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general interest
My Father’s House
On Will Barnet’s Paintings
thomas dumm
Photo by Judith Piotrkowski
Thomas Dumm is William H.
Hastie ’25 Professor of Political
Ethics at Amherst College. He is
the author of Loneliness as a Way
of Life, A Politics of the Ordinary,
Michel Foucault and the Politics
of Freedom, and Democracy and
Punishment: Disciplinary Origins
of the United States, and a
coeditor of Performances of
Violence.
“My Father’s House is a genuine and rare accomplishment.
Art criticism is often at its best when, rather than
dissecting objects, it follows their rhythms, twists, and
turns. Thomas Dumm does just that. One of this book’s
many strengths is the variety of ways that he evocatively
relates the experience of Will Barnet’s paintings. Another
is the magnificent introduction, which brings Emerson,
Melville, Cavell, and others into conversation with the
spirit of Barnet’s work and with Barnet himself.”—TOM
HUHN, author of Imitation and Society: The Persistence
of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant
“In this beautiful book, Thomas Dumm invents a new
genre of writing, neither art criticism nor memoir nor
philosophy nor psychology but something drawing from
each of those, something that tries to show more than
describe how works of art have power, a disseminating,
productive power that exceeds any biography. Dumm is
an extraordinary writer and courageous thinker.”—JANE
BENNETT, author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology
of Things
:::
My Father’ s house
on will barnet’s paintings
Thomas Dumm
:::
In My Father’s House, the political philosopher
Thomas Dumm explores a series
of stark and melancholy paintings by the
American artist Will Barnet. Responding
to the physical and mental decline of his
sister Eva, who lived alone in the family
home in Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet
began work in 1990 on what became
a series of nine paintings depicting Eva
and other family members as they once
were and as they figured in the artist’s
memory. Rendered in Barnet’s signature
quiet, abstract style, the paintings, each
featured in full color, present the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of a twentieth-century
American family.
Dumm first became acquainted with Barnet and his paintings in 2008. Given his
scholarly focus on the lives of ordinary people, he was immediately attracted
to the artist’s work. When they met, Dumm and Barnet began a friendship and
dialogue that lasted until the painter’s death in 2012, at the age of 101. This
book reflects the many discussions the two had concerning the series of paintings,
Barnet’s family, his early life in Beverly, and his eighty-year career as a
prominent New York artist. Reading the almost gothic paintings in conversation
with the writers and thinkers key to both his and Barnet’s thinking—Emerson,
Spinoza, Dickinson, Benjamin, Cavell, Nietzsche, Melville—Dumm’s haunting
meditations evoke broader reflections on family, mortality, the uncanny, and
the loss that comes with remembrance.
“Thomas Dumm’s unique intelligence, perceptual clarity, and philosophical erudition inform
this powerful homage to the artist Will Barnet and his series of paintings, My Father’s
House. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walter Benjamin, and Stanley Cavell
are among those summoned to assist Dumm as he meditates on questions of place
and person, loss and love, past and present, conjured for him by Barnet’s haunting and
haunted works. This is a deeply moving account of how an encounter with art might allay
the turbulent loneliness of our age.”—ANN LAUTERBACH, author of Under the Sign
8
ART CRITICISM/POLITICAL THEORY & PHILOSOPHY
September 144 pages, 10 color illustrations cloth, 978–0–8223–5546–5, $24.95tr/£15.99