Posted on 03/07/2006 7:18:20 AM PST by Pharmboy
Major art history ping...
"Whistler's Mother" out? Then so's the book. :')
Art ping!
Let Republicanprofessor; me or woofie know if you want on or off the art history ping list.
I have a copy of Jansen, whatever, Whistler is surely one of the all time greats.
I never knew much about Whistler, but saw a couple of his paintings at the Frick. They knocked me out.
That's Carlyle the old curmudgeon? I did not know he did a self portrait in his book about clothing style, but there it is.
Oh, are you familiar with the Gridiron Secret Society? < g >
I totally agree that Carlisle is better (to me) than Whistler's mother. It's just that the latter became such an icon, right away.
I actually find Whistler's white works somewhat boring. Not a lot of drama in white....
Is the dog "Whistler" a Wegman? He sure does some clever things, even down to the Whister-like print on the wall.
Interesting post....wish I could get to the rest of it easily. I hate that registering hoop to jump through.
But since I choose art texts, I am always interested in what comes out. I have not used Janson for years.
Would have loved to be a fly on the wall in THOSE sittings. Story is, as Carlyle was coming out, he met a little girl going in to be painted. "Puir lassie! Puir lassie!" he murmured.
At first, I did not mind the dropping of some of what I see to be minor artists.
But this paragraph had me stunned:
And it uses art much more as a way to discuss race, class and gender. In the introduction, on pages that once used Dürer and Mantegna to examine the concept of originality, Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" a painting that rested on clumps of elephant dung and created a furor when it was shown in Brooklyn in 1999 is used to talk about differences between Western and African ways of seeing. "Art is never an empty container," the introduction states. "Rather, it is a vessel loaded with meaning."
What a boatload of postmodern revisionist *#&$. Janson himself must be rolling over in his grave.
Stephen F. Eisenman, a professor of art history at Northwestern University who described himself as a longtime critic of Janson, welcomed many of the changes. "It's clearly a liberal version of a cold-war classic that will pass muster in most of the U.S.," he said.
But he added that it would probably never regain the dominance it once had, simply because the whole idea of a book like it... had become outdated.
"The main problem, I think, is that there's no longer a general belief that there exists a single canon for art that should be taught to all students," he said.
The liberal ideology doesn't get any clearer than that. Keep me away from this revised book and all who had to do with it.
I have used Eisenman's 19th century art book in the past and some of its claims are amazing. In one of the essays (which I don't know is by him or just edited by Eisenman) claims that the man in red giving Socrates the poisoned hemlock in David's famous painting is really Socrates' lover. He reads a great deal of homosexuality into this painting. Hello?! I'd never heard of those interpretations in previous art history texts. Where do they get these ideas from?
I hadn't jumped through the registration hoop either - but I'm horrified at what you found there. I'm glad my copy of Janson is an older one.
For all the pretensions of the art world (and especially the Leftist inhabitants of it) of breaking away from rigidity, and tossing down barriers, etc, the truth is that their intention is to impose rigidity and to erect barriers the likes of which we have never seen in the (free) West.
RP, what was the name of that text which exposes the PC nonsense being taught in Art History classes today? And which has apparently infected even Janson?
Perhaps some overinterpretation of the color of his toga..."man in red ~ lady in red"
Thank you. You obviously know more about this than do I.
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