Essays in the Arts

A deeply personal meditation on the haunting power of American photos and films of the 1940s Wartime Kiss is a personal meditation on the haunting power of American photographs and films from World War II and the later 1940s. Starting with a stunning reinterpretation of one of the most famous photos of all time, Alfred Eisenstaedt's image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, Alexander Nemerov goes on to examine an array of mostly forgotten images and movie episodes-from a photo of Jimmy Stewart and Olivia de Havilland lying on a picnic blanket in the Santa Barbara hills to scenes from such films as Twelve O'Clock High and Hold Back the Dawn. Erotically charged and bearing traces of trauma even when they seem far removed from the war, these photos and scenes seem to hold out the promise of a palpable and emotional connection to those years. Through a series of fascinating stories, Nemerov reveals the surprising background of these bits of film and discovers unexpected connections between the war and Hollywood, from an obsession with aviation to Anne Frank's love of the movies. Beautifully written and illustrated, Wartime Kiss vividly evokes a world in which Margaret Bourke-White could follow a heroic assignment photographing a B-17 bombing mission over Tunis with a job in Hollywood documenting the filming of a war movie. Ultimately this is a book about history as a sensuous experience, a work as mysterious, indescribable, and affecting as a novel by W. G. Sebald.

Malcolm Bull is university lecturer in fine art at the University of Oxford. His previous books include Anti-Nietzsche, The Mirror of the Gods, and Seeing Things Hidden. How the philosophy of Giambattista Vico was influenced by eighteenth-century Neopolitan painting Can painting transform philosophy? In Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy. Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history, The New Science. Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed. "[A] highly compelling account of an important subject. . . . Bull is to be congratulated on presenting such a thought-provoking study . . . welcome addition to the study of early modern art and thought."---Alexander Marr, Apollo "[T]antalizingly meaty." "[A]rt historians and critics will find in it a fascinating account of how paintings can initiate and/or facilitate philosophical reflection."---Giorgio Baruchello, European Legacy "This is a daring and highly imaginative book."---Helen Langdon, Burlington Magazine "Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth offers intriguing analyses of painting along with acute close readings of Vico's writings with a fruitful interdisciplinary approach. . . . An accomplished, concise, and intelligently focused account."---Maria Fabricius Hansen, CAA Reviews "Bull is a scholar with a gift for traversing traditional disciplinary boundaries, and his book acknowledges, as has rarely been done before, the wide philosophical dimensions of artistic practice in the 'long seventeenth century.' Given its originality of focus, this synthesis helps reconceptualize the period in a new way."-Tom Nichols, University of Glasgow "Malcolm Bull is an extraordinary writer-lucid, far reaching, and entirely original. His book explains how painting does not merely provide the subject for philosophical debate when we interpret, but also, quite by itself, manifests a form of philosophical thinking. In what way do the fantasies represented in art manifest a truthful way of thinking? This book offers the answer."-David Carrier, coauthor of Wild Art

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013" Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His books include Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton); Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture; The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism; and Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome. The skirmish between painting and poetry-from Plato and Praxiteles to Rembrandt and Shakespeare Why do painters sometimes wish they were poets-and why do poets sometimes wish they were painters? What happens when Rembrandt spells out Hebrew in the sky or Poussin spells out Latin on a tombstone? What happens when Virgil, Ovid, or Shakespeare suspend their plots to describe a fictitious painting? In Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, Leonard Barkan explores such questions as he examines the deliciously ambiguous history of the relationship between words and pictures, focusing on the period from antiquity to the Renaissance but offering insights that also have much to say about modern art and literature. The idea that a poem is like a picture has been a commonplace since at least ancient Greece, and writers and artists have frequently discussed poetry by discussing painting, and vice versa, but their efforts raise more questions than they answer. From Plutarch ("painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture") to Horace ("as a picture, so a poem"), apparent clarity quickly leads to confusion about, for example, what qualities of pictures are being urged upon poets or how pictorial properties can be converted into poetical ones. The history of comparing and contrasting painting and poetry turns out to be partly a story of attempts to promote one medium at the expense of the other. At the same time, analogies between word and image have enabled writers and painters to think about and practice their craft. Ultimately, Barkan argues, this dialogue is an expression of desire: the painter longs for the rich signification of language while the poet yearns for the direct sensuousness of painting. "Barkan (Michelangelo: A Life on Paper) fruitfully illustrates that 'word and image, poetry and painting, language and visuality are the oppositions upon which artistic theory and practice have been stretched.' Barkan's splendid meditations take us from Plutarch, who believed that 'painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture,' through Horace, examining to the art and poetry of early modern Europe. . . . In his rich and detailed musings on this ongoing debate in the history of ideas, Barkan concludes, as Shakespeare does, that 'even when we insist that poetry and painting lie separately, it turns out they lie together.'" "[E]rudite and wide-ranging."---Michael Dirda, Washington Post "This deeply learned essay by Barkan, one of the great contemporary American scholars of the Renaissance, deserves to become a standard work on the relations of word, image, and poetry and painting in pre-modern culture. Over the course of four chapters, Barkan offers lucid, often humorous expositions of the key concept of mimesis and the practice of ekphrasis as meditations on them evolved over centuries from Plato and Pliney to Albertia and Vasari." "This is an impressive, challenging, highly innovative study on a subject that we thought we knew by heart: the relationships, either pacific or antagonistic, between words and images. . . . At first sight, Barkan's approach combines the best of historical criticism and deconstruction, which is already quite an achievement in itself, but the most admirable quality of his analyses is both the tightening and the broadening of this age-old debate. On the one hand, Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures brings together a wide range of works, authors, sources, interpretations, debates, and concepts that are most of the times separated or only partially covered in most historical overviews. . . . The power