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Photographers on Photography (Paperback)

How the Masters See, Think & Shoot

Henry Carroll

● Includes iconic images from 50 masters

● Each image is accompanied by a quote from the master photographer to inspire and illuminate

● Analysis from Henry Carroll provides invaluable insight into their thoughts and techniques

Through a curated selection of quotations, images, and interviews, Photographers on Photography reveals what matters most to the masters. With enlightening text by Henry Carroll, author of the internationally bestselling Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs series, you’ll discover how the giants of the genres developed their distinctive visual styles, the core ideas that underpin their practice and, most importantly, what photography means to you.

AUTHOR Henry Carroll studied photography at the Royal College of Art in London and his work has been exhibited worldwide. Henry’s clear, jargon-free style of teaching has demystified digital photography and inspired thousands to get creative with their cameras. INFO 9781786279156

50 illustrations

PHOTOGRAPHERS ON PHOTOGRAPHY

HOW THE MASTERS SEE, THINK & SHOOT HENRY CARROLL

128 pages 7⅞ x 5¾ ins $17.99 • Paperback

AUGUST 2021

AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

Fundamentals of Art History (New Edition)

Michael Cothren and Anne D’Alleva

● Bestselling handbook for art history students, now in its 4th edition. Previously published as Look! The

Fundamentals of Art History

● Provides step-by-step guidance on how to write papers and prepare for exams

● Updated discussions of types and media of art, controversies around study of art, art and museums, art and the marketplace

This invaluable guide enables students to get the most from their art history course. Written in an accessible style, the book introduces two basic art historical methods—formal analysis and contextual analysis. In this new edition, revising author Michael Cothren has extended the discussion on iconography and iconology. Greater emphasis is placed on the global and multicultural aspects of art creation and analysis. There is more step-by-step guidance on how to use these methods to prepare for exams and write papers.

AUTHOR Anne D’Alleva is Dean of the School of Fine Arts, University of Connecticut. She is the author of Arts in the Pacific Islands and Methods and Theories of Art History. Michael Cothren is Scheuer Family Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Swarthmore. He is co-author of Art History and Art: A Brief History and Methods and Theories of Art History, Third Edition INFO 9781913947019

49 illustrations

168 pages 8⅜ x 5½ ins $19.99 • Paperback

AUGUST 2021

Wölfflin and formal analysis

In Principles of Art History (1915), the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) sought to systematize formal analysis through his definition of paired, contrasting terms to distinguish fundamental stylistic differences. He defined five basic pairs of characteristics, which he saw as characterizing the Renaissance in contrast to the Baroque: linear vs. painterly, planar vs. recessional, closed forms vs. open forms, multiplicity vs. unity, absolute clarity vs. relative clarity. Here we will use Raphael’s School of Athens (1510–11) (Figure 2.7) to represent the characteristics of Renaissance painting and Rubens’s Garden of Love (c.1630–5) (Figure 2.8) to represent the Baroque. Comparing them clarifies the polarities Wölfflin saw in the styles of these two periods.

LINEAR VS. PAINTERLY

Wölfflin used the term linear to indicate works that emphasize outlines and have a special kind of clarity in the spatial separation and relationship of objects to each other. Painterly form is more elusive—attention is withdrawn from the edges, outlines are deemphasized, and form is developed primarily through the use of light and shade.

PLANAR VS. RECESSIONAL

In a planar composition, objects are represented parallel to the picture plane. The spatial recession is clear, achieved by a series of planes that are all parallel to the picture plane, as in much fifteenth-century Italian art. In contrast, a work characterized by recession is one in which the planes are not clearly articulated as separate parallel units. Spatial depth is created through diagonal placement, and the frontal plane is not emphasized.

CLOSED FORMS VS. OPEN FORMS

In a closed form, the depicted contents of

2.7 Raphael, The School of Athens, 1510–11. Fresco. 19 x 27ft (5.79 x 8.24m).

Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome.

