LAUSR

Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch, eds. The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018, 306 pp., 115 color illus. £75.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781350038417; £24.99 (paper), ISBN 9781350038400 Mari Lending Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018, 284 pp., 48 color and 73 b/w illus. $49.95/£40 (cloth), ISBN 9780691177144 “For better or worse, all my figures are men and all my texts are canonical, but the men do not look so triumphant in retrospect, and today the canon appears less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through.” These lines, written by Hal Foster, appear in his 2002 article “Archives of Modern Art,” which traces major shifts in the memory structure of European art between 1850 and 1950. Rereading this history through a series of oppositions (Baudelaire/Manet, Valery/Proust, Panofsky/Benjamin), Foster examines the “institutional relay” between the artist's studio and the space of the museum. Art in the nineteenth century was a “mnemonic elaboration” of earlier work. Yet this relation between the atelier and the museum was hardly a one-way street: Baudelaire's idea of artistic practice, for instance, “already presumes the space of the museum as the structure of its mnemonic effects.” Each theorist's position is reread through a “dialectic of reification and reanimation”—that is, the shifting relation between art museum and art studio could reanimate European art, reify it into a spectacle, or both. Foster ends by asking how our own archival moment, the age of digital reproducibility, is transforming art's memory structure. His answer is compelling: “If the old museum, as imagined from Baudelaire through Proust and beyond, was the site for the mnemonic reanimation of visual art, the new museum tends to split the mnemonic experience from the visual one.”1 Decoupled from its archival/mnemonic function, the new museum highlights the exhibition and exchange value of art in unprecedented ways. The two volumes under review here offer insight into the now-lost memory structure of the nineteenth century by rethinking architecture's relation with technical reproductions—printed images and plaster casts. Meticulously researched and produced, these two books reveal a curatorial approach to architectural history, one that foregrounds …