Research Catalog

Title

Against affective formalism : Matisse, Bergson, modernism / Todd Cronan.

Author

Cronan, Todd.

Publication

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2013]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 324 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color); 27 cm

Summary

" For nearly fifty years the humanities have been confined by a series of critiques: of the subject, of representation, of the visual, of modernism, of autonomy, of intention, of art itself. In their place various "materialities" have appeared: signs, identities, bodies, history, and works. Against Affective Formalism challenges these orthodoxies. "What I am after, above all, is expression," Henri Matisse declared. Matisse believed that through the careful arrangement of line and color he could transmit his feelings directly to the minds and bodies of his viewers. Yet Matisse continually struggled with the reality that his feelings were misunderstood--or simply ignored--by viewers of his art. Matisse oscillates between a desire for expressive command over the viewer and a sense of the impossibility of making himself known. Against Affective Formalism confronts modernism's dissatisfactions with representation. As Todd Cronan explains, a central tenet of modernist thought turns on the effort to overcome representation in the name of something more explicit in its capacity to generate bodily or affective experience. Henri Bergson was one of the most influential advocates of the antirepresentational impulse; his novel theories of memory and freedom gripped a generation of writers, philosophers, psychologists, and artists. Matisse and Bergson worked within and against the context of form and expression that remains in force today. Writing in opposition to prevailing theories and assumptions about the relation of intention and form--most of which accept the "death of the author" as a basic fact of interpretation--Cronan argues that the beholder's response to art, outside a framework of intentionality, is irrelevant to a work's meaning. Intentions are not a matter of method at all: no letter, biography, document, archive, or key will recover an intention. What matters is that intentions make works of art different from objects in the world. "--

Subjects

• PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics
• Bergson, Henri, 1859-1941
• ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)
• Representation (Philosophy)
• Modernism (Aesthetics)
• Matisse, Henri, 1869-1954 > Criticism and interpretation

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: Modernism against Representation -- One. Painting as Affect Machine -- Two. Freedom and Memory: Bergson's Theory of Hypnotic Agency -- Three. The Influence of Others: Matisse and Personnalite -- Four. Matisse and Mimesis -- Conclusion. From Art to Object: The Case of Paul Valéry.

Call Number

JQF 14-620

ISBN

• 9780816676026 (hardback)
• 081667602X (hardback)
• 9780816676033 (pb)
• 0816676038 (pb)

LCCN

2013015888

OCLC

816563749

Author

Cronan, Todd.

Title

Against affective formalism : Matisse, Bergson, modernism / Todd Cronan.

Publisher

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2013]

Type of Content

text

still image

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Research Call Number

JQF 14-620