Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2022.2076034
Matthew Martin
In 1939, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) became the beneficiary of a rich private collecting legacy—the bequest of Mr Howard Spensley (1870–1938) of Westoning Manor, Bedfordshire. Howard Spensley was born in Melbourne in 1870, the son of the Hon. Howard Spensley (1834–1902), solicitor general of Victoria in 1871–72, commissioner for Victoria to the London exhibition of 1873, and MP for Finsbury Central in 1885–86. The younger Spensley was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, and became a barrister, with chambers in the Inner Temple. Before moving to Westoning in 1905, when he bought Westoning Manor, he lived in London and travelled widely, particularly to Egypt and Australia, where he had business interests. He was an avid collector, with wide-ranging tastes, and he assembled an impressive collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, antiquities, bronzes, ceramics, glass, and furniture, the details of which, including date and place of purchase and the amount paid, he meticulously recorded in a handwritten catalogue. Those records are held in the rare books collection of the Shaw Research Library at the NGV, in Melbourne. Spensley died on 3 March 1938, bequeathing his art collection to the NGV. This group of nearly 800 artworks was transformative in a number of areas of the Melbourne art museum’s collection, especially the small group of Italian Renaissance maiolica works and the large group of Renaissance bronzes, mortars, and plaquettes. Among the bequeathed works was a collection of some sixteen ivory objects of various dates and places of origin, including a 1714 portrait bust of Isaac Newton by David le Marchand (4118-D3), perhaps the most significant work in this group. But it is another of these ivory works that concerns us here (fig. 1). Spensley’s catalogue entry describes the work thus:
1939年,维多利亚国家美术馆(NGV)成为了一笔丰厚的私人收藏遗产的受益者——贝德福德郡威斯宁庄园的霍华德·斯宾斯利先生(1870-1938)的遗赠。霍华德·斯宾斯利于1870年出生于墨尔本,他的父亲霍华德·斯宾斯利(1834-1902)曾于1871-72年担任维多利亚州副检察长,1873年担任维多利亚参加伦敦展览的专员,1885-86年担任芬斯伯里中央议员。小斯宾斯利在剑桥的哈罗公学和三一学院接受教育,并成为一名律师,在内殿设有办公室。1905年,他买下威斯顿庄园,搬到威斯顿,在此之前,他住在伦敦,经常旅行,特别是去埃及和澳大利亚,因为他在那里有商业利益。他是一个狂热的收藏家,爱好广泛,他收集了令人印象深刻的油画、素描、雕塑、古董、青铜器、陶瓷、玻璃和家具,他一丝不苟地在手写的目录中记录了细节,包括购买的日期、地点和支付的金额。这些记录保存在墨尔本NGV的Shaw研究图书馆的珍本藏书中。斯宾斯利于1938年3月3日去世,他将自己的艺术收藏遗赠给了国家档案馆。这组近800件艺术品在墨尔本艺术博物馆收藏的许多领域都是革命性的,尤其是一小部分意大利文艺复兴时期的马爵利卡陶瓷作品和大量文艺复兴时期的青铜器、灰泥和牌匾。在遗赠的作品中,有大约16件象牙制品,它们来自不同的年代和地点,其中包括大卫·勒·马尔尚(David le Marchand, 418 - d3)于1714年创作的艾萨克·牛顿半身像,这可能是这组作品中最重要的作品。但我们在这里关注的是另一件象牙作品(图1)。斯宾斯利的目录条目是这样描述这件作品的:
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2021.1992721
T. Juliff
Maurice Blanchot’s sparse 1994 text The Instant of My Death re-tells a story that intersects at the moment of gunshots and silences. Relating to an event in Nazioccupied France, the story is located where ontological certainties embedded in the silences are made insecure by the traumatic nature of the events that they are called upon to verify. In the story, a young man is faced with imminent death by a firing squad. He is saved, however, when his enemies are momentarily distracted and a Russian soldier tells him to ‘disappear’. As a result, the young man is saved to live with the uncanny feeling of having survived his death as well as the guilt at the death of his neighbours who did not share his good