2017年9月28日 星期四

Thames & Hudson and the Phaidon Press; The Self-Portrait: a Cultural History by James Hall 自畫像文化史





 The Self-PortraitA Cultural History  By James Hall 自畫像文化史










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漢清講堂2017-06-29 Thames & Hudson and the Phaidon Press 兩家出版社簡介Phaidon was founded in Vienna in 1923 as a ...

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http://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/the-self-portrait-a-cultural-history-hardcover
The Self-PortraitA Cultural History
James Hall




Order this Book

List Price


$35.00
Details

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Artwork: 120 illustrations in color and black and white
Size: 6.4 in x 9.3 in x 1.3 in
Published: April 22nd, 2014
ISBN-10: 050023910X
ISBN-13: 9780500239100
Genre: Art
E-book Available: Yes
Description


This broad cultural history of self-portraiture brilliantly maps the history of the genre, from the earliest myths of Narcissus and the Christian tradition of “bearing witness” to the prolific self-image-making of today’s contemporary artists.


Focusing on a perennially popular subject, the book tells the vivid history of works that offer insights into artists’ personal, psychological, and creative worlds. Topics include the importance of the medieval mirror craze in early self-portraiture; the confessional self-portraits of Titian and Michelangelo; the mystique of the artist’s studio, from Vermeer to Velázquez; the role of biography and geography for serial self-portraitists such as Courbet and Van Gogh; the multiple selves of modern and contemporary artists such as Cahun and Sherman; and recent developments in the era of globalization.


Comprehensive and beautifully illustrated, the book features the work of a wide range of artists including Beckmann, Caravaggio, Dürer, Gentileschi, Ghiberti, Giotto, Goya, Kahlo, Kauffman, Magritte, Mantegna, Picasso, Poussin, Raphael, Rembrandt and Van Eyck. The full range of the subject is explored, including comic and caricature self-portraits, “invented” or imaginary self-portraits, and important collections of self-portraiture such as that of the Medici.


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The Self-Portrait: a Cultural History by James Hall, review

The self-portrait invites the viewer to meet the gaze of its creator, making it the most compelling of all artistic genres

4 out of 5 stars
Every artist of every style and period has had a crack at a self-portrait at one time or another. For the artist the interest of the self-as-subject is often expedient: a model they don’t have to pay; a convenient alternative to yet another arrangement of crockery or flowers.
But for the viewer, the self-portrait opens up a potent range of possibilities: the artist is seen looking into the soul of the person they know best (one would hope), who they care about most (inevitably) and with whom they have the most perplexing relationship – themselves. Meeting their gaze, we take on their position, seated in their chair or standing at their easel; viewer becomes artist in an exchange of roles that makes this perhaps the most compelling of all artistic genres.
You’d be forgiven for thinking the self-portrait is essentially a historical phenomenon, but James Hall begins his lively cultural history with the challenging assertion that “self-portraiture has become the defining visual genre of our confessional age: the sheer volume of contemporary self-portraits defies enumeration”.
This might seem improbable, until you realise that Hall is including conceptual art in his remit – pieces such as Tracey Emin’s self-obsessed Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, a small tent with the names of her lovers appliqued onto the inside. His aim is to define the self-portrait as broadly as possible, starting in the early Middle Ages – several centuries before the “invention” of self-portraiture, generally agreed to have been around 1400 – and ending in our own time, when representational painting and sculpture have become niche activities; but the idea that the artist is their art is all-pervading.
The notion of the artist constructing themselves as a character in their own work may sound like an arch postmodern conceit, but from the late 15th century artists were manipulating their self-images, making themselves appear older or younger to suit their purposes, taking on fictional and biblical roles to heighten their brand profiles. Andrea Mantegna, the “richest and most famous artist of the time”, portrayed himself as a grim-faced Roman in his memorial bust, “his tumescent bulldog features” conveying a “visceral machismo”. Comparing himself in the accompanying inscription to Apelles, court artist of Alexander the Great, he brought the reflected glory of the Greek conqueror on himself and his patrons, the Gonzagas.
Albrecht Dürer, the first great career self-portraitist and a shameless narcissist and megalomaniac, painted himself with flowing crinkly locks in an unforgettable image that is generally considered “Christlike”, though as Hall waspishly points out, his personal grooming is far from humble: “his permed hair, plucked eyebrows, waxed handlebar moustache and trimmed beard are a tour de force of the barber’s art.”
This being a “cultural history”, these great painters take their places in a stream of personalities, many of them minor by conventional standards, such as Thomas Patch, an English landscape painter who portrayed himself as an ox, or the 16th-century proto-surrealist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo. Literary, philosophical and social context becomes as important to Hall as the intentions of the artist, leading to intriguing insights and off-the-wall facts. Van Gogh’s paintings of the chairs he and Gauguin used are, Hall claims, surrogate portraits, informed by Renaissance ideas of dexter and sinister; Gauguin’s stoneware jug in the form of his own severed head alludes both to Vincent’s sliced-off ear and his witnessing of the guillotining of a “glamorous” multiple murderer named Prado who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Napoleon III.
Jeff Koons’s contention that “My art and my life are totally one” might almost have come from the lips of Gauguin. Koons’s Jeff and Ilona (Made in Heaven), a grotesquely kitsch, life-size, polychrome wood tableau of himself and his porn-star wife La Cicciolina in sexual congress, appears in this context as a kind of postmodern updating of Gauguin’s jug. Indeed, among many “subconscious, disguised and surrogate” contemporary self-portraits, Hall finds surprisingly direct examples of the form from the likes of Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and Gilbert & George. In the Japanese artist Tatsumi Orimoto’s touching photographic self-portraits with his elderly mother, Hall finds echoes of Dürer, whose paintings of himself and his elderly mother were exhibited side by side.
Hall’s range of references is polymathic and his writing often pithy, but the democratically even tone – in which geniuses and nonentities are accorded the same level of interest – can feel monotonous. The book gives a good account of the role of the self-portrait in the elevation of the artist from craftsman to cultural hero. Yet Hall is so keen to avoid aggrandising the better known figures that you’re left yearning for a contrast between what’s of historical interest and what’s genuinely extraordinary. Occasionally you wish he’d let his dispassionate scholarly mask drop and scream out, “This is a freaking masterpiece!”

