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Book Cover for: Somewhere Between Art History and Phenomenology: At the Still Point of the Painted World, Michael Ann Holly

Somewhere Between Art History and Phenomenology: At the Still Point of the Painted World

Michael Ann Holly

Michael Ann Holly is fascinated by a silent route rarely chosen in the historical and critical history of art: the poetic possibility of phenomenology.

Selecting early modern paintings by Bellini, Patinir, Dürer, Rembrandt, Aertsen, Breughel, and Sassetta, she imagines what a range of classical phenomenologists in the twentieth century might quietly contribute to the understanding of these canonical works of art. This special brand of philosophy dares to think about what is whispered, hidden, concealed or veiled by a prosaic exchange with objects and images. The shift today from epistemology to ontology has resulted in a renewed attention to the animacy of objects.

Through this (re)reading, and often offering a very personal account, she asks - how might we construe art history differently by intimating the magic of painting, the silence and wonder beneath words?

Michael Ann Holly is Starr Director Emerita of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
  • Publish Date: May 31st, 2025
  • Pages: 224
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
  • EAN: 9781399531856
  • Categories: Criticism & TheoryAestheticsMovements - Phenomenology

About the Author

Holly, Michael Ann: - "Michael Ann Holly is Starr Director Emerita of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute (Director from 1999-2016) and professor of art history in the graduate program at Williams College. Co-founder (with Mieke Bal) of the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester, she was also Chair of the Art and Art History Department there for thirteen years. In addition to many essays on the history of art, Holly is the author of several books on the subjects of the historiography and critical theory in the history of art - Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Cornell, 1984), Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Cornell, 1996), The Melancholy Art (Princeton 2013) and co-editor of Visual Theory (ed. with Norman Bryson and K. Moxey, HarperCollins,1991), Visual Culture (ed. with Bryson and Moxey, New England Press, 1994), The Subjects of Art History (ed. with Mark Cheetham and Moxey, Cambridge, 1998), Aesthetics and Visual Studies (ed. with Moxey, Yale, 2002), and What is Research in the Visual Arts?(ed. with M. Smith, Yale, 2008). She has received many grants, including a Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Humanities fellowships, a Mellon fellowship, a CASVA senior fellowship, a Getty Senior Fellowship (twice), among several others. She has served as book editor of the Art Bulletin and is a trustee emerita of the National Humanities Center. Her most recent published essay appears in the Jasper Johns, Mind/Mirror retrospective catalogue, ed. Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf (Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art (New Haven, 2022)."