VISIONS 6

Editor: D.C. Rose

Associate Editors :
Anne Anderson, Isa Bickmann, Tricia Cusack, Nicola Gauld, Charlotte Ribeyrol, Sarah Turner.
Hon. Advisor : Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch

WINTER 2009/2010

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IN THE EYE OF THE CRITIC

Views and Reviews

Reviews Editor: Tricia Cusack @

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Isa Bickmann on Masks from Carpeaux to Picasso
Bénédicte Coste on Literature and Æsthetics
Glyn Newman on František Bílek at the City Gallery, Prague
Nele Martina Putz on