This posthumously published essay presents Hans De Wolf's sharp analysis of one of the greatest rivalries in art history: a rivalry between two centuries, embodied by two of their most prominent figures: Courbet for the 19th and Duchamp for the 20th Century. It is a story in which, in a certain sense, one becomes the perfect enemy of the other. This constellation helped Duchamp to forge his own path, creating an artistic response to Courbet's work with equal relevance and monumentality. The c...

Art, with its finite means, cannot hope to record the infinite variety and complexity of Nature, and so contents itself with a partial statement, addressing this to the imagination for the full and perfect meaning. This inadequation, and the artificial adjustments which it involves, are tolerated by right of what is known as artistic convention; and as each art has its own particular limitations, so each has its own particular conventions. Sculpture reproduces the forms of Nature, but discard...

THE LOVE between man and woman has been told in story and poem since long before the days of Sappho. It forms, indeed, the subject of the great bulk of what we call literature. In music, love's domain is less extended. With the exception song and the opera, most of the greatest music has, in its title at least, no hint of the great heart historyof human kind.

In this respect the plastic arts are more allied to music than to literature. The masterpieces in painting and sculpture generally not ...

An introduction to the artistic and architectural traditions of the Islamic world

'Animal Modernities' challenges the traditional human-centered focus of art history and explores how modern art, visual culture, and modernity itself emerge from relationships between humans and animals. The essays in this volume reveal histories of exploitation and domination, as well as confusion and ambivalence, and occasional moments when affinities between humans and animals have been embraced, and animal agency asserted and acknowledged. The authors collectively point to the importance ...