Christopher P . Heuer | University of Rochester (original) (raw)
Papers by Christopher P . Heuer
Landscape Revisited (Helsinki: Academy of Fine Arts), 2023
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 2023
He has published on early modern European art, with an emphasis on artistic ecologies and the eth... more He has published on early modern European art, with an emphasis on artistic ecologies and the ethical dimensions of style. Ann-Sophie Lehmann holds the chair of art history & material culture at the University of Groningen, where her research focuses on the history, theory, and ecology of materials and processes. She is editor-in-chief of the series Studies in Art and Materiality (Brill) and member of the editorial boards of Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art and Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte. From 2020-2025 she leads the research project Curious Hands. Moving Making to the Core of Education.
The Brooklyn Rail, 2022
Hegel prized Dutch landscape painting not just for its "secularizing" maneuvers, but for its inde... more Hegel prized Dutch landscape painting not just for its "secularizing" maneuvers, but for its indexing of work, work which was a piece with the Low Countries's man-made topography: "What nature affords directly to other nations … [Hollanders] have had to acquire by hard struggles and bitter industry." Laborious constructions of space characterized the country and its aesthetics, with ever-churning processes of differentiation-sand from sea, Protestant from Catholic, idea from thing-for Hegel a pictorial drama generative of thought. It is the same regions' "transitory and fugitive material" that forms the recalcitrant terrain of Lytle Shaw's engrossing New Grounds for Dutch Landscape, a poetic revision of no less than two centuries of in-gazing art history. On the occasion of the book's publication, the Rail has commissioned exchanges with some of Shaw's interested readers. The book's central contention is remarkably simple: that artists like Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, and, above all, Jan van Goyen, did not so much show their native Republic as pictorially re-enact the unsteady geological circumstances of its existence. Dunes, polders, swamps, fens, and beaches were in constant flux. The provinces were forever flooding, the turf eroding, to set the country in shifting shapes of dampness. Van Goyen, for example-who Shaw notes painted wet-on wetwielded pigments of brown and tan to both describe and metaphorize Dutch sog. Jacob van Ruisdael, meanwhile, dramaturge of the rushing waterfall, refashioned sediment control as anxious scenery, rhyming "land management-drainage, reclamationwith pigment management." Shaw's connection here is no pat allegory. The entropic yearnings of the Dutch countryside index a surprising history (the early modern Dutch economy was itself collapsing when painterly experiments were at their height). What the book offers is a multi-epoch story that oozes and puddles creatively around both Northern matter and four hundred years of its beholding. This all renders the Dutch painters-as more than one of Shaw's interlocutors points out-poets of a type; but avowedly unpastoral ones. For these are landscapes possessible but forever fugitive; constructed and potentially dissolved, they are property and property's opposite; disquieted rather than consolatory: in Shaw's words, "almost nervous." For like the bourgeois economy of their making, the countless Dutch pictures actually allure by their hostility to easy inhabitation and with it, intimacy. It was Hölderlin, of all people (Hegel's seminary roommate from Tübingen) who knew this: "Wie schön aus heiterer/Ferne Glänzt einem das herrliche Bild/Der Landschaft" he wrote during late-life madness: "The landscape shines/cheerfully distant/Like an enchanting picture." Not quite an indifference greets us in old Dutch art, but a timely reminder that, once painted, nothing was more unsettled than "nature."
