BiblioVault - Books about Bann, Stephen

Contemporary Garden Aesthetics, Creations and Interpretations

Michel Conan

Harvard University Press, 2007

The present renewal of garden art demands a new approach to garden aesthetics. This book considers exceptional creations around the world and proposes new forms of garden experience.

Using a variety of critical perspectives, the authors demonstrate a renewal of garden design and new directions for garden aesthetics, analyzing projects by Fernando Chacel (Brazil), Andy Goldsworthy (Great Britain), Charles Jencks (Great Britain), Patricia Johanson (U.S.), Dieter Kienast (Switzerland), Bernard Lassus (France), and Mohammed Shaheer (India). The first half of the volume begins with an argument for a return to John Dewey’s focus on “Art as Experience,” while the second half concludes with a debate on the respective roles of cognition and the senses, and of science and the visual arts.

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French Suite

A Book of Essays

Michael Fried

Reaktion Books, 2022

From Manet to Gericault, Daubigny to Corot, an insightful, breathtakingly original exploration of French art and literature.

French Suite examines a range of important French painters and two writers, Baudelaire and Flaubert, from the brothers Le Nain in the mid-seventeenth century to Manet, Degas, and the Impressionists in the later nineteenth century. A principal theme of Michael Fried’s essays is a fundamental concern of his throughout his career: the relationship between painting and the beholder. Fried’s typically vivid and strongly argued essays offer many new readings and unexpected insights, examining both familiar and lesser-known French artistic and literary works.

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Interlacing Words and Things

Bridging the Nature–Culture Opposition in Gardens and Landscape

Stephen Bann

Harvard University Press, 2012

Interlacing Words and Things: Bridging the Nature–Culture Opposition in Gardens and Landscape examines the various ways in which the natural world has been transformed through the creative use of language. The nine contributors do not assume that there is an opposition between nature and culture, but rather emphasize that forms of language are embedded in our understanding and appreciation of the natural environment. Their illustrated essays consider the relationship between language and the natural world, as it has been mediated in different cultures and at different periods by broad notions such as landscape and the garden. Complementing the richness of the examples covered in the volume is the message that writing must still be integrally involved in the creative remaking of the natural world.

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Interpreting Contemporary Art

Edited by Stephen Bann and William Allen

Reaktion Books, 1991

The interpretation of contemporary art has always presented the critic with the hardest challenge; yet today, as new and often bewildering trends and movements come to the fore with dizzying speed, a critical engagement with the works of our own time is particularly vital. Each contributor to Interpreting Contemporary Art has looked at his chosen painting, sculpture, photograph or installation with a conviction that the work’s own importance can be enhanced by what is written about it. From the French critic Marcelin Pleynet, writing about a painting by Robert Motherwell, to the English artist and critic Victor Burgin, who chooses a photograph by Helmut Newton, the range of contributions covers a broad international field, touching upon virtually all the most significant art-forms of the present day. Anyone seeking a greater substance in writings on the art of the last two decades, going beyond the major critical orthodoxies of recent years, and who wishes to understand more about the profound links which unite the art of our own period with that of the past, will find this book full of invaluable insights into the kaleidoscope of contemporary art.

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Patricia Johanson’s House and Garden Commission

Re-construction of Modernity

Xin Wu

Harvard University Press, 2007

In 1969, House and Garden magazine commissioned one of the first minimalist artists, Patricia Johanson, to propose new directions for American garden art. Having never been exhibited or published before as a whole, the resulting garden proposals reveal an unknown dimension of the New York art world of the late 1960s. Three years of research have brought 146 surviving drawings to light. They demonstrate the intimate progress of the artist’s engagement with nature in her quest for an art concerned with ethical relationships between humans and the natural world. Shuttling between the West and the East, and the contemporary and the historical, Johanson takes equal distances from earthworks created by her peer artists such as Robert Smithson, and the environmentalism advocated by landscape architects following Ian McHarg. Her vision of a new modernity is still significant today. The book is divided into 2 volumes, and includes a preface by Stephen Bann and a catalogue of 146 original garden proposals.

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Scenes and Traces of the English Civil War

Stephen Bann

Reaktion Books, 2020

The English Civil War has become a frequent point of reference in contemporary British political debate. A bitter and bloody series of conflicts, it shook the very foundations of seventeenth-century Britain. This book is the first attempt to portray the visual legacy of this period, as passed down, revisited, and periodically reworked over two and a half centuries of subsequent English history. Highly regarded art historian Stephen Bann deftly interprets the mass of visual evidence accessible today, from ornate tombs and statues to surviving sites of vandalism and iconoclasm, public signage, and historical paintings of human subjects, events, and places. Through these important scenes and sometimes barely perceptible traces, Bann shows how the British view of the War has been influenced and transformed by visual imagery.

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Utopias and the Millennium

Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann

Reaktion Books, 1993

Utopia has always had a close, though ambivalent, relationship with millennialism. This relationship was probably at its most intense in England at the time of the Civil War; even when utopia aspired to secularism – as at the time of the French Revolution, or in nineteenth-century socialism – it continued to turn to millennial forms to recharge its energies.

The essays in this book explore aspects of this relationship; some consider their role in the debate concerning human perfectibility, while others examine the rise of secularism. Further contributions reflect upon the apparent failure of the modern Communist utopia, note the recent reappearance of apocalyptic themes in fiction and social theory, or draw on the contributions of feminism and ecology. As our century ends, it seems that utopia and the millennium are once more locked in an uneasy embrace.

With essays by Louis Marin, J. C. Davis, Louis James, Gregory Claeys, Krishan Kumar, Vita Fortunati, David Ayers, Jan Relf and John O'Neill.

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