Review by James Housefield
2015-03-17 08:02:00 来自: yi (why can't we be iconophile?)
Toward a Geography of Art的评论
5
Toward a Geography of Art的评论
5 大半夜迅速把这篇jstor上的书评逐字敲下来，因为这本堪称"博大精深"的书实在太inspiring了！！个人觉得是任何去国外读艺术史的学子都该参考的书，不为了别的，为了知道自己所站的位置究竟是哪里。
顺带给一个作者的页面，普林斯顿大学元老级的教授，目前专攻艺术史全球化的问题：http://artandarchaeology.princeton.edu/people/faculty/thomas-dacosta-kaufmann
Review by: James Housefield
Geographical Review
Vol. 94, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 119-122
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30033958
The time is ripe for studies of the connections between art and geography. Geographers and art historians share an assortment of research methods, especially used for contemporary and historical analysis of material culture and visual imagery. Art historians and geographers often find it essential to understand the site-specific nature or the broader geographical diffusion of physical, social, and intellectual dimensions of culture.
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, an art historian, outlines the beginnings of a history of this potent realm of exchange between art and geography. In doing so, he sets out an essential historiography of the idea of a "geography of art" and puts it into practice with case studies selected from Europe, the Americas, and Japan. His apparently unassuming title recalls Le Corbusier's powerful manifesto Vers une Architecture (translated as Towards a New Architecture [1965]). Kaufmann's book, like Corbusier's, reveals possible steps along pathways whose pursuit may transform further ways of seeing. From cover to cover of this book, such paths are given specific form. A View of Vienna From the Belvedere by Bernardo Bellotto decorates the dust jacket; this painting of 1758-1760 marks physical paths through a Viennese garden while signalling the book's broader intellectual, chronological, and geographical range. Like Canaletto, his uncle and teacher, Bellotto hailed from Venice and achieved international renown as a painter of views. From his vantage point within the upper Belvedere Palace, Bellotto depicted the imperial gardens and the surrounding architecture and landscape of Vienna. In the process, he painted the gardens and buildings that reveal human transformation of the land while subtly transforming it, with the eye of an artist, by condensing the space of the city to fit Vienna's architectural heritage within the space of his canvas. This one image encapsulates many aspects of geography; it speaks of the diffusion of an Italian artistic transition into a new location and to the practice of shaping the earth with buildings designed to give beautiful views (the Belvedere) of the landscape itself. Kaufmann passes over these aspects of the interconnectedness of art and geography as he evaluates larger questions of cultural diffusion and the problem of artistic metropolises with special consideration of theories of center and periphery. As the classically influent architectural style of the Holy Roman Empire was adopted in the Central European capitals of Warsaw and Vienna, he argues, it transferred these and other cities. "The cultural model of the capital considerably determined, directly and indirectly, the nature of the artistic output throughout the imperial realms" (p.181). Belloto's passage from Italy to the courts of Dresden, Vienna, and Warsaw in search of patronage offers an alternative trajectory of the encounter with different stages of imperial growth and urban transformation of the landscape that parallels Kaufmann's analysis.
Kaufmann's consideration of center and periphery, of transformation through diffusion, and especially of the historiography of the concept of Kunstgeographie (geography of art) reveal tremendous historical and geographical breadth. Toward a Geography of Art merits the attention of current and future generations of scholars. Its primary audiences will be theses geographers interested in art, those seeking to expand the methods of cultural geogrpahy, and theses interested in seeking out a well-established but little discussed literature. This book should be considered as a resource to be used by advanced courses in the methods and theories of geographical research. Although it engages the language and literature of art history, expansive endnotes effectively introduce geographers to a useful bibliography while clarifying elements that an art historian might take for granted. The only significant negative criticisms that this reviewer will offer are editorial concerns: This book would have been even more effective and engaging had the note appeared as footnotes, in wide margins, to be annotated by the eager reader and fleshed out with a full bibliography. Instead, the endnotes fill nearly one-fifth of the book, and the inquisitive reader must follow them from the beginning in order to make sense of some references because there is no bibliography.
Geographers will find familiar names in the bibliography that balance those borrowed from other disciplines. At the core of the book is an intellectual history shared by geographers and art historians that is frequently traceable to German origins (or nomenclature, at least). Carl Sauer is here, with his Berkeley incarnation of Kulturlandschaft (cultural landscape). An emphasis on these German intellectual origins is no surprise, given their importance to the historiography of both geography and art history. In addition, Kaufmann's initial expertise emphasised the arts of central Europe during the Renaissance. Yet his emphasis on German traditions facilitates concise and repeated referenced to the negative impact of racialist theories and environmental determinism on the tradition of Kunstgeographie. "In 1955 Dagobert Frey noted that scholarly interest in the geography of art had declined. Although Frey himself never knew why, it would initially seem that the notorious consequences of nationalist and racialist thinking, coupled with the personal engagement of Frey and certain other scholars in the promotion of Nazi ideology and even in war crimes, may have led to a reluctance to stress national questions in artistic geography…. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to state that the geography of art had been discredited" (p.89). Kaufmann knows his subject well enough to examine the arguments and politics of someone like Frey without falling into their oversimplifications about the relationships between art and geography.
