Richard Neer

University of Chicago, Art History, Cinema & Media Studies, Faculty Member

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Richard Neer is William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Art History , Cinema & Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago. He is also Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry. He works at the intersection of aesthetics, archaeology and history, with particular emphasis on the role of phenomenology and theories of style in multiple fields: Classical Greek sculpture, neo-Classical French painting, and mid-20th century cinema. His Ph.D. is from the University of California at Berkeley (1998), his A.B. from Harvard College (1991). He has received fellowships and awards from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the J. Paul Getty Trust and the American Academy in Rome. His most recent books are The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and The Art and Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, 2000–100 BCE (Thames & Hudson, 2011). He has published on the politics of architectural sculpture in Greece, the history of connoisseurship, French painting and recent cinema.
Phone: 773-702-0278
Address: Art History
5540 S. Greenwood Ave.
Chicago IL 60637

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Books by Richard Neer

Greek Art and Archaeology: A New History, c. 2500-c. 150 BCE

The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture

Style and politics in Athenian vase-painting: the craft of democracy, ca. 530-460 B.C.E.

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Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum: Athenian Red-Figured Closed Vessels from the Collection of Molly and Walter Bareiss. Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Fascicule 7

Papers by Richard Neer

Statues, Stelai, and Turning Posts in Greece, c.565–c.465 BCE

Landscape and Space

This essay is about Greek sculpture of the Archaic and Classical periods but addresses larger iss... more This essay is about Greek sculpture of the Archaic and Classical periods but addresses larger issues of method. It argues that iconography, while indispensable, is a limited way to study sculpture. As an alternative, it addresses some of the ways in which Greek sculptural monuments could intervene in landscapes. It examines the connections between statues, stelai, turning posts and boundary stones in the Greek imagination. A secondary goal is to advocate an approach to Greek epigraphy that goes beyond semantics to include the connotative aspects of visual features such as mise en page and the difference between epigraphic and metrical line breaks. Examples include the class of “Man-and-Dog” stelai, the “Mourning Athena” from the Athenian Acropolis, and inscriptions from Athens, Eleusis, Troezen, and elsewhere.

Small Wonders Figurines, Puppets, and the Aesthetics of Scale in Archaic and Classical Greece

Figurines

This chapter addresses the aesthetics of smallness with regard to material from Archaic and Class... more This chapter addresses the aesthetics of smallness with regard to material from Archaic and Classical Greece (roughly, from the late eighth to the late fourth centuries BCE). It sketches a range of historical possibilities to relate ancient Greek concepts of scale and likeness to the research protocols of art history and archaeology. It explores the ancient concepts and corpora, with two propositions: 1. that smallness in Archaic and Classical Greece could be wonderful, in that it could make a work of craft what the Greeks called a thauma idesthai, “a wonder to behold for itself and oneself”; 2. to show that the comparativist method to accommodate ancient categories in a modern disciplinary infrastructure requires an eclectic and egalitarian approach to evidence that combines archaeological taxonomy with the reading habits of philology and art history, corpus scholarship with close looking.

Three Types of Invisibility: The Acropolis of Athens

Conditions of Visibility

Classical Greek monuments were meant to be seen. The poet Pindar often refers to the conspicuousn... more Classical Greek monuments were meant to be seen. The poet Pindar often refers to the conspicuousness of architecture: “When a work is begun,” he declares, “it is necessary to make its façade far-beaming” (Olympian 6.3–4), and a sacred precinct can be tēlephantos, “shining from afar” (fr. 5 SM). According to Plato, the works of Pheidias were made “conspicuously” (periphanōs), literally, “so as to seen round about,” a term that can also be used to distinguish freestanding sculpture from relief (Meno 91d). The philosopher may have been thinking of Pheidias’ great bronze Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, the spear and helmet of which, we are told, were visible to ships at sea. The conspicuousness of Greek architecture was integral to its function. The Acropolis itself, for instance, was the supreme monument of the most powerful and long-lived democracy of Classical antiquity. Soaring over Athens, its great buildings—the temple of Athena Nike, the Parthenon, the Erechtheum—were statemen...

