James D. HerbertProfessor, Art History Professor, Visual Studies |
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Research Interests |
Modern European art and music | |||||||
| URL | www.humanities.uci.edu/arthistory/faculty/jherbert.htm | |||||||
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Research Abstract |
While my original training is in the area of French modern painting of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and I have published extensively in that field, I have also broadened my interests significantly. My publications span from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and deal with artifacts from Italy, Germany, England, and the United States. I study architecture, sculpture, and gardens, and have trained myself in the sibling discipline of musicology. I have published on museums, and on the discipline of art history. Methodologically, my approach has ranged from the social history of depicted motifs, to the close semiotic analysis of pictorial details, to the comparative study of art and non-art objects in the manner of visual studies. In my most recent book, OUR DISTANCE FROM GOD, I have become intrigued by the theological dimensions of art and music. The discipline of art history has produced highly sophisticated accounts of the depictions of worldly space in art, especially in Western art since the Renaissance. Yet works of art can also evoke attributes of space more often associated with the divine: omnipresence rather than situatedness, or infinite distance paradoxically coupled with absolute proximity. Drawing on insights developed in recent theoretically informed Christian theology, OUR DISTANCE FROM GOD examines historical instances where works of visual art or music juxtapose, and sometimes conflate, mundane and celestial forms of distance. I explore three kinds of remove: physical expanse between objects, the semiotic fissure between representation and reality, and the ethical gap between practice and ideals. I discover that residual manifestations of the sacred versions of these forms of distance often continue to haunt our seemingly secular modern artifacts. I am honored to have received awards from the UCI Division of Undergraduate Education for Instructional Technology Innovation (2007) and from the School of Humanities for Teaching Excellence (2007). A video of me discussing my instructional use of Keynote (a Mac version of PowerPoint) can be found at: rtsp://media.nacs.uci.edu:554/ITC/TLTC/coft2007/stream_herbert.rm |
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| Publications |
BOOKS
ARTICLES "The Eucharist in and beyond Messiaen’s BOOK OF THE HOLY SACRAMENT." THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION 88 (July 2008): 331-64. "The Son that Does Not Shine in Raphael’s TRANSFIGURATION." WORD AND IMAGE 24 (April-June 2008): 176-98. "Crossroads of the King: The Unity of the Disciplines under the Absolute Monarch." In THE INTERDISCIPLINARY CENTURY: TENSIONS AND CONVERGENCES IN 18th-CENTURY ART, HISTORY AND LITERATURE, ed. Julia Douthwaite & Mary Vidal. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005. "What Matters" [Picasso & Ozenfant]. WORD AND IMAGE 20 (July-September 2004): 165-73. "Visual Culture/Visual Studies." In CRITICAL TERMS IN ART HISTORY, ed. Robert S. Nelson & Richard Shiff. 2nd. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. "The Debts of Divine Music in Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen." CRITICAL INQUIRY 28 (Spring 2002): 677-708. "A Picture of Chardin’s Making." EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 34 (Winter 2000-01): 251-274. "Bad Faith at Coventry: Spence’s Cathedral and Britten’s War Requiem." CRITICAL INQUIRY 25 (Spring 1999): 535-565. "Passing Between Art History and Post-Colonial Theory." In THE SUBJECTS OF ART HISTORY: HISTORICAL OBJECTS IN CONTEMPOARY PERSPECTIVE, ed. Mark Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly, & Keith Moxey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. "Reconsiderations of Matisse and Derain in the Classical Landscape." In FRAMING FRANCE: THE REPRESENTATION OF LANDSCAPE IN FRANCE, 1870-1914, ed. Richard Thomson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. "Impressionism." In THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AESTHETICS, ed. Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. "Privilege and the Illusion of the Real." In 12 VIEWS OF MANET'S BAR, ed. Bradford Collins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. "Masterdisciplinarity and the 'Pictorial Turn.'" Contribution to "Inter/Disciplinarity: A Range of Critical Perspectives." THE ART BULLETIN 77 (December 1995): 537-540. "The View of the Trocadero: The Real Subject of the Exposition Internationale, Paris 1937." ASSEMBLAGE 26 (March 1995): 94-112. "Gods in the Machine at the Palais de Chaillot." MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY 18 (June 1994): 16-36. "Painters and Tourists: Matisse and Derain on the Mediterranean Shore." In THE FAUVE LANDSCAPE, ed. Judi Freeman. New York: Abbeville, 1990. "The Political Origins of Abstract-Expressionist Art Criticism." TELOS 62 (Winter 1984-85): 178-87. |
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| Graduate Programs |
Visual Studies |
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| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2630 | |||||||
| Last updated | 09/11/2009 | |||||||