fortune. The three voices of Blanchot’s text, that of the narrator, that of the young man, and that of Blanchot himself, make the idea of a singular viewpoint problematic and blur the boundaries of identity. Who is the young man? At the same time, the affective impact of the event, ‘this unanalyzable feeling’, plays havoc with conventional temporal progression, placing death and the overcoming of the fear of death, or ‘perhaps already the step beyond’, in the middle of life. If the young man hears the thud of bodies falling beside him, he is—albeit momentarily—alive. No thud: dead. It is not the presence of gunshot but, rather, the absence of a fall that marks out death. The man survives as a witness of his own death, and as the blindfolded witness of the death of others. This auditory witnessing, or hearing of silences, haunts the young man, who lives the rest of his life, or should it be the rest of his death, awaiting the thud. Blanchot’s text reminds us that the witnessing of death might not require the visual evidence of absence. In the case of many ‘forcibly disappeared’ people in the Latin American context, this silence is a double-witness. It is the absence of the ‘thud’—the fall to the ground—that we witness. This sense of listening to that silence runs strongly
莫里斯·布朗肖(Maurice Blanchot)在1994年出版的《我死亡的瞬间》(The moment of My Death)内容稀疏,重新讲述了一个在枪声和寂静的时刻交织在一起的故事。关于纳粹占领下的法国的一个事件,这个故事发生在沉默中嵌入的本体论确定性,由于他们被要求核实的事件的创伤性而变得不安全。在这个故事中,一个年轻人面临着行刑队即将到来的死亡。然而,当他的敌人暂时分散了注意力,一名俄罗斯士兵告诉他“消失”时,他得救了。结果,这个年轻人得救了,他有了一种离奇的感觉,觉得自己从死亡中活了下来,同时也为邻居们没有分享他的好运而感到内疚。布朗肖文本的三种声音,叙述者的声音,年轻人的声音,以及布朗肖自己的声音,使单一观点的想法变得有问题,模糊了身份的界限。那个年轻人是谁?与此同时,事件的情感影响,“这种无法分析的感觉”,破坏了传统的时间进程,将死亡和对死亡的恐惧的克服,或者“可能已经超越了”,置于生命的中期。如果这个年轻人听到身体在他身边倒下的砰砰声,他就还活着——尽管只是暂时活着。没有砰的一声:死了。不是枪声的出现,而是没有摔下来的迹象表明死亡。这个人作为他自己的死亡的见证人,也作为蒙着眼睛的其他人的死亡的见证人而幸存下来。这种听觉上的见证,或听到寂静,萦绕着这个年轻人,他的余生,或者应该是他的余生,都在等待着那砰的一声。布朗肖的文章提醒我们,目睹死亡可能不需要缺席的视觉证据。在拉丁美洲许多“被迫失踪”的人的情况下,这种沉默是双重证人。我们看到的是没有“砰”的一声——摔在地上。这种倾听沉默的感觉非常强烈
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2021.1992729
P. Hoffie
The psychological self-portraiture running beneath so much of Gordon Bennett’s work was there in the first room. As was the historical revisionism. As was the post-colonial intervention. As was the artist’s critical responsiveness to so many of the racially divisive and damaging frameworks through which we construct our daily lives. Any number of possible narratives could have been used to structure this exhibition. But curator Zara Stanhope’s curatorial openness and her choice of chronological order provided full scope for the multi-layered, contradictory shifts in Bennett’s imaginary to speak clearly about the ambivalence from which they were born and the history of their imagining. The artist rapidly moved from the chance-game of letting an image evolve as if of its own volition, towards a system of representation where he was in full curatorial/artistic control. Bennett understood that, for his particular task, ‘art’ could not be separated from the order or structure of ‘language’. The first two rooms of the exhibition reveal how early he developed the themes that he would ‘worry’ productively about over his 25-year career. These earlier works, which laid bare the complex frameworks of ideas and imagery with transparently painful personal evidence, were soon left behind as the artist moved towards more controlled and strategic tactics in what was for him a game of emotional, psychological and racial life-and-death. Two images in the first room of the exhibition expose the deep uncertainties at the core of his work. In Untitled (Nuance) (1992), a strip of eight black and white self-portraits run above a grey-scale of seven rectangles spelling out the word ‘nuance’. In the first, the artist’s own face stares back at the camera over a rectangle of black. Presented with full-frontal, no-frills directness, it could be a mug shot or an anthropological study of an Australian Aboriginal male. Or both. In the succession of seven images that follow, it is unclear whether the subject is applying or removing the skin-like mask that adheres to his face. As Gordon well knew, in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon speaks of the ‘epidermalization’ of the ‘black man’s’ ‘inferiority complex’. As if the skin itself binds the fixity of identity into being. But Fanon, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, also identifies the ‘massive psycho-existential complex’ emerging ‘from the juxtaposition of the white and black races’, and his analysis in that book focused on unravelling this complex.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2021.1992725
David M. Challis
From the moment Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) first exhibited his monument to the French author Honor e de Balzac at the 1898 Salon in Paris, it became the subject of ridicule and controversy (fig. 1). The daily newspaper Le Gaulois exclaimed, ‘Help me find something beautiful in these goiters, these growths, these hysterical distortions!’ The commissioning body for the monument, the Paris-based literary union Soci et e des Gens de Lettres, famously claimed it could not recognise the author Balzac in the sculpture and refused to accept or pay for it. Rodin responded by withdrawing the sculpture from the exhibition and transporting it back to his studio, where it remained until after his death. In 1955, more than half a century later, Balzac experienced an entirely different reception when it was welcomed into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the press release announcing the arrival of the sculpture, Alfred Barr, the museum’s director, declared that it was ‘one of the very great sculptures in the entire history of Western art’. This article examines the dramatic reversal in the critical appreciation of Balzac, which precipitated its acquisition by the Felton Bequest on behalf of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1964. The NGV’s campaign to acquire Balzac was not without its own controversies, and these are explored in detail using unpublished archival correspondence and gallery records from the 1960s. Unfortunately, the sculpture courtyard where Balzac was originally exhibited at the NGV’s then new St Kilda Road building was later abandoned, consigning the sculpture to relative obscurity in the gallery’s rear garden. More recent scholarship on Rodin’s late-career sculptures has provided new insights into the interconnection between his use of materiality, the object nature of sculpture, and the foregrounding of the artist through performative markings. An exploration of these themes in relation to Rodin’s Balzac provides a new reason for the NGV to celebrate its status as one of the departure points for the early twentieth-century turn toward modern sculpture.
