Georg Simmel Rembrandt

First published in 1916 in German, this important work has never been translated into English--until now. Simmel attacks such questions as "What do we see in a work of Art?" and "What do Rembrandt's portraits tell us about human nature?" This is a major work by a major thinker concerning one of the world's most important painters.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"This book is a first of its kind: an edited collection bringing the finest of Georg Simmel's writing on art and aesthetics together, and bringing many of these essays into English for the first time. Simmel is considered one of the founding fathers of modern sociology but he, like his contemporary Walter Benjamin, wrote about many aspects of life and culture. Simmel's intellectual contributions have long been recognized and he is a keystone in cultural theory of the early 20th century. The essays in this collection are gathered topically and show the wide range of Simmel's thinking even within the arts: aesthetics, landscape, theater, sculpture, literature, and more. Austin Harrington is the brilliant guide behind this substantial volume. He served as editor and translator and also wrote an introduction. Richly informative and thoroughly familiar with Simmel's life and work, Harrington's introduction will itself be an important contribution to the scholarship on Simmel"--

This book draws upon the work of Georg Simmel to explore the limits, tensions and dynamism of social life through a close analysis of the works produced in the final years of his life and reveals what they might still offer some 100 years later. Focusing on the relationships between worlds, lives and fragments in these works, David Beer opens up a conceptual toolkit for understanding life as both an individual experience and as a deeply social phenomenon. Taking the reader through artistic and musical forms of inspiration, to the problems of culture and on to the conceptual understanding of lived experience, the book illuminates the richness of Simmel’s ideas and thinking. This sophisticated dialogue with Simmel’s lesser known later works will provide fresh insights for students and scholars of cultural and social theory and pave the way for a reinvigorated engagement with his ideas.

More Than Life: Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on Art is the first book to trace the philosophical relation between Georg Simmel and his one-time student Walter Benjamin, two of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century. Reading Simmel’s work, particularly his essays on Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin, alongside Benjamin’s concept of Unscheinbarkeit (inconspicuousness) and his writings on Charlie Chaplin, More Than Life demonstrates that both Simmel and Benjamin conceive of art as the creation of something entirely new rather than as a mimetic reproduction of a given. The two thinkers diverge in that Simmel emphasizes the presence of a continuous movement of life, whereas Benjamin highlights the priority of discontinuous, interruptive moments. With the aim of further elucidating Simmel and Benjamin’s ideas on art, Stéphane Symons presents a number of in-depth analyses of specific artworks that were not discussed by these authors. Through an insightful examination of both the conceptual affinities and the philosophical differences between Simmel and Benjamin , Symons reconstructs a crucial episode in twentieth-century debates on art and aesthetics.

The significance of the German philosopher and social thinker, Georg Simmel (1858–1918), is only now being recognised by intellectual historians. Through penetrating readings of Simmel's thought, taken as a series of reflections on the essence of modernity and modern civilisation, Efraim Podoksik places his ideas within the context of intellectual life in Germany, and especially Berlin, under the Kaiserreich. Modernity, characterised by the growing differentiation and fragmentation of culture and society, was a fundamental issue during Simmel's life, underpinning central intellectual debates in Imperial Germany. Simmel's thought is depicted here as an attempt at transforming the complexity of these debates into a coherent worldview that can serve as an effective guide to understanding their main parameters. Paying particular attention to the genealogy and usage of the concepts of Bildung, culture and civilisation in Germany, this study offers contextual analyses of Simmel's philosophies of culture, society, art, religion and the feminine, as well as his interpretations of Dante, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe and Rembrandt.

A quartet of essays on great European cities from the groundbreaking thinker Georg Simmel These brilliant essays, from one of Germany's greatest and most influential thinkers, are beautifully written and highly readable portraits of three Italian cities: Rome, Venice and Florence. Simmel saw the city as a work of art in itself, and taken together these pieces act as a powerful suite expounding that notion. A seminal work of psycho-geography, this collection has never been published together in English before.

Georg Simmel is one of the most original German thinkers of the twentieth century and is considered a founding architect of the modern discipline of sociology. Ranging over fundamental questions of the relationship of self and society, his influential writings on money, modernity, and the metropolis continue to provoke debate today. Fascinated by the relationship between culture, society, and economic life, Simmel took an interest in myriad phenomena of aesthetics and the arts. A friend of writers and artists such as Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George, he wrote dozens of pieces engaging with topics such as the work of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin, Japanese art, naturalism and symbolism, Goethe, “art for art’s sake”, art exhibitions, and the aesthetics of the picture frame. This is the first collection to bring together Simmel’s finest writing on art and aesthetics, and many of the items appear in English in this volume for the first time. The more than forty essays show the protean breadth of Simmel’s reflections, covering landscape painting, portraiture, sculpture, poetry, theater, form, style, and representation. An extensive introduction by Austin Harrington gives an overview of Simmel’s themes and elucidates the significance of his work for the many theorists who would be inspired by his ideas. Something of an outsider to the formal academic world of his day, Simmel wrote creatively with the flair of an essayist. This expansive collection of translations preserves the narrative ease of Simmel’s prose and will be a vital source for readers with an interest in Simmel’s trailblazing ideas in modern European philosophy, sociology, and cultural theory.

Historian Amos Morris-Reich here tracks the trajectory of racial photography from 1876 through the Weimar and Nazi periods in Germany and, briefly, after WWII. With a particular focus on German and Jewish contexts, "Race and Photography "reveals the important role of racial photography within academic discourse on race. Photography was not simply a medium of illustration but rather it was a conduit for new forms of visual perception. Approaching the history of racial photography from an epistemic point of view raises questions concerning the similarity and specific difference of photography compared with other scientific media, and makes explicit the scientific and cultural assumptions in which different uses of photography were embedded. Paying particular attention to the effect of photography on concepts of visual perception and also to the intricate relationship between racial photography and the imagination, Morris-Reich examines numerous scientists and scholars, both prominent and obscure, who developed photographic methods for the study of race or made methodical use of photography for its study. His careful reconstruction of individual cases, conceptual genealogies, and emergent patterns points to transformations in the scientific status of photography throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and uncovers the agency of photographic media in the history of scientific racism. This work makes a distinctive contribution to the fields of history of science, history of photography, intellectual history, European and Jewish history, and the history of race.