Andrei Pop

Last updated
Andrei Octavian Pop
Born
Bucharest, Romania
NationalityRomanian, American
Alma mater Stanford University, Harvard University
Known forArt History, Aesthetics, History of Ideas
Academic background
Doctoral advisorEwa Lajer-Burcharth

Andrei Pop is the Allan and Jean Frumkin Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. [1]

Contents

Life and Education

Pop was born under the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime in Bucharest, Romania where he attended primary school. He moved to Los Angeles shortly after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, when his parents were admitted into the graduate program in mathematics at the University of Southern California. [2] Pop graduated from Van Nuys High School, and received a B.A. in Art History with a minor in Computer Science from Stanford University and his PhD in art history from Harvard University, where he was an Ashford Fellow and received a Derek Bok Teaching Prize. [3] Prior to completing his dissertation, Pop received a 2008-10 Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. [4] After teaching at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte at the University of Vienna and Kunsthistorisches Seminar at the University of Basel, he joined the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2015.

Research

Pop's early research concerned European neoclassical art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as "the aesthetic branch of the Enlightenment." [5] His first book focused on Henry Fuseli (born Heinrich Füßli, 1741-1825), a Swiss artist working in London after a long interval in Rome, who embodied both the era's interest in local cultures and literatures and its cosmopolitanism. [6] Pop called this combination of preoccupations, which adopted a detached relativist view of culture open to feminist, anticolonial, and liberal politics, "neopaganism", in contrast to the invocation of Roman purity typical of Fuseli's contemporary Jacques-Louis David, and the neoclassicism of the French Revolution. [7] This work has implications for the history of modern theatre (which became more interested in performing ancient forms of theatre like Greek tragedy) and modern understandings of the mind, in particular, of subjectivity, sympathy, and the privacy of experience. [8]

Pop's second project, completed after his arrival at the University of Chicago, explores the relations between the privacy of conscious experience and the publicity of meaning and of truth, showing how they were central to the art and science of the late nineteenth century. In the resulting book, A Forest of Symbols, the fin de siècle art movement called symbolism, and the use of new symbolic notations in period science, logic and mathematics are brought together in their opposition to psychologism and the skeptical undermining of truth it occasioned. [9] Close attention to the doctrines about language and pictures of the mathematician and founder of analytical philosophy Gottlob Frege is "novel and therefore deserves special attention." [10] The definition of symbolism as an investigation of the means of meaning-making also makes possible a new account of the period focused on neglected artists and logicians, many of them women, [11] as well as neglected works by canonical figures like Edgar Allan Poe, Edouard Manet and Stéphane Mallarmé, [12] and the history of color, perspective and photography. [13] The overall perspective argued for is a kind of reformed Platonism, whose logical structures are accessed by sensuous beings attentive to historical context. [14] It's perhaps appropriate, given this tendency, that the book has been published in Greek by Crete University Press. [15]

Other Scholarly Activities

Early in his graduate education, Pop was fascinated by the aesthetic theory of ugliness, which he encountered on returning to Bucharest in the Romanian translation of Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853), then unavailable in English. With Mechtild Widrich, he completed a translation and critical edition of this classic of nineteenth-century aesthetics and art criticism, [16] as well as editing a collection of essays and sources on ugliness historical and contemporary. [17] The preoccupation with social and aesthetic dimensions of ugliness, inflected by Fuseli's classicism, in turn informs his recent studies of race, slavery, and cultural politics in romantic era-art, in the work of Henry Fuseli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joshua Reynolds, and Francisco Goya. His interests in cultural translation, classicism, and the psychology of art have also led to invitations to discuss the work of living artists, like Virginio Ferrari (artist), [18] the London-based performance art trio JocJonJosch, [19] and Paola Pivi, [20] [21] as well as public humanities issues like pandemic literature, in Science+Fiction: Reflections on Pandemics with Lorraine Daston and Elisabeth Bronfen for the Goethe-Institut, [22] and historic preservation and minoritarian aesthetics in Louis Sullivan's demolished skyscraper housing a German-language Schiller Theater, for the gallery Wrightwood 659 in Chicago. [23] Alongside this work, for most of the 2010s, Pop served as commissioning editor for book reviews in art theory and historiography for the College Art Association's online organ, caa.reviews. [24]

Publications

Books

Articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aesthetics</span> Branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of art, beauty, and taste

