Faculty

Andrei Pop

Associate Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, Art History, and in the College

Associate Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, Art History, and in the College

Andrei Pop trained as an art historian (BA Stanford, PhD Harvard), specializing in European art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His book on Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), an Anglo-Swiss painter on the cusp of romanticism, and his revolutionary approach to antiquity, appeared in 2015 with Oxford University Press. A long-standing interest in the history and philosophy of beauty and ugliness resulted in an edited volume on the latter concept (2014) and an annotated translation of Karl Rosenkranz's 1853 Ästhetik des Hässichen (Aesthetics of Ugliness, 2015). His current work, drawing back to generalize from the narrative images that have mainly fascinated him, concerns pictures as logical objects with a definite conceptual content. Figuring out how pictures work conceptually is interesting not only to artists and art historians (who depend on the practice implicitly), but to clarifying how we can know abstract objects like numbers in mathematics. Of moment is also the role such entities, and art more generally, can play in human life, good and bad. A related project, also in progress, investigates a historical moment that can be regarded as a golden age for Platonistic theorizing in both science and art: the "symbolist" end of the nineteenth century. Main characters here include the painter Edouard Manet, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the mathematician Gottlob Frege and the physicist Ernst Mach.

Homepage: https://socialthought.uchicago.edu/directory/andrei-pop

Courses taught

Reading Winckelmann

Henry Fuseli, Revolutionary Classicist

Beauty and Ugliness

Sculpture: Thing or Artificial Life?

Theoretical Foundations of Art History

How to Look at Artworks

Art as Theatre, 1700-1900

Painting: A Paradigmatic Art

Garrick and Greek Tragedy

Classicism between Reflection and Revolution