The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism)

This volume presents for the first time in English the work of one of the most important French theorists of today. The selection represents the whole of Schefer's career, from the 1960s, when he was influenced by structuralism, to his more lyrical and autobiographical essays of the 1990s, which meditate on the role of the spectator in relation to art practice. Schefer considers the nature of art, film and writing through his close examination of artists as diverse as Uccello, Poussin and Cy Twombly, and writers such as Paul Valéry and Roland Barthes. These provocative essays register the writer's direct confrontation with these media in a way that stands as a corrective to the formal traditions of interpretation and criticism. Schefer's work offers some of the most original interpretations of art available today.