INTERVIEW
The Sense of the Past and the Writing of History:
Stephen Bann in Conversation with Karen Lang
Karen Lang
Karen Lang: I’d like to start in the 1960s, when you were
writing about concrete art. You were also concerned with
kinetic art, comparative criticism, history, and more besides.
But in one of your first publications on concrete art you
noted that all definitions are dangerous. I think that’s a
fitting place to begin because from the outset you haven’t
necessarily inhabited a discipline but a space between disci-
plines. I wonder if you would tell us about your intellectual
formation?
Stephen Bann: Thank you very much, Karen. I will follow
your suggestion by starting in 1964. Because I think it may be
too tedious to begin before that. That was the stage at which
I was just beginning my postgraduate work. And I must say,
first of all, I have to make a confession. Michael Fried some-
times reminds me about this with a certain irony. In America,
they’d say you weren’t “trained” as an art historian. No, I
wasn’t. In fact, that’s true of many people of my generation.
Art history has spread, ramified, a great deal since then. But
1964 was, I think, a crucial moment for me because, in the
first place, I had just read Ernst Gombrich’s Meditations on a
Hobby Horse. Having done a fairly conventional history degree
at Cambridge, I found this to be a work that suddenly seemed
to offer new possibilities. Not necessarily in relation to the
work that I was doing in history and history of historiography,
but because I could see how it very much applied to the work
of the artists of the present day. I had been tremendously
impressed by the great Rauschenberg exhibition at the
Whitechapel Gallery earlier in the year—in fact, I had made
a brief television appearance on the local Anglia Television
talking about the exhibition. So I wrote an article called
“Rauschenberg and Representation.”1 That was an attempt to
see how the concept of representation was integral to
Rauschenberg. I was responding to the great Gombrich essay
where he writes about the “hobby horse,” putting forward the
notion of the substitute rather than the analog in represen-
tation. I think that’s something I’ve never ceased to be con-
cerned with.
Now, a bit later in that particular year, I was off to Paris.
This was with the blessing of my PhD supervisor, who was a
great man: Sir Herbert Butterfield. His name means little
today, perhaps. He was probably the only major intellectual
historian of the modern period then teaching at Cambridge.
Butterfield had written, when very young, a book that really
established his reputation as early as the 1930s. It was called
The Whig View of History, and what he was saying, effectively,
was that the Whig view is an attitude that not only abridges
history, and makes history abstract, it also propagated a kind
of historical writing that dealt with all issues in contemporary
terms. This was the history that in Butterfield’s view was very
dominant through the school that led from Lord Macaulay
and his successors to present-day Cambridge. He was affirm-
ing that history must be concrete. We must bring back the
past in a concrete form. So he was probably the only person
at Cambridge who would have been willing to supervise—and
did supervise—a thesis which was concerned, on the historio-
graphical level, with the implications of doing precisely that.
Butterfield gave me two pieces of good advice when I was
setting off for Paris in the autumn of 1964. One was: make
friends with the old lady! You may be puzzled by that, but I
had told him that the family château of the person I was
writing on, the early nineteenth-century historian and politi-
cian Prosper de Barante, was still in the family’s hands. The
baronne de Barante was still there every summer, and the
family had actually preserved one of the finest—to be precise,
the second-finest—private library in the whole of France. So
for subsequent summers, over several years after that, I would
visit the château de Barante and immerse myself in the riches
that were there. The second piece of advice—perhaps it really
wasn’t advice, but what Butterfield brought up in a long letter
that he wrote to me at the time—was the significance of the
concept of “historical-mindedness.” Now this was something
that he had very profoundly studied, looking both at contem-
porary German historiography and the earlier German his-
torical writings of all kinds. He was one of the very few
English historians of that period who had a truly European
network of connections. We had talked about “historical-
mindedness,” and in his letter he suggested that historical-
mindedness is a concept that people are well accustomed to
studying in relation to the Renaissance. That is the canonical
period, in terms of history of art as well as other modes of
history, when people believe that the fascination with the past
begins. But what he was saying to me, I suppose, was that you’re
quite right to start looking at the period around 1800, as a time
in which the sense of the past developed in a fashion that was
qualitatively different from anything that went before.
Actually, Michael Bentley’s recent biography of Butterfield
quotes that letter written to me and relates it to the fact
that Butterfield was then preparing to give the Gifford Lec-
tures on that particular subject. He would later regard them
as a failure, according to Bentley, because he was intent on
proving that the “sense of the past” was a product of the
development of historical science. I can say that nothing in
my experience has tended to support that hypothesis. In fact,
from my work as an art historian in particular, I would
conclude that the two modes of relating to the past are
asymptotic. They may, or may not, run in parallel, but they
never meet.

Stephen Bann in conversation with
Karen Lang, Association of Art
Historians, 38th Annual Conference,
University of Warwick, 2011
(photograph © Joanne Anderson)
Yet I have certainly stuck to Butterfield’s original intuition
and tried to develop it. This actually landed me in hot water
at one later stage when I gave a seminar at Harvard. I was
invited by Norman Bryson, and, as it happened, John Shear-
man, the great historian of Renaissance art, was in the audi-
ence. I was talking about the French painter François-Marius
Granet and the amazing paintings that he completed in
Rome shortly after Napoléon had suppressed the monaster-
ies—trying, as he put it, to “recover the sweet sense of peace
I’d had before.” I was suggesting that this was a mood that was
essentially created by the historical rupture of the French
Revolution, and it was really quite different from anything
that had manifested before. John Shearman was extremely
indignant. He suggested that this was yet another attempt to
take people’s attention away from the Renaissance, and the
Renaissance was indeed the period in which the modern
sense of history developed. I believe that you can be aware of
the significance of the Renaissance and also remain preoc-
cupied with the particular phase after the French Revolution
when, not only in France but in other countries as well,
somehow the sense of the past started to become more
concrete than ever before.
Lang: Yes. I’m put in mind of Gustave Flaubert, who captured
that sense so beautifully in Madame Bovary. At the awards
ceremony in the village an old woman is carted onto the
platform and a medal is fastened to her breast, though she
knows not why. In this scene the sense of the past has
changed, it has become “official,” and it is made startlingly
concrete.
Working on history and art history as you do, how do you
reconcile “the sense of the past” we find in literature and art,
say, and in the historical science? How do you negotiate the
asymptotic relation between the two?
