The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art

Jonathan Gilmore

Jan. 2000 · Cornell University Press

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What does it mean to say that a form of art is exhausted, that an artist has brought his or her work as far as it can go, that modernism began with Edouard Manet, or that cubism reached a natural ending in 1914 (even if members of that movement continued to paint in a cubist style)? Contemporary theories of art history tend to treat such issues as matters of narrative form, of the manner in which history is represented - with beginnings, turning points and ending belonging to the narrative itself and not constrained by historical fact. In this book, Jonathan Gilmore claims that such narrative developments inhere in the history of art itself.