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art. It examines aesthetic values, often expressed through judgments of taste.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beauty</span> Characteristic that provides pleasure or satisfaction

Beauty is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes these objects pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics, one of the major branches of philosophy. As a positive aesthetic value, it is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Classicism</span> Art movement and architectural style

Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. In its purest form, classicism is an aesthetic attitude dependent on principles based in the culture, art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, with the emphasis on form, simplicity, proportion, clarity of structure, perfection, restrained emotion, as well as explicit appeal to the intellect. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint and compression we are simply objecting to the classicism of classic art. A violent emphasis or a sudden acceleration of rhythmic movement would have destroyed those qualities of balance and completeness through which it retained until the present century its position of authority in the restricted repertoire of visual images." Classicism, as Clark noted, implies a canon of widely accepted ideal forms, whether in the Western canon that he was examining in The Nude (1956), or the literary Chinese classics or Chinese art, where the revival of classic styles is also a recurring feature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Fuseli</span> Swiss-born British painter, draughtsman and writer on art (1741-1825)

Henry Fuseli was a Swiss painter, draughtsman and writer on art who spent much of his life in Britain. Many of his works, such as The Nightmare, deal with supernatural subject matter. He painted works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, and created his own "Milton Gallery". He held the posts of Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy. His style had a considerable influence on many younger British artists, including William Blake.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aesthetics of music</span> Branch of philosophy

Aesthetics of music is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of art, beauty and taste in music, and with the creation or appreciation of beauty in music. In the pre-modern tradition, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics explored the mathematical and cosmological dimensions of rhythmic and harmonic organization. In the eighteenth century, focus shifted to the experience of hearing music, and thus to questions about its beauty and human enjoyment of music. The origin of this philosophic shift is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the 18th century, followed by Kant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exoticism</span> Trend in art and design

Exoticism is a trend in art and design, whereby artists became fascinated with ideas and styles from distant regions and drew inspiration from them. This often involved surrounding foreign cultures with mystique and fantasy which owed more to the culture of the people doing the exoticism than to the exotic cultures themselves: this process of glamorisation and stereotyping is called "exoticisation".

<i>The Nightmare</i> 1781 painting by Henry Fuseli

The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. It shows a woman in deep sleep with her arms thrown below her, and with a demonic and ape-like incubus crouched on her chest. The painting's dreamlike and haunting erotic evocation of infatuation and obsession was a huge popular success.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Weimar Classicism</span> German literary and cultural movement, whose practitioners established a new humanism

Weimar Classicism was a German literary and cultural movement, whose practitioners established a new humanism from the synthesis of ideas from Romanticism, Classicism, and the Age of Enlightenment. It was named after the city of Weimar, Germany, because the leading authors of Weimar Classicism lived there.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virgil Widrich</span> Austrian director and scriptwriter

Virgil Widrich is an Austrian director, screenwriter, filmmaker and multimedia artist.

Svetlana Leontief Alpers is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1984 book The Art of Describing. She has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others.

Aesthetic of Ugliness is a book by German philosopher Karl Rosenkranz, written in 1853. It is among the earliest writings on the philosophy of ugliness and "draws an analogy between ugliness and moral evil".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward A. Shanken</span> American art historian (born 1964)

Edward A. Shanken is an American art historian, whose work focuses on the entwinement of art, science and technology, with a focus on experimental new media art and visual culture. Shanken is Professor, Arts Division, at UC Santa Cruz. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been translated into many languages. Shanken is the author of Art and Electronic Media, among other titles.

Margaretta M. Lovell is an American art historian who serves as the Jay D. McEvoy, Jr. Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching center on the art and history of the United States, including eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape painting, portraiture, decorative arts, furniture, architecture, food, and forests.

Anti-monumentalism is a tendency in contemporary art that intentionally challenges every aspect of traditional public monuments. It has been defined as art designed "not to uphold but negate sacred values". Anti-monumentalism claims to deny the presence of any imposing, authoritative social force in public spaces.

Claire Bishop is a British art historian, critic, and Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York where she has taught since September 2008.

Avary William Holmes Forbes (1853–1938) was a religious philosopher, teacher, and writer.