INTERVIEW: BANN IN CONVERSATION WITH LANG 545
Bann: I think the main point is that one has to have a foot in
both camps. Your question reminds me of a question posed
to me at a recent conference, when I was talking about the
extraordinary development of lithography in the early nine-
teenth century and its capacity to seize the historical moment
in respect of the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris. The ques-
tion was whether the intense response to the historical event
was in any way reflected in changes in historiography. My
immediate response was that this was not the case. It was the
novelists who kept pace in their own ways with the technical
novelty of the lithograph. So, when Stendhal wrote the re-
markable passages in La Chartreuse de Parme about the young
Fabrice del Dongo desperately trying to find the action at the
Battle of Waterloo, the parallel might be in, say, Horace
Vernet’s wonderful lithographs of detached moments in a
battle—so radically different from the bird’s-eye view of ear-
lier pictorial treatments. But of course I could have answered
that my work, from The Clothing of Clio onward, has often been
concerned with the role played by illustration in historical
works.2 A work like Augustin Thierry’s History of the Conquest of
England by the Normans accumulated more and more images
in its successive editions, culminating in a full “atlas” of
relevant visual material. This was not just a matter of com-
mercial exploitation by the publishers. Readers were also
viewers, of the paintings at the Salon as well as the wood
engravings in the illustrated magazines. They brought certain
expectations to the reading of historical texts, and these were
progressively fulfilled. I made the point, however, in The
Clothing of Clio that Jules Michelet represents a more sophis-
ticated and self-aware stage in responding to this process. His
histories eschewed illustrations because they were in part
meditations on the visual legacy of the past—that is, the stock
of historical portraiture dating from the period with which he
was concerned.
546 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 4
1 Stephen Bann, Tierce de Picardie, London: Coracle Press,
1975 (lettering by Ron Costley)
Lang: Let’s go back to Gombrich’s conception of represen-
tation as substitution, which I believe you talk about in rela-
tion to concrete poetry. The notion of representation as
substitution reminds me of Nietzsche’s theory of representa-
tion in The Birth of Tragedy. I bring this up because it would
seem Nietzsche is also an influence. I don’t know if this came
from your adviser at Cambridge or just on your own. Repeat-
edly in your writing you take up the Nietzschean idea—
actually, you take up several Nietzschean ideas, but let’s start
with this idea— of taking a few steps back. Taking a few steps
back seems to resonate with your historical-mindedness.
Bann: Yes. You are right to mention that I was involved at the
same time with contemporary poetics. Let me add a short
footnote on the question of representation. Again I am talk-
ing about the year 1964. This was also the year when I first
met Ian Hamilton Finlay. I went up to see him in Edinburgh
and, as a result of that visit, published a short article, “Com-
munication and Structure in Concrete Poetry,” which was
very much indebted to another essay in the Hobby Horse
collection, where Gombrich investigates the concept of “se-
mantic space.”3 So there were two strands of activity going at
the same time, and from that point onward I also began to
write concrete poems, which gradually took over from the
topographical watercolors I had done before. It seemed to
me that one could use printed language as a material, involv-
ing spatial references and configurations that wouldn’t nec-
essarily be richer than— but would certainly appear very dif-
ferent from—the more or less figurative landscapes that I had
done before. These were initially produced in postcard for-
mat (Fig. 1), but later silk-screened by my friend Bob Chap-
lin, with whom I had a joint exhibition of historical and
topographical works in 1980.
Now I come to my interest in Nietzsche. As you rightly say,
this is a source that I have found extraordinarily useful. In
Nietzsche’s Use and Abuse of History, which is the text that I
have used most often, the central argument is that there are
three possible positions in relation to history: the antiquar-
ian, the monumental, and the critical. The essential point to
bear in mind, of course, is that none of the three is entirely
good or entirely bad.
The antiquarian, Nietzsche says, “breathes a moldy air.”
But that’s not all that could be said about the antiquarian.
Also he has respect for his forefathers, respect for the place in
which he lives, and so on and so forth. I am often reminded
of that “moldy air” in connection with another of my heroes,
Sir Walter Scott. Scott talks about how a good ruin is “like a
good Stilton cheese,” promoting this idea of an unmediated,
almost oral appetite for the past.
The monumental, of course, is something very different. It
is a relation to the great achievements of the past that Nietz-
sche recognizes in the founding fathers of German history.
The critical dimension, then, is essential for Nietzsche, since
it is the function that he himself most distinctively supplies.
I can cite one recent issue in my work that was, if not
resolved, at least helped by the use of these three categories.
I was asked to write something about Horace Walpole for the
fine catalog published in relation to the Strawberry Hill
exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2010), which
I suspect many of the audience saw.4 Horace Walpole had
always posed a problem to me insofar as I thought about him
as an eighteenth-century man, and yet in so many ways he
anticipated “the Romantic Interior,” to use Clive Wain-
wright’s book title. He was somebody who in terms of his
social position, his aesthetic tastes, and all of his attitudes to
collecting was in some ways a pioneer, but he also looked
back to the period of James I, when in his view the Middle
Ages really come to an end, with the reign that preceded the
English Civil War. So he had a really intriguing blend of
interests, which seem to be difficult to coordinate. I’d been
thinking about this for a certain time when it occurred to me
that one of the ways of looking at this would be in terms of
Nietzsche’s three positions. You could really see the monu-
mental aspect, the antiquarian aspect, and the critical as-
pect— or the ironic aspect, I suppose you might also call
it—all forming a kind of texture within which Horace Wal-
pole’s multiple achievements might be understood.
I would say that my problem initially as a historian of
historiography was that I was working in a domain that had
been established, the history of what historians wrote, but was
deadly dull. You had to sort of plow through books that
didn’t really present the issue that was interesting to me,
which was: Why are people fascinated by the past, and how
can we track the sense of the past, and the history of the sense
of the past, as it can be observed in concrete forms of repre-
sentation? That was something which took me a long time to
work out. I mean, it took me about ten years or so, because I
was very keen to be a historian. I wasn’t going to spin theories
out of the air. I think the first intuition really came to me
when I found a footnote by Michelet. This was long after I
 INTERVIEW: BANN IN CONVERSATION WITH LANG 547

had finished my PhD, which was preparatory work, but noth-

ing more than that. It was around the late 1960s, when I
discovered that Michelet had said: “if you examine the histo-
rians of the present day, Barante, Thierry, and myself form a
kind of cycle. You can only understand one in relation to the
others.” Now this is just a footnote in Michelet’s correspon-
dence. And I don’t think that anybody had paid much atten-
tion to it before then. But I was thinking to myself of that idea
of a cycle— one, two, three—in which number two relates to
number one, number three relates to number two and num-
ber one, and the whole sequence forms a kind of system. I was
reading, roughly at the same time, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The
Raw and the Cooked (Le cru et le cuit), which begins with this
wonderful “Overture,” as he calls it, in which he talks about
music. He talks about composers of “the code,” of “the mes-
sage,” and of “the myth”: about Bach, Beethoven, and Wag-
ner. He uses that particular series of examples, presumably
very familiar to his readers, in order to clarify a structural
point: that we have here a cycle, code, message, and myth,
which relates to Roman Jakobson’s different functions of
discourse, and so has its basis in linguistics.