60 / chapter 2 style and subject 2.8 Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Love, c.1630–5. Oil on canvas. 6ft 6in x 9ft 4½in (1.99 x 2.86m). Museo del Prado, Madrid.

represented forms seem to stand in clear relation to their edges, allowing the viewer to establish a clear sense of the forms’ position in relation to other objects in the image. In an open form, spatial relationships are less clear, either among objects within the work or between those objects and the viewer. The elements within the image are not oriented in relation to clear edges. Sometimes, objects merge with other objects into a single mass, without a clear barrier separating them individually.

MULTIPLICITY VS. UNITY

This dichotomy contrasts works in which the individual parts appear as independent units (even when they are subordinate to a whole), with works that are perceived as unified wholes, in which individual elements are less clearly distinguished from each other.

ABSOLUTE CLARITY VS. RELATIVE CLARITY

Wölfflin’s final pair is closely related to the preceding pair. Absolute clarity refers to works with explicit and clearly articulated forms, and relative clarity refers to works with less explicit and less clearly articulated forms.

Although art historians today may not continue to use these same paired terms, Wölfflin’s comparative method still dominates art-historical research and presentation. Many classroom lectures still rely on a series of paired images to make their points, especially when characterizing stylistic change.

Heinrich Wölfflin. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. Translated by M. D. Hottinger. New York: Dover, 1940 (originally published in 1915).

chapter 2 style and subject / 61 are discussed at length. You could staple this sheet to the front of the photocopy if you have one, or gather together all your summaries in your notebook. It will not take long to do this after you finish each reading, and it will save you a lot of time when studying for exams. If it would help you, create a template in a word-processing program at the beginning of the term and print out the number you will need, or use a copy of the template as a file for taking notes and storing them on your computer.

Preparing for slide identifications and short-answer questions

Memorizing important information about important works of art has traditionally been an important part of training in art history. This process teaches the basic material of art history and fixes a set of visual works in your memory that can be drawn on as your study of the discipline continues. Students of art history need to be able to recall images visually, from memory, to understand other works of art as they are exposed to them. For example, if your instructor discusses how Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) modeled some of his compositions on Egyptian sculpture, you will need to remember what Egyptian sculpture looks like in order to understand this observation. As with the analytical and interpretive abilities you acquire through the study of art, a well-trained visual memory will enrich your life and enhance your appreciation of art in a variety of settings. Even if you do not become an art historian, you will probably visit art museums or important cultural sites during your travels.

Until relatively recently, a standard part of examinations for introductory art-history students in a survey course, was a series of slide identifications, usually at the very beginning of the exam. Of course, your professors will no doubt be projecting works of art from digital images rather than 35mm photographic slides, but in many places the word “slide” is still in use even if the artifacts themselves are no longer there. In some colleges, students often nicknamed survey courses in art history “Slides,” whether affectionately or mockingly. Today, not all introductory course in art history are survey courses, and, even when they are, increasingly professors are not using these identification sections within their exams. But, since in some places they are still standard, we wanted to discuss them briefly here in case your professor continues this traditional practice.

Students often find slide identifications (“Slide IDs” for short) to be the most frustrating and difficult part of art-history exams. A slide

94 / chapter 4 surviving and succeeding: art history examinations 4.1 Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939. Oil on canvas. 5ft 7in x 5ft 7in (1.70 x 1.70m).

Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.

identification usually consists of a single image, shown for a minute or two. During this time, students are asked to “identify” the work in the slide by listing the artist (if known), the subject or title, the date, the location (where it was made and/or where it is if the location is original). Some professors also want to know its medium, and its period or culture. A complete slide identification for Figure 4.1 could be

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas. 1939. Oil on canvas. Mexico.