Kaufmann's historiography is broad and deep, and it includes the tradition of géographie humaine that emerged from the work and followers of Paul Vidal de la Blache. He has read Clarence Glacken's magisterial Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1976) and applied it in a book that resembles Glacken's project in its breadth and in its sensitivity to the original meanings of humanism. Too few historians of art know Glacken's work. How many geographers know the writings of Leon Battista Alberti, Giorgio Vasari, Julius von Schlosser, Erwin Panofsky, or Henri Focillon? Although these names pass by quickly, Kaufmann gives readers a place to being their investigations of the importance of these figures in constructing histories (and geographies) of art. He devotes a full chapter to the legacy of George Kubler, an expert in the art and architecture of Spain, Portugal, and the pre-Columbian and colonial Americas. He examines the work of Kubler as that of a "geographer of art," who "clearly articulates what he thought the geography of art might be" (p. 221). Kubler's definition of a geography of art appears to over lap many definitions of cultural geography.
As his case studies put into practice his theory of a geography of art, Kaufmann opens new doors for cultural geography and for potential exchanges between geography and the visual arts. His approach is rigorous, but not dogmatic: "Geographical considerations of art do not necessarily have to produce general laws or principles…. Rather than striving for general laws, they can attend to individual cases. From these cases they can suggest some of the sorts of geographical conditions and relations that affect works of art. Attention to individual cases also may help to provide answers to the problem of the relation to the historical and the transhistorical, of change in relation to individual objects and the places where they originate and circulate" (p. 351). In his penultimate chapter Kaufmann gives an excellent example of how this attention to individual cases might expand outward to a larger world. There he describes the Japanese practices surrounding the ceremony of e-fumi (trampling on religious images) that incorporates artworks known as fumi-e. In these, a convergence of centre and periphery, of East and West, and of the sacred and the profane resulted in a fascinating set of rituals and artowkrs. E-fumi, acts of deliberate cultural rejection, signal the limited of theories of cultural diffusion. These examples, and the history that Kaufmann has assembled here, call for close attention to detail, for considerations of exceptions, and for a focus on individual cases as new generations of scholars pursue the geographies of art.
顺带给一个作者的页面，普林斯顿大学元老级的教授，目前专攻艺术史全球化的问题：http://artandarchaeology.princeton.edu/people/faculty/thomas-dacosta-kaufmann
Review by: James Housefield
Geographical Review
Vol. 94, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 119-122
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30033958
The time is ripe for studies of the connections between art and geography. Geographers and art historians share an assortment of research methods, especially used for contemporary and historical analysis of material culture and visual imagery. Art historians and geographers often find it essential to understand the site-specific nature or the broader geographical diffusion of physical, social, and intellectual dimensions of culture.
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, an art historian, outlines the beginnings of a history of this potent realm of exchange between art and geography. In doing so, he sets out an essential historiography of the idea of a "geography of art" and puts it into practice with case studies selected from Europe, the Americas, and Japan. His apparently unassuming title recalls Le Corbusier's powerful manifesto Vers une Architecture (translated as Towards a New Architecture [1965]). Kaufmann's book, like Corbusier's, reveals possible steps along pathways whose pursuit may transform further ways of seeing. From cover to cover of this book, such paths are given specific form. A View of Vienna From the Belvedere by Bernardo Bellotto decorates the dust jacket; this painting of 1758-1760 marks physical paths through a Viennese garden while signalling the book's broader intellectual, chronological, and geographical range. Like Canaletto, his uncle and teacher, Bellotto hailed from Venice and achieved international renown as a painter of views. From his vantage point within the upper Belvedere Palace, Bellotto depicted the imperial gardens and the surrounding architecture and landscape of Vienna. In the process, he painted the gardens and buildings that reveal human transformation of the land while subtly transforming it, with the eye of an artist, by condensing the space of the city to fit Vienna's architectural heritage within the space of his canvas. This one image encapsulates many aspects of geography; it speaks of the diffusion of an Italian artistic transition into a new location and to the practice of shaping the earth with buildings designed to give beautiful views (the Belvedere) of the landscape itself. Kaufmann passes over these aspects of the interconnectedness of art and geography as he evaluates larger questions of cultural diffusion and the problem of artistic metropolises with special consideration of theories of center and periphery. As the classically influent architectural style of the Holy Roman Empire was adopted in the Central European capitals of Warsaw and Vienna, he argues, it transferred these and other cities. "The cultural model of the capital considerably determined, directly and indirectly, the nature of the artistic output throughout the imperial realms" (p.181). Belloto's passage from Italy to the courts of Dresden, Vienna, and Warsaw in search of patronage offers an alternative trajectory of the encounter with different stages of imperial growth and urban transformation of the landscape that parallels Kaufmann's analysis.
