ART THEORY /// Texts, Writings & Manistos

1637
Painting of the Ancients – Franciscus Junius
1885
“Ten o’clock” – Mr. Whistler
1886
Symbolist Manifesto – Jean Moréas
1887
“Neo-Impressionism” – Félix Fénéon
1895
Preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Wagnerian Painting – Teodor de Wyzewa
1896
The tall office building artistically considered – Louis H. Sullivan
1897
A Throw of the Dice never will abolish Chance – Stéphane Mallarmé
The Beauty of Form and Decorative Art – August Endell
1899
Letter to Fontainas – Gauguin
from Eugene Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism – Signac
1901
On dream [excerpts] – Freud
1902
The Metropolis and Mental Life – Georg Simmel
1903
Sex and character – Otto Weininger
1904
The Mediums of Art, Past and Present – Julius Meier-Graefe
Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism [excerpt] – Max Weber
1905
Party Organization and Party Literature – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
1906
Programme of the Briicke – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1907
‘Cezanne’ – Maurice Denis
1908
Ornament and Crime – Adolf Loos [Excerpts]
from Abstraction and Empathy – Wilhelm Worringer
Notes of a Painter – Henri Matisse
Nature and Culture – Alexander Blok
1909
Manifesto of futurism – Marinetti
From Gauguin and van Gogh to Neo-Classicism – Maurice Denis
An Essay in Aesthetics – Roger Fry
1910
Manifesto of Futurist Musicians – Pratella
Manifesto of the Futurist Painters
Someone is buried here – Adolf LOOS
Note on Painting – Jean Metzinger
1911
from Concerning the Spiritual in Art – Wassily Kandinsky
1912
On the Subject in Modern Painting – Guillaume Apollinaire
from The Cubist Painters (Chapter VII) – Guillaume Apollinaire
Present Tendencies in Painting – Jacques Riviere
from Cubism – Albert Gleizes & Jean Metzinger
The “Savages” of Germany – Franz Marc
Two Pictures – Franz Marc
On Primitive Art – Emil Nolde
On the Nature of Visions – Oskar Kokoschka
Neo-Primitivism – Alexander Shevchenko
On the Construction of Reality in Pure Painting – Robert Delaunay
The New Painting: Art Notes – Guillaume Apollinaire
1913
The Origins of Painting and its Representational Value – Fernand Leger
The Bases of the New Creation – Olga Rozanova
Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without strings—Words-in-Freedom
The Art of Noises – Russolo
1914
Manifesto of Futurist Architecture – Sant’Elia (1914)
The Cologne Lecture – Wassily Kandinsky
The Aesthetic Hypothesis – Clive Bell
from Expressionism – Hermann Bahr
Our Vortex – Percy Wyndham Lewis
‘Foreword’ to the planned second volume of Der Blaue Reiter – Franz Marc
Contemporary Achievements in Painting – Fernand Leger
In These Great Times – Karl Kraus
1915
Picasso Speaks – Pablo Picasso
Mystery and Creation – Giorgio de Chirico
Gaudier-Brzeska Vortex – Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska (Written from the Trenches) – Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting – K.Malevich
1917
Thoughts on Painting – Georges Braque
War, the World’s Only Hygiene – Marinetti
A Slap in the Face of Public Taste – Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov
What Is Art? – Benedetto Croce
1919
Statement in catalogue of Tenth State Exhibition – Popova
The Initiative Individual in the Creativity of the Collective – Tatlin
KOMFUT – Programme Declaration
Non-Objective Art and Suprematism – Malevich
1920
Letter to Mikhail Matiushin – K. MALEVICH
from Bulletin of the E.C.M.S.A. Workshops – K. MALEVICH
Organizational Program – RODCHENKO Aleksandr
The Monument to the Third International – Punin
Programme of a United Audience in Painting of the Vitebsk State Free Workshops – UNOVIS
The Realistic Manifesto – GABO, PEVNER
The Question of Imitative Art – Malevich
1921
Letter to David Shterenberg – K. MALEVICH
Tradition and individual talent – T.S. Eliot
Plan for the Physico-psychological Department of the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences – Kandinsky
Neo-Plasticism: the General Principle of Plastic Equivalence – Mondrian
1922
Literature and Revolution [Excerpts] – Leon Trotsky
Programme of the First Working Group of Constructivists
from Constructivism – Gan
1923
Manifesto of Surrealism – Andre Breton
The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought – Georg Lukacs
The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus – Walter Gropius
1925
Declaration of the Bureau de Recherches Surrealistes – Louis Aragon
Art Is in Danger – George Grosz & Wieland Herzfelde
to Comrade Petrov – K. MALEVICH
1926
Photography versus Painting – Osip Brik
1927
We Are Searching – Sergei Tretyakov
We Raise the Alarm – Sergei Tretykov
At the Bauhaus in Dessau – K. MALEVICH
1928
Against the synthetic portrait, for the snapshot – RODCHENKO Aleksandr (1928)
Surrealism and Painting – Andre Breton
