ART AS EXISTENCE: THE ARTIST'S MONOGRAPH AND ITS PROJECT

The narrative of the artist's life and work is one of the oldest models in the Western literature of the visual arts. In 'Art as existence', Gabriele Guercio investigates the metamorphosis of the artist's monograph, tracing its formal and conceptual trajectories from Vasari's sixteenth-century lives of the painters, sculptors, and architects (which provided the model and source for the genre) through its apogee in the nineteenth century and decline in the twentieth. He looks at the legacy of the life-and-work model and considers its prospects in an intellectual universe of deconstructionism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism.