Mieke Bal is one of Europe's leading theorists and critics. Her work within feminist art history and cultural studies provides a fascinating alternative to prevailing thinking in these fields. The essays in this collection include Bal's brilliant analyses of the:
Myth of Rembrandt
Imagery of Vermeer
Baroque of Caravaggio
Neo-Baroque of David Reed
Culture of the museum
Visual representation of rape
Closet in Proust
Bal brings a keen visual sense to these studies, as well as an understanding of how literature represents visuality and how the ethics and aesthetics present within museums affect the cultural artifacts displayed.
In his engaging commentary, eminent art historian Norman Bryson shows how Bal's original approach to the interdisciplinary study of art and visual culture has had wide- reaching influence.

Mieke Bal is one of Europe's leading theorists and critics. Her work within feminist art history and cultural studies provides a fascinating alternative to prevailing thinking in these fields. The essays in this collection include Bal's brilliant analyses of the:
Myth of Rembrandt
Imagery of Vermeer
Baroque of Caravaggio
Neo-Baroque of David Reed
Culture of the museum
Visual representation of rape
Closet in Proust
Bal brings a keen visual sense to these studies, as well as an understanding of how literature represents visuality and how the ethics and aesthetics present within museums affect the cultural artifacts displayed.
In his engaging commentary, eminent art historian Norman Bryson shows how Bal's original approach to the interdisciplinary study of art and visual culture has had wide- reaching influence.

In this, the only up-to-date critical work on still life painting in any language, Norman Bryson analyses the origins, history and logic of 'still life', one of the most enduring forms of Western painting. The first essay is devoted to Roman wall-painting while in the second the author surveys a major segment in the history of still life, from seventeenth-century Spanish painting to Cubism. The third essay tackles the controversial field of seventeenth-century Dutch still life. Bryson concludes in the final essay that the persisting tendency to downgrade the genre of still life is profoundly rooted in the historical oppression of women.
In "Looking at the Overlooked," Norman Bryson is at his most brilliant to date. These superbly written essays will stimulate us to look at the entire tradition of still life with new and critical eyes.

In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power. Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art. With more than 150 illustrations, this book provides new and brilliant insight into this period that will captivate readers.

Mark Dion (b.1961) is an American artist who, in making his art, metamorphoses into explorer, biochemist, detective and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments and museum caches of the great historical naturalists - following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics. His research and magical collections are presented in installational still lifes that combine taxidermic animals with lab equipment artefacts, like walk-through Wunderkammers and life-sized cabinets of curiosity. Lias Graziose Corrin, Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, surveys Dion's most significant works and his ongoing investigations into natural history's obsession with categorizing nature. Critic and theorist Miwon Kwon talks to the artist about the interface between ecology and culture and the phenomenon of site-specific art. Norman Bryson, Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, makes an iconographical analysis of The Library for the Birds of Antwerp, an indoor sculpture Dion constructed for 18 live African finches in 1993. The artist has selected a text by novelist Jon Berger, one of the first post-war thinkers to analyze the position of animals in a capitalist society. The book also features Dion's own provocative, witty and often lyrical writing on nature and his role as an artist engaged in environmental issues.

In this highly original book Norman Bryson applied 'structuralist' and 'post-structuralist' approaches to French Romantic Painting. He considers the work of David, Ingres and Delacroix as artists who found themselves within an artistic tradition that had nothing creative to offer them.

Winner of the Prix de la Confédération des Negociants en Oeuvres d'Art, this book examines the evolution of narrative styles of French 18th-century paintings: the stories paintings tell, the ways they communicate information, the techniques of presenting the body as an instrument for incorporating textual messages.

"We can no longer see, much less teach, transhistorical truths, timeless works of art, and unchanging critical criteria without a highly developed sense of irony about the grand narratives of the past," declare the editors, who also coedited Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1990). The field of art history is not unique in finding itself challenged and enlarged by cultural debates over issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Visual Culture assembles some of the foremost scholars of cultural studies and art history to explore new critical approaches to a history of representation seen as something
different from a history of art.
CONTRIBUTORS: Andres Ross, Michael Ann Holly, Mieke Bal, David Summers, Constance Penley, Kaja Silverman, Ernst Van Alphen, Norman Bryson, Wolfgang Kemp, Whitney Davis, Thomas Crow, Keith Moxey, John Tagg, Lisa Tickner.