Review: The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch, and Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction, by Mari Lending

“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, Valéry/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...