从奥古斯特·罗丹(1840–1917)在1898年巴黎沙龙首次展出法国作家巴尔扎克纪念碑的那一刻起,它就成为了嘲笑和争议的主题(图1)。日报Le Gaulois惊呼道:“帮我在这些甲状腺肿、这些生长物、这些歇斯底里的扭曲中找到美丽的东西!”这座纪念碑的委托机构,总部位于巴黎的文学联盟Soci et e des Gens de Lettres,以其无法认出雕塑中的作家巴尔扎克而闻名,并拒绝接受或支付费用。作为回应,罗丹将雕塑从展览中撤回,并将其运回工作室,直到他去世。1955年,半个多世纪后,巴尔扎克被纽约现代艺术博物馆永久收藏,受到了完全不同的欢迎。在宣布雕塑抵达的新闻稿中,博物馆馆长阿尔弗雷德·巴尔宣称,这是“整个西方艺术史上非常伟大的雕塑之一”。这篇文章探讨了对巴尔扎克的批判性评价发生了戏剧性的逆转,这促使费尔顿·贝克斯特于1964年代表维多利亚国家美术馆(NGV)收购了巴尔扎克。NGV收购巴尔扎克的运动并非没有争议,这些争议通过20世纪60年代未出版的档案通信和画廊记录进行了详细探讨。不幸的是,巴尔扎克最初在NGV当时的新圣基尔达路大楼展出的雕塑庭院后来被废弃,使雕塑在画廊的后花园中相对默默无闻。最近对罗丹职业生涯后期雕塑的研究为他对物质性的使用、雕塑的客体性质以及艺术家通过表演标记的前景之间的相互联系提供了新的见解。结合罗丹的《巴尔扎克》对这些主题的探索,为NGV庆祝其作为20世纪初转向现代雕塑的出发点之一的地位提供了一个新的理由。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2021.1992723
Sophie Rose
In one of the earliest critical texts on Lindy Lee, Rex Butler allegorised the Brisbane-born artist’s use of photocopies through Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. Borges’s story-cum-thought-experiment is as follows: the protagonist, Pierre Menard, pledges to write the seventeenth-century masterpiece Don Quixote—not to adapt it, nor to mechanically copy it, but to arrive at the novel independently and fully, three centuries later. On paper, Menard is a deranged plagiarist, yet through his ‘deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution’, he produces a genuinely novel framing of the text. There is something of Menard in Lee’s fuzzy carbon copies. By borrowing from a bank of artistic ‘masters’, she untethers the historical image from its author and bestows it with new signification. But there is another story by Borges, equally pertinent to Lee’s work. ‘Funes the Memorious’ tells the tale of the extraordinary man Ireneo Funes who, after a riding injury, could remember every moment of his past in excruciating detail. Memory paralysed him. Not only did he remember every object he encountered but the quality of that object from all angles, at all times of day. He remembered his own face so accurately that he was startled by the microscopic evidence of ageing reflected in the mirror each morning. He learnt English, French, Portuguese, and Latin within days but, finding them all unsatisfactory in describing his plethora of experiences, he created his own mad language in which every memory was catalogued with an arbitrary number or word. Funes’s absolute recall of the world meant that he could not understand it. No patterns emerged in the ‘garbage heap’ of his mind, so that childhood memories were tangled with events just past, as each moment hauled him into an unfamiliar mass of sensation. In the story of Funes we find a strange but irrefutable lesson: that to make sense of the past, we must, at some level, forget it. In the late 1980s, Lee began a long series of appropriative works using the Xerox photocopier, which was to become her signature medium during the 1990s and early 2000s. During this time Lee also applied black wax onto brightly painted canvases: carving out the outlines of historical artworks from the dark, viscous substance. Cousins of the Xerox works and equally arresting, these two-tonal canvases are, sadly, outside the scope of this essay. In subsequent decades, the artist
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2021.1992730
Vivien Johnson
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2021.1992720
Kit Messham-Muir
Introduction When a snap general election was called in the United Kingdom in 2017, Cornelia Parker, one of that nation’s most prominent and celebrated contemporary artists dealing often in war and conflict, was appointed as the official British election artist. The 2017 election followed less than a year after the 2016 Brexit referendum, as the Conservative government, committed to making good on the outcome of the 2016 referendum, hoped to have elected more pro-Brexit MPs into the House of Commons in an attempt to push through Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal with the European Union. The plan backfired, forcing May into leading a minority government, the second in a decade. This further prolonged and intensified the political turbulence and eventually led to May’s tearful resignation in 2019 and yet another general election later that year, called by the new prime minister, Boris Johnson. The 2016 