Phoenix

Aesthetic experiences are basically inconceivable without specific objects. What consequences does this object-relatedness have for the nature of aesthetic experience? To what extent do aesthetic objects also determine how they are experienced? The texts in the book consider their topic on the one hand empirically through examining concrete aesthetic objects from art, popular culture, and religion, but on the other, also by means of historical and theoretical reflections. By examining new adjustments to theory such as post-humanism, actor-network theory, object-oriented rational ontology, and speculative realism, conventional social-constructive explanatory models are transcended in favor of defining the aesthetic as a necessary interplay between object and experience.

The Middle Rhein has a high density of sophisticated church buildings and fortified castles from the Middle Ages. The Rhine and its tributaries were one key reason why these structures were built: these bodies of water functioned as a transport network, connecting numerous important cities. The authors of this volume examine Gothic architecture in the Middle Rhine against a backdrop of competition, conflict, networks, and processes of exchange.

This publication is the result of decades of research on urban planning in Mainz. Marcel Lods was commissioned to plan the reconstruction of the extensively destroyed city. The project, which drew international attention and contemplated extensive alterations to the cityscape, was never implemented. For the first time, this book offers a systematic description of Lods’s plans.

By examining the collecting interests and protective practices of Cosimo III de’ Medici, the study reveals the close ties between the arts and natural sciences in the early modern period. A number of previously unpublished sources of images and texts reveal a panorama of botanical splendor and scholarship during the era of the "last Medici" and examine the achievements and boundaries of grand-ducal patronage.

Together with Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth, Max Slevogt (1868–1932) ranks as one of the great artists of German Impressionism. This volume takes stock of earlier research perspectives and seeks new insights in a scholarly engagement with the painter’s artistic oeuvre.

In works of art, gray can signal the absence of color or be a color in its own right, a zero point in the art of painting or its summation. Gray is at once a means of (material) mimesis and abstraction, a mode of reflection, and a medium for presenting reality. The essays collected in this volume address the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon, its aesthetic implications, and the functional contexts of the “color gray.”

Having grown up in Germany or France, they have crossed the border between the linguistic and cultural areas several times, both literally and metaphorically. As border crossers/frontaliers, they have also become cultural mediators/passeurs de culture. In their respective fields – art, literature, science – they have provided impulses and opened up new possibilities by building bridges. They have developed cultural syntheses that others have been able to build upon, whether in Germany, France or beyond.

This volume brings together individual studies on David d'Angers, Louis Aragon, Ernst Robert Curtius, Émile Durkheim, Hans Hartung and Wols, Victor Hugo, Julius Meier-Graefe, Edgar Quinet, Germaine de Staël and Johann Georg Wille.

• With contributions in German and French

Look Inside

Allan Kaprow is regarded as a key figure of the 1960s happening scene. Little known, however, are the "activities" that he developed in California during the 1970s - exercises for couples, realised without an audience on the basis of a written score. They constitute an attempt to create a participatory art form intended to enable participants to engage actively in the shaping of interpersonal relationships. For the first time, the activities are explored with all their formal and thematic complexity, and discussed in detail. Examined in conjunction with the procedures and concerns of the social sciences and psycho-disciplines in the 1970s, they emerge as an independent, exciting contribution to a new discourse on intimacy.

• On Allan Kaprow's work after the Happenings
• New art- and cultural-historical perspectives on the participatory art of the 1970s

Look Inside

The very multifaceted artist Max Slevogt had contact with many different circles. As a leading member of the Berlin Secession and then the Prussian Academy of Art, he had an outstanding network and was a central figure on the art scene in Germany from the turn of century until the 1920s. The texts in the book situate Max Slevogt within the intellectual history of the late German Empire and the Weimar Republic and thus attempt to classify his work from the perspective of art and cultural history. Max Slevogt's extremely complex artistic practice is described from its intellectual, material, and communicative requirements. The constitution of his oeuvre and his identity as an artist hence go hand in hand and, as netlike structures, give rise to reciprocal interactions.