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Aesthetic Thinking: Essays on Intention, Painting, Action, and Ideology

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Published Dec 2021

Fred Orton

Author: Fred Orton
Fred Orton’s teaching and writing has always combined theoretical and formal – which is to say structural – analysis with historical research and reflection. This collection of essays – rewritten studies of Paul Cézanne, Jasper Johns, the American cultural critic Harold Rosenberg and a new essay on Marx and Engels’ notion of ideology – brings together some of his most decisive contributions to thinking about fine art practice and rethinking the theory and methods of the social history of art. More than an anthology, it offers a vivid demonstration of how theory can work to generate new interpretations and unsettle old ones.

Biographical Note

Fred Orton is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Theory, University of Leeds. His earlier books include Figuring Jasper Johns (Reaktion Books, 1994), Jasper Johns: The Sculptures (Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, 1996) and Fragments of History (Manchester University Press, 2007) with Ian Wood and Clare A. Lees.

Readership

Undergraduate and post-graduate students of fine art and art history in universities and art colleges and their teachers. Anyone with an interest in art, art history, Marxism and social history.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
‘Present, the Scene of … Selves, the Occasion of … Ruses’: Fred Orton’s Art History
Steve Edwards
Publications by Fred Orton

1 Beginning … with Intention

2 Painting Out of Time
Symbol and Allegory
Modernist Painting
On the Motif
Sensations
A Dabbing Sensation
As If. As If.
Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’
Slack Links and Gaps
Allegory

3 Action, Revolution & Painting (Resumed)
I
II
III
IV

4 Ideology: Reading Paul de Man Reading Marx and Engels
‘The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism’ (1956)
‘Georg Lukács’s “Theory of the Novel” ’ (1966)
‘The Contemporary Criticism of Romanticism’ (1967)
‘Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism’ (1972)
‘Metaphor (Second Discourse)’ (1973)
‘The Resistance to Theory’ (1982)
Excursus: Aberration
‘The Resistance to Theory’ (Continued)
Coda: Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology
For the End …

Bibliography
Index