Ornament, incipience and narrative: Geometric to Classical

Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art, 2018

Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014

Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology

Was the Knidia a statue?

Comparativism in Art History, 2017

1. Wonders taken for signs

Art & Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, C.2500-C.150 Bce

This richly illustrated, authoritative and accessible book presents a fresh way of looking at anc... more This richly illustrated, authoritative and accessible book presents a fresh way of looking at ancient Greek art and archaeology, combining a clear chronological narrative with a lively account of art and material culture and emphasizing the cosmopolitan character of the entire Greek world over two thousand years. Through up-to-date and balanced coverage that integrates the archaeological evidence into its broader historical, cultural and social context, Richard Neer suggests new ways of thinking about fundamental subjects, such as the relationship between art and politics and the evolution of style. Recent discoveries are included, such as an astonishing Minoan-style bull-leaping fresco from Egypt; a spectacular marble sarcophagus from northwest Anatolia; and, a bronze statue of an athlete found in the sea off Croatia; and tomb paintings from ancient Macedonia. Quotations from ancient texts provide first-hand testimonials, and numerous photographs, maps, plans and chronological char...

2. The Speed of Light

Coda: The Benefits of Hindsight

4. Myths of the Inner

Ancient Greek Vessels between Sea, Earth, and Clouds

Vessels, 2019

What is a vessel? It is, first and foremost, a tool. It is a tool historically, in the prosaic se... more What is a vessel? It is, first and foremost, a tool. It is a tool historically, in the prosaic sense of an item manufactured in the more or less distant past for the purpose of containing something. But a vessel is also a tool for historians: vessel is a taxonomic term, naming a category of data that we use to build arguments. An animating idea of the present volume is that these two tools may not be identical. It is for this reason that it makes sense to ask: What is, what counts as, a vessel? One might rephrase this question more precisely to say: What are the necessary and/or sufficient conditions of being a vessel? This way of putting it is very Greek, even Socratic. But what if there are no such conditions, nothing that does the work of essence when it comes to vessels? That seems, in fact, to be the case when it comes to Archaic and Classical Greek materials. This is not to say that ancient Greek vessels had nothing in common beyond the fact that they were called vessels (ange...

Texte et image dans l’Antiquité : lire, voir et percevoir

Perspective, 2012

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Michelangelo’s Sculpture

Amber, Oil and Fire: Greek Sculpture beyond Bodies

Art History, 2018

… and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars o... more … and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. (Revelation 10:1) What happens to an 'embodied object' when the body in question is incorporeal, like a tongue of flame, a beam of light or a wisp of smoke? How can we talk about embodiment-or, more expansively, about 'materiality'-when the items under discussion exceed or fail to attain that category? Such questions may seem remote from classical art history, with its corpora of marble statues, ruined temples and potsherds. But they become acute when we turn to images made of oil and smoke, amber and fire; 'small-finds' like lamps, pendants, instruments and armour ask us to recalibrate concepts like medium and material and even, perhaps, object and body. Fire, says Aristotle, is 'certainly the most bodiless of elements'-an ambiguous phrase that only sharpens the questions: is there such a thing as fire made flesh? 1 Can light and heat be material culture? 'Embodied', as opposed to what? The problem of the excessive or inadequate object is as old as aesthetics itself. Kant, for instance, concluded his 'Analytic of the Beautiful' with a discussion of 'the changing figures of a fire in a hearth or of a rippling brook'. 2 These flickering figures, Kant argued, are not formally cognizable as objects at all, but are 'strictly speaking fantasies with which the mind entertains itself while it is being continuously aroused by the manifold that strikes the eye'. 3 The figures dancing in a fireplace are so variable, so indistinct, that they do not conform to the ordinary criteria of objecthood: what is fire, anyway? Kant, as it happens, wrote his Master's thesis on this very topic: the Exposition of Some Meditations on Fire (Meditationem quarandum de igne succincta delineatio, 1755) offered a physicalist explanation for the phenomenon. 4 By 1790, however, the pre-critical question of fire's material cause had become the critical question of its subjective formalization: whatever fire may turn out to be, the flickering, transitory shapes in the hearth are mere inventions of the subject. As such, fire-figures are not even candidates for beauty: although the sight, or Anblick, of them may strike some as beautiful, the shapes are so ephemeral and insubstantial that there is no determinate basis for that sharing in perception, that potential normativity, that is at the core of Kant's aesthetic. For Kant, the inadequate or excessive object is not strictly an object at all, but a way to segue between the judgement of comprehensible beauties that both secure and attest to intersubjective agreement and freedom, and the judgement of incomprehensible sublimities that exceed the limits of the faculties and thereby attest to shared finitude. Fire-figures flicker between the Analytics, between