So I suddenly saw a way of dealing with the Michelet cycle.
Is it that kind of cycle? I published an essay in 1970, which was
a way of testing that hypothesis.5 That was also my first
acquaintance with the concept of ricorso. Michelet himself was
not particularly interested in dialectics, certainly not inter-
ested in the idea of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but
thought very much in terms of cycles, and the person he
looked back to, I suppose the paradigm case of somebody
talking about cyclical or spiraling views of history, was Giam-
battista Vico. Vico indeed sees this motion of ricorso, or of
returning to an earlier point in a cyclical progression, as
being one of the fundamental motivating factors of history. 2 Cover of “Visual Poetics,” double issue of 20th Century Studies
15–16 (December 1976)
Lang: Yes, and that really puts pressure on a developmental
idea of history. With the ricorso, as you say, we have the spiral.
Nietzsche also talks about the spiral. So it’s not simply a
return to an earlier point; it’s a sort of widening out, too. If Moholy-Nagy.6 My friend Philip Steadman devised the ele-
we think of the motion of the spiral in terms of space (and I gant chart, which has sometimes been titled “Constructivism
think senses of space have been on your mind, from the Moves West” and turns up in the company of other spatial
concrete poetry onward), then this kind of history concerns representations of modernism, such as Alfred Barr’s famous
not only points in time or places in time but also spaces. diagram. In fact, it has recently resurfaced in a new edition of
Those spaces can embody different temporalities. Those Richard Kostelanetz’s 1975 anthology Essaying Essays: Alterna-
spaces can comprise the past, the present, the near, the far. tive Forms of Exposition.
As the 1970s progressed, I was also deputy editor, then
Bann: Yes, I think that one way of answering that would be to editor of the journal 20th Century Studies, and I was editing a
say that at a certain point in my career, I’d been working very number of collections of essays: on structuralism, the French
largely on spatial representation. I had published one of the new novel, Russian formalism, and so on. As my final double
first international anthologies of concrete poetry in 1967 and number, in 1976, I put together a little group of texts that I
devoted much thought to the setting of poems on the page. still very much value, entitled “Visual Poetics,” where I juxta-
Then, by the early 1970s, I had been commissioned by Robert posed essays by myself and by the artist Victor Burgin with
Motherwell to compile an anthology of texts on the history of those by theorists from very different traditions: the Middle-
Constructivism for the series Documents of Modern Art, European semioticians Jan Mukarovsky and Max Bense, and
which he was still editing. In both instances, it involved three French writers—Hubert Damisch, Marcelin Pleynet,
drawing material from a wide range of international sources, and Jean-Louis Schefer—whose work still means a great deal
and in the case of my Tradition of Constructivism (1974), I felt to me (Fig. 2).
the need to provide a spatial representation of the process So all these dimensions— historical and contemporary—
whereby a movement that began in Russia acquired an inter- were of interest to me, and the point you make about what
national dimension, extending as far as the United States sort of space should they occupy, or should there be multiple
with the emigration of artists like Naum Gabo and László spaces, is a relevant one. I decided then to do a rather
548 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 4
adventurous thing, I suppose—something that could easily
have failed. I wrote a study called The True Vine, which was
really trying to begin a long way back—to start with the
Greeks and come up to the present day.7 But to do this in
terms of organizing the material around a series of nodes: the
representation of the object, beginning with Zeuxis and the
grapes, and following the tradition of still life; the represen-
tation of the self, typified by images of Narcissus; and thirdly,
that of history. For the last of the three, I looked at the story
of the True Cross, which is surely the greatest and most
comprehensive historical epic to have emerged from Western
consciousness, and gave rise along the line to an incredible
number of superb works of art from the medieval period
through to Piero della Francesca, Adam Elsheimer, and in-
deed survived into the eighteenth century.
The best way in which I could identify what I was trying to
do there was again by taking a phrase from Nietzsche, in this
case from Human, All Too Human, where he talks about the
attitude to the past in terms of climbing a ladder. There are
two comparisons involved, actually. He says that invoking the
past is a process similar to how the ox plows, the “boustro-
phedon.” You go back and you return along parallel tracks,
you can’t actually proceed in straight lines, but you take the
curves that lead you into the next furrow, and so on. That is
another way of conveying the spiral motion, I suggest. But
Nietzsche also uses the idea of the ladder. He says something
that has always rung in my mind: that no one who wants to see
far ahead stands on the topmost rung of the ladder. What you
have to do to see furthest is to take a few steps back. That has
been always my rule when looking at the art of the twentieth
century. I think that if you start in 1900, which because of the
century division, seems very plausible—and at least until
recently was the century we were living in, therefore contem-
porary and not only modern—then in my view you immedi-
ately prejudice all kinds of issues around modernism, around
the connection between modernism and postmodernism,
and so on. And so taking a few steps back, both chronologi-
cally, and also conceptually, is perhaps the way to see further.
Lang: I’m reminded here of your comment about “no short
breaks” and of the way you’ve enacted this in your writing.
The idea of short breaks between periods or short breaks
between modernism and postmodernism really is a fiction.
Moving back, you’ve put pressure on definitions of modern-
ism and postmodernism. For instance, your book Ways around
Modernism looks at Manet but then takes a swerve toward
Ingres to talk about the ways his art, which concerns repro-
duction and the multiplication of images, leads to a different
definition of modernism from the one we generally hear
about and, consequently, to a different notion of postmod-
ernism.
Bann: Yes, I start with quite a simple proposition that we can’t
really know how we are to take postmodernism, or under-
stand postmodernism, if we don’t take into account the gen-
esis of modernism: how that particular concept develops.8
That is the initial proposition or hypothesis to begin with. But
the real paradox, which you touch on, seems to me that, on
the one hand, in talking about modernism, we are fated to
talk about Manet! And I don’t in any way deny that. I would
subscribe to that point of view absolutely, without any reserve.
On the other hand, what is happening at the time that Manet
is painting, and in a certain relation to it—although I
wouldn’t wish to define it in simple terms—is an absolutely
exponential development in the multiplication of images.
The painters who are most interested in their work being
multiplied— either in the form of engravings, initially, or
later in the form of photographs—are, of course, not the
modernists, or not principally the modernists, or not only the
modernists. The activities of Adolphe Goupil, the great
French pioneer of the marketing of contemporary art in the
nineteenth century, also have to be at the center of attention
for me.
