Overview

In this investigative tour de force, now available in a new format edition, Victor I. Stoichita untangles the history of one of the most enduring technical and symbolic challenges to confront Western artists - the depiction and meanings of shadows. Stoichita's compelling account of the shadow and Western art - which draws on texts by Renaissance artist-authors such as Vasari and Cennini, folk and fairy tales, classical myths, works by van Eyck, Poussin, Malevich, De Chirico, Picasso, among other masters, German Expressionist cinema, photography and child psychology - is a wholly original investigation of a subject that for centuries has challenged the very meaning of art as representation. 'Discriminating, inspired interrogation. . . . Dazzling analysis.' - Marina Warner, Tate Magazine 'Ambitious and a pleasure to read. . . . A thoroughly worthwhile book.' - Times Higher Education '[Stoichita] shows how shadows are deftly used, among other purposes, to suggest the ambiguity of the human psyche.' - Lee Adair Lawrence, Washington Times

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9781780239880

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Reviews

`Victor I. Stoichita is an art historian with a tremendous range, and has brewed together optics and metaphysics, phantasmagoria and propaganda, Plato and Warhol to conjure meaning out of shadows in his engagingly original study.' - Marina Warner, International Books of the Year, Times Literary Supplement; `Discriminating, inspired interrogation . . . dazzling analysis' - Tate Magazine; `Ambitious and a pleasure to read . . . a thoroughly worthwhile book.' - Times Higher Education Supplement

Author Information

Victor I. Stoichita is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (1997) and co-author with Anna-Maria Coderch of Goya: The Last Carnival (1999), both published by Reaktion Books.

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