The Specter of Manet: A Contribution to the Archaeology of Painting
2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1540-6245.2008.00318.x
ISSN1540-6245
Autores Tópico(s)Photographic and Visual Arts
ResumoMichel Foucault's essays dedicated to painting have fared poorly in terms of scholarly attention, notwithstanding his memorable treatments of Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas and Rene Magritte's Cecin'estpas unepipe.1 When we open up a systematic perspective on these occasional essays, however, it is clear that Foucault was engaged in an effort to define a distinctive, philosophical approach to works of art in accordance with the method that he developed under the name of archaeology. Foucault's writings on visual art were the attempt to fashion a type of thinking that would allow him to analyze modern painting in terms of its historical uniqueness. Accordingly, what we find is that each of these essays seeks to highlight the distance that separates one set of cultural practices from another, and they do this by means of a careful analysis of the painting itself. When taken together, Foucault's essays form an unwritten genealogical project, one that tells the story of modern art through the analysis of some of its representative cultural products. Essential to this claim is familiarity with some of Foucault's final lecture courses on Hel-
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