Brexit referendum is commonly recognised as one of the most fierce and toxic votes in modern British history. Its campaigns were marked by widespread and blatant disinformation, overt ethno-nationalist politics, and the violent assassination of the pro-Remain MP Jo Cox. With the election following barely one year after the Brexit vote, and being triggered by the political impossibility of delivering the outcome of the referendum, Parker may well have felt more like an official war artist than an official election artist. Parker created two significant video works as the 2017 election artist. The first was Left Right & Centre (2017) (fig. 1), a haunting and aesthetically rich work shot mostly by drone in the chamber of Britain’s House of Commons, the democratically elected lower house of government. The work depicts the dispatch boxes at the centre of the Commons chamber stacked with various British daily newspapers, representing the left, right and centre of British politics. The drone’s rotors stir up the pages of the newspapers until the entire chamber is chaotically littered in drifts of newsprint. Parker’s other work, Election Abstract (2017),
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2021.1992724
M. Lee
almost monochrome. As a former assistant to another lawman, Rover Thomas, Dirrji painted flat passages of red, black, and white pigment (omitting the yellow on this occasion). In the seventh painting, All Different Languages for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal People, seventeen red or black ovoid shapes are surrounded by white pigment. Beyond that, a red and black border follows the canvas edge. This has an important dual function: it not only frames the white ‘ground’ but it also sinks below it to suggest a subterranean layer (see fig. 4). Figure 4. Two Laws, One Big Spirit series: Dirrji (Rusty Peters), All Different Languages for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal People (left), 2000, natural ochre on linen, 135 122 cm; and Peter Adsett, Number Eight (right), 2000, acrylic on linen, 135 122 cm. Grantpirrie Collection, NSW. Photo: courtesy of Grantpirrie Collection. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 21, no. 2
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2021.1992727
M. Caruso
Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism is an important book that helps resituate art historical studies of the Fascist period. As the title indicates, the author, Anthony White does not shy away from using the ‘F’ word that still today tends to be elided when discussing art from the 1920s and 1930s in Italy. Even Germano Celant’s highly praised exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 at the Prada Foundation in Milan in 2018 avoided criticising the censorship, violence and bloodshed of the period in order to exploit it as a purely productive and creative period. In his book, White invites the reader to reconsider three artists from the time in greater depth: the research he conducted in archives in Italy sheds new light on the work of Fortunato Depero, Scipione (Gino Bonichi) and Mario Radice. The author dedicates a chapter to each artist—these chapters, he explains, began their lives as separate peer-reviewed articles. In each chapter, he analyses specific aspects that intrigue him about the artist under examination: war and machinery in the work of Depero, spirituality in that of Scipione, and abstraction and architecture in Radice. By entering into their specificities, White conversely reveals the vastness of their production. The interdisciplinarity of the three artists reaches from architecture to abstraction, spirituality, choreography, tapestries, performance, poetry and painting. Although marketed exclusively at an academic audience, the book—unlike many art history academic books that tend to forego image quality over scholarship—is richly illustrated and includes eight colour plates. White is also careful to reference contemporary issues that concern the field. Depero’s work, he observes, and its connections to military combat and destruction was appropriated by the extreme right-wing group CasaPound for a conference on the artist in 2013. White, instead, aims to understand Depero more holistically by uncovering the lesserknown aspects of his production. In his first chapter, ‘The Folk Machine: Fortunato Depero’s Cloth Pictures, 1919–1927’, the author examines Depero’s early forays into set design, first working for the Ballets Russes, then developing futurist toys like Giacomo Balla for his Plastic Ballets in 1918 and eventually creating his ‘fabric mosaics’. In his detailed visual analysis of the tapestry Serrada from 1920, we learn of the effects of the destruction of men and cities during the First World War on the artist’s creativity:
