When the Enlightenment thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote his treatise Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in 1766, he outlined the strengths and weaknesses of each art. Painting was assigned to the realm of space; poetry to the realm of time. Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics explores how artists since the eighteenth century up to the present day have grappled with the consequences of Lessing's theory and those that it spawned. As the book reveals, many artists have been - and continue to be - influenced by Lessing-like theories, which have percolated into the art education and art criticism. Artists from Jean Raoux to Willem de Kooning and Frances Bacon, and art critics such as Clement Greenberg, have felt the weight of Lessing's theories in their modes of creation, whether consciously or not. Should we sound the death knell for the theories of Lessing and his kind? Or will conceptions of temporality, spatiality and artistic competition continue to unfold? This book - the first to consider how Lessing's writings connect to visual art's production - brings these questions to the fore.

Introduction: The Tenets of Lessing and his Legacy by Sarah LippertChapter 1: Drawing the Line: Jean Raoux's painted Virgins and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's written Theories by Gabriela JasinChapter 2: After Lessing: Beauty and the Unreality of Artistic Space and Time by Franco CirulliChapter 3: E. H. Toelken's Addendum to Lessing's Laocoön (1822) by Eric GarbersonChapter 4: The Temporality of Imitation in the Work of Moreau and Gérôme by Sarah LippertChapter 5: Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient: Flesh: A Look at the Work of Soutine, Bacon, Dubuffet, and de Kooning by Chad AirhartChapter 6: Almost: Greenberg and Lessing by Thomas Morgan EvansChapter 7: In the Body's Space, the Body's Time: Feeling Your Way Through Richard Serra's The Matter of Time by Rob MarksChapter 8: Time, Space and Film: The Symbiosis of Pull My Daisy by Timothy HilesConclusion: Limit-Imposing Systems by Sarah Lippert