About Michael Baxandall

A distinguished group of art historians reflect on the work of Michael Baxandall, in terms of its importance for their own formation, its location in the development of a new art history, and its influence on the broader languages and theories of contemporary cultural theory. The volume deploys the meaning of the word 'about' both as an adverb and a preposition to weave a tissue of readings through and around the writing of Baxandall in such a way as both to characterize its importance in recent thinking on art and cultural history and to displace it from a conventional understanding.Working critically, analytically and through analogy the essays not only rethink Baxandall through a cultural theory in which he takes an unexpected position alongside Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, but position his ideas in the conceptual fields of a Marcel Duchamp or a Donald Judd. Alternatively they historicize his thinking in a context of modern ethnographic, sociological and feminist methodologies, or one of important considerations on such concepts as material culture or artistic production as figures in the writing of art history.

Adrian Rifkin is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Leeds.