'Whether it is being studied or critiqued, the art canon is usually understood as an authoritative list of important works and artists. This collection breaks with the idea of a singular, transcendent canon. Through provocative case studies, it demonstrates that the content of any canon is both historically and culturally specific and dependent on who is responsible for the canon’s production and maintenance. The contributors explore how, where, why, and by whom canons are formed; how they function under particular circumstances; how they are maintained; and why they may undergo change.Focusing on various moments from the seventeenth century to the present, the contributors cover a broad geographic terrain, encompassing the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Taiwan, and South Africa. Among the essays are examinations of the working and reworking of a canon by an influential nineteenth-century French critic, the limitations placed on what was acceptable as canonical in American textbooks produced during the Cold War, the failed attempt to define a canon of Rembrandt’s works, and the difficulties of constructing an artistic canon in parts of the globe marked by colonialism and the imposition of Eurocentric ideas of artistic value. The essays highlight the diverse factors that affect the production of art canons: market forces, aesthetic and political positions, nationalism and ingrained ideas concerning the cultural superiority of particular groups, perceptions of gender and race, artists’ efforts to negotiate their status within particular professional environments, and the dynamics of art history as an academic discipline and discourse. This volume is a call to historicize canons, acknowledging both their partisanship and its implications for the writing of art history.' - from back cover.
Access level

Onsite

editor
Location code
REF.BRA2
Keyword
Publication/Creation date

2007

No of pages

370

ISBN / ISSN

9780822341062

No of copies

1

Content type

anthology

Chapter headings

Introduction: Canons and Art History - Anna BRZYSKI

Measuring Canons: Reflections on Innovation and the Nineteenth-century Canon of European Art - Robert JENSEN

Canon and Globalization in Art History - James ELKINS

Mere Exposure, Reproduction, and the Impressionist Canon - James CUTTING

Imitation and Authority: The Creation of the Academic Canon in French Art, 1648-1870 - Paul DURO

Chinese Art, the National Palace Museum, and Cold War Politics - Jane C. JU, 朱靜華

Masculine Reason or Feminine Spirit: Gender Battles in the Werkbund's Canonization of National Style - Despina STRAITGAKOS

Courbet, the Decorative, and the Canon: Rewriting and Rereading Meier-Graefe's Modern Art - Jenny ANGER

The Multiple Masculinities of Canonical Modernism: James Johnson Sweeney and Alfred H. Barr Jr. in the 1930s - Marcia BRENNAN

'Gardner' Variety Formalism: Helen Gardner and Art through the Ages - Barbara JAFFEE

The Rembrandt Research Project: Issues and Controversies Raised by a Canonical Oeuvre - Linda STONE-FERRIER

Making Art in the Age of Art History, or How to Become a Canonical Artist - Anna BRZYSKI

Kinkade and the Canon: Art History's (Ir)Relevance - Monica KJELLMAN-CHAPIN

Canons Apart and Apartheid Canons: Interpellations beyond the Colonial in South African Art - Julie L. MCGEE

Coda: Canons and Contemporaneity - Terry SMITH

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Partisan Canons