TEXTS ON (TEXTS ON) ART collects art historian Joseph Masheck's essays on the interplay of texts and art, and texts on such texts, into an imaginative volume that speaks to the range and depth of textual and visual intersections in the modern history of art. Demonstrating an extraordinary scope of reference, Masheck delves into just what Aloïs Riegl meant by the “grammar” of art history; an unlikely but plausible connection between Henri Matisse and the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder; Marcel Duchamp's playful riff on the face of Mona Lisa in possible respect to the Spanish-American aesthetician George Santayana; the unexpected irony of Le Corbusier in the background of Andre Breton's novella Nadja; spirituality and caricature in Ad Reinhardt's work; a curiously possible role of the Orthodox icon in Lacanian theory; Mike Bidlo's non-Warholian Brillo Boxes; and more. Together the essays comprise a wide-ranging and penetrating inquiry into textual and visual possibilities of influence in modernity.

The book had a hardback first edition, copyright 2011; but when stock was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy, minor errors were corrected minor errors in a paperback.

Second Edition
New York: Rail Editions, 2011; 2014

ISBN-13: 978-0-9907881-0-2