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2021.1992728
Giles Fielke
The sovereignty of the idea is a defining principle for art history, yet today it appears as one amongst a more generalised set of concepts for the so-called New Art History. Resisting the post-modern compulsion to ‘pluralise the term: new art histories’, as Bill Readings admitted during a symposium on the topic at the Mus ee d’Art contemporain de Montreal in 1994, meant the discipline again asked the related question: what is history? The idea was ascribed to the nineteenth-century emergence of the discipline in continental Europe. It is supposed to have reached its apotheosis with the arrival of the German art historian, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), to Princeton in 1935. If only things were so straight-forward. George Didi-Huberman (b. 1953), whose work begins with this rupture, is subject to an intensive study by Chari Larsson. Against both the Platonic and neoKantian modes of art history, the French philosopher of art has carefully arranged his post-structural method upon the topology of psychoanalytic symptom. This approach could be seen as the direct result of his academic coming-of-age in the 1970s and 80 s, perhaps. Yet Didi-Huberman has also worked tirelessly to reintroduce figures from Art History’s own history—in particular, the idiosyncratic wanderings of Aby Warburg (1866–1929). This focus means that the naïve utopianism of the 1990s (as the end of history) is key for understanding Didi-Huberman’s emergence as a spokesperson for the discipline. The companion to his breakthrough work from 1990, Confronting Images, appeared as Devant le Temps in 2000. Larsson’s analysis of an exhaustive set of Didi-Huberman’s published work, mostly in French, shows the importance of Natural History by Pliny the Elder (AD23/4-79), for example, in the 2000 study yet to appear in an English translation. Two years later Didi-Huberman’s book on Warburg—the founder of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg in 1926, an eccentric research library that was inaugurated by Ernst Cassirer—saw its publication in the context of the appearance of Warburg’s collected manuscripts under the title The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (1999), a project realised by the Getty Research Center in LA. It is obvious why this latter study has since been translated into English, while others by Didi-Huberman, such as Devant le Temps, are yet to be. Warburg’s collected writings had originally appeared posthumously in German in 1932. Of course, this nexus of German and French theory and its influence on English Art History still engulfs the discipline today, dwarfing its Florentine origins.
思想的主权是艺术史的一个定义原则,但今天它似乎是所谓的新艺术史的一套更广义的概念之一。1994年,比尔·雷丁斯在蒙特利尔当代艺术馆的一次研讨会上承认,抵制后现代主义对“多元化术语:新艺术史”的强迫,意味着这门学科再次提出了相关的问题:什么是历史?这个想法被归因于19世纪在欧洲大陆出现的这门学科。1935年,随着德国艺术史学家欧文·帕诺夫斯基(Erwin Panofsky, 1892-1968)来到普林斯顿,它被认为达到了顶峰。要是事情这么直接就好了。乔治·迪迪-休伯曼(生于1953年)的工作从这种断裂开始,查理·拉尔森对他进行了深入研究。反对柏拉图主义和新康德主义的艺术史模式,这位法国艺术哲学家在精神分析症状的拓扑结构上精心安排了他的后结构方法。也许,这种方法可以看作是他在20世纪70年代和80年代学术成熟的直接结果。然而,迪迪-休伯曼也孜孜不倦地重新引入艺术史自身历史中的人物,特别是艾比·沃伯格(1866-1929)的独特流浪。这种关注意味着,20世纪90年代的naïve乌托邦主义(作为历史的终结)是理解迪迪-休伯曼作为该学科发言人出现的关键。他1990年的突破性作品《直面影像》于2000年问世,名为《Devant le Temps》。拉尔森对迪迪-胡伯曼(Didi-Huberman)出版的一套详尽的作品(主要是法语)进行了分析,显示了老普林尼(Pliny the Elder,公元23/4-79年)的《自然史》(Natural History)的重要性,例如,在2000年的一项研究中,尚未出现英文译本。两年后,迪迪-休伯曼关于沃伯格的书——1926年在汉堡建立了沃伯格文化图书馆,这是一个由恩斯特·卡西尔主持落成的古怪的研究图书馆——在沃伯格手稿集以《异教古代的复兴》(1999年)为名出现的背景下出版,这是洛杉矶盖蒂研究中心实施的一个项目。很明显,后一项研究后来被翻译成英语,而迪迪-休伯曼的其他研究,如Devant le Temps,还没有被翻译成英语。华宝的文集最初于1932年在他死后以德语出版。当然,这种德国和法国理论的联系及其对英国艺术史的影响今天仍然吞没着这门学科,使其佛罗伦萨起源相形见绌。
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