Alexander Nemerov

Celeste Olalquiaga

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Ernst van Alphen

Mieke Bal

Serge Guilbaut

Joanne Morra

Alex Potts

Akira Mizuta Lippit

Marc Gotlieb

Clark Conference

Sina Najafi

Reva Wolf

W. J. Thomas Mitchell

With essays by Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, Marc Gotlieb, Serge Guilbaut, Michael Ann Holly, Akira Mizuta Lippit, W. J. T. Mitchell, Joanne Morra, Sina Najafi, Alexander Nemerov, Celeste Olalquiaga, Alexander Potts, and Reva Wolf The discipline of art history is in a moment of self-consciousness, and art historians are increasingly more self-reflexive about their practices. In this volume, thirteen authors address both the philosophical and practical issues now facing those in the visual arts field by investigating the ever-pressing issue of research. Their essays explore the remarkable nature of art historians' personal, political, aesthetic, creative, and emotive curiosity and the process of doing research in the archive, library, studio, gallery, museum, and beyond. As such, the book considers the pleasures and dangers of researchers' obsessions and encounters with the incoherence, chaos, and wonder that lie at the heart of searching for the not-yet-known. The volume is based on the 2007 Clark Conference of the same name.

Obsession, Archive, Encounter

What is Research in the Visual Arts?

This is the first book in many years about the nineteenth-century French artist Henri Regnault. Controversial and celebrated in his day, Regnault did not live long. He died at the age of 28 in the Franco-Prussian War, becoming a hero of the French nation. What sets him apart from the more conventional members of the French academy is his great skill in painting "Oriental"--exotic--subjects and doing so in a highly materialistic vein designed to produce, through elements like gold paint, garish colors, and odd details, blatant amusement for the eye. In a word, his images are both delightful and awful. Gotlieb's book combines biography, history, and comparative readings of works by Regnault with those by other French artists such as Delacroix, Fromentin, and Renoir. It also, importantly, explores the afterlives of Regnault as a cultural and artistic figure, as well as his diminishment during the rise of modernism and his eventual demise in the history of art.

The Deaths of Henri Regnault

Marc Gotlieb

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