Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics: The Legacy of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

by Sarah Lippert (Editor)

Overview

When the Enlightenment thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote his treatise Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in 1766, he outlined the strengths and weaknesses of each art. Painting was assigned to the realm of space; poetry to the realm of time. Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics explores how artists since the eighteenth century up to the present day have grappled with the consequences of Lessing's theory and those that it spawned. As the book reveals, many artists have been - and continue to be – influenced by Lessing-like theories, which have percolated into the art education and art criticism. Artists from Jean Raoux to Willem de Kooning and Frances Bacon, and art critics such as Clement Greenberg, have felt the weight of Lessing's theories in their modes of creation, whether consciously or not. Should we sound the death knell for the theories of Lessing and his kind? Or will conceptions of temporality, spatiality and artistic competition continue to unfold? This book - the first to consider how Lessing's writings connect to visual art's production - brings these questions to the fore.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786722560
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	06/30/2017
Series:	International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Sarah Lippert is Associate Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts Program at the University of Michigan-Flint, as well as the Director of the Society for Paragone Studies. Her research on nineteenth century visual culture has been published in the journals Artibus et Historiae and Dix-Neuf.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Tenets of Lessing and his Legacy by Sarah Lippert

Chapter 1: Drawing the Line: Jean Raoux's painted Virgins and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's written Theories by Gabriela Jasin

Chapter 2: After Lessing: Beauty and the Unreality of Artistic Space and Time by Franco Cirulli

Chapter 3: E. H. Toelken's Addendum to Lessing's Laocoön (1822) by Eric Garberson

Chapter 4: The Temporality of Imitation in the Work of Moreau and Gérôme by Sarah Lippert

Chapter 5: Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient: Flesh: A Look at the Work of Soutine, Bacon, Dubuffet, and de Kooning by Chad Airhart

Chapter 6: Almost: Greenberg and Lessing by Thomas Morgan Evans

Chapter 7: In the Body's Space, the Body's Time: Feeling Your Way Through Richard Serra's The Matter of Time by Rob Marks

Chapter 8: Time, Space and Film: The Symbiosis of Pull My Daisy by Timothy Hiles

Conclusion: Limit-Imposing Systems by Sarah Lippert

Editorial Reviews

Although Lessing’s Laocoön is his most celebrated text, cited in almost every discussion of time and space in the arts, it has not received such intensive, imaginative and challenging consideration by writers interested primarily in the visual arts until this thoughtfully assembled and fascinating group of essays.

James H. Rubin