Kaufmann's consideration of center and periphery, of transformation through diffusion, and especially of the historiography of the concept of Kunstgeographie (geography of art) reveal tremendous historical and geographical breadth. Toward a Geography of Art merits the attention of current and future generations of scholars. Its primary audiences will be theses geographers interested in art, those seeking to expand the methods of cultural geogrpahy, and theses interested in seeking out a well-established but little discussed literature. This book should be considered as a resource to be used by advanced courses in the methods and theories of geographical research. Although it engages the language and literature of art history, expansive endnotes effectively introduce geographers to a useful bibliography while clarifying elements that an art historian might take for granted. The only significant negative criticisms that this reviewer will offer are editorial concerns: This book would have been even more effective and engaging had the note appeared as footnotes, in wide margins, to be annotated by the eager reader and fleshed out with a full bibliography. Instead, the endnotes fill nearly one-fifth of the book, and the inquisitive reader must follow them from the beginning in order to make sense of some references because there is no bibliography.
Geographers will find familiar names in the bibliography that balance those borrowed from other disciplines. At the core of the book is an intellectual history shared by geographers and art historians that is frequently traceable to German origins (or nomenclature, at least). Carl Sauer is here, with his Berkeley incarnation of Kulturlandschaft (cultural landscape). An emphasis on these German intellectual origins is no surprise, given their importance to the historiography of both geography and art history. In addition, Kaufmann's initial expertise emphasised the arts of central Europe during the Renaissance. Yet his emphasis on German traditions facilitates concise and repeated referenced to the negative impact of racialist theories and environmental determinism on the tradition of Kunstgeographie. "In 1955 Dagobert Frey noted that scholarly interest in the geography of art had declined. Although Frey himself never knew why, it would initially seem that the notorious consequences of nationalist and racialist thinking, coupled with the personal engagement of Frey and certain other scholars in the promotion of Nazi ideology and even in war crimes, may have led to a reluctance to stress national questions in artistic geography…. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to state that the geography of art had been discredited" (p.89). Kaufmann knows his subject well enough to examine the arguments and politics of someone like Frey without falling into their oversimplifications about the relationships between art and geography.
Kaufmann's historiography is broad and deep, and it includes the tradition of géographie humaine that emerged from the work and followers of Paul Vidal de la Blache. He has read Clarence Glacken's magisterial Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1976) and applied it in a book that resembles Glacken's project in its breadth and in its sensitivity to the original meanings of humanism. Too few historians of art know Glacken's work. How many geographers know the writings of Leon Battista Alberti, Giorgio Vasari, Julius von Schlosser, Erwin Panofsky, or Henri Focillon? Although these names pass by quickly, Kaufmann gives readers a place to being their investigations of the importance of these figures in constructing histories (and geographies) of art. He devotes a full chapter to the legacy of George Kubler, an expert in the art and architecture of Spain, Portugal, and the pre-Columbian and colonial Americas. He examines the work of Kubler as that of a "geographer of art," who "clearly articulates what he thought the geography of art might be" (p. 221). Kubler's definition of a geography of art appears to over lap many definitions of cultural geography.
As his case studies put into practice his theory of a geography of art, Kaufmann opens new doors for cultural geography and for potential exchanges between geography and the visual arts. His approach is rigorous, but not dogmatic: "Geographical considerations of art do not necessarily have to produce general laws or principles…. Rather than striving for general laws, they can attend to individual cases. From these cases they can suggest some of the sorts of geographical conditions and relations that affect works of art. Attention to individual cases also may help to provide answers to the problem of the relation to the historical and the transhistorical, of change in relation to individual objects and the places where they originate and circulate" (p. 351). In his penultimate chapter Kaufmann gives an excellent example of how this attention to individual cases might expand outward to a larger world. There he describes the Japanese practices surrounding the ceremony of e-fumi (trampling on religious images) that incorporates artworks known as fumi-e. In these, a convergence of centre and periphery, of East and West, and of the sacred and the profane resulted in a fascinating set of rituals and artowkrs. E-fumi, acts of deliberate cultural rejection, signal the limited of theories of cultural diffusion. These examples, and the history that Kaufmann has assembled here, call for close attention to detail, for considerations of exceptions, and for a focus on individual cases as new generations of scholars pursue the geographies of art.
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