Ekphrastic Image-Making in Early Modern Europe, 2022
Albrecht Dürer's Deluge haunts as a work out of time [Fig. 17.1].1 The sheet's washy coloration b... more Albrecht Dürer's Deluge haunts as a work out of time [Fig. 17.1].1 The sheet's washy coloration bespeaks, on the one hand, mid-twentieth-century abstract painting. Its written confessional on blank rag2 paper-wherein Dürer describes a nightmare and his bodily reaction to it-seems an inchoate document of interiority, long before Freud or Proust. The astonishing watercolor, a reverse mushroom cloud,3 pairs a catastrophic vision with an expository text. It describes a nocturnal vision the artist experienced between June 7-8, 1525. In it, an inundated space of hillocks specked with trees and houses is pummeled by a colossal column of water. Below, nine ink lines and a signature detail the ��ood's speed and scale relative to the trembling artist at home: 'I painted the above as I had seen it'. Dürer inscribes. Heinrich Wöl���in, entranced by the world-ending grimness of the paper in 1905, deemed it simply 'ein Stück Apokalypse' .4 The sheet has long dazzled as an art-historical 'source' .5 It promises direct access to Dürer's thinking, an autograph caption, a primal message from the hand of a maker. It stabilizes, signs, and even temporalizes-dates-the artistic message it transmits to history.6 And to do so it mobilizes, as Caroline Fowler eloquently points out, the paper medium's burgeoning a���nity with the aesthetic of the archive, to a then-developing rhetoric of bureaucratic legitimacy.7
Oxford Art Journal, 2021
'caution' as to the affective world of medieval devotion. The use of the theatrical analogies (p.... more 'caution' as to the affective world of medieval devotion. The use of the theatrical analogies (p. 165) drawn from the Zehnjungfrauenspiele, staged dramatisations of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, known mostly from later fourteenthcentury sources, seems to equip our images with the voices that accompany action. Viewed empathetically we (moderns) might well wring our hands at the hand-wringers at Erfurt. But viewed from the perspective of medieval legal and punitive culture we very well might not. For the theatrical words are subtle: the Foolish Virgins' weepy appeal to sensibility, which is then read backwards onto the sculptures, is a textbook Argumentum ad misericordiam of the sort used by classical, lawbook rhetoricians. 10 The whole point of the Argumentum ad misericordiam is that it is an insincere, unwarranted, crowd-pleasing ploy which recognises the fallacy of the case pleaded for. The point of these ploys is that they are to be resisted, not empathised with. The 'sinister', proper left side of Gothic portals is the side of Synagoga, of the damned, of temptation-especially the temptation to the audience to override its own judgement. These few debating points cannot pretend to embrace the range and interest of this book. Jung's study is clever and well supported, and, as this review indicates, it prompts thought if not necessarily accord. It poses questions and is in some ways congenial to the rhetorical mode of criticism which sees artworks like this as being intended, purposeful, directive, but not dictatorial: that they pose questions and work within a public domain. The quantity of material and scope of the bibliography are also admirable. Given its title, one might expect its geographical scope to have been yet greater, but it remains essentially a monograph on the German situation in the thirteenth century despite a useful final excursus into the late Middle Ages. Overall the book is at its strongest in the chapters on the choir at Naumburg where it draws substantive historical conclusions; though here, too, a wider range of comparative material would greatly have enriched it. When Professor Jung suggests that the donor images and the conception of the choir amount to a defensive and legitimating strategy by the cathedral itself, a leap abroad would have helped. It may not be coincidental that at least one of Europe's major displays of sculpture including historical figures, itself also surplus to requirement and undeniably impressive, the west front of Wells Cathedral in Somerset, completed just as the Naumburg choir was begun, can be understood as a response to the challenges to the institutional rites and identity of Wells as a cathedral fostered by its bishops and chapter at that time. It is difficult to resist noting that precedents for the gabled and arched format of the choir screen at Naumburg had already been developed on the Wells façade around 1220. Again, the greatest display of this type of realist sculpture outside France and Germany, in the cloister complex of the cathedral of
21: Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur , 2020
Time, which kills everything, obsessed early modern England's architects as much as its playwrigh... more Time, which kills everything, obsessed early modern England's architects as much as its playwrights. If for a distraught Macbeth, moments crept interminably, for Stuart and Tudor builders, time's slog always threatened to end too soon. The inevitability of architectural death through slow ruin, or frenetic dismantling, took on particular verve in a polity with a history of iconoclasm. Architecture's emphasis upon surface aligned building with (say) portraiture which, around 1600, carried its own rhetorics of time -and information -arrested. Both building and posing subsisted in the proffering of a good face, the warding off of bodily death. And in the case of this article's focus -an ephemeral arch built in London in 1603 -this face -this façade -was threatened by unexpected epistemes of time: duration, instant, and epoch. These were temporalities in upheaval in Stuart London, a moment of unsteady power relations, of new kinds of printed publications, and of that most unpresentable of human phenomena: contagion.
Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, 2020
Last fall, Christopher P. Heuer and Eloy Fernández Porta met in Barcelona for an event at the Fun... more Last fall, Christopher P. Heuer and Eloy Fernández Porta met in Barcelona for an event at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies to discuss Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of Image, Heuer's recent book published by Zone. As an art historian at the University of Rochester, Heuer considers BLOG // LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
Sixteenth Century Journal, 2019
Ecologies/Agents/Terrains (Yale UP), 2018
Naturalismen: Kunst, Wissenschaft, und Ästhetik (ed. Robert Felfe and Maurice Saß), 2019
Wall Street Journal, 2019
edited by Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower (2012) 1. In 1880, a 20-year-old Edinburgh Universi... more edited by Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower (2012) 1. In 1880, a 20-year-old Edinburgh University medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle accepted a role as the ship's surgeon on an arctic whaler. The young Conan Doyle spent six months on the Hope, nearly dying several times from hypothermia. But he also kept a journal in which he wrote about birds, polar bears, stars, drunken shipmates and the northern sea itself, furtively finding his voice as an author: "Calm as a fishpond, water like quicksilver." He recorded in minute detail the dangers and mundanities of life aboard the Hope: blood-soaked decks and blubber, sailors' hands crushed by winching equipment, tobacco pouches fashioned from seal flippers. The diary, never intended for publication, provides glimpses of Conan Doyle's later strategies. A handful of stories stemmed directly from these voyages, including the haunting "The Adventure of Black Peter," wherein a man is murdered with a harpoon.
Lapham's Quarterly, 2019
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/nothing-solitude
In July of i920, Erwin Panofsky was invited to Hamburg for a Probevorlesung, a trial faculty lect... more In July of i920, Erwin Panofsky was invited to Hamburg for a Probevorlesung, a trial faculty lecture. Scrambling for a topic with only two weeks to prepare, the ambitious young art historian chose not a motif but a structure-human proportion, art's quantification of the animate form. The Hamburg talk, published the following year, wove a dazzling but cryptic narrative of art from Egypt to Franconia. The milieu of Panofsky's own dissertation subject, Albrecht Dtirer, witnessed Italianate understandings of proportion atomize and unravel: "by their very exactitude and complexity" Panofsky wrote, "[Dtirer's] investigations lost all connection with artistic practice.'' 1 It was Diirer's attempts to build bodies in movement that his acolytes took up, Panofsky claimed, which failed most inventively, coming off as "awkward and mechanical;' scandalously breaking down schemes of geometric universals. Yet in matters of proportion, Panofsky discovered a bulwark against an anachronism he had grown up with academically: the idea that Renaissance art was in essence, beauty. Panofsky's thesis revived a Dilrerzeit where art was not grace but Kenntnis-"knowledge."2 Panofsky's was a Kunstwissenschaft that, too, pivoted on art's quelling by language, the translation of pictorial into symbolic forms, the utter sovereignty of the philological. Panofsky saw art as a model-that was his definition of art-a vehicle for reducing complex content to something • With gratitude to LS, who taught me about art history and resurrection. This essay began life as a lecture at Harvard University in 2012. My thanks to Susan Dackerman and to Ashley West.
The Nîmes antiquarian Jean Poldo d'Albenas (1512-63) prefaced a 1559 treatise (Figure 24.1) with ... more The Nîmes antiquarian Jean Poldo d'Albenas (1512-63) prefaced a 1559 treatise (Figure 24.1) with an expression of mock dismay. The architectural fragments that faced him, he lamented, were simply too confusing: "So many engraved epitaphs/ Cut into the hard stone/And so many rich pavements/Found fortuitously in the fields/so many magnificent marble pieces/Columns, capitals, bases/so many medals and vases…" 1 For Poldo, the mass of antique pieces was an overwhelming jumble, a vagabond landscape that, rhetorically steeling himself, he could only approximate in his own illustrations and prose.
Landscape Revisited (Helsinki: Academy of Fine Arts), 2023
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 2023
He has published on early modern European art, with an emphasis on artistic ecologies and the eth... more He has published on early modern European art, with an emphasis on artistic ecologies and the ethical dimensions of style. Ann-Sophie Lehmann holds the chair of art history & material culture at the University of Groningen, where her research focuses on the history, theory, and ecology of materials and processes. She is editor-in-chief of the series Studies in Art and Materiality (Brill) and member of the editorial boards of Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art and Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte. From 2020-2025 she leads the research project Curious Hands. Moving Making to the Core of Education.
The Brooklyn Rail, 2022
Hegel prized Dutch landscape painting not just for its "secularizing" maneuvers, but for its inde... more Hegel prized Dutch landscape painting not just for its "secularizing" maneuvers, but for its indexing of work, work which was a piece with the Low Countries's man-made topography: "What nature affords directly to other nations … [Hollanders] have had to acquire by hard struggles and bitter industry." Laborious constructions of space characterized the country and its aesthetics, with ever-churning processes of differentiation-sand from sea, Protestant from Catholic, idea from thing-for Hegel a pictorial drama generative of thought. It is the same regions' "transitory and fugitive material" that forms the recalcitrant terrain of Lytle Shaw's engrossing New Grounds for Dutch Landscape, a poetic revision of no less than two centuries of in-gazing art history. On the occasion of the book's publication, the Rail has commissioned exchanges with some of Shaw's interested readers. The book's central contention is remarkably simple: that artists like Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, and, above all, Jan van Goyen, did not so much show their native Republic as pictorially re-enact the unsteady geological circumstances of its existence. Dunes, polders, swamps, fens, and beaches were in constant flux. The provinces were forever flooding, the turf eroding, to set the country in shifting shapes of dampness. Van Goyen, for example-who Shaw notes painted wet-on wetwielded pigments of brown and tan to both describe and metaphorize Dutch sog. Jacob van Ruisdael, meanwhile, dramaturge of the rushing waterfall, refashioned sediment control as anxious scenery, rhyming "land management-drainage, reclamationwith pigment management." Shaw's connection here is no pat allegory. The entropic yearnings of the Dutch countryside index a surprising history (the early modern Dutch economy was itself collapsing when painterly experiments were at their height). What the book offers is a multi-epoch story that oozes and puddles creatively around both Northern matter and four hundred years of its beholding. This all renders the Dutch painters-as more than one of Shaw's interlocutors points out-poets of a type; but avowedly unpastoral ones. For these are landscapes possessible but forever fugitive; constructed and potentially dissolved, they are property and property's opposite; disquieted rather than consolatory: in Shaw's words, "almost nervous." For like the bourgeois economy of their making, the countless Dutch pictures actually allure by their hostility to easy inhabitation and with it, intimacy. It was Hölderlin, of all people (Hegel's seminary roommate from Tübingen) who knew this: "Wie schön aus heiterer/Ferne Glänzt einem das herrliche Bild/Der Landschaft" he wrote during late-life madness: "The landscape shines/cheerfully distant/Like an enchanting picture." Not quite an indifference greets us in old Dutch art, but a timely reminder that, once painted, nothing was more unsettled than "nature."
