« HOME

The Center

Fellowships

Workshops

Events

Digital

2005-2006 Fellows

Bryan Wolf

Stanford University
Department of Art and Art History

Bryan J. Wolf joined the Stanford faculty in 2002 as the Jeanette and William Hayden Jones Professor in American Art and Culture.  He also serves as Co-Director of the new Stanford Arts Initiative.  He previously taught at Yale University as Professor of American Studies and English.   His writing focuses on American art and literature of the nineteenth-century; ways of seeing in the transatlantic world of the eighteenth century; and reconceptualizations of race and ethnicity in contemporary American art.  His latest publication, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (University of Chicago Press, 2001), addresses the question of Vermeer’s “modernity,” arguing for Vermeer’s immersion in — rather than withdrawal from — the historical concerns of his day.  He has recently completed American Encounters: Art and Cultural Identity from the Beginning to the Present (Prentice Hall, 2006), a co-authored textbook of the history of the visual arts in the United States from the perspective of the early twenty-first century.

Project Summary

Wolf’s current book, The Dream of Transparency, explores the many — and often vexed — ways that seeing has been set aside from the other senses and asked to do special work in the modern world.  From John Locke to John Ruskin, sight has been linked to notions of innocence and transparency, as if seeing clearly were a moral imperative and thinking clearly the result of unmediated vision.  The Dream of Transparency focuses on the way that seeing works historically to affirm the tenets of liberal belief: that the world is stable and inert, that the individual has agency within that world, that the individual’s relation to the environment forms a seamless whole.   Each chapter pursues the dream of transparency at a specific historical moment, examining the fantasy of a visually coherent and transparent world, and the cultural ends towards which that fantasy has been applied.