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. 1. Patterns in the Shadows: Attention in/to the Writings of Michael Baxandall: Michael Anne Holly (University of Rochester).

2. Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall's Concept of the Period Eye: Alland Langdale (University of British Columbia).

3. Limewood, Chiromancy and Narratives of Making. Writing about the Materials and Processes of Sculpture: Malcolm Baker (Victoria and Albert Museum).

4. Michael Baxandall and the Shadows in Plato's Cave: Alex Potts (University of Reading).

5. Last Words (Rilke, Wittgenstein)(Duchamp): Molly Nesbit (Vassar University).

6. Women under the Gaze, a Renaissance Genealogy: Paolo Berdini (Stanford University).

7. A Baxandall Bibliography: Allan Langdale (University of California at Santa Barbara).

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