1900s
20th century
A01=Margareta Ingrid Christian
aby warburg
academic
aesthetics
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
alois riegel
analysis
art scholar
artwork
atmosphere
aura
Author_Margareta Ingrid Christian
automatic-update
belief
biology
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=ACX
Category=AG
Category=AGA
cezanne
choreographer
christian
college
colors
contemporary
COP=United States
critical
critics
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
ecstasis
environment
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
faith
fine arts
form
human nature
humanities
interdisciplinary
Language_English
milieu
modern
objects
PA=Available
painting
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
psychology
rainer maria rilke
religion
research
rudolf laban
scholarly
science
softlaunch
textbook
university
Product details
- ISBN 9780226764771
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jun 2021
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its “milieu,” “atmosphere,” or “environment.” Christian explores how the artwork’s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and that Cezanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited.
Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.
Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.
Margareta Ingrid Christian is assistant professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. She has published articles in a range of contributed volumes and journals, among them PMLA, German Studies Review, and History of Photography.
