Conversation with Roland Recht
Roland Recht is Emeritus Professor at the Collège de France, member of the Institut de France and holds the Chair of Historiography of Art at USIAS. He is the author of over 200 articles on art in the Middle Ages and from the 18th to 20th centuries, as well as on the historiography and theory of art. Roland Recht has published or edited some 20 books, including the recent L’Historien de l’Art. Conversation dans l’atelier (“The Art Historian. Conversation in the Workshop”) (L’atelier contemporain, 2018), with Agnès Callu.
About the book
This work complies with both social science practice and a biographical exercise. It combines a random, unique journey with the milestones of an exemplary academic trajectory, adopting a micro-historical approach to convey how general questions are presented in the form of a “conversation with oneself”. The opus delivers a narrative for two voices where the testimony gives way to a historical and historiographic “wide angle” analysis of the history of art. It is free, elliptical, distant from any censorship, spontaneous in the way it flows or is silent, and skilful in focusing on personal affairs without revealing anything of a private life. This dialogue introduces the straight and winding path of an intellectual life that spans a second 20th century as much as modelling itself on and understanding it for the purpose of the study - a study that was carried out in the heart of an office that becomes a workshop and even multi-scale when the “self” advocated this specific discipline of history.
