Terra Dialogues

Mardi 15 décembre 2009
14h30
Terra Foundation for American Art Europe
29, rue des Pyramides
75001 Paris

Entrée libre

Terra Dialogues

  • Regarder la peinture précisionniste avec Adorno : Esthétique et limites de l'interprétation historique

Andrew Hemingway, professeur d'histoire de l'art à l'University College London.

Réponse : Theodor Adorno et la critique romantique de la civilisation

Michael Löwy, directeur de recherche émérite au CNRS, professeur,
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Le séminaire se déroulera en anglais.

Entrée libre
T : 01 43 20 67 01
information@terraamericanart.eu

  • Looking at Precisionist Painting with Adorno : Aesthetics and the Limits of Historical Interpretation

Andrew Hemingway, History of Art professor at University College London

The English translation of Theodor W. Adorno's posthumously published Ästhetische Theorie (1970), twice in the space of thirteen years (C. Lenhardt, 1984 ; Robert Hullot-Kentor, 1997), forms an index of the level of interest in Adorno's magnum opus in the English-speaking world.

Ästhetische Theorie is arguably the outstanding achievement of Marxist philosophical aesthetics in the twentieth century and the benchmark against which any subsequent contributions in that field must be measured.

Andrew Hemingway will explore the implications of Adorno's aesthetics for the practice of art history and test them out in relation to a type of painting and print-making he would probably not have valued, namely American Precisionism.

Response : Theodor Adorno and the Romantic Critique of Civilisation

Michael Löwy, research director emeritus at the CNRS, professor,
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Adorno was not a Romantic thinker, but there is an important Romantic dimension in his critique of the modern (bourgeois) industrial civilisation. He explained his relation to the (conservative) Romantic Zivilisationskritik in an important passage from Minima Moralia : “One of the main tasks of thinking today is to put all the reactionary arguments against Western Civilisation at the service of the progressive Aufklarung".