Enfilade

From Brill:

Kerr Houston, The Place of the Viewer: The Embodied Beholder in the History of Art, 1764–1968 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 270 pages, ISBN: 978-9004400238 , €112 / $135.

In recent decades, art historians and critics have occasionally emphasized a dynamic, embodied mode of looking, accenting the role of the viewer and the complex interplay between beholders and works of art. In The Place of the Viewer, Kerr Houston shows that an attention to the position and physical experiences of beholders has in fact long informed art historical analyses—and that close study of the theme can lead to a fuller understanding of the discipline, the act of viewership and individual works of art. Simultaneously attentive to historical ideas and contemporary scholarship, this book identifies a vein of thought that has been generally overlooked, and proposes new ways of seeing familiar works and traditions.

Kerr Houston (PhD, Yale, 2001) has taught art history and criticism at The Maryland Institute College of Art since 2002. He is the author of An Introduction to Art Criticism (2013) and numerous articles and reviews.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements
Figures

Introduction
The Communicative Viewpoint: Photography, Frontality, and Multiplicity in the 1800s
The Beholder in Motion: Kinetic Viewership
The Body Physical, the Body Politic: Incorporated Viewership in the 1960s
Art History and the Place of the Viewer since 1968

Bibliography
Index