This article offers theoretical and practical reflections on the operations involved in description and interpretation based on 'close looking'. Explanations are given of the necessary appeal to contexts of origin or reception in order to disambiguate works of art, the widespread though rarely acknowledged reliance on an attenuated form of intention, and the way in practice that contexts are mobilised in the description or 'redescription' of works of art. Wider points made concern scepticism about the idea that works of art might determine their own interpretation (including problems with claims made as part of the phenomenological turn in image studies for the priority of direct or unmediated response to works of art), the quasi-allegorical nature of even ostensibly objectcentred interpretation, and consequences of the fact that modernism can function as a kind of context.
Starting from the possibility of a ‘global’ account of a style, this essay examines the consequences of the idea of post‐impressionism. Around 1910, Roger Fry drew on histories of world art and international art historiography to cast post‐impressionism as putatively universal, a style that was not just a new development, but was a rediscovery of a natural form of artistic creation. Seen this way, post‐impressionism also had the potential to go global: to have a causal role in the development of multiple international modernisms following its spatial circulation across the globe. The essay goes on to explore first how even within Britain local variations and divisions quickly came to undercut this specifically British articulation of a universal style. It then turns to aspects of post‐impressionism's subsequent circulations in India, Nigeria, Japan, and China to examine further how its putative universalism was transformed in a variety of locally specific ways.
List of figures vii Acknowledgements xi This book has been at least ten years in the making, but writing much of it over the course of 2020 and 2021 was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. My main debt is to those friends and family who kept me going. Many are named in what follows and the rest know who they are, but thanks above all have to go to Stephanie O'Rourke, who has variously guided, encouraged, and just put up with me over that time. Without her this book could not have been written. It would be traditional at this point to also thank Henry, but he was no help at all.Given the length of this project and the many false starts along the way it's hard to name all the people who have commented on texts that fed into the book in one way or another. In the very final stages I was lucky to have three close readers of the manuscript from three different disciplines: Tom Geue, C. Oliver O'Donnell, and Justin Snedegar. (Who knew my funniest feedback would come from an analytic philosopher?) With apologies for many inevitable omissions here, others who have commented on earlier texts in decisive ways include David
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