James Elkins
Biography
James Elkins was born in 1955 in Ithaca, New York. studied art history at Cornell University. He then earned a fine art degree at the University of Chicago, where he later completed a PhD he has in art history with a dissertation on Perspective in Renaissance Art and in Modern Scholarship. He has gone on to have a distinguished career in art studies and has written and edited many books on a variety of related topics. However, he has given up this aspect of his career to devote himself to writing fiction.
Other links
his website
James_Elkins
james Elkins
YouTube videos accompanying his work
Bibliography
1994 the Poetics of Perspective
1996 The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing
1997Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing
O1998 n Pictures and the Words That Fail Them
1998 What Painting Is (
1999 Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (
1999 The Domain of Images
2010 Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History
1999 Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis
2000 How to Use Your Eyes
2001 Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings
2001Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students (
2002 Stories of A
20 Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (Routledge, 2003)
2003 What Happened to Art Criticism? (
2004 On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
2005 Master Narratives and Their Discontents
2008 Six Stories from the End of Representation
2011 Art Critiques: A Guide
W2012 What Photography Is
Five Strange Languages
2026 Book 1: Stories, Like Illnesses
2025 Book 2: A Short Introduction to Anneliese
Press, )
2023 Book 3: Weak in Comparison to Dreams
Book 4: Ghosts Are (forthcoming)
Book 5: An Inventory of the Dead (forthcoming)