Ekphrastic Image-Making in Early Modern Europe, 2022
Albrecht Dürer's Deluge haunts as a work out of time [Fig. 17.1].1 The sheet's washy coloration b... more Albrecht Dürer's Deluge haunts as a work out of time [Fig. 17.1].1 The sheet's washy coloration bespeaks, on the one hand, mid-twentieth-century abstract painting. Its written confessional on blank rag2 paper-wherein Dürer describes a nightmare and his bodily reaction to it-seems an inchoate document of interiority, long before Freud or Proust. The astonishing watercolor, a reverse mushroom cloud,3 pairs a catastrophic vision with an expository text. It describes a nocturnal vision the artist experienced between June 7-8, 1525. In it, an inundated space of hillocks specked with trees and houses is pummeled by a colossal column of water. Below, nine ink lines and a signature detail the ��ood's speed and scale relative to the trembling artist at home: 'I painted the above as I had seen it'. Dürer inscribes. Heinrich Wöl���in, entranced by the world-ending grimness of the paper in 1905, deemed it simply 'ein Stück Apokalypse' .4 The sheet has long dazzled as an art-historical 'source' .5 It promises direct access to Dürer's thinking, an autograph caption, a primal message from the hand of a maker. It stabilizes, signs, and even temporalizes-dates-the artistic message it transmits to history.6 And to do so it mobilizes, as Caroline Fowler eloquently points out, the paper medium's burgeoning a���nity with the aesthetic of the archive, to a then-developing rhetoric of bureaucratic legitimacy.7
Oxford Art Journal, 2021
'caution' as to the affective world of medieval devotion. The use of the theatrical analogies (p.... more 'caution' as to the affective world of medieval devotion. The use of the theatrical analogies (p. 165) drawn from the Zehnjungfrauenspiele, staged dramatisations of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, known mostly from later fourteenthcentury sources, seems to equip our images with the voices that accompany action. Viewed empathetically we (moderns) might well wring our hands at the hand-wringers at Erfurt. But viewed from the perspective of medieval legal and punitive culture we very well might not. For the theatrical words are subtle: the Foolish Virgins' weepy appeal to sensibility, which is then read backwards onto the sculptures, is a textbook Argumentum ad misericordiam of the sort used by classical, lawbook rhetoricians. 10 The whole point of the Argumentum ad misericordiam is that it is an insincere, unwarranted, crowd-pleasing ploy which recognises the fallacy of the case pleaded for. The point of these ploys is that they are to be resisted, not empathised with. The 'sinister', proper left side of Gothic portals is the side of Synagoga, of the damned, of temptation-especially the temptation to the audience to override its own judgement. These few debating points cannot pretend to embrace the range and interest of this book. Jung's study is clever and well supported, and, as this review indicates, it prompts thought if not necessarily accord. It poses questions and is in some ways congenial to the rhetorical mode of criticism which sees artworks like this as being intended, purposeful, directive, but not dictatorial: that they pose questions and work within a public domain. The quantity of material and scope of the bibliography are also admirable. Given its title, one might expect its geographical scope to have been yet greater, but it remains essentially a monograph on the German situation in the thirteenth century despite a useful final excursus into the late Middle Ages. Overall the book is at its strongest in the chapters on the choir at Naumburg where it draws substantive historical conclusions; though here, too, a wider range of comparative material would greatly have enriched it. When Professor Jung suggests that the donor images and the conception of the choir amount to a defensive and legitimating strategy by the cathedral itself, a leap abroad would have helped. It may not be coincidental that at least one of Europe's major displays of sculpture including historical figures, itself also surplus to requirement and undeniably impressive, the west front of Wells Cathedral in Somerset, completed just as the Naumburg choir was begun, can be understood as a response to the challenges to the institutional rites and identity of Wells as a cathedral fostered by its bishops and chapter at that time. It is difficult to resist noting that precedents for the gabled and arched format of the choir screen at Naumburg had already been developed on the Wells façade around 1220. Again, the greatest display of this type of realist sculpture outside France and Germany, in the cloister complex of the cathedral of
21: Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur , 2020
Time, which kills everything, obsessed early modern England's architects as much as its playwrigh... more Time, which kills everything, obsessed early modern England's architects as much as its playwrights. If for a distraught Macbeth, moments crept interminably, for Stuart and Tudor builders, time's slog always threatened to end too soon. The inevitability of architectural death through slow ruin, or frenetic dismantling, took on particular verve in a polity with a history of iconoclasm. Architecture's emphasis upon surface aligned building with (say) portraiture which, around 1600, carried its own rhetorics of time -and information -arrested. Both building and posing subsisted in the proffering of a good face, the warding off of bodily death. And in the case of this article's focus -an ephemeral arch built in London in 1603 -this face -this façade -was threatened by unexpected epistemes of time: duration, instant, and epoch. These were temporalities in upheaval in Stuart London, a moment of unsteady power relations, of new kinds of printed publications, and of that most unpresentable of human phenomena: contagion.
Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, 2020
Last fall, Christopher P. Heuer and Eloy Fernández Porta met in Barcelona for an event at the Fun... more Last fall, Christopher P. Heuer and Eloy Fernández Porta met in Barcelona for an event at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies to discuss Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of Image, Heuer's recent book published by Zone. As an art historian at the University of Rochester, Heuer considers BLOG // LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
Sixteenth Century Journal, 2019
Ecologies/Agents/Terrains (Yale UP), 2018
Naturalismen: Kunst, Wissenschaft, und Ästhetik (ed. Robert Felfe and Maurice Saß), 2019
Wall Street Journal, 2019
edited by Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower (2012) 1. In 1880, a 20-year-old Edinburgh Universi... more edited by Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower (2012) 1. In 1880, a 20-year-old Edinburgh University medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle accepted a role as the ship's surgeon on an arctic whaler. The young Conan Doyle spent six months on the Hope, nearly dying several times from hypothermia. But he also kept a journal in which he wrote about birds, polar bears, stars, drunken shipmates and the northern sea itself, furtively finding his voice as an author: "Calm as a fishpond, water like quicksilver." He recorded in minute detail the dangers and mundanities of life aboard the Hope: blood-soaked decks and blubber, sailors' hands crushed by winching equipment, tobacco pouches fashioned from seal flippers. The diary, never intended for publication, provides glimpses of Conan Doyle's later strategies. A handful of stories stemmed directly from these voyages, including the haunting "The Adventure of Black Peter," wherein a man is murdered with a harpoon.
Lapham's Quarterly, 2019
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/nothing-solitude
In July of i920, Erwin Panofsky was invited to Hamburg for a Probevorlesung, a trial faculty lect... more In July of i920, Erwin Panofsky was invited to Hamburg for a Probevorlesung, a trial faculty lecture. Scrambling for a topic with only two weeks to prepare, the ambitious young art historian chose not a motif but a structure-human proportion, art's quantification of the animate form. The Hamburg talk, published the following year, wove a dazzling but cryptic narrative of art from Egypt to Franconia. The milieu of Panofsky's own dissertation subject, Albrecht Dtirer, witnessed Italianate understandings of proportion atomize and unravel: "by their very exactitude and complexity" Panofsky wrote, "[Dtirer's] investigations lost all connection with artistic practice.'' 1 It was Diirer's attempts to build bodies in movement that his acolytes took up, Panofsky claimed, which failed most inventively, coming off as "awkward and mechanical;' scandalously breaking down schemes of geometric universals. Yet in matters of proportion, Panofsky discovered a bulwark against an anachronism he had grown up with academically: the idea that Renaissance art was in essence, beauty. Panofsky's thesis revived a Dilrerzeit where art was not grace but Kenntnis-"knowledge."2 Panofsky's was a Kunstwissenschaft that, too, pivoted on art's quelling by language, the translation of pictorial into symbolic forms, the utter sovereignty of the philological. Panofsky saw art as a model-that was his definition of art-a vehicle for reducing complex content to something • With gratitude to LS, who taught me about art history and resurrection. This essay began life as a lecture at Harvard University in 2012. My thanks to Susan Dackerman and to Ashley West.
The Nîmes antiquarian Jean Poldo d'Albenas (1512-63) prefaced a 1559 treatise (Figure 24.1) with ... more The Nîmes antiquarian Jean Poldo d'Albenas (1512-63) prefaced a 1559 treatise (Figure 24.1) with an expression of mock dismay. The architectural fragments that faced him, he lamented, were simply too confusing: "So many engraved epitaphs/ Cut into the hard stone/And so many rich pavements/Found fortuitously in the fields/so many magnificent marble pieces/Columns, capitals, bases/so many medals and vases…" 1 For Poldo, the mass of antique pieces was an overwhelming jumble, a vagabond landscape that, rhetorically steeling himself, he could only approximate in his own illustrations and prose.