So that one is talking here about another history, but a
history that is simultaneously affecting—through processes
that are obviously much more diverse than can be under-
stood in simply following the history of the Salon paintings—
the evolution of our ways of seeing. This is made very clear by
a phenomenon like the major Gérôme exhibition, which
took place in Los Angeles, Paris, and Madrid a few years ago.
We notice, of course, that virtually all the major paintings by
Jean-Léon Gérôme are in the United States. They left France
through the good offices of Goupil, Gérôme’s father-in-law,
and they succeeded in fertilizing a certain culture of the
image, which is blazoned across the skies by Hollywood. But
this was not just a matter of the diffusion of the paintings. As
the exhibition showed, Gérôme and Goupil were dedicated
to making innumerable print reproductions of the paintings.
So in Ways around Modernism, as in my earlier book Parallel
Lines, I was interested in seeing how you could so to speak
revise the idea of modernism as a kind of parenthesis within
history, and bring it into conjunction with the other history of
the multiplication of images, and the development of the
visual technologies in the modern world.9
Lang: Manet looked at paintings incessantly, of course, and
he quoted or took from reproductions. Should we conceive
of tradition, modernism, and postmodernism as a cycle, then,
in which, as you put it earlier, two takes from one and three
takes from one and two? Doing so would certainly help revise
our rather wooden term “avant-garde.”
Bann: I am tempted to say that anything would be better than
perpetuating that tired old military metaphor! Certainly we
are very far away from the position of Clement Greenberg in
1970 when he wrote of the avant-garde being “alone with
itself” and “in full possession of the ‘scene.’ ” I like triadic
models, as in the case of Lévi-Strauss’s code, myth, and
message. But I think there is a wider perspective to be inves-
tigated, and from that point of view we are perhaps talking
not just about the succession of modes of discourse but of a
quasi-Freudian return of the repressed: in other words, the
persistence of underground or disregarded discourses that
often confuse us by taking on a succession of different names.
Postmodernism is perhaps their legatee, rather than being
the sign of any epochal break.
Lang: Displacing postmodernism moves the attention from
irony to curiosity. You have studied curiosity from the early
modern period, when curiosity (and curiosity cabinets) came
 INTERVIEW: BANN IN CONVERSATION WITH LANG 549

to the fore as central motivating concepts for collections. But

then thinking about curiosity as it shapes and unhinges post-
modernism seems to be a very productive strategy . . .

Bann: Yes, I think it is. I became interested in curiosity partly

for the very local reason that probably the finest extant
collection of curiosities in Britain happens to be in the ar-
chive and library of the Cathedral of Canterbury, left by one
John Bargrave when he died in 1680, and accompanied by a
wonderful catalog and a set of annotations—let’s say ex-
tremely scabrous annotations— of the collection of portraits
of cardinals that he brought back from his visits to Rome (Fig.
3). All of these things were there in the city where I live, close
to hand. But looking further into the way in which curiosity
is important, in its historical development, in relation to
what’s happening today, I came across the work of Krzysztof
Pomian, very much the main figure who, over a long period
of time, had been writing about curiosity. And Pomian had
had his Foucault phase. Some of his earliest, still to my
knowledge untranslated, work was a direct reaction to Michel
Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things). Pomian
makes this very suggestive, but in my view ultimately falla-
cious, statement that curiosity was an “interim regime” be-
tween the regime of religion and that of science. Now that
would be a classic Foucauldian position, you might say, of
distinct epistemes. The more I looked at the question, the
more it seemed to me that what was happening was in fact
rather different: that the progress of curiosity, at least ini-
tially, developed from what Foucault would call the Renais-
sance episteme, from the habit of making analogies between
disparate parts of the world—what’s under the sea, what’s on
top of the mountains—and looking at nature essentially as a
divine plan illustrated by all of these different correspon-
dences and analogies. Now the scientific spirit in the seven-
teenth century repudiated curiosity to the extent that it de-
pended on the observation of particulars. I remember a
phrase that I quoted from Francis Bacon where he says that
it’s a “curiosity” to place a fruit tree on the north side of a 3 John Bargrave, page with portrait of Cardinal Gian Carlo
wall: in other words, when you plant the fruit tree where it de’ Medici, after an engraving in The Effigies published by
won’t fruit, it is a curiosity. In other words, it’s something G. G. de Rossi (1657), from College of Cardinals, 1662– 80.
against nature. And the regard for particulars above all is also Archive of Canterbury Cathedral (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by permission of the Dean and Chapter
against reason, because science progresses through the amal- of Canterbury Cathedral)
gamation of instances, experimentally tested and so resulting
in general laws.
In this context, my view of what happens to curiosity is present day, we may be misguided in looking at certain tenden-
rather different from Pomian’s. Curiosity does not actually cies as the result of Surrealism when they could be more appro-
disappear with the rise of science, it takes on other forms. priately seen as instances of curiosity in a new guise.
One of the forms it takes—let’s say the motivations are very I remember talking to Hal Foster about this, because he has
similar, although they turn in more specifically historical written about the kinds of art that he and the October group
directions—is that of antiquarianism. Antiquarianism vali- don’t really consider to be art but count instead as a form of
dates the attachment to the individual object. But the attach- ethnography. He seems to be quite interested in this idea of a
ment to these historical objects also takes on much more of return of curiosity, and he quoted to me Donald Judd’s idea that
an affective, even emotional character, compared with that of his art should simply be “interesting.” That is, in a way, a moti-
a seventeenth-century traveler like Bargrave, who always looks vation very comparable to curiosity. It’s fundamentally different
at his objects with a certain reserve.10 What has happened in from the hegemonic tradition of the beautiful, the tradition of
that process can be traced up to the manifestations of curi- high art. In the nineteenth century, when Charles Blanc started
osity at the present day. Surrealism is a cult of the object that the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, everyone knew what the “fine arts”
is at the same time a reaction against the Constructivist trend meant—the arts of disegno or dessin, comprising architecture,
of modernism, and also ramifies in all sorts of other direc- painting, sculpture, engraving, and so on— gardening, even.
tions, into anthropology, and so on and so forth. At the Then, on the other hand, the second title of the Gazette des
550 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 4
4 Cover of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1861)
Beaux-Arts was Courrier européen de l’art et de la curiosité, and that
covered a multitude of things like the occasional Far Eastern
object discussed in the Gazette, and even the occasional “Wood-
burytype” photograph that was printed in the Gazette (Fig. 4).