Giuliana Bruno is a scholar of visual art and media. She is currently the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is internationally known as the author of numerous influential books and articles on art, architecture, film, and visual culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Greenwood</span> Professor of Classics

Emily Greenwood is Professor of the Classics and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She was formerly professor of Classics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and John M. Musser Professor of Classics and Chair of the Department of Classics at Yale University. Her research focuses on Ancient Greek historiography, particularly Thucydides and Herodotus, the development of History as a genre and a modern critical discipline, and local and transnational black traditions of interpreting Greek and Roman classics. Her work explores the appropriation and reinvention of Greco-Roman classical antiquity from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Mechtild Widrich is an Austrian art historian, curator, and Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Michael Squire FBA is a British art historian and classicist. He became Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology in the University of Cambridge in 2022.

References

  1. ↑ University of Chicago News. "19 University of Chicago faculty receive named, distinguished service professorships". University of Chicago. Retrieved December 26, 2021.
  2. ↑ Hall, Ann (2005). "The Art of Graduate Funding: One Student's Story" (PDF). Colloquy (Spring): 17. Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  3. ↑ "Ashford family celebrates with Ashford Fellows". The Harvard Gazette. November 16, 2006. Retrieved December 26, 2021.
  4. ↑ National Gallery of Art. "Center 30 Record of Activities and Research Reports June 2009–May 2010" (PDF). Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Retrieved December 26, 2021.
  5. ↑ Pop, Andrei (2014). "Neoclassicism in Art". The Virgil Encyclopedia. Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 890–892. doi:10.1002/9781118351352.wbve1436. ISBN   9781118351352.
  6. ↑ Myrone, Martin (2015). "Henry Fuseli's Alternative Classicism". Journal of Art Historiography (December).
  7. ↑ O'Rourke, Stephanie (2017). "Patchwork Classicism". Oxford Art Journal. 40 (3): 501–505. doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcx033 . Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  8. ↑ Latimer, Quinn (2013). "Private Views. Literature vs. Art History". Frieze (156). Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  9. ↑ Baetens, Jan (2020). "A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century". Leonardo. 53 (3): 579–580. doi:10.1162/leon_r_01943. S2CID   224948924 . Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  10. ↑ Berman, Patricia (2021). "A Forest of Symbols". Caa.reviews. doi:10.3202/caa.reviews.2021.78. S2CID   238711823 . Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  11. ↑ Morehead, Allison (2020). "Andrei Pop, A Forest of Symbols" (PDF). H-France Review. 20: 1–5. Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  12. ↑ Weintraub, Alex (2020). "Art History in the Light of Mallarmé" (PDF). Journal of Art Historiography. December. Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  13. ↑ Hayes, Emily (2021). "Andrei Pop, A Forest of Symbols". British Journal for the History of Science. 54 (4). doi:10.1017/S0007087421000777. S2CID   245495509 . Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  14. ↑ "Andrei Pop: "For Platonism in Aesthetics"" . Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  15. ↑ "Andrei Pop, ΔΑΣΟΣ ΣΥΜΒΟΛΩΝ". 29 June 2022. Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  16. ↑ Ground, Ian (July 1, 2016). "Ugliness, in the cry of the beholder". Times Literary Supplement. Retrieved 2022-01-16.
  17. ↑ "Rethinking Ugliness". 2014-01-22. Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  18. ↑ "The Lifespan of Public Art: In Conversation with Virginio Ferrari and Andrei Pop". 2018-10-20. Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  19. ↑ "PRESS KIT Etat du Valais" . Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  20. ↑ "Paola Pivi: Tulkus 1880 to 2018" . Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  21. ↑ Segbars, Jack (2013-07-01). "Willen weten wat je ziet". Metropolis M. Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  22. ↑ "Interactive Online Conversation. Science+Fiction: Reflections on Pandemics" . Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  23. ↑ "The Schiller: Art, Labor, and Assimilation" . Retrieved 2022-12-02.
  24. ↑ "Theoretically Speaking . . .: David Carrier, Michael Ann Holly, and Andrei Pop in Dialogue". 2020-03-02. doi:10.3202/caa.reviews.2020.25. S2CID   226095149 . Retrieved 2022-12-02.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  25. ↑ "Andrei Pop A Forest of Symbols".access-date=2022-01-16|website=The MIT Reader
  26. ↑ Rosenkranz, Karl (2015). Aesthetics of ugliness : a critical edition. Andrei Pop, Mechtild Widrich. London, UK. ISBN   978-1-350-02292-8. OCLC   910969637.
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