In addition to the basic identification, some professors may ask about a specific issue or interpretation in relation to the piece, or ask you to comment generally on its significance, giving you additional time to do this. The slide of Figure 4.1 could be accompanied by this question:

Why are there two women depicted here?

chapter 4 surviving and succeeding: art history examinations / 95

Methods & Theories of Art History (Third Edition)

Michael Cothren and Anne D’Alleva

● Clear, accessible introduction to the critical theories used in analysing art

● Essential handbook for students taking a range of art history courses

● Updated and revised for greater clarity between the different analytical methods and theories

This invaluable introduction to the critical theories used in analysing art has been updated to reflect recent scholarship in contemporary art and has been broken down into smaller sections for greater clarity and accessibility. The book begins with a revised discussion of the difference between method and theory. The following chapters apply the varying approaches to works of art, and the book ends with a new conclusion that focuses on the way the study of art is informed by theory.

AUTHOR Anne D’Alleva is Dean of the School of Fine Arts, University of Connecticut. She is the author of Arts in the Pacific Islands and Fundamentals of Art History. Michael Cothren is Scheuer Family Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Swarthmore. He is co-author of Art History and Art: A Brief History and Fundamentals of Art History. INFO 9781913947026

34 illustrations

200 pages 8⅜ x 5½ ins $19.99 • Paperback

AUGUST 2021

not narrative and symbolic. In her view, Dutch painters participated in a distinctive visual culture that led them to value detailed paintings of everyday life as a way of knowing the world, not as a way of presenting disguised moralistic messages. She connected painting to the production of maps, lenses, and mirrors as expressions of a distinctive Dutch visual culture. Other scholars (e.g., Willem Lash) have argued that both perspectives on Dutch painting could be right—that Dutch artists deliberately created open-ended works which viewers could interpret symbolically, if they chose to, or experience as a fresh and penetrating view of the world if that was their inclination.

Practicing iconography and iconology

When beginning an iconographic and iconological analysis, it helps to work slowly and systematically through Panofsky’s three stages, usually in order. Only rarely, however, will all three be surveyed in order when crafting a final presentation of your analysis and interpretation. A painting entitled De Style (1993) by American artist Kerry James Marshall can serve as an example of the beginning of such a systematic, three-step analysis (Figure 1.5).

1.5 Kerry James Marshall, De Style, 1993. Acrylic and collage on unstretched canvas. 8ft 8in x 10ft 2in (2.64 x 3.10m). Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

42 / chapter 1 style, iconography, and iconologyy

The pre-iconographic description or natural subject matter will be quite rudimentary or somewhat more involved depending on the viewer’s or scholar’s life experiences and the relationship of these experiences to the subject portrayed in the painting.

. What does this painting represent, on the simplest level?

It portrays five human figures within an interior setting. Two stand and three sit. The four whose heads are visible address viewers directly, almost as if they had just come into the room. Those already in the room seem to be acknowledging them. On a basic level, the setup is similar to that in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait, but unlike that now-familiar painting, although there is a mirror on the back wall—not the relatively small, framed convex mirror of the double portrait, but a broad strip of reflective glass that extends all the way across this room—if viewers are entering this room, they are not reflected here. What is reflected rather prominently, however, are the backs of the two standing figures, and since those reflections are not directly behind them but off their right shoulders, either they or the mirror are tilted, or the viewer is slightly off center.

Because of overlapping, not everything is visible in this crowded painting, but behind and around the monumental human forms we can see a sizable collection of objects and furnishings. Many viewers will draw on their own experiences to interpret these, as well as on the broad expanse of the mirror and the postures and actions of the figures posed in front of it, as evidence that this scene is set in a barber shop. Since the figures are Black, presumably this is a barber shop that serves an African-American clientele.

An iconographic analysis usually requires research on the part of viewers or scholars who are not already familiar with the subjects and symbols portrayed in the painting.

. Which aspects of the painting carry specific conventional or symbolic significance that will help us focus our understanding on the meaning of the painting as a whole?

. What are the salient aspects of the setting and the conventional meaning of the individual objects within it?

The room in which these men stand is full of tools used in cutting hair (e.g., the electric clippers in the right hand of the barber) and products used to style it (e.g., Royal Crown Hair Dressing, a still well-known pomade used in grooming that sits on a surface near the barber’s right elbow). The particular barber shop represented (real or imagined) is identified as Percy’s House of Style in a diploma framed with what must be a souvenir first-dollar-earned and hung in front of the mirror at upper left. In the same area of the painting, the mirror itself reflects in reverse a part of the shop’s name—presumably painted on the other side of a street-front window glass. On the other side of the painting, the mir-

chapter 1 style, iconography, and iconology / 43 Are works of art puzzles? Do they pose problems?

