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What Heaven Looks Like Comments on a Strange Wordless Book

Innbundet / 2017 / Engelsk

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781946053022
Publisert
2017-10-05
Utgiver
Vendor
Laboratory Books
Høyde
239 mm
Bredde
163 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
128

Biographical note

James Elkins is E. C. Chadbourne Chair of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His scholarship has focused on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature; his many books include What Painting Is, Pictures and Tears, and The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. Presently he is working on an experimental novel with images.

What Heaven Looks Like Comments on a Strange Wordless Book

Innbundet / 2017 / Engelsk
Innbundet / 2017 / Engelsk
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An unknown masterpiece of visionary art-as daring as Blake or Goya, but utterly different-reproduced in full color, with a commentary by one of our most original art historians Somewhere in Europe-we don't know where-around 1700. An artist is staring at something on the floor next to her worktable. It's just a log from the woodpile, stood on end. The soft, damp bark; the gently raised growth rings; the dark radial cracks-nothing could be more ordinary. But as the artist looks, and looks, colors begin to appear-shapes-even figures. She turns to a sheet of paper and begins to paint. Today this anonymous artist's masterpiece is preserved in the University of Glasgow Library. It is a manuscript in a plain brown binding, whose entire contents, beyond a cryptic title page, are fifty-two small, round watercolor paintings based on the visions she saw in the ends of firewood logs. This book reproduces the entire sequence of paintings in full color, together with a meditative commentary by the art historian James Elkins. Sometimes, he writes, we can glimpse the artist's sources-Baroque religious art, genre painting, mythology, alchemical manuscripts, emblem books, optical effects. But always she distorts her images, mixes them together, leaves them incomplete-always she rejects familiar stories and clear-cut meanings. In this daring refusal to make sense, Elkins sees an uncannily modern attitude of doubt and skepticism; he draws a portrait of the artist as an irremediably lonely, amazingly independent soul, inhabiting a distinct historical moment between the faded Renaissance and the overconfident Enlightenment. What Heaven Looks Like is a rare event: an encounter between a truly perceptive historian of images, and a master conjurer of them.
Les mer
An unknown masterpiece of visionary art--as daring as Blake or Goya, but utterly different--reproduced in full color, with a commentary by one of our most original art historians
CONTENTS Preface 6 The Book 8 The Title Page 10 PLATES 12 Postscript: Falls from Faith in the Seventeenth Century 116 Discussions on the Internet 118 For Further Reading 119 Index 123
Critical Praise for What Heaven Looks Like by James Elkins "A cryptic artifact . . . is the source of endless fascination in this alluring annotated reproduction." —Publishers Weekly It might be a delicious intrigue cooked up by Borges: a manuscript of fuzzy provenance, consisting of 52 paintings, rests unvisited on the shelves of a library for generations. Rediscovered, it proves fascinating." —Kirkus Reviews Featured in the Publishers Weekly Fall 2017 Announcements
Les mer
Advance Praise for What Heaven Looks Like by James Elkins "These cryptic visions from the trunk of a tree are captivating and beguiling. James Elkins has created a most strange and singular book about a most strange and singular book." —Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything and cofounder of Atlas Obscura "In What Heaven Looks Like, James Elkins has brought to light a fantastic late seventeenth-century work by an anonymous visionary artist. Elkins's poetic and erudite commentary provides a guide to the phantoms and figures, scenes and allegorical suggestions, in these rich and delicate works. Painted as if on slices of wood, the images are full of light and atmosphere, and Elkins attends to their details with equal generosity toward the artist and his readers. A rare treasure. —Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA, and author of Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production "This might be the strangest book I have ever come across, partially for the fascinating indefiniteness of the intricately formed images, and partially for the efforts of Elkins to convince us (and himself) that his alchemical mysteries and embattled skepticism are adequate accounts of what is imaged. I love how his interpretations are cast as adventures in honoring the strangeness of an imagination not bound by public convention or high ambition. And I love even more Elkins's efforts to get at this strangeness in a historical manner by postulating a seventeenth century sensibility between belief and unbelief and devoted to making that betweenness itself a feasible mode of sensibility. We moderns have much to learn from that capacity to suspend both belief and disbelief—as scholars and as simple observers of our own experiences." —Charles F. Altieri, Stageberg Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience
Les mer

