Professor Hans Bertin, a German art historian, art critic, and graphic anthropologist, passed away in Berlin on January 10, 2023. Professor Bertin, who worked at the Karlsruhe State Academy of Design, the University of Munich, the University of Heidelberg and the University of Hamburg during his lifetime, was an important image theorist and was also concerned about the faces and people behind the images. In the book “Image Anthropology”, as the author of this article puts it, Bertin “takes Kantian broad anthropology as a reflection to explore how images are generated by people, experienced by people, used by people, and connected with people.” We also mourn him.
Author/Yang Yunqian (Boya Postdoctoral Fellow at Peking University School of Arts) Editor/YL (Original text posted on WeChat on January 12, 2023)
“The History of the Face” At the beginning of 2023, the public news we read the most is probably the obituary. This kind of text that summarizes life stories and expresses grief is often accompanied by a portrait of the deceased, which reminds us to remember his voice and appearance and seems to be a kind of farewell: look again, this face that is about to disappear. Hans Bertin has written at many places in his recent Chinese translation of The History of the Face (Peking University Press, 2017) about the face—or the mask as a simulated and ritualized face—and death. Relationship. The face is a confirmation of identity, a change of role, a manifestation of certain traits, or a hidden strategy. On January 10, Bertin passed away in Berlin. There is a photo of him that will bring an end to his life and become a symbol of his passing and remaining here. I just don’t know which face of Bertin is this? If it were him, how would he evaluate this behavior of summarizing a person’s life with one face?
Hans Belting (1935 – 2023), Source: https://ift.tt/9Ky1ITr Was Belting an art historian? Of course it is. However, his broad vision has already transcended the words of “art” and entered the territory of “images”. As early as the 1980s, his representative work “Resemblance and Presence: A History of Images before the Age of Art” (English translation was released by the University of Chicago Press in 1997) clearly defined the need to expand the narrow sense of art history through the social history of images. This research vision also allows him to navigate with ease in modern and contemporary art where the concept of “art” is constantly blurred and extended. “Art History After Modernism” (the German version was published in 1995, the English translation was launched by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, the Chinese version was published by Jincheng Press in 2014) announced “the end of art history”, But this seemingly appalling phrase is actually a criticism, targeting the American cultural hegemony, Western-centrism, and exclusion of ethnic minorities and female art workers that pervaded art history writing at that time ( For relevant discussion, please refer to Jonathan Gilmour’s book review published in Artforum in October 2003). It can be said that Bertin has maintained reflection on traditional art history for many years, and used an “image anthropology” method to question the concept of art and the legitimacy of various powerful discourses. “Image Anthropology: Pictures, Media, Bodies” (English version published by Princeton Press in 2011) is a slim book that explores the “habitability” of ancient Chinese landscape paintings and the acceptance of painted portraits by ordinary people in central India. It has been involved in the installation works of the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik. It uses Kantian anthropology as a perspective to explore how images are generated by people, experienced by people, used by people, and connected with people.
“Image Anthropology” Bertin’s works provide wisdom for us to understand the “image world” we live in today. Nowadays his physical body is far away, but as he said in Chapter 4 of “Image Anthropology” “Image and Death”: “Creating an image of the disembodied dead raises the question of how death plays a role in humans’ decisions to establish themselves. What role did the invented image play? Today, this question seems distant, as images today are more likely to invite the living to escape the body than to attempt to represent the body of the dead.”
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