Review
Making and Effacing Art is the work of a very superior mind...Certain works of Picasso, Klee, Degas, Rodin, as well as Johns and Stella, will never be so brilliantly or so precisely written about...Written in a wonderfully clear style, shot through with irony, displaying an extraordinary descriptive exactitude, unlike contemporary writing on the arts, this book takes its place in the great literature of philosophical art criticism...Every moment at which the reader is engaged with [this book] is like time spent in the soft-spoken company of an incredibly intelligent, very well read, totally unenvious, visually avid man who is tied down to no obvious profession, and who at his most serious is most intrigued, most amused, by the prodigious world around him. (Richard Wollheim Times Literary Supplement)
One of the major themes of this important book [is] the idea that modern works of art are created with an intuitive awareness that they are destined from the outset to come to rest in museums, earning a place in tomorrow's judgment of what happened yesterday or today, in what the author calls the future's past...Fisher's ideas are challenging and provocative, informed and wide-ranging, and they take into account the broad picture of modernism while providing in-depth and convincing descriptions of its specific manifestations. (Carl Belz Boston Globe)
A brilliant, intricate interpretation of modern art's progress as it reflects the dictates of the musuem...A ringing affirmation, in the company of Arthur Danto's Encounters and Reflections and Robert Hughes's Nothing if Not Critical, that today art criticism is often contemporary art's most interesting aspect. (Kirkus Reviews)
About the Author
Philip Fisher is the Felice Crowl Reid Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University.
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