Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Cloth, xiii, 300 pages, illustrations; 25 cm. Tight, clean copy. Dust jacket protected in a mylar cover. A fine copy of the first printing. "This book is the first to focus on the extraordinary symbiosis between Critical Theory and other discourses of the visual in the first half of the twentieth century. In four extended case studies, Frederic J. Schwartz traces the way central concepts of the aesthetics later termed 'Frankfurt School' were deeply rooted in contemporary developments in painting, photography, architecture, and film, as well as psychology, advertising, and the discipline of art history as it was practiced by figures such as Heinrich W lfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Wilhelm Pinder, and Hans Sedlmayr. Schwartz explores the shifting intersection between the history of art and the Frankfurt School and seeks to uncover its specific logic. He argues that artists, art historians, and Critical Theorists were united by a common project: that of exploring those aspects of modernity that could only be revealed by its visual products, of knowing the modern visually. / FREDERIC J. SCHWARTZ is reader in history of art, University College London, and author of The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War, published by Yale University Press." - Publisher. CONTENTS: Fashion: Concepts of style in Wo¨lfflin and Adorno. Cathedrals and shoes. Novelty. The new Distraction: Walter Benjamin and the avant-garde. The blur at the centre. Book-space. Excursus I: architecture, photography and the avant-garde. Excursus II: architecture, photography and the baroque. Sight for sore eyes. Distraction. The eye of the expert. Dangerous games; Nonsimultaneity: Ernst Bloch and Wilhelm Pinder. Enigmas of arrival. History of nonsimultaneity. Philosophy of nonsimultaneity. Styles of nonsimultaneity. Politics of nonsimultaneity; Mimesis: Physiognomies of art in Kracauer, Sedlmayr, Benjamin and Adorno. Kracauer and Riegl: the problem. Panofsky and Sedlmayr: the options. For Sedlmayr I: his critique. Against Sedlmayr I: bad science. Excursus: Benjamin meets Sedlmayr halfway (but they do not meet). For Sedlmayr II: art historiography as modernism. Against Sedlmayr II: bad poetry, bad philosophy. The visible man. The invisible years. Physiognomies of art and language. Mimic behaviour. The psychophysical problem. Politics as Verhalten: revisiting the expert. Art as Verhaltensweise; Afterword: Seeing and time/Seeing in time. . 1st. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 8vo. Collectible.