Art history and its institutions: foundations of a discipline

Abstract

"What is art history? The answer depends on who asks the question. Museum staff, academics, art critics, collectors, dealers and artists themselves all stake competing claims to the aims, methods, and history of art history. Dependent on and sustained by different - and often competing - institutions, art history remains a multi-faceted field of study. Art History and Its Institutions focuses on the professional and institutional formation of art history, showing how the discourses that shaped its creation continue to define the field today. Grouped into three sections, articles examine the sites where art history is taught and studied, the role of institutions in conferring legitimacy, the relationship between modernism and art history, and the systems that define and control it. From museums and universities to law courts and photography studios, the contributors explore a range of different institutions, revealing the complexity of their interaction and their impact on the discipline of art history."--Back cover

Contents

Art history and modernism / Elizabeth Mansfield -- Hearing the unsaid : art history, museology, and the composition of the self / Donald Preziosi -- From Boullée to Bilbao : the museum as utopian space / Andrew McClellan -- Marburg, Harvard and purpose-built architecture for art history, 1927 / Kathryn Brush -- Viollet-le-Duc and Taine at the École des Beaux-Arts : on the first professorship of art history in France / Philip Hotchkiss Walsh -- Colonizing culture : the origins of art history in Australia / Jacqueline Strecker -- Deep innovation and mere eccentricity : six case studies of innovation in art history / David Carrier -- The taste of angels in the art of darkness : fashioning the canon of African art / Christopher B. Steiner -- Tradesmen as scholars : interdependencies in the study and exchange of art / Ivan Gaskell -- How canons disappear : the case of Henri Regnault / Marc Gotlieb -- Using art history : the Louvre and its public persona, 1848-52 / Gabriel P. Weisberg -- Silent moves : on excluding the ethnographic subject from the discourse of art history / Claire Farago -- Art history on the academic fringe : Taine's philosophy of art / Mary G. Morton -- "For connoisseurs" : The Burlington magazine, 1903-11 / Helen Rees Leahy -- Photographic perspectives : photography and the institutional formation of art history / Frederick N. Bohrer -- Instituting genius : the formation of biographical art history in France / Greg M. Thomas -- A preponderance of practical problems : discourse institutionalized and the history of art in the United States between 1876 and 1888 / Eric Rosenberg -- Emancipation and the freed in American sculpture : race, representation, and the beginnings of an African American history of art / Steven Nelson -- Art photography, history, and aesthetics / Catherine M. Soussloff.