Beat Wyss

Die Wiederkehr des Neuen
VOLUME 163

Seminal Writings on Aesthetics and the History of Mentalities

The book gathers writings by Beat Wyss from three decades, including numerous out-of-print pieces on German aesthetics and the history of mentalities. The collection provides an overview of the essayist’s thematically and methodologically wide-ranging oeuvre and its manifold philosophical and literary inspirations. Wyss’s forays into the classical fields of art history are consistently anchored in the present and its aesthetic experiences. One focus of his explorations is on the modernist avant-gardes since the nineteenth century and the paradigm shift in postmodernism. In several more recent contributions on the subject of the pictorial turn, Beat Wyss explicitly engages contemporary discourses, reminding the reader that art-historical reflection is an open-ended process, its findings always provisional.

With an afterword by the art historian Silke Walther.

Beat Wyss (b. Basel, 1947) is a Swiss art historian and professor of art history and media theory. His publications span subjects related to the history of ideas and mentalities, analyze the political culture of the postwar era, and limn the history of art in a systems-theoretical perspective.

Michael Diers (b. Werl, Germany, 1950) is one of Germany’s most prominent art historians and academics. He has written and edited numerous volumes on the history and theory of art and the image and on political iconography, and is a coeditor of the collected writings of Aby Warburg.