Bryan Wolf

Bryan Wolf is currently working on a new book, The Dream of Transparency.  The book focuses on the origins of liberal belief in the eighteenth century and its relation to visual culture.  Beginning with British painter Joseph Wright of Derby, The Dream of Transparency explores the way that seeing works historically to affirm the tenets of liberal belief: that the world is stable and inert, that the individual has agency within that world, that the individual’s relation to the environment forms a seamless whole. The book concludes with chapters on twentieth-century artists Philip Guston and Martin Puryear.