That was a curiosity as well. So at a time when Baudelaire gave
the collective edition of his writings the title that it has retained,
Curiosités esthétiques, there was this space newly available for what
was not classed as high art. One could say that the curiosity/
antiquarian tradition now informs much of the production of
many immediately contemporary artists. Indeed, it reaches
much further back. I have recently been given the task of writing
about the “boxes” of Joseph Cornell in the light of the tradition
of curiosity. It is fascinating that if one reads Greenberg’s early
review of Cornell’s work, the issue is entirely about Cornell’s
position within the spectrum of Surrealism. Poor Cornell was so
uneasy about being put in that bracket that he even wrote on
one occasion to Alfred Barr asking instead to be described as an
“American Constructivist”! I think we can do a lot better by
invoking sometimes quite distant manifestations with regard to
modernist art.
Lang: This shows us that curiosity is not only a historical
concept, it is also a motivating one—a way of seeing, a way of
considering. For the Gazette des Beaux-Arts to employ the term
curiosity to include objects from China, objects from Japan,
and so on, shows right there a sort of spatial boundary in
suggesting what lay outside the conceptual contours of art,
which is something your writing reveals. In terms of this idea
of curiosity as a kind of motivating concept, it seems to me
part of your interest in curiosity, which I am very sympathetic
to, arises from its location between the known and the un-
known, and from the way it puts pressure on received ideas of
art, including what we might imagine art to be. Art can turn
into a Baconian fact, free from all theory. Curiosity, then,
offers just the kind of needling we need. As a mode, curiosity
pushes against our efforts to take those received ideas as
givens. Instead, it pushes us to explore the situation anew,
which you do in your own writing.
Bann: Yes, I would say in reply to your point that there is a
sense in which curiosity is a state in which the ordinary
subject-object relation is modified. Take the subject-object
relation as one in which there is a clear distinction between
subject and object—the object is knowable, completely know-
able, and the subject is in possession of, or in a position of
power in relation to, the object. By contrast, the object of
curiosity always answers back. It invites stories to be written
about it, and that again is why I refer to John Bargrave for a
very fascinating example. He will, for example, include in his
cabinet a stiletto. And then he will say: this is the kind of
stiletto that was used for assassinating people in dark alley-
ways in Venice in the seventeenth century. You can see the
little place where the poison would be secreted. We can then
add our own complementary story. Bargrave must have been
well aware through his close relation Sir Henry Wotton, the
British ambassador to Venice, that the great Venetian church-
man and scientist Paolo Sarpi was nearly assassinated by a
Jesuit, in fact, who had been dispatched on that errand to the
free city of Venice by the Counter-Reformation papacy. Now,
coming up to the immediately contemporary period, I could
actually talk about quite a few artists who seem to me to adopt
that particular way of looking at, and being interrogated by,
the object. One would be Cornelia Parker, who employs the
tiny, thin strands of material extracted from Sigmund Freud’s
couch, though admittedly, she does also provoke and perpet-
uate great explosions! In each case, there is a kind of situa-
tion in which the object is not exactly undefinable but it is
certainly elusive. She is telling stories about something, and
you want to hear those stories as well. I can remember a
particularly wonderful example of this, which I witnessed at a
show in the United States. She placed on exhibition the
nightdress that Mia Farrow wore in Rosemary’s Baby, I believe.
You saw it at the end of a long corridor. And you respond, oh,
yes, that’s the dress behind a glass screen. But the strange
thing about it was that this was a kind of glass that, the closer
you approached—I don’t really understand how—the more
indistinct the dress appeared, and so it seemed to move away
from you. So when you got right up to it, as it were, you didn’t
see it closely, indeed, you hardly saw it at all. That seemed to
me a very effective paradigm for the relationship of artist/
material, artist/work, subject/object, and so on. Again, this
shifting, oblique relationship is involved.
Lang: Of course, Walter Benjamin famously says that the aura
looks back at us. I believe he means to suggest its elusiveness.

Importantly, this elusiveness counters the art historian’s or
the historian’s anthropomorphism, the desire to read into
the object instead of the object coming back, so to speak, at
us.
Keeping on with Benjamin now, let’s turn to origins. In
what you’ve written, I see you’ve tackled the origin as a point
in time. For me, coming from the German side of things, I
think of Benjamin’s description of the origin as an emer-
gence that can only be discovered retrospectively. No clear
path exists from past to present. You also speak of emergence
when you speak of origins and you show how no clear devel-
opmental line arises. This obviously puts pressure on the view
of time as an arrow and of history as developmental. Instead,
we can imagine radiating lines, if you will, and in terms of
meaning, we can say that various things are possible.
Bann: Well, I’d like to say a bit about Benjamin because The
Origin of German Tragic Drama is a work that I read long ago,
and I greatly admire for the sort of reasons you give. But I do
think that, as regards Benjamin’s work as a whole, one of the
problems is that we haven’t successfully or fully managed to
historicize Benjamin. I mean that The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, with its “mosaic” approach and its wonderful pro-
logue about discourse and representation, stands almost
alone. The shorter essays, which have taken most of the
attention, desperately need critical revision. For instance, the
“Little History of Photography” is full of wonderful intuitions,
but then this excellent French journal, which I recommend
to everybody, Études Photographiques, did a kind of edited
translation of the text, showing how many mistakes there are,
and how these are, of course, dependent on there having
been many sources and works that Benjamin could not have
seen. In other words, Benjamin was writing about photogra-
phy from a situation that we are not in today. We know a lot
more about photography. It doesn’t mean we lose his in-
sights, but there are certain points at which we have to bear
that fact in mind. And I have a great problem with the essay
that is probably best known, and has become absolutely, as
Roland Barthes would have said, “doxa”: “The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” What you were saying
about the evolutionary view, the developmental view, is to a
great extent inherent in that thesis. For instance, he recog-
nizes that the invention of lithography was a crucial stage in
the development of new visual technologies, but then he
remarks that it was soon superseded—the German word lit-
erally means “flown over”— by photography. Just as the Salon
of 1863 was traditionally taken as the genesis of modernism,
so photography is presented as the watershed, and the
unique harbinger of a crisis in the relation between the
original and the reproduction.
Now, when I read this, I feel that it simply doesn’t reckon
with the complexity of what was taking place. In fact, the
whole history of the “invention” of photography has been
adapted to fit a simplistic evolutionary narrative. A saying,
which was never actually said in my view, is attributed to the
painter Paul Delaroche: “From today, painting is dead.” Not
only does Delaroche, as far as I can tell, certainly not say
anything like that, it’s actually first reported in a rabidly
nationalistic work published long after his death in the 1870s.