自畫像文化史


內容簡介

自畫像已經成為定義我們這個自白時代的視覺藝術門類:當代的自畫像僅數量而言就已不計其數。較之以往任何一個時代,關注自畫像的人數更多、國別更繁雜、關注度也更高。自畫像的領地已遠不限於教堂、宮殿、學院、博物館、畫廊、建築物基座和畫框等。如今,以攝影與影片形式出現的自畫像充斥著互聯網,學童們也開始被要求畫自畫像。人們普遍認為並希望自畫像能賦予自己以一種特權,得以觸及畫中人的靈魂,從而消解現代城市化社會中芸芸眾生所經歷的疏離與籍籍無名。

霍爾用形象生動的筆觸向我們展示了幾個世紀以來自畫像都是藝術家們的寵兒的這一事實。中間他揭示了中世紀時期「鏡子熱」的重要性;文藝復興時期的自畫像熱潮;提香和米開朗基羅的自我剖析的自畫像作品;自傳對於系列自畫像畫家如庫爾貝、梵?高的影響;蒙奇、勃納爾和莫德松一貝克爾作品中展示的有關性的主題和才華;以及在全球化時代巾自畫像的最新發展。

詹姆斯?霍爾編著、劉頓、徐秀香、楊霞祥、王燕飛編譯的《自畫像文化史(精)》幾乎涵蓋了自畫像所有的類型,包括漫畫、諷刺畫以及自創的或假想的自畫像作品。當然也少不了經典的收藏品,如佛羅倫薩的美第奇家族的收藏品。通過仔細推敲藝術家們的字句和想法,霍爾始終在探求他們是何時何故決定創作自畫像的。《自畫像文化史》呈現了一部豐富而生動的歷史,是所有對這一為經久不衰、充滿人間情義的藝術形式感興趣的人們不可或缺的讀物。

本書包含120幅插圖,其中109幅彩圖。

詹姆斯.霍爾(James Hall)是一位藝術史學家、演講家和播音員。他還是南安普敦大學的客座研究員。他在倫敦考陶爾德藝術學院取得碩士學位,在劍 橋大學取得博士學位。他曾擔任《周臼通訊》和《衛報》的首席評論員,並在許多出版物上發表過作品,包括《衛報》、《華爾街日報》和《藝術報》。霍爾還出版 了包括《世界如雕塑:從文藝復興到現在雕塑地位的改變》和《陰暗面:左右象征主義是怎樣定義西方藝術的》等在內的四本廣受好評的書。

目錄

引言
序言:古代的自畫像創作
1.源於中世紀
2.鏡之迷狂
3.社會中的藝術家
4.文藝復興的英雄式藝術家
5.戲仿英雄式自畫像
6.藝術家工作室
7.十字路口
8.回家:進入19世紀
9.性與天才
10.面孔之外:現當代自畫像
原版書注釋
原版書參考書目及感謝
原版書圖片索引
原版書索引

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