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Greek Art and Archaeology: A New History, c. 2500-c. 150 BCE

The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture

Style and politics in Athenian vase-painting: the craft of democracy, ca. 530-460 B.C.E.

Download

Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum: Athenian Red-Figured Closed Vessels from the Collection of Molly and Walter Bareiss. Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Fascicule 7

Statues, Stelai, and Turning Posts in Greece, c.565–c.465 BCE

Landscape and Space

Small Wonders Figurines, Puppets, and the Aesthetics of Scale in Archaic and Classical Greece

Figurines

Three Types of Invisibility: The Acropolis of Athens

Conditions of Visibility

Ornament, incipience and narrative: Geometric to Classical

Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art, 2018

Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014

Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology

Was the Knidia a statue?

Comparativism in Art History, 2017

1. Wonders taken for signs

Art & Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, C.2500-C.150 Bce

2. The Speed of Light

Coda: The Benefits of Hindsight

4. Myths of the Inner

Ancient Greek Vessels between Sea, Earth, and Clouds

Vessels, 2019

Texte et image dans l’Antiquité : lire, voir et percevoir

Perspective, 2012

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Michelangelo’s Sculpture

Amber, Oil and Fire: Greek Sculpture beyond Bodies

Art History, 2018

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Introduction: Davidson and His Interlocutors

Critical Inquiry, 2019

This special issue of Critical Inquiry is dedicated to Arnold I. Davidson, the journal's executiv... more This special issue of Critical Inquiry is dedicated to Arnold I. Davidson, the journal's executive editor from 1989 to 2012 and currently its European editor. In these capacities he played a crucial role in setting the journal's intellectual agenda for more than two decades. Davidson is sui generis, and it seems folly to try to sum him up in a few paragraphs. Still, readers may reasonably expect some explanation for what might otherwise seem a heterogeneous collection of essays. After an early career as a prestidigitator, Davidson's formal training was in moral philosophy and religion. He wrote his dissertation with Stanley Cavell and John Rawls in 1982 on Kant, Heidegger, and Rawls himselfby no means an obvious combination of names. But it was his encounter with Michel Foucault, both in person and on the page, that proved decisive. Davidson discerned connections between Foucault's genealogy of concepts and the mode of conceptual analysis associated with the later Wittgenstein. These connections had far-reaching implications for epistemology, ethics, even ontology. To pursue them, however, would necessarily be a historiographic enterprise in its own right and would require a rigorous commitment to elucidating ordinary language. The very originality of this insight meant that Davidson's scholarship would have no obvious home in the disciplinary structure of the modern research university-yet its concomitant importance meant that it would be universally relevant and welcome everywhere. Davidson has, accordingly, roamed between departments of philosophy, history of science, comparative literature, divinity, Jewish studies, and Unless otherwise noted, translations are our own.

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Greek art and archaeology

Choice Reviews Online, 1993

Introduction. 1. The Aegean in the Third Millennium. 2. The Middle Bronze Age. 3. The Late Bronze... more Introduction. 1. The Aegean in the Third Millennium. 2. The Middle Bronze Age. 3. The Late Bronze Age. 4. The Dark Age and Geometric Greece. 5. The Orientalizing Period. 6. Archaic Greece. 7. The Period of Transition. 8. The High Classical Period. 9. The Fourth Century. 10. The Hellenistic Period. Conclusion. Chronology. Glossary. Select Bibliography. Photographic Credits. Index.

“A tomb both great and blameless”: Marriage and murder on a sarcophagus from the Hellespont

Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2012

On a late Archaic/early Classical sarcophagus depicting the Death of Polyxena from the Troad, cur... more