The Language of Art History

The first volume in the series Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts offers a range of responses by distinguished philosophers and art historians to some crucial issues generated by the relationship between the art object and language in art history. Each of the chapters in this volume is a searching response to theoretical and practical questions in terms accessible to readers of all human science disciplines. The editors, one a philosopher and one an art historian, provide an introductory chapter which outlines the themes of the volume and explicates the terms in which they are discussed. The contributors open new avenues of enquiry involving concepts of ‘presence’, ‘projective properties’, visual conventions and syntax, and the appropriateness of figurative language in accounting for visual art. The issues they discuss will challenge the boundaries to thought that some contemporary theorising sustains.

• The Language of Art History launched the new series Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts (in hardback), raising philosophical issues in relation to painting, literature, drama, music and film • Kemal and Gaskell are series and volume editors. Kemal is a US based philosopher, Gaskell is an art historian who has worked with Kettles Yard and the Cambridge Darkroom. They have an eminent advisory board. • Contributors include important names such as: Richard Wollheim (author of Art and its Objects, 2nd ed. 1980), Carl Hausman (Metaphor and Art 1989), Michael Baxandall and Jean-Francois Lyotard

1. Art history and language: some issues; 2. Presence; 3. Writing and painting: the soul as hermeneut; 4. Correspondence, projective properties, and expression in the arts; 5. The language of art criticism; 6. Baxandall and Goodman; 7. Figurative language in art history; 8. Cézanne’s physicality: the politics of touch; 9. Conditions and conventions: on the disanalogy of art and language; 10. A minimal syntax for the pictorial: the pictorial and the linguistic- analogies and disanalogies.