Drawing on a broad foundation in the history of nineteenth-century French art, Richard Shiff offers an innovative interpretation of Cezanne's painting. He shows how Cezanne's style met the emerging criteria of a "technique of originality" and how it satisfied critics sympathetic to symbolism as well as to impressionism. Expanding his study of the interaction of Cezanne and his critics, Shiff considers the problem of modern art in general. He locates the core of modernism in a dialectic of making (technique) and finding (originality). Ultimately, Shiff provides not only clarifying accounts of...

In an age where art history's questions are now expected to receive answers, Richard Shiff presents a challenging alternative. In this essential new addition to James Elkins's series Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts, Richard Shiff embraces doubt as a critical tool and asks how particular histories of art have come to be.

Shiff's turn to doubt is not a retreat to relativism, but rather an insistence on clear thinking about art. In particular, Shiff takes issue with the style of self-referential art writing seemingly 'licensed' by Roland Barthes....

The most comprehensive monograph on Turner Prize-nominated artist Peter Doig. In every generation of artists, there are a few-or perhaps just one-who propose a new set of questions and alter the way we understand art. Peter Doig is such an artist. While stories of painting's demise in the early 1990s deemed painters and their work quaintly anachronistic, Doig-looking ahead as much as back for inspiration-forged a new painterly language: an ironic mix of Romanticism and post-impressionism to create haunting and sometimes dreamlike landscape vistas.
In this lavish new volume devoted to his...

Inspired by the 1976 exhibition Drawing Now at The Museum of Modern Art, Drawing Then investigates revolutionary developments in the practice of drawing that emerged in the United States during a decade of radical social and political upheaval.
With more than 70 works by 39 artists--almost half of whom were not represented in the 1976 exhibition--Drawing Then includes works by Josef Albers, Mel Bochner, Chuck Close, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman,...