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Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), one of the most important figures ever to have written about art, is considered by many to be the father of modern art history. This book is an intellectual biography of Winckelmann that discusses his magnum opus, History of the Art of Antiquity , in the context of his life and work in Germany and in Rome in the eighteenth century.
Alex Potts analyzes Winckelmann's eloquent account of the aesthetic and imaginative Greek ideal in art, an account that focuses on the political and homoerotic sexual content that gave the antique ideal male nude its larger resonance. He shows how Winckelmann's writing reflects the well-known preoccupations and values of Enlightenment culture as well as a darker aspect of Enlightenment ideals--such as the fantasy of a completely free sovereign subjectivity associated with Greek art. Potts explores how Winckelmann's historical perspective on the art of antiquity both prefigures and undermines the more strictly historicizing views put forward in the nineteenth century and how his systematic definition of style and historical development casts a new light on the present-day understanding of these notions. According to Potts, Winckelmann goes well beyond the simple rationalist art history and Neoclassical art theory with which he is usually associated. Rather, he often seems to speak directly to our present awareness of the discomforting ideological and psychic contradictions inherent in supposedly ideal symbolic forms.
Alex Potts analyzes Winckelmann's eloquent account of the aesthetic and imaginative Greek ideal in art, an account that focuses on the political and homoerotic sexual content that gave the antique ideal male nude its larger resonance. He shows how Winckelmann's writing reflects the well-known preoccupations and values of Enlightenment culture as well as a darker aspect of Enlightenment ideals--such as the fantasy of a completely free sovereign subjectivity associated with Greek art. Potts explores how Winckelmann's historical perspective on the art of antiquity both prefigures and undermines the more strictly historicizing views put forward in the nineteenth century and how his systematic definition of style and historical development casts a new light on the present-day understanding of these notions. According to Potts, Winckelmann goes well beyond the simple rationalist art history and Neoclassical art theory with which he is usually associated. Rather, he often seems to speak directly to our present awareness of the discomforting ideological and psychic contradictions inherent in supposedly ideal symbolic forms.
304 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1994
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About the author
Alex Potts
29 books4 followersAlex Potts’ work on art and artistic theory covers a number of areas - sculptural aesthetics and the history of sculpture, experimental practices and the aesthetics of realism in twentieth-century art, art and artistic theory in the nineteenth century, and Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment conceptions of the classical ideal. His main publication on the latter was his book Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994).
In addition to the book The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000), his work on sculpture includes a co-edited anthology of texts on modern sculpture, The Modern Sculpture Reader (2007; reissued 2012), and articles on David Smith, Alberto Giacometti and other twentieth-century sculptors.
In his more recent research he has been arguing for the larger significance of experimental forms of realism in post-war European and American art. This was the subject of the Slade Lectures in Fine Art he gave at the University of Oxford in 2008 and of the Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lectures at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2009, and also of his book, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art, published by Yale University Press in 2013. The latter examines a variety of different kinds of art, from the postwar painting of De Kooning and Dubuffet to New Brutalist and Pop image and object making and actions and assemblages of artists such as Rauschenberg and Beuys.
In his current project, he is exploring ways in which political commitment informed conceptions of naturalism and realism as well as more abstract forms of representation in the art of the late-nineteenth and earlier-twentieth centuries.
- http://www.lsa.umich.edu/histart/peop...
In addition to the book The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000), his work on sculpture includes a co-edited anthology of texts on modern sculpture, The Modern Sculpture Reader (2007; reissued 2012), and articles on David Smith, Alberto Giacometti and other twentieth-century sculptors.
In his more recent research he has been arguing for the larger significance of experimental forms of realism in post-war European and American art. This was the subject of the Slade Lectures in Fine Art he gave at the University of Oxford in 2008 and of the Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lectures at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2009, and also of his book, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art, published by Yale University Press in 2013. The latter examines a variety of different kinds of art, from the postwar painting of De Kooning and Dubuffet to New Brutalist and Pop image and object making and actions and assemblages of artists such as Rauschenberg and Beuys.
In his current project, he is exploring ways in which political commitment informed conceptions of naturalism and realism as well as more abstract forms of representation in the art of the late-nineteenth and earlier-twentieth centuries.
- http://www.lsa.umich.edu/histart/peop...
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September 12, 2014
I found Potts' Freudian views to be problematic. His assertions are not always supported by evidence and the psychoanalysis tends to be oversimplified. This is not helped by his convoluted language and instances on contradicting his own argument. He also does not address many key issues that would have influenced Winckelmann's writing. This made more sense once I discovered that Potts' is not an expert on the eighteenth century and is only really interested in the Winckelmann's text, not the culture from which it was conceived. Overall, the book is a good introduction to many of Winkelmann's ideas on beauty, sublimity, and the ideal, but it has some serious flaws.
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