Stephen Bann

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding valuable service in a wide range of useful activities. It comprises five classes of awards across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two o ...

, FBA (born 1 August 1942) is the emeritus professor of

history of art The history of art focuses on objects made by humans for any number of spiritual, narrative, philosophical, symbolic, conceptual, documentary, decorative, and even functional and other purposes, but with a primary emphasis on its aesthetics ...

at the

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a public university, public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Br ...

. He was subsequently appointed professor of modern cultural studies at the

University of Kent at Canterbury A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Univ ...

, and later appointed to the chair in history of art at Bristol in 2000. He was made a

Fellow of the British Academy Fellowship of the British Academy (post-nominal letters FBA) is an award granted by the British Academy to leading academics for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The categories are: # Fellows – scholars resident in t ...

in 1998, and named a

in 2004.

Early life

Stephen Bann was born on 1 August 1942 in Manchester, England. He was educated at

Winchester College Winchester College is an English Public school (United Kingdom), public school (a long-established fee-charging boarding school for pupils aged 13–18) with some provision for day school, day attendees, in Winchester, Hampshire, England. It wa ...

and

King's College, Cambridge King's College, formally The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge, is a List of colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college lies beside the River Cam and faces ...

, attaining his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 1967.

Career

Stephen Bann's work has been influential in focusing scholarly attention toward connections between the history of art and visual culture. ''The Clothing of Clio'' (1984), ''The Inventions of History'' (1990) and ''Romanticism and the Rise of History'' (1995) are concerned in particular with the deepening consciousness of history particular to the 19th century. The examples that Bann takes are explained by him not from a

reductive art Reductive art is a term to describe an artistic style or an aesthetic, rather than an art movement. Movements and other terms associated with reductive art include Minimal art, ABC art, anti-illusionism, cool art, rejective art, Bauhaus aesthetic, ...

historical perspective, but through acknowledgement of such examples' location in a broader, metahistorical network. Visual sources, sometimes even unlikely or fragmentary ones, are valued by the author as still points of reference: "a visual example provides a support for the exegesis that the reader (spectator) can follow in a directly participatory way. Its very self-contained nature (as opposed to an extract from a text) enables it to generate cross-references as well as to provide a field for practical analysis" (''Romanticism and the Rise of History''). Bann's notion of "historical-mindedness" as originating in the 19th century and particularly in Paris is unique in the addition of the concept of "the poetics of the museum". Here, the subjectivity of the author of a museum or collection is established as significant in determining how particular representations of the past are structured, specifically in terms of tendencies toward synecdoche (empathetic recreation) and/or metonymy (mechanical and sequential display). Bann's interest in

semiotics Semiotics ( ) is the systematic study of sign processes and the communication of meaning. In semiotics, a sign is defined as anything that communicates intentional and unintentional meaning or feelings to the sign's interpreter. Semiosis is a ...

, the capacity of images to bear significance, is exemplified in ''Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness'' (1994), which comments on the peculiar history and status of a 17th-century cabinet of curiosity as an aid in the self-definition of the collector. Themes of travel and acquisition are brought together on these grounds to detect meaning. Similarly, in writing on the history of gardens, Bann has found cause to cite the Scottish poet

Ian Hamilton Finlay Ian Hamilton Finlay (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. Life Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, to James Hamilton Finlay and his wife, Annie Pettigrew, both of Scots descent. He was educa ...

, among others indicative of a contemporary imaginative predisposition. ''In Ways Around Modernism'' (2006), Bann affirms his approach of appreciating commentaries or histories as themselves change- and epoch-making. The argument is completed with an assessment of

Post-Modernism Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting the wor ...

in connection with "the historical phenomenon of 'curiosity'" which, for Bann, "has resurfaced as a widespread and noteworthy feature of present-day art". By implication, Post-Modernism may thus reveal overlooked qualities in

Modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

. An insistence upon the importance of looking and unstinting attentiveness, in addition to inter-disciplinary openness, is characteristic and influential in his writing. Bann's book ''Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France'' (Yale University Press, 2001) was awarded the 2002 R. H. Gapper Book Prize by the UK

Society for French Studies The Society for French Studies, or SFS, is the oldest learned association for French Studies in the UK and Ireland. It aims to promote teaching and research in French Studies within higher education. the president is Professor Judith Still. S ...

. This prize recognises the work as the best book published by a scholar working in Britain or Ireland in French studies in 2001. Bann has also contributed translations of

Roland Barthes Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 25 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popu ...

's ''The Discourse of History'' and

Julia Kristeva Julia Kristeva (; ; born Yuliya Stoyanova Krasteva, ; on 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Colum ...

's ''Proust and the Sense of Time'' (1993).

Selected publications

1960s

* + Reg Gadney, Frank Popper, and Philip Steadman, ''Four Essays on Kinetic Art'', St. Albans, 1966 * ''Experimental Painting: Construction, Abstraction, Destruction, Reduction'', London, 1967

1970s

* + J.E. Bowlt (eds), ''Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation'', Edinburgh, 1973 * (ed), ''The Tradition of Constructivism'', New York, 1974

1980s

* ''The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France'', Cambridge, 1984 * ''The True Vine: On Visual Representation and Western Tradition'', Cambridge, 1989

1990s

* ''The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past'', Manchester, 1990 * + William Allen (eds), ''Interpreting Contemporary Art'', London, 1991 * + Krishan Kumar (eds), ''Utopias and the Millennium'', London, 1993 * ''Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness'', Michigan, 1995 * (ed) ''Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity'', London, 1994 * ''The Sculpture of Stephen Cox'', London, 1995 * ''Romanticism and the Rise of History'', New York, 1995 * "Eminent Views" with Bob Chaplin. Limited edition book, Connecticut, 1995 * ''Paul Delaroche'', London, 1997

2000s

* ''Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France'', Yale, 2001 * ''The Tradition of Constructivism'', London, 2001 * ''Jannis Kounellis'', London, 2004 * ''The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe'', London, 2004 (editor) * ''Ways Around Modernism (Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts)'', London, 2006 * ''Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France'', London, 2013 * ''The Garden at War: Deception, Craft, and Reason,'' London, 2017