Analyzes the myth of the artist in western culture.
The myth of the artist-genius has long had a unique hold on the
imagination of Western culture. Iconoclastic, temperamental, and
free from the constraints of society, these towering figures have
been treated as fixed icons regardless of historical context or
individual situation. In The Absolute Artist, Catherine M.
Soussloff challenges this view in an engaging consideration of the
social construction of the artist from the fifteenth century to the
present.
Traditional art history has held that the concept of the
artist-genius arose in the Enlightenment. Soussloff disputes this,
arguing that earlier writings -- artists' biographies written as
long ago as the early fifteenth century -- determined and continue
to determine our understanding of the myth of the artist. Moving
chronologically, Soussloff shifts from fifteenth-century Florence
to nineteenth-century Germany, the birthplace of the discipline of
art history in its academic form, and considers the cultural
historiography of Aby Warburg and Jacob Burckhardt. She discusses
intellectual life in early-twentieth-century Vienna, demonstrating
the rich cross-fertilization that occurred between art history and
psychoanalysis, and scrutinizes the historical situation of Jewish
art historians and psychoanalysts in Vienna in the 1930s,
considering the impact of exile and an assimilationist ethic on the
discourse of art history.
Soussloff concludes with a groundbreaking analysis of one of the
earliest and most persistent elements of biography, the "artist
anecdote," demonstrating that it is essential in the construction
of the figure of the artist. Singular in its breadth and ambition,
The Absolute Artist is the first book to analyze the artist's
biography as a rhetorical form and literary genre rather than as an
unassailable source of fact and knowledge.
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