Books by Richard Shiff
Georges Seurat: The Drawings
by Richard Thomson, Jodi Hauptman, Karl Buchberg, Hubert Damisch, Bridget Riley, Richard Shiff
Once described as "the most beautiful painter's drawings in existence," Georges Seurat's mysterious and luminous works on paper played a crucial role in his short, vibrant career. This comprehensive publication surveys the artist's entire oeuvre, from his academic training and the emergence of his unique methods to the studies made for his monumental canvases. Accompanying the first exhibition in almost 25 years to focus exclusively on Seurat's drawings, this volume presents approximately 130 works, primarily the artist's incomparable conté drawings along with a small selection of oil sketches and paintings. In an effort to bridge the seemingly opposite goals of description and evocation, Seurat masses dark and light tones to abstract figures, exploits medium and paper to amplify radiating light, and engages with the Parisian metropolis, revealing urban types, the industrial suburbs and nineteenth-century entertainment. Though Seurat is perhaps best known as the inventor of Pointillism, this volume demonstrates his tremendous achievement as a draftsman and his fundamental importance to the art of the twentieth century. It includes carefully selected details of the work, as well as reproductions from pages of Seurat's sketchbooks, which have never before been published. Texts by Jodi Hauptman, Karl Buchberg, Hubert Damisch, Bridget Riley, Richard Shiff and Richard Thomson address specific aspects of Seurat's techniques, materials, and subject matter. They are rounded out by a chronology, a selected bibliography and a detailed checklist.
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Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd Edition
by Richard Shiff, Robert S. Nelson
"Art" has always been contested terrain, whether the object in question is a medieval tapestry or Duchamp's Fountain. But questions about the categories of "art" and "art history" acquired increased urgency during the 1970s, when new developments in critical theory and other intellectual projects dramatically transformed the discipline. The first edition of Critical Terms for Art History both mapped and contributed to those transformations, offering a spirited reassessment of the field's methods and terminology.
Art history as a field has kept pace with debates over globalization and other social and political issues in recent years, making a second edition of this book not just timely, but crucial. Like its predecessor, this new edition consists of essays that cover a wide variety of "loaded" terms in the history of art, from sign to meaning, ritual to commodity. Each essay explains and comments on a single term, discussing the issues the term raises and putting the term into practice as an interpretive framework for a specific work of art. For example, Richard Shiff discusses "Originality" in Vija Celmins's To Fix the Image in Memory, a work made of eleven pairs of stones, each consisting of one "original" stone and one painted bronze replica.
In addition to the twenty-two original essays, this edition includes nine new ones—performance, style, memory/monument, body, beauty, ugliness, identity, visual culture/visual studies, and social history of art—as well as new introductory material. All help expand the book's scope while retaining its central goal of stimulating discussion of theoretical issues in art history and making that discussion accessible to both beginning students and senior scholars.
Contributors: Mark Antliff, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Stephen Bann, Homi K. Bhabha, Suzanne Preston Blier, Michael Camille, David Carrier, Craig Clunas, Whitney Davis, Jas Elsner, Ivan Gaskell, Ann Gibson, Charles Harrison, James D. Herbert, Amelia Jones, Wolfgang Kemp, Joseph Leo Koerner, Patricia Leighten, Paul Mattick Jr., Richard Meyer, W. J. T. Mitchell, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, William Pietz, Alex Potts, Donald Preziosi, Lisbet Rausing, Richard Shiff, Terry Smith, Kristine Stiles, David Summers, Paul Wood, James E. Young
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