The journal Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art will devote its n ° 2022 – 2 to the question of the relations between narration, art and art history .
Whether it is a question of the stories on which the images and works of art are based, of those that (for themselves) constitute his viewers, or of the “narratives” carried out by historians of art, this issue intends to seize the act of telling as a heuristic tool as fruitful as it is destabilizing. The image and the art object tell, even in the absence of figurative diegetic content, if only as witnesses of an era or of practices – if only as vectors of narrativity.
Rooted in the works of Giorgio Vasari and Karel van Mander, the history of art has been, since Antiquity, founded on a narrative exercise, from ekphrasis to the great tales of modernist autonomy, including anecdote or biographical legend. The way in which art historians have shaped their discipline, extracting themselves from a literary practice, willingly mythical, to embrace, forge and gradually discuss “scientific” methods, testifies to a complex relationship to narrative, to narration – to fiction in a way.
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