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Editor: D.C. Rose |
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Associate Editors: Anne Anderson, Isa
Bickmann, Tricia Cusack, Nicola Gauld, Charlotte Ribeyrol, |
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SUMMER 2009 |
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For the VISIONS homepage,
click |
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RECENT CONFERENCE PAPERS (ABSTRACTS) |
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This page is edited by Sarah Turner. If you would like an abstract or full paper
published here, please contact Dr Turner @. |
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The
following abstracts are from MODERNISM, CULTURAL EXCHANGE AND
TRANSNATIONALITY: THE SECOND CONFERENCE OF THE AHRC MODERNIST MAGAZINES
PROJECT. |
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Sarah Turner (University of York, England) :
A ‘world-wide exchange of art-powers’: Orpheus,
the Theosophical Art Circle and intercolonial cultural networks, ca.1907-1914 |
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The
Theosophical Society was a truly cosmopolitan movement; formed in the contact
zones of empire, it boasted a global membership with an international
headquarters in Ayer (Madras), as well as another headquarters in London. The
term theosophy, meaning “divine wisdom” was loose enough to incorporate the
strands of various world religions, and appealed to a global audience
sympathetic to the idea of a “universal brotherhood” — at once at odds, and
yet inherently part of, the imperial hierarchical model. This paper takes as
its focus a group of little-know artists and writers based in London who
called themselves the Theosophical Art Circle, and their journal, Orpheus, produced in London between
1907 and 1914. The group’s activities suggest a complex interface between art
and artistic discourse, a concern for the “spiritual” and “mystical” which
permeated late Victorian and Edwardian culture and an interest in the arts of
the “East” (especially India, in this case). Yet these interconnections
between cultural modernity, the global networks of the British Empire and
fin-de-siècle mysticism have, on the whole, been left critically unexamined. |
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Of
particular significance are the articles written by the Irish-born violinist,
singer, writer and authority on Indian music (as well as the Theosophical Art
Circle founding member), Maud McCarthy, and the Sri Lankan-British art
historian, Ananda Coomaraswamy. Calling for a ‘world-wide exchange of
art-powers’ and the moulding of a ‘cosmopolitan humanity’, McCarthy’s and Coomaraswamy’s
articles offer an alternative view of art practice outside of the
isolationism of national schools which have dominated the scholarship of this
period. |
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Caroline Maclean (Birkbeck, University of
London, England) : Rhythm and
Russian Spiritual Aesthetics |
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This paper
argues that Rhythm (1911-13), one
of a cluster of pre-war journals and magazines, was key to the dissemination
of a Russian-inflected spiritual aesthetics in England during its short life
span. The journal was launched by John Middleton Murry and the critic Michael
Sadleir but the visual quality of the magazine was established by the art
editor, John Duncan Fergusson and the literary content was enhanced by
Katherine Mansfield’s short stories and later by her input as assistant editor.
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Rhythm has been accurately classified by Mark Antliff as Bergsonian in
philosophy and Scottish Fauvist in its aesthetics, with a clear Parisian
emphasis. Less often noted is the wider international focus of the magazine,
which included work by the Russian artists and writers Leonid Andreyev,
Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, the made-up Russian alias for Katherine
Mansfield: Boris Petrovsky, and in the later issues Yone Noguchi’s articles
on Japanese aesthetics. Peter Brooker has noted the ‘outsider’ status of the
magazine, and Rhythm certainly embraced this status, increasing the ‘Agents
for Rhythm Abroad’ printed on the back cover and the foreign correspondents
listed on the contents page. This paper focuses on the early introduction of
Kandinsky’s aesthetics to the British public via Michael Sadleir’s article,
‘After Gauguin’(1912), published two years before he translated Kandinsky’s
famous spiritualist treatise on art: Über das Geistige in der Kunst. |
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Diane Silverthorne (Royal College of Art) :
Modernism, Cultural Exchange and the Marketing of the Vienna Secession: Ver Sacrum and the Rejuvenation of
Austrian Art and Design |
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The
publication of the first issue of Ver
Sacrum marked a pivotal moment for the Vienna Secession. Through its
pages, the Secessionists announced their break with the conservative Vienna
Academy, and the Künstlerhaus, Vienna’s official exhibiting body, to create a
new community of artists. The magazine was the first indicative sign of the
Secessionists’ stated aim: to bring a new art ‘for all Austria into our daily
existence’. |
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The
magazine, like others of the period, featured new forms of ‘kleinkunst’
(small art forms) from across the arts. These included literary
contributions, such as poetry, polemic and playlets, by ‘jung Wien’ writers
and others, including Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke. Exemples
of new architectural designs, avantgarde fine and applied arts drew on the
work of artists and designers of the Secession, across the Austro-Hungarian
empire, and beyond. |
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However,
unlike other periodicals, Ver Sacrum
was designed and edited by the Secession artists themselves. In this way, the
periodical acted as an indicative showcase for the Secessionist’s own design
world, and promoted their interests in shaping and transforming public and
domestic spaces. This paper will show how, through the formation of special
committees and other means, the Secessionists exercised exceptional control
over the signs and symbols they created to represent the Secession. These
deliberate marketing strategies were indicative of an early form of ‘brand
identity’, which gave their public face its sense of unity, and even extended
to a special supplement, in the Wiener
Allgemeine Zeitung, to announce the magazine’s launch. |
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Emily Burns (Washington University, St Louis,
USA) : Le Courrier Innocent and
Giverny as a Site for International Exchange |
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From the
late 1880s until the second decade of the twentieth century, Giverny was a
wildly popular location for American artists who studied painting in France.
So many Americans and other foreign artists flocked to the region here Claude
Monet resided that it became a large artist colony by the 1890s. Starting in
the early 1890s, a group of American artists in Giverny began to produce
their own journal, which they called Le
Courrier Innocent. The journal was continued with under same name when
its main contributors, including Thomas Meteyard, Theodore Butler and Dawson
Dawson-Watson, returned to the United States in 1895. Two issues of the
Giverny journal from the early 1890s have recently come to light, and are
reproduced in the recent exhibition catalogue for Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885-1915 (2007).
These newly-accessible issues offer new insights on the relationship between
artist and place and international artistic exchange at the end of the
nineteenth century. |
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This paper
looks closely at both the drawings and poetry of the journal in relation to
both the artistic products and social exchanges of American artists in
Giverny at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that the journal offers
a major contribution to our understanding of the American Impressionist's
foregrounding of place in their artistic practice. It also suggests the
institutionalization of the experience of the artist colony through the
serial, communal project. The journal also helped to work through anxieties
and negotiations of national identity in a space of extensive cross-national
exchange in a way that is both reflected in and suppressed by contemporary
paintings. |
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