearing the inscription “Night is the Earth’s Shadow,” which form part of a significant corpus of work connected with language. Accompanied by essays from renowned poet and critic Eugen Gomringer and the art historian Stephen Bann, Vera Röhm is lavishly illustrated with images from her exhibitions.

With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their "Realistic Manifesto," constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of EI Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman—many of which have never before been available in English—and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.

The Tradition Of Constructivism

Jacky Bowring

Massimo Venturi Ferriolo

Susan Herrington

Using a variety of critical perspectives, this text demonstrates a renewal of garden design and directions for garden aesthetics, analysing projects by Fernando Chacel (Brazil), Andy Goldsworthy (Great Britain), Charles Jencks (Great Britain), Patricia Johanson (U.S.) and Bernard Lassus (France).

Contemporary Garden Aesthetics, Creations and Interpretations

Paul Delaroche

Paul Delaroche’s works were heralded as masterpieces in the nineteenth century, and the man himself was lauded in 1853 by one Italian critic as “at the summit of all living painters.” But while his paintings themselves are still familiar to many, Delaroche the artist fell into almost total obscurity during the twentieth century. Stephen Bann addresses this lacuna in art scholarship, presenting an in-depth examination of Delaroche’s career. Bann situates Delaroche and his wide-ranging oeuvre in the context of early nineteenth-century visual culture. From his early historical paintings to experimental pieces influenced by photography, the book analyzes each stage of Delaroche’s artistic development—as well as his major masterpieces such as The Execution of Lady Jane Grey and The Princes in the Tower. Bann also analyzes the numerous reproductions of Delaroche’s works in a variety of visual mediums, including engravings by Mercuri and Henriquel-Dupont, lithographs, popular prints, and the photographs that illustrated Delaroche’s first retrospective catalog. An unparalleled and lushly illustrated study, Paul Delaroche restores a neglected master to his rightful place in nineteenth-century European art.

History Painted

The English Civil War has become a frequent point of reference in contemporary British political debate. A bitter and bloody series of conflicts, it shook the very foundations of seventeenth-century Britain. This book is the first attempt to portray the visual legacy of this period, as passed down, revisited, and periodically reworked over two and a half centuries of subsequent English history. Highly regarded art historian Stephen Bann deftly interprets the mass of visual evidence accessible today, from ornate tombs and statues to surviving sites of vandalism and iconoclasm, public signage, and historical paintings of human subjects, events, and places. Through these important scenes and sometimes barely perceptible traces, Bann shows how the British view of the War has been influenced and transformed by visual imagery.

Scenes and Traces of the English Civil War

Emeritus Professor of Art History Stephen Bann

Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness is a cultural history that combines some of the most vital questions in the history of art, the history of science, intellectual history, and the new discipline of museology. The "Cabinet of Curiosities," an early modern phenomenon some historians view as the forerunner of the modern museum, has evinced considerable interest in recent years. Increasing attention has also been paid to the history of travel and its documentation. The collector John Bargrave (1610-80) holds a unique position at the intersection of these two areas of cultural practice, yet this is the first in-depth study of his life, and it is the first to assess his significance for contemporary cultural studies. Stephen Bann seeks not only to investigate the life and philosophy of an individual collector but to elaborate a genealogy of collecting that sheds new insights on the practice in its variable historical forms. John Bargrave's collection of "curiosities" remains nearly intact at Canterbury Cathedral, where it was recently rescued from virtual oblivion. His role as a traveler and his part in writing the first English guidebook to Italy have also come to light only in the last decade. Bann offers an investigation of Bargrave's family background, his social position in the period preceding the English Civil War, and his roles as traveler and collector during and after the war. Bargrave left a unique catalog detailing the circumstances of acquiring many of the objects, which Bann analyzes in order to reconstruct the methods and motives of collecting and establishing a permanent display. He argues that collecting can be seen as a form of authorship, an effort always rooted in a particular time and place (and the early modern period is crucial in this cultural shift) to make sense of objects symbolically.

Stephen Bann

Books

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