Alexander Nemerov
Biographic Data
| ID | 368872 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander Nemerov |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander |
| FAMILY NAME | Nemerov |
| SIGNATURE | NEMEROV A |
| AFFILIATIONS | ALEXANDER NEMEROV's most recent book is Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine (Princeton, 2016). |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Forest
Forest
The outcast space of Perugino
When I was a boy in St. Louis, Missouri, I grew up across the street from the house of Norris K. Smith, an art historian who taught at Washington University. As I have gotten older, I associate this experience with a picture in Smith’s last book–a book about Renaissance perspective and a kind of career summation he published in 1994 called Here I Stand: Perspective from Another Point of View. The picture, painted by the artist Robert Jordan, show…
John Quidor in hell
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
The Destruction of Hood's Ordnance Train
How is something that is not there still present in a photograph? What is the importance of seeing a photograph in this way? Looking at George Barnard's Civil War photograph Destruction of Hood's Ordnance Train, this essay meditates on the operations of imagination in historical images
A Questionnaire on Materialisms
Recent philosophical tendencies of "Actor-Network Theory," "Object-Oriented Ontology," and "Speculative Realism" have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects-from Graham Harm…
Paper Stars
Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London by Matthew C. Hunter, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013, i–xv and 329 pp., 10 colour and 60 b. & w. illus., £38.50/$55.00 This is a remarkable book. With an intelligence to rival that of the experimental philosophers he writes about, Matthew C. Hunter traces the interlaced world of science and art in late seventeenth-century London. The wickedness of …
The cauldron
Wartime Kiss
Wartime Kiss is a personal meditation on the haunting power of American photographs and films from World War II and the later 1940s. Starting with a stunning reinterpretation of one of the most famous photos of all time, Alfred Eisenstaedt's image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, Alexander Nemerov goes on to examine an array of mostly forgotten images and movie episodes--from a photo of Jimmy Stewart and Olivia de Havilland…
Judy Garland's Face
Kent Puckett's essay describes a form of mediated and mediating subjectivity that runs through two unlikely wartime texts, Georg Lukacs's The Theory of the Novel and David Lean's Brief Encounter
The Usable Photograph
‘The handle’ is a phrase that comes to mind reading Terri Weissman's fine book on Berenice Abbott. Weissman emphasises the use value of Abbott's photography, stressing the photographer's aim to ‘utilise’ her work to help create a democratic sphere of thoughtful citizens (p. 106). The utility is not so straightforward as you might think. Abbott's well-known social photography of the 1930s, exemplified by Changing New York (1939), the book she co-p…
The Madness of Art
Ground Swell
How do we return Edward Hopper to history? The process is difficult, since Hopper worked hard to defeat any obvious sense in which his pictures are about any particular topic. Yet it is possible to connect Hopper’s Ground Swell, an enigmatic picture of 1939, to political and cultural developments of that year. Rather than “solving” the picture, as though it were a code to be cracked, the aim of such analysis is to open the painting up—to make us …
The Flight of Form
Coming Home in 1945
At the end of World War II, many artists, writers, and filmmakers turned to representing enlisted men coming home. It is not surprising that their imagery was often downbeat even amid the celebrations. It is surprising, however, to see how this gloom permeates the work of two unlikely figures: Robert Frost and Norman Rockwell. Frost’s great poem “Directive,” about a somber return to the ruins of a settlement in the Vermont woods, is powerfully li…
The Dark Cat
The Body of Raphaelle Peale
Haunted Supermasculinity
The Ashes of Germanicus and the Skin of Painting
The Ashes of Germanicus and the Skin of Painting: Sublimation and Money in Benjamin West’s Agrippina Alexander Nemerov (bio) Figures Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Benjamin West, Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus, 1768. Oil on canvas, 64H x 94H in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Gift of Louis M. Rabinowitz. Few artists were more famous and influential in the later eighteenth century than B…
Vanishing Americans
Frederic Remington & Turn-of-the-Century America
Journal Article Frederic Remington & Turn-of-the-Century America. By Alexander Nemerov. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. x, 244 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-300-05566-8.) Get access William H. Goetzmann William H. Goetzmann University of Texas, Austin, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 2, September 1996, Pages 650–651, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945031 Publishe…
Projecting the Future
N. C. Wyeth's Theater of Illustration
A Questionnaire on Materialisms
