Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T05:10:17.048Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The artist speaks: the interview as documentation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Stephen Bury  and
Helen Scott
Stephen Bury
Affiliation:
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library, The London Institute, Manresa Road, London SW3 6LS, UK
Helen Scott*
Affiliation:
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library, The London Institute, Manresa Road, London SW3 6LS, UK
*
[email protected]
Get access

Abstract

Nearly every exhibition catalogue now contains an interview with, or related statement by, the artist. How and why did this become the norm? The increasing popularity of the artist’s words is traced back in this article to its roots in Romanticism, the rise of the mass media and the cult of the avant-garde artist. The value and reliability of the transcribed and printed words is questioned and a bibliography of published interviews with artists follows.

Type
Research Article
Information
Art Libraries Journal , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , 2000 , pp. 4 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Crichton, Michael. Jasper Johns. London: Thames & Hudson, 1977, p.48.Google Scholar
2. Courtney, Cathy. ‘Artists’ lives’. Art Libraries Journal vol. 23 no. 4 1998, p.5–8; Tomkins, David. ‘Creating the Artists’ Papers Register’. Art Libraries Journal vol. 24 no. 2 1999, p. 16–21.Google Scholar
3. The word ‘interview’ is used to embrace several forms – conversation (with both speakers nominally equal), dialogue (with one of the speakers prompting the other, more ‘dominant’ speaker) and ‘interview’, which is a sort of populist dialogue (usually with a famous or infamous person) and intended for publication – the word, of French origin, was re-introduced into French by 1883. This article will concentrate on the published variety.Google Scholar
4. Brown, Hilda Meldrum. Heinrich von Kleist: the ambiguity of art and the necessity of form. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, p.71–74; Paulin, Tom. ‘Juices of the mind: William Hazlitt and the idea of the unfinished’. Times Literary Supplement October 10 1997, p.15–17; Hazlitt, William. The plain speaker: the key essays, introduced by Paulin, Tom, edited by Wu., Duncan Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, p.33. Northcote’s conversation was also retailed by Ward, James, Conversations of James Northcote R.A. with James Ward on art and artists, edited by Fletcher, Ernest. London: Methuen & Co., 1901.Google Scholar
5. Art talk: the early 80s, edited by Siegel, Jeanne. New York: Da Capo, 1988, p.3.Google Scholar
6. Roditi, Edouard. Dialogues on art. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1960, p. 15.Google Scholar
7. Rodman, Selden. Conversations with artists. New York: The Devin-Adair Co., 1957, p.xx–xxi.Google Scholar
8. Catoir, Barbara. Conversations with Antoni Tàpies, with an introduction to the artist’s work. Munich: Prestel, 1991, p.[7].Google Scholar
9. The sculptor speaks: Jacob Epstein to Arnold L. Haskell: a series of conversations. London: William Heinemann, 1931, p.xi.Google Scholar
10. Inside the art world: conversations with Barbaralee Diamonstein. New York: Rizzoli, 1994, p.7; Artists in their own words: interviews by Paul Cummings. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979, p.xi–xii.Google Scholar
11. Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962-1979. New ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980, p.6.Google Scholar
12. A fruitful incoherence: dialogues with artists on internationalism, edited by Jantjes, Gavin in association with Malik, Rohini, Bury, Steve, and Tawadros, Gilane. London: inIVA, 1998, p.27 cf. Chelsea College of Art & Design Archive, transcript and tape.Google Scholar
13. Collingwood, R. G. The idea of history. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p.69 cf. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1984, p.60–106.Google Scholar
14. Krauss, Rosalind E. The Picasso papers. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998, p.39–40, 247, developing Patricia Leighton’s Re-ordering the universe: Picasso and anarchism, 1897-1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, p.132–134.Google Scholar