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To convey ideas through the medium of images has always been the aim of those who are artists as well as thinkers in art history, and it is to a desire to give a sensuous environment to intellectual concepts that we owe Haladyn's volume.
For this Imaginary Portrait pictures an art historian or, should we prefer to perceive, numerous art historians, formed in a series of 40 philosophic studies of art in which the philosophy is tempered by personality, and the thought shown under varying conditions of mood and manner, the very permanence of each principle gaining something through the spatial and temporal realities of life in Florence, Italy.
The most fascinating of all these pictures is undoubtedly that of Peter Porçal. The account of this art historian is perhaps a little bit of a memorial, and the description of other art historians conjures various seekers after something in the world of art's history that Haladyn also locates himself within and which readers are invited, with the support of photographic images of the city and other personalities, to inhabit.
About the author
Julian Haladyn is an art historian, cultural theorist and Assistant Professor at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. His writings on art and theory have appeared in numerous publications. He is the author of several books, including The Hypothetical (2020), Duchamp, Aesthetics, and Capitalism (2019), Aganetha Dyck: The Power of the Small (2017), Boredom and Art: Passions of the Will To Boredom (2014), and Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (2010). In addition, he is co-editor of Community of Images: Strategies of Appropriation in Canadian Art, 1977-1990 (with Janice Gurney 2022) and the Boredom Studies Reader (with Michael E. Gardiner 2016).
