Each only around 100 pages, the scholar generally divided the book into small chapters addressing every approach art history (at the time) could address the work of art. Looking at the titles and the authors, it reads like a who’s who of 1970s art history.
#Gentle reader artwork series#
To make it work, he appointed Hugh Honor and Jack Fleming, series editors, to commission the top scholars in the field to write these. The brilliant publisher Alan Lane came up with the idea of short books on a sole artwork. These often tended to center around a major work and therefore were nearly as handing as the series, soon to come, below.Īrt in Context Series (Penguin/Viking), early 1970s. Although not quite a series on a single work of art, the series, edited by HW Janson (of Janson’s History of Art fame) collected texts throughout art history on eminent artists. The Artists in Perspective Series (Prentice-Hall) early 1970s. They are, to a title, still worth reading, still unique. Through my career I made note of those book series devoted to single works. Of course, I was one of these graduate students. Whence the catholic scholar? I don’t know.
No graduate student can afford to sit down and read a little book on the aspects of a single painting. Even graduate students in art history, who must, because of things like comprehensive exams, know about all the famous works of art, tend only to cover the highlight factors, the reasons the work is in art books. Art history started around the concept of the single work of art. There’s no tenure promotion given on single-artwork writing: what methodological theory can that advance? What new discovery can be wrapped around an entire book on a sole work of art? No, these, when they are written, are only done by scholars safe in their publishing careers. This is still pretty rare in art publishing. Periodically publishers issue a series monographs on individual works of art.
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