Recent philosophical tendencies of "Actor-Network Theory," "Object-Oriented Ontology," and "Speculative Realism" have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects-from Graham Harm…
The Flight of Form
N. C. Wyeth's Theater of Illustration
Projecting the Future
Frederic Remington & Turn-of-the-Century America
Journal Article Frederic Remington & Turn-of-the-Century America. By Alexander Nemerov. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. x, 244 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-300-05566-8.) Get access William H. Goetzmann William H. Goetzmann University of Texas, Austin, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 2, September 1996, Pages 650–651, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945031 Publishe…
Vanishing Americans
The Ashes of Germanicus and the Skin of Painting
The Ashes of Germanicus and the Skin of Painting: Sublimation and Money in Benjamin West’s Agrippina Alexander Nemerov (bio) Figures Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Benjamin West, Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus, 1768. Oil on canvas, 64H x 94H in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Gift of Louis M. Rabinowitz. Few artists were more famous and influential in the later eighteenth century than B…
Haunted Supermasculinity
The Dark Cat
The Body of Raphaelle Peale
Coming Home in 1945
At the end of World War II, many artists, writers, and filmmakers turned to representing enlisted men coming home. It is not surprising that their imagery was often downbeat even amid the celebrations. It is surprising, however, to see how this gloom permeates the work of two unlikely figures: Robert Frost and Norman Rockwell. Frost’s great poem “Directive,” about a somber return to the ruins of a settlement in the Vermont woods, is powerfully li…
The Flight of Form
Ground Swell
How do we return Edward Hopper to history? The process is difficult, since Hopper worked hard to defeat any obvious sense in which his pictures are about any particular topic. Yet it is possible to connect Hopper’s Ground Swell, an enigmatic picture of 1939, to political and cultural developments of that year. Rather than “solving” the picture, as though it were a code to be cracked, the aim of such analysis is to open the painting up—to make us …
The Madness of Art
Wartime Kiss
Wartime Kiss is a personal meditation on the haunting power of American photographs and films from World War II and the later 1940s. Starting with a stunning reinterpretation of one of the most famous photos of all time, Alfred Eisenstaedt's image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, Alexander Nemerov goes on to examine an array of mostly forgotten images and movie episodes--from a photo of Jimmy Stewart and Olivia de Havilland…
Judy Garland's Face
Kent Puckett's essay describes a form of mediated and mediating subjectivity that runs through two unlikely wartime texts, Georg Lukacs's The Theory of the Novel and David Lean's Brief Encounter
The Usable Photograph
‘The handle’ is a phrase that comes to mind reading Terri Weissman's fine book on Berenice Abbott. Weissman emphasises the use value of Abbott's photography, stressing the photographer's aim to ‘utilise’ her work to help create a democratic sphere of thoughtful citizens (p. 106). The utility is not so straightforward as you might think. Abbott's well-known social photography of the 1930s, exemplified by Changing New York (1939), the book she co-p…
The cauldron
Paper Stars
Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London by Matthew C. Hunter, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013, i–xv and 329 pp., 10 colour and 60 b. & w. illus., £38.50/$55.00 This is a remarkable book. With an intelligence to rival that of the experimental philosophers he writes about, Matthew C. Hunter traces the interlaced world of science and art in late seventeenth-century London. The wickedness of …
A Questionnaire on Materialisms
Recent philosophical tendencies of "Actor-Network Theory," "Object-Oriented Ontology," and "Speculative Realism" have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects-from Graham Harm…
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
The Destruction of Hood's Ordnance Train
How is something that is not there still present in a photograph? What is the importance of seeing a photograph in this way? Looking at George Barnard's Civil War photograph Destruction of Hood's Ordnance Train, this essay meditates on the operations of imagination in historical images
John Quidor in hell
The outcast space of Perugino
When I was a boy in St. Louis, Missouri, I grew up across the street from the house of Norris K. Smith, an art historian who taught at Washington University. As I have gotten older, I associate this experience with a picture in Smith’s last book–a book about Renaissance perspective and a kind of career summation he published in 1994 called Here I Stand: Perspective from Another Point of View. The picture, painted by the artist Robert Jordan, show…
The Forest
Forest
Art (19 works) · Art history (17 works) · History (13 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Visual arts (9 works) · Performance art (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Library science (5 works) · Art, Politics, and Modernism (4 works) · Download (4 works)