The Arabesque from Kant to Comics tracks the life and afterlife of the arabesque in its surprising transformation from an iconoclastic literary theory of early German Romanticism to aesthetic experimentation in both avant-garde art and popular culture.
The Arabesque from Kant to Comics tracks the life and afterlife of the arabesque in its surprising transformation from an iconoclastic literary theory of early German Romanticism to aesthetic experimentation in both avant-garde art and popular culture.
Its explosive growth in popularity was followed by an inevitable taming as arabesques became staples in book illustration, poetry publications, and even the decoration of printed scores. The subversive potential of the arabesque was preserved in one of its most surprising offspring, the comic strip: born at the moment when the cholera pandemic first swept through Europe, the comic translated the arabesques rank growth into unnerving lawlessness and sequences of contagious visual slapstick. Focusing roughly on the period between 1780 and 1880, this book illuminates the intersecting histories of avant-garde theories of writing, visual culture, and even the disciplinary origins of art history. In the process, it explores media history and intermediality, social networks and cultural transfer, as well as the rise of new and nontraditional art forms.
This book will be of particular interest to scholars of art history, intellectual history, European art, aesthetics, book illustration, material culture, reproduction, comics, and German history.
Part I: Three Beginnings
1. Prologue
2. Forays into a Form Grown Wild:
Setting the Stage
3. An Outline (of Things to Come) Part II: The Arabesque
Revolution: Image, Script, and the Crisis of Representation
4. Metaphysics
and Media Crisis
5. The Ornament of the Gaze: On Albrecht Dürer
6. The Divine
(as) Parergon
7. Ornament, Allegory, Autonomy: Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe,
Karl Philipp Moritz
8. The Disappearance of a Goddess: On Immanuel Kants
Parergonality Part III: The Writing on the Wall
9. Art History Painted: Peter
Corneliuss Murals for Munichs First Picture Gallery, 18271840
10. History
as Nationalist Vision: Wilhelm Kaulbachs Murals for Berlins Neue Museum,
18471865 Part IV: Turning the Page
11. Philipp Otto Runges Flypaper: On
Intimacy
12. The Poets Pencil: On Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim
13.
Turning the Page: On Eugen Napoleon Neureuther Part V: Taming the Arabesque
14. The Artist as Arabesque: Wilhelm Schadow as The Modern Vasari
15. The
Humorous Arabesque: From Wilhelm Schadow to Karl Leberecht Immermann and
back, via Johann Baptist Sonderland
16. The Arabesques Kingdom: Adolph
Schroedter and Theodor Mintrop
17. Illustration as Intervention and Parody:
On Julius Hübner Part VI: A Symphonic Intermezzo
18. Beethoven, or the Call
for Freedom in Composition: On Moritz von Schwind
19. The Laws of Form: On
Seriality and Pictures Stories Part VII: A Satirical Finale
20. Contagious
Laughter: On Pandemics, the Comics Birth, and Rodolphe Töpffer
21. "Ach!
Poor Venus is perdue": On Wilhelm Busch
22. The Last Acts Final Flourish
Cordula Grewe is Professor of Art History at Indiana University Bloomington, USA.
