Henri Bergson and Visual Culture: A Philosophy for a New Aesthetic

What does it mean to see time
in the visual arts and how does art reveal the nature of time? Paul Atkinson
investigates these questions through the work of the French philosopher Henri
Bergson, whose theory of time as duration made him one of the most prominent
thinkers of the fin de siecle. Although Bergson never enunciated an aesthetic
theory and did not explicitly write on the visual arts, his philosophy
gestures towards a play of sensual differences that is central to aesthetics.
This book rethinks Bergson’s philosophy in terms of aesthetics and provides a
fascinating and original account of how Bergsonian ideas aid in understanding
time and dynamism in the visual arts.

From an examination of
Bergson’s influence on the visual arts to a reconsideration of the
relationship between aesthetics and metaphysics, Henri Bergson and Visual Culture explores what it means to
reconceptualise the visual arts in terms of duration. Atkinson revisits four
key themes in Bergson’s work - duration; time and the continuous gesture; the
ramification of life and durational difference - and reveals Bergsonian
aesthetics of duration through the application of these themes to a number of
19th and 20th-century artworks.

This book introduces readers and art lovers to the work of Bergson and contributes to Bergsonian
scholarship, as well as presenting a new of understanding the relationship
between art and time.