I can find no trace of it in earlier literature. In fact, Dela-
INTERVIEW: BANN IN CONVERSATION WITH LANG 551
roche, who nurtured in his studio some of the major photog-
raphers of the age, like Gustave Le Gray, Charles Nègre, and
Henri Le Secq, produced a very judicious report on how
photography could help painters, and indeed, he is now
known to have visited Daguerre’s studio as early as the au-
tumn of 1838. So the way in which, in his history of photog-
raphy, Helmut Gernsheim associates the supposed remark
with the meeting of the two Academies of Sciences and Fine
Arts in Paris on August 19, 1839, is completely implausible.
What I would conclude, in the case of Benjamin’s view of
the print culture of the nineteenth century, is that it is
essentially the view of an extremely cultivated and sensitive
connoisseur of the 1920s. When he refers to an unnamed
artist as being the best-known engraver of his time, in the
essay “Unpacking My Library,” we can now see who it is that
he means, but we also have to conclude that this person
probably wasn’t the “best-known engraver” of his time by any
contemporary standard! That’s a misconception that has
come about as a result of the steep decline in the interest in
reproductive engraving, which Benjamin and many other
people of his generation saw as being a totally doomed
endeavor throughout the nineteenth century. I think that the
restocking of the gallery of forms of printmaking in the
nineteenth century—not only in France, of course, but also
elsewhere—and the investigation of the relation of the dif-
ferent modes, one to another, in respect of the overall devel-
opment of the market, the Salons, and the academies, is a
task that is very overdue. In short, I think that not only
Benjamin, but many people of that particular generation,
such as Charles Ivins, should be seen to have constructed
extremely powerful mythologies about visual culture in the
nineteenth century that don’t really stand up to close exam-
ination.
Lang: Yes, and you have certainly opened out our under-
standing of the nineteenth century and of those essential
spaces of reproductive technology. To get back to the doctri-
nal “Work of Art” essay for just a moment, in my view, fear
over the loss of aura pivots around fear over the object’s
ability to look back and, correspondingly, fear over the loss of
humankind’s ability to be affected by the work of art. So
Benjamin is not simply expressing worry over the loss of
painting’s resonance in the advent of reproducibility, he is
also exposing a deeper question in that essay: What happens
to humanity in the face of the apparatus? That’s what we still
haven’t tackled. This is why curiosity is so important—as a
relation that enables things of the world to look back.
What you have just said about powerful mythologies of
visual culture that don’t stand up to scrutiny puts me in mind
of Roland Barthes. His humanity suffuses his writing, and his
curiosity about the world—about how we construct the world,
about how we perceive objects and press them into the ser-
vice of mythologies—is there on the page. You encountered
Barthes very early on and helped introduce him into the
Anglophone world. Would you tell us about that experience
and how it affected your thinking?
Bann: I am glad you have mentioned Barthes. I think I must
have been the first person to translate an essay of his into
English. This was “The Activity of Structuralism,” originally
552 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 4
published in 1963, which we placed in the first issue of the
Cambridge-based magazine Form, in 1966. Later, I published
a review in the Times Literary Supplement of his La chambre
claire, the great work on photography that was published just
a few days before his tragic death. I had already received his
permission to translate the essay “The Discourse of History,”
and this was to appear in the 1981 issue of the Comparative
Criticism yearbook on “Rhetoric and History”—just next to my
own essay “The Historian as Taxidermist,” which became the
first chapter of The Clothing of Clio. In other words, Barthes
had a tremendous influence on my thinking, and somehow
this doesn’t diminish.11 On recently writing about Ian Ham-
ilton Finlay’s first garden constructions, I thought about a
significant passage from the 1963 Barthes essay that John
Dixon Hunt, as well as I myself, had quoted in relation to
Finlay’s view of the ancient world. Going back to our corre-
spondence in the 1960s, I verified the fact that we were
indeed discussing that essay at the time. The concluding phrase
in the essay “The Discourse of History”—that “the sign of His-
tory from now is no longer the real, but the intelligible”— has
always haunted me. On occasion, I have thought of it as a
Utopian statement, but I feel I am now coming back to it
again.
The other aspect of Barthes that I value enormously is his
avoidance of “doxa.” The word has already come up here, and
it surely epitomizes the quest that drove him into so many
different areas of study. We may not always be able to follow
him there, but it is the quest that counts . . .
Lang: There’s so much we could discuss. But let’s go back to
Nietzsche now and to the antiquarian, because the antiquar-
ian has been a central figure for you, in terms both of
recuperating what the antiquarian meant in a full sense and
that wonderful image in Nietzsche’s essay “The Use and
Abuse of History,” where he likens the antiquarian to a tree
rooted deeply in the ground. Nietzsche implies that the
antiquarian’s familiarity with and love of objects that have
come down from the past and from tradition provide a being
at home in the world. When he moves to the description of
critical history, he says that critical history is important be-
cause the antiquarian’s love of the past can make him lose
sight of the present. Yet Nietzsche cautions: critical history
presents a dangerous proposition when carried too far—as
he says, critical history can deracinate the past, can cut off the
past at its roots. As someone who appears to think about the
present as the way through to an understanding of the past,
you clearly do not want to cut off the past at its roots, even
though you are using that critical form of history. I wonder if
you would talk about this?
Bann: Yes, it reminds of me of what an old friend, Wolfgang
Ernst, said about me. He is now professor of media studies of
the Humboldt University in Berlin, but when I first knew him,
he was a young German student. In fact, I always remember
the very day he came to see me in Canterbury because a large
building nearby burned down that evening. So it’s a coinci-
dence that I can tease him with. He described me in a recent
essay as a media-critical antiquarian. It probably sounds bet-
ter in German, but there it is: a media-critical antiquarian. I
think that that really is the issue, because “antiquarian” here
has connotations of the Foucauldian “archaeologist,” some-
one who digs up discourse rather than digging up objects.
Media-critical— here media means, of course, a much broader
kind of arena than would be covered by any one particular
province of the visual arts, and certainly the element of
“criticism” is fundamental.
One of the things that influenced me most in this direction
in the 1970s was coming across the work of Hayden White. I
mean, after I had written this article about a “cycle in histor-
ical discourse,” I thought to myself, well, this cycle, will it run?
Will anybody be interested in the work I am doing? People
like the anthropologists Sir Edmund Leach and Caroline
Humphrey were very kind about that particular essay, and
about the issue of 20th Century Studies where it was published
in 1970. But it wasn’t obvious that anybody in the history of
art, or indeed, history, was interested as well. I spent quite a
long period actually, wondering where I should turn my
attention. The first article that I submitted to Art History was
returned to me by the editor, John Onians, who said some-
thing like: try to imagine what your worst enemy would think
if they were reading this essay! That was rather an interesting
response. I commend it to other editors. But Hayden White
published Metahistory in 1973, and soon afterward he invited
me to the Center for the Humanities, which he was directing
at Wesleyan. Through him, I met other American scholars
who were interested in the critical analysis of historiography,
such as Lionel Gossman and Natalie Zemon Davis at Prince-
ton, and I began to publish in a journal that has been
hospitable to me ever since, Wesleyan’s History and Theory.
Hayden White helped me to develop my work on museums
in particular. After an opportunity to test the ideas at Wes-
leyan and Princeton, I published a comparative study of two
French museums in History and Theory in 1978 —which has
since been translated into most major languages, though
never into French!12 I then began to think about how a
“cycle” of discourses would proceed through different stages
and became interested in the application of White’s concept
of irony. What you can’t ignore in early nineteenth-century
British culture is the fact that, by the midcentury, people were
actually being ironic about— or, if you like, taking the piss
out of—antiquarianism. When Horace Walpole’s collection
was put up for sale in the 1830s, there was a great catalog with
drawings by John Leech on the cover, and people were
invited to make fun of the absurdity of the objects. Indeed,
this cycle ending in irony seems to run indefinitely. I later
reformulated my ideas on various museums and museum
forms and wrote about the idea of the “ironic museum.” What
I wrote first appeared in Germany, where people were quite
interested in the idea of the ironic museum as being one in
which this relativization of the antiquarian and the monu-
mental by the critical should be made evident.13 We cannot,
so to speak, plunge back naively into an antiquarian phase,
and yet the tree must remain rooted. So it’s a sort of balanc-
ing act. I think that the museum is a very good terrain in
which to observe how that can be achieved, in terms of
display and ways of exhibiting. The museum is a place where
we place on record, like a fly in amber, our habits of viewing
and understanding the past, and these need, of course, to be
constantly reviewed in the design and creation of new muse-
ums.

5 Dessert plate with transfer design,
Vieillard Factory, Bordeaux, ca. 1863
(artwork in the public domain)
Lang: On that note, we could turn to something that also
comes through in your writing, namely, that you travel deeply
into a context and inevitably upset received ideas about it.
But then, it happens that in thinking about objects in relation
to history (which, of course, is what we, as art historians, are
meant to do, to put objects into history), the object does look
back at you. I mean, I feel that in your writing you come to
know a given context so well and the object so well that
contexts and objects ask questions that, as a historian and art
historian, you seek to answer in a historically sensitive way.
Bann: I hope so, but the notion of context often has to be
stretched. Let me give you two examples. Long ago, I had to
deal with probably the most frequently repeated dictum,
which has become a kind of sacred text relating to the origins
of modern historiography. This is Leopold von Ranke’s state-
ment that the historian must tell things “as it really happened
[wie es eigentlich gewesen].” And I thought, now how can we
begin to understand this? Of course, it is in part a question of
translating from the German, and that term “really” has to be
deconstructed accordingly. But what I envisaged as a context
for Ranke’s aspiration was the experimental taxidermy of a
Yorkshire squire called Charles Waterton. Waterton didn’t
stuff animals in the way they had previously been stuffed.
Before this, people just stuffed the carcass with the bones in
place, and then the skeleton became distorted, and the skin
pulled against the bones; it ended up as an awful mess.
Waterton actually took all the bones out, soaked the carcass
in corrosive sublimate, which he also used to keep his top hat
rigid, and then he would mold it from the inside so that it
formed a stable and perfectly lifelike specimen. This was, of
course, the epoch of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. So it seemed
to me that that notion of the wish for lifelike representation
and the artful technique to achieve it were points in common
INTERVIEW: BANN IN CONVERSATION WITH LANG 553
between the Catholic squire and the descendant of Protestant
pastors. That’s one example of context.
The other is perhaps a rather playful example, but I think
it’s not irrelevant. Thinking about modernism, and its ad-
vent: 1862 and 1863. What changes in 1863? I mean, obvi-
ously, there is Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe at the Salon des
Refusés, you know all about that. And effectively we focus on
that, don’t we? Indeed, we’re right to. It’s a fantastic painting,
fresh as the day it was painted, and so on. Well, I found in a
Bordeaux antique shop a dessert plate that showed two ladies
in a park, confronting one another (Fig. 5). The caption
included the dates 1862 and 1863. One lady was wearing a
voluminous crinoline, and the other was wearing just a sort of
straight-down dress and a floppy kind of hat. Of the two
accompanying gentlemen, one was all buttoned up with a
smart top hat, and the other wore a baggy coat, and so on. It
seemed to me this was very interesting because, after all, they
weren’t aware that modernism was beginning in 1863. On the
other hand, something was changing, and it was associated
with the styles of dress and the leisure activities of people as
they were depicted on this plate. The second lady with her
escort and the dress that slips off so easily could easily have
migrated to the Déjeuner. So the question of context could, in
a sense, send you mad, but there are always parallel events, or
chance discoveries that provide context. You just have to find
them by chance, by luck, and be observant when you find
them.
Lang: What you’ve just said shows that what seems to be far
away may actually be of central significance. Well, maybe the
last question would have you talk a bit about poetics. In
addition to curiosity and the playful, I see poetics moving
through your writing. What I have in mind is an idea of
poetics as a kind of forming and shaping. Again, resisting
554 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 4
6 Cover of The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of
History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984
received ideas or definitions and being aware, as a historian,
of shaping an account by bringing things in that haven’t been
used before and by the writing of history itself as a poetics, as
the shaping of an account.
Bann: Well, that brings a lot of things together. It certainly
does. I suppose I was very attracted to the idea of poetics from
the early 1970s onward. Partly because one of the first articles
I published in French was for the new journal Poétique, which
was founded at that time, very much under the auspices of
Barthes. He provided a splendid short article to head the first
issue: “Où commencer?”—“How do you start to do poetics?”
The editors were Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov, both
of whom I had been in contact with. So I was very pleased to
be associated with this venture. I called the 1976 collection
that I have already mentioned “Visual Poetics.” And when I
brought together the early writings on historical representa-
tion in The Clothing of Clio, I stated in my introduction that the
aspiration was to achieve a “historical poetics” (Figs. 6, 7).
Now, the reason for choosing “poetics” as the term was partly
because it was in the wind at that point. It was a way of not
having to talk about rhetoric, because rhetoric, or indeed,
the whole concept of figurative language, was bound up with
the notion of a departure from the norm, or what might be
dismissed as ornament. In other words, there was the idea
you were dressing up the material. The traditional posture of
rhetoric is to speak well, in order to persuade people of your
case in the forum or from the podium. And clearly that
connotation is not an appropriate one.
But what I found fascinating at that point was that a pupil
of Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist Dan Sperber, was writing
about the concept of a “cognitive rhetoric,” which could
indeed be called a poetics. The point being that these figures,
whether you took them in the strict sense or the traditional
sense, were not simply ways of departing from the ideal of a
neutral language, which conveyed the meaning adequately
and were in no need of a supplement. For Sperber, commu-
nication depended upon the figures, and the figures repre-
sented something that was not just an ornament but part of
the mental process, and consequently of the process of com-
munication. They were therefore integral to the reactions
and the very possibility of reacting by an audience or a
reader. So I suppose I still, for a similar reason, see the
question of the use of language, the poetics of language, as
being absolutely fundamental. I mean, in my case, it may
come from having very, very far back—I mean as far back as
I can remember, maybe further back—studied Latin. There’s
the factor of having that particular sort of training behind the
language you use— having an early experience of organizing
a language that is at the same time very different from, but
also fundamentally akin to, the language you customarily
speak. That, I think, can be a dominant factor in the way one
writes, and indeed, not only in the way one writes but also the
way one plans a book or an article in its various dimensions:
from the paragraph and the chapter to the overall organiza-
tion. All of these things come together, really, in the enter-
prise of a poetics. I recall that when Peter Burke reviewed one
of my books, he made the judgment that I was best as an
essayist! Actually I think that was a misunderstanding. But I
do undoubtedly attach a special value to the way in which a
book comes together from its separate elements— call them
chapters if you like. And, of course, I am very attentive to the
quality and character of the illustrative images, as one can
afford to be under the auspices of Yale University Press.
My forthcoming book, entitled Distinguished Images, is proba-
bly more “poetic” in this sense than any of my previous
ones.14 But, of course, I am hoping it will also satisfy people
who are curious about the print culture of nineteenth-cen-
tury France.
Lang: Poetics also has its ties with curiosity. Now we’ve run
out of time, however, so we should probably stop there.
Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Bann is Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at
Bristol University. He recently published Distinguished Images
and is curator for two exhibitions in 2014: L’invention de
l’histoire at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons, and works of Ian
Hamilton Finlay from his own collection at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
University [History of Art, Bristol University, BS1 1TB, U.K.,
s.bann@bristol.ac.uk].

7 Cover of The Clothing of Clio, Russian edition, Moscow: Kanon⫹Publishing, 2010
Karen Lang, editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, has published on
works of art, aesthetic theory, and the history of art history, 1790 to
the present. Her book Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in
Aesthetics and Art History examines the conceptual foundations of
the discipline of the history of art [History of Art Department,
University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, U.K., karen.lang
@warwick.ac.uk].
Notes
The text was based on a public conversation held at the Association of Art
Historians’ annual conference, the University of Warwick, March 31, 2011.
The authors wish to thank Louise Bourdua for planning the event and the
AAH for hosting it.
Unless otherwise noted, the sources given below are by Stephen Bann.
1. This article, appearing in the Cambridge Review, March 7, 1964, 333–36,
was in response to the Rauschenberg exhibition that took place at the
Whitechapel Gallery, February–March 1964.
2. The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-
Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984); The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), translated into Portu-
guese as Invenções da história (Saõ Paulo: University of Saõ Paulo Press,
1994); Romanticism and the Rise of History, Twayne’s Studies in Intellec-
tual and Cultural History (New York: Twayne, 1995); and “Print Cul-
ture and the Illustration of History,” in Constable to Delacroix: British Art
INTERVIEW: BANN IN CONVERSATION WITH LANG 555
and the French Romantics, ed. Patrick Noon (London: Tate Publishing,
2003), 28 –37.
3. “Communication and Structure in Concrete Poetry,” Image (London),
1964: 8 –9. See also “A Context for Concrete Poetry,” in Studies in the
Arts, ed. Francis Warner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 131– 49; and Ste-
phen Bann, ed., Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (London:
London Magazine Editions, 1967).
4. “Historicizing Horace,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael
Snodin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 117–33. Bann re-
fers to the audience listening to the conversation between him and
Lang.
5. “A Cycle in Historical Discourse: Barante, Thierry, Michelet,” 20th Cen-
tury Studies 3 (1970): 110 –30.
6. Stephen Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism, Documents of Modern
Art (New York: Viking Press, 1974; reprint, Da Capo Press, 1990). See also
idem, introduction to Constructive Context: An Exhibition Selected from the Arts
Council Collection (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978).
7. The True Vine: On Visual Representation and Western Tradition (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
8. Ways around Modernism, Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in
the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2007).
9. Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century
France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
10. Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness (Ann Ar-
bor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); “Travelling to Collect: The
Booty of John Bargrave and Charles Waterton,” in Travellers’ Tales: Nar-
ratives of Home and Displacement, ed. George Robertson et al. (London:
Routledge, 1994), 155– 63; and “Scaling the Cathedral: Bourges in John
556 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 4
Bargrave’s Travel Journal for 1645,” in Monuments and Memory: Made
and Unmade, ed. Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003), 15–35. See also “Shrines, Curiosities and the
Rhetoric of Display,” in Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances, ed.
Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 15–29; and
“The Return to Curiosity: Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Mu-
seum Display,” in Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium,
ed. Andrew McClellan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 17–30.
11. See “Barthes Britannicus,” PN Review 5, no. 2 (1977): 40 – 44; “Barthes
et Cy Twombly: Une écriture picturale,” in Barthes àpres Barthes, ed.
Cathérine Coquio and Régis Salado (Pau: Publications de l’Université
de Pau, 1993), 173–78; and “History, Myth and Narrative: A Coda for
Roland Barthes and Hayden White,” in Refiguring Hayden White, ed.
Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2009), 144 – 61.
12. “Historical Text and Historical Object: The Poetics of the Musée de
Cluny,” History and Theory 17, no. 3 (1978): 251– 66, reprinted in En-
glish and in Italian translation in Lotus International 35, no. 2 (1982):
36 – 43. A revised version appeared in The Clothing of Clio and was re-
printed in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, ed. Donald Prezi-
osi and Claire Farago (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2004).
13. “Das ironische Museum,” in Geschichte sehen: Beiträge zur Ästhetik histo-
rischer Museen, ed. Jörn Rüsen, Wolfgang Ernst, and H. Th. Grütter
(Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1988), 63– 68. See also “History as Compe-
tence and Performance: Notes on the Ironic Museum,” in A New Philos-
ophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (London: Reak-
tion Books, 1995), 195–211.
14 Distinguished Images: Prints and the Visual Economy in Nineteenth-Century
France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).