Are art historians needed to put together the pieces or solve those problems?

Underlying formalist and iconographic/ iconological approaches to art history is the basic question of whether or not a work of art is something that needs to be deciphered, like a puzzle or a murder mystery. Do artworks pose problems of understanding that need to be solved? Do we need to crack their visual, iconographic, and iconological codes before we can understand them?

In his undergraduate classes on the methods and theories of art history, Michael Cothren often assigned an article and asked students to figure out

1. what was the problem the art historian was addressing?

2. what was the solution they offered?

3. what was the theoretical and methodological system and the nature of the evidence that allowed them to move from problem to solution, like walking from ignorance on a bridge to knowledge on the other side?

After they had accomplished this, he suggested that they ponder what was at stake in choosing to address the problem and posing a solution in their particular way. Sometimes, scholars make the rationale for, and the perceived importance of their studies, very clear from the outset in their publications. Good examples are Meyer Schapiro’s 1939 article on the transition from Mozarabic to Romanesque style in medieval Spain and Linda Seidel’s 1989 revisionist study of the iconography and iconology of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait. Sometimes, however, we as readers have to figure out the inspiration and reasons for the study, as well as the nature of the methods used to draw its conclusions, in the process of reading the article itself.

Art historian James Elkins has proposed that, because this deciphering or problemsolving mode has become such a basic art-historical practice, art historians tend to focus on works of art that can be treated this way, that call for problem-solving and code-cracking. He says, “We are inescapably attracted to pictures that appear as puzzles, and unaccountably uninterested in clear meanings and manifest solutions. The discipline thrives on the pleasure of problems well solved, and it languishes in the face of the good, the common, the merely true, the skillful, the private, and above all, the image that refuses to present itself as a puzzle.” (p. 258)

If art historians are detectives and problem solvers, is it because we choose to be? Or do the works of art themselves call for it?

46 / chapter 1 style, iconography, and iconologyy School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012). The scene shifts here from a crowded barber shop to a more spacious beauty shop, using many of the same pictorial devices and iconographic strategies with even more obvious references to great works within the European tradition.

Of course, iconography and iconology do not have to be used in isolation from other theoretical viewpoints. A three-part Panofskian analysis could be executed as a starting point, using it to generate ideas, and then using those ideas as the basis for addressing issues of ideology, class, gender, or race, informed by specific contextualizing theories presented in subsequent chapters of this book.

Beyond the object

Traditional practice of iconography and iconology as envisioned by Panofsky, as well as traditional visual analysis, runs the risk of an inadvertent emphasis on material objects—painting, sculpture, architecture, drawings, prints, etc.—as the primary, or even the exclusive, subjects of art-historical analysis. We must keep in mind that art history can be concerned with multiple subjects that may or may not focus on objects, including the history of art institutions, the roles of patrons and collectors, the way objects are or were used in ritual or performance, and how performance itself can constitute a form of art. Can these traditional systems of inquiry be useful in the interpretation of works of art that are not object-based?

Performance is a vibrant form of practice in contemporary art, and there are many different theorizations of contemporary performance art. In the 1990s, French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud developed the theory of relational aesthetics to account for the work of contemporary artists responding to the social relations and artistic practices made possible by new technologies, including digital media and the Internet. “The role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities,” he declared, “but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.” (p.13) For example, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (Free) was an event in which the artist took all the hidden work that usually goes on in an art gallery and put it on display—gallery employees went about the business of buying and selling works, cataloguing them, doing accounting, etc., in the galleries rather than the back offices— while, at the same time, Tiravanija set up a kitchen and cooked Thai curry, which he offered to gallery visitors. The work created an arena

chapter 1 style, iconography, and iconology / 47