Relaterte produkter

An unknown masterpiece of visionary art-as daring as Blake or Goya, but utterly different-reproduced in full color, with a commentary by one of our most original art historians Somewhere in Europe-we don't know where-around 1700. An artist is staring at something on the floor next to her worktable. It's just a log from the woodpile, stood on end. The soft, damp bark; the gently raised growth rings; the dark radial cracks-nothing could be more ordinary. But as the artist looks, and looks, colors begin to appear-shapes-even figures. She turns to a sheet of paper and begins to paint. Today this anonymous artist's masterpiece is preserved in the University of Glasgow Library. It is a manuscript in a plain brown binding, whose entire contents, beyond a cryptic title page, are fifty-two small, round watercolor paintings based on the visions she saw in the ends of firewood logs. This book reproduces the entire sequence of paintings in full color, together with a meditative commentary by the art historian James Elkins. Sometimes, he writes, we can glimpse the artist's sources-Baroque religious art, genre painting, mythology, alchemical manuscripts, emblem books, optical effects. But always she distorts her images, mixes them together, leaves them incomplete-always she rejects familiar stories and clear-cut meanings. In this daring refusal to make sense, Elkins sees an uncannily modern attitude of doubt and skepticism; he draws a portrait of the artist as an irremediably lonely, amazingly independent soul, inhabiting a distinct historical moment between the faded Renaissance and the overconfident Enlightenment. What Heaven Looks Like is a rare event: an encounter between a truly perceptive historian of images, and a master conjurer of them.
Les mer
An unknown masterpiece of visionary art--as daring as Blake or Goya, but utterly different--reproduced in full color, with a commentary by one of our most original art historians
CONTENTS Preface 6 The Book 8 The Title Page 10 PLATES 12 Postscript: Falls from Faith in the Seventeenth Century 116 Discussions on the Internet 118 For Further Reading 119 Index 123
Critical Praise for What Heaven Looks Like by James Elkins "A cryptic artifact . . . is the source of endless fascination in this alluring annotated reproduction." —Publishers Weekly It might be a delicious intrigue cooked up by Borges: a manuscript of fuzzy provenance, consisting of 52 paintings, rests unvisited on the shelves of a library for generations. Rediscovered, it proves fascinating." —Kirkus Reviews Featured in the Publishers Weekly Fall 2017 Announcements
Les mer
Advance Praise for What Heaven Looks Like by James Elkins "These cryptic visions from the trunk of a tree are captivating and beguiling. James Elkins has created a most strange and singular book about a most strange and singular book." —Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything and cofounder of Atlas Obscura "In What Heaven Looks Like, James Elkins has brought to light a fantastic late seventeenth-century work by an anonymous visionary artist. Elkins's poetic and erudite commentary provides a guide to the phantoms and figures, scenes and allegorical suggestions, in these rich and delicate works. Painted as if on slices of wood, the images are full of light and atmosphere, and Elkins attends to their details with equal generosity toward the artist and his readers. A rare treasure. —Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA, and author of Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production "This might be the strangest book I have ever come across, partially for the fascinating indefiniteness of the intricately formed images, and partially for the efforts of Elkins to convince us (and himself) that his alchemical mysteries and embattled skepticism are adequate accounts of what is imaged. I love how his interpretations are cast as adventures in honoring the strangeness of an imagination not bound by public convention or high ambition. And I love even more Elkins's efforts to get at this strangeness in a historical manner by postulating a seventeenth century sensibility between belief and unbelief and devoted to making that betweenness itself a feasible mode of sensibility. We moderns have much to learn from that capacity to suspend both belief and disbelief—as scholars and as simple observers of our own experiences." —Charles F. Altieri, Stageberg Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781946053022
Publisert
2017-10-05
Utgiver
Vendor
Laboratory Books
Høyde
239 mm
Bredde
163 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
128

Biographical note

James Elkins is E. C. Chadbourne Chair of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His scholarship has focused on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature; his many books include What Painting Is, Pictures and Tears, and The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. Presently he is working on an experimental novel with images.

Relaterte produkter