Painting and the Problem of Architecture – Kasimir Malevich
October (Association of Artistic Labour) – Declaration
Architecture and Revolution — Revolutionary Architecture? Utopian Designs by Tatlin, Lissitzky, and Others
1929
Second Manifesto of Surrealism – Andre Breton
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language – V.N. Volosinov
from ‘Critical Dictionary’ – Georges Bataille
The Lugubrious Game – Georges Bataille
1930
Letter to Aleksandr S. Nikolsky – K. MALEVICH
STATEMENT NO OF INTERROGATION – K. MALEVICH
The Stinking Ass – Salvador Dali
1931
Letter to Gershom Scholem – Walter Benjamin
1932
Letter to Meyerhold – Kasimir Malevich
1933
La Radia – T. Marinetti, Masnata
1934
The Author as Producer – Walter Benjamin
from Aesthetic Function – Jan Mukafovsky
1935
Conversation with Picasso – Pablo Picasso
What Is Revolutionary Art? – Herbert Read
1936
What is art- John Graham
Preface to System & dialectic of art – John Graham
The New Realism Goes On – Fernand Leger
The Social Bases of Art – Meyer Schapiro
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – Walter Benjamin
Letter to Benjamin – Theodor Adorno
The Mirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the I – Lacan
1937
The Constructive Idea in Art – Gabo
Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art – Mondrian
Sculpture – Hepworth
1938
The critique of subjective idealism – Georg Lukacs
Editorial Statement of American Abstract Artists (AAA)
Popularity and Realism – Bertolt Brecht
Education of the Architect – Hannes Meyer
Discussing Expressionism – Ernst Bloch
Towards a Free Revolutionary Art – Breton, Rivera, Trotsky
1939
Avant-garde and KITSCH – Clement Greenberg
1940
The Fall of Paris – Harold Rosenberg
The American Avant-Garde – Clement Greenberg
1942
Open Opinions on Painting – Maurice de Vlaminck
1943
Statement – Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman
Statement – Adolph Gottlieb
from Marxism and Modern Art – Francis Klingender
1944
Answers to a Questionnaire – Jackson Pollock
The Parable of the Oarsmen -Adorno, Horkheimer
The Modern Painter’s World – Robert Motherwell
Why I Joined the Communist Party – Pablo Picasso
1945
from Existentialism and Humanism – Jean-Paul Sartre
Statement to Simone Tery – Pablo Picasso
The Human Body Considered as an Object – Fernand Leger
1946
Notes for the Well-Lettered – Jean Dubuffet
The White Manifesto – Lucio Fontana
1947
The Romantics were Prompted . . . – Mark Rothko
Statement – Mark Rothko
The Ideographic Picture – Barnett Newman
The First Man Was an Artist – Barnett Newman
from Van Gogh: the Man Suicided by Society – Antonin Artaud
The Question of What Will Emerge Is Left Open – Motherwell, Rosenberg
1948
Language – Asger Jorn
The Sublime Is Now – Barnett Newman
The Decline of cubism – Clement Greenberg
Interview with William Wright – Jackson Pollock
Crude Art Preferred to Cultural Art – Jean Dubuffet
The Search for the Absolute – Jean-Paul Sartre
Abstraction and Adventure in Contemporary Art – Jean-Michel Atlan
1949
from The Congressional Record – George Dondero
from Three Dialogues – Samuel Beckett,Georges Duthuit
1950
from The Politics of Freedom – Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr
1951
‘Creation and Revolution’ from The Rebel – Albert Camus
Reflections on the Statuettes, Figures and Paintings of Alberto Giacometti – Ponge
1952
Is Modern Art Communistic? – Alfred H. Barr Jr
The Sculptor in Modern Society – Henry Moore
Aesthetics, the Artist and the Audience – David Smith
Statement – Clyfford Still
from The American Action Painters – Harold Rosenberg
Letter to Gordon Smith – Clyfford Still
from An Other Art – Michel Tapié
1953
Economic Support of Art in America Today – David Smith
1955
Open Letter to the Painters, Sculptors and Engravers of the Soviet Union – Siqueiros
1956
from Myth Today – Roland Barthes
Le Corbusier’s Chapel and the crisis of rationalism – James Stirling
1957
Writings from the Situationist International – Guy Debord
Commitment – Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Creativ Act – Marcel Duchamp
1958
The Ideology of Modernism – Georg Lukacs
The Arts and the Mass Media – Lawrence Alloway
1959
from Assemblages, Environments and Happenings – Allan Kaprow
Tradition and Identity – David Smith
Sorbonne Lecture – Yves Klein
1960
Three Dimensional – Piero Manzoni
The New Realists – Pierre Restany
Modernist Painting – Clement Greenberg
1961
The Analysis of Culture – Raymond Williams
On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and his Work – John Cage
For the Finest Art, Try Pop – Richard Hamilton
‘I Am for an Art . . .’ – Claes Oldenburg
from Eye and Mind – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Pandemonium Manifestos – Georg Baselitz
1962
from The Shape of Time – George Kubler
from Commitment – Theodor Adorno
Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler – Barnett Newman
from After Abstract Expressionism – Clement Greenberg
Art as Art – Ad Reinhardt
Interview with David Sylvester – Francis Bacon
1963
Interview with Gene Swenson – Andy Warhol
1964
Lecture to the College Art Association – Roy Lichtenstein
Understanding Media (Introduction) – Marshall McLuhan
Interview with Samuel Wagstaff Jr – Tony Smith
from Three American PAinters – Michael Fried
1965
Interview with David Sylvester – Jasper Johns
Specific Objects – Donald Judd
A city is not a tree – Christopher Alexander
1966
A media art – Costa, Escary, Jacoby
from ‘Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings’ – Michael Fried
on Sculpture 1-3 – Robert Morris
1967
A Matter of Meaning It – Stanley Cavell
Reflections on Sculpture – Tucker, Scott
ART and Objecthood – Michael Fried
Paragraphs on Conceptual Art – Sol LeWitt
Statement – Buren, Mosset, Parmentier & Toroni
The Exorbitant – Jacques Derrida
1968
AVANT GARDE ATTITUDES
Air Show – Terry Atkinson & Michael Baldwin
A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects – Robert Smithson
Anti Form – Robert Morris
1969
The Absence of Presence – Victor Burgin
Sentences on Conceptual Art – Sol LeWitt
Interview with Arthur R. Rose – Robert Barry
Art after Philosophy – Joseph Kosuth
Beware – Daniel Buren
Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects – Robert Morris
Art & Language (Editorial) – Terry Atkinson
The Role of Language – Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden
Situational Aesthetics – Victor Burgin
from Art Povera – Germano Celant
What Is an Author? – Michel Foucault
1970
The Work of Art as Object – Richard Wollheim
from ‘The Artist and Politics: a Symposium – Jo Baer
from ‘The Artist and Politics: a Symposium – Donald Judd
From ‘THE ARTIST AND POLITICS: A SYMPOSIUM’ – Robert Smithson
From ‘THE ARTIST AND POLITICS: A SYMPOSIUM’ – Lawrence Weiner
from ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ – Louis Althusser
from ‘Postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Thomas Kuhn
1971
Pratt Institute Lecture – Frank Stella
From Work to Text – Roland Barthes
1972
Not Just a Few Are Called, But Everyone – Joseph Beuys
Cultural Confinement – Robert Smithson
from Other Criteria – Leo Steinberg
A View of Modernism – Rosalind Krauss
1973
Interview with Ursula Meyer – Lucy Lippard
Ethic of Labour, Aesthetic of Play – Jean Baudrillard
1974
I Am Searching for Field Character – Joseph Beuys
Prolegomenon’ to Revolution in Poetic Language – Julia Kristeva
1975
The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation – Ian Burn
from ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ – Laura Mulvey
1976
Editorial to Art-Language
A Lecture – Michel Foucault
The Hyper-realism of Simulation – Jean Baudrillard
The Hyper-realism of Simulation – Jean Baudrillard
1977
from ‘Reflections on the Brecht-Lukacs Debate’ – Fredric Jameson
Dominant, Residual and Emergent – Raymond Williams
1978
from ‘Modernism and Capitalism’ – Daniel Bell
1979
MODERN AND POSTMODERN – Clement Greenberg
Introduction to The Postmodern Condition – Jean-François Lyotard
1980
Towers of Horror – Julia Kristeva
Art & Language Paints a Picture – Baldwin, Ramsden & Harrison
1981
Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community – Edward Said
Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism – Mary Kelly
ART CRITICISM – Clement Greenberg
Modernity : An Incomplete Project – Jurgen Habermas
from The Originality of the Avant-Garde – Rosalind Krauss
1982
What Is Postmodernism? – Jean-Francois Lyotard
Statement – Sherrie Levine
Letter to a Canadian Curator – Baldwin,Ramsden, Harrison
Taking Pictures – Barbara Kruger
1983
Nature and Culture – Peter Halley
1984
The Deconstruction of Expression – Fredric Jameson
from … not about master-pieces but why there are so few of them – JUDD
1985
Sexuality in the Field of Vision – Jacqueline Rose
from ‘The Cultural-Historical Tragedy of the European Continent’
from ‘Subversive Signs’ – Hal Foster
1986
From Criticism to Complicity – Koons, Halley, Steinbach, Bickerton, Levine
Image and Word – W. J. T. Mitchell
Mute Poesy and Blind Painting – W. J. T. Mitchell
Tainting after Art?: Comments on Wollheim – Flint Schier
from Interview with Benjamin Buchloh – Gerhard Richter
1987
When Was Modernism? – Raymond Williams
1989
Who Claims Alterity? – Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak
Artillery Sheds – Donald JUDD
1990
The Yale Lecture – Richard Serra
1991
Notes – Gerhard Richter
1999
Barcellona Manifesto – Enzo Mari
2000
Sound Art? – Max Neuhaus
2003
Annotations for Sound Art – Julian Cowley
2012
Omnitheism and Democracy – Michelangelo PISTOLETTO

ART THEORY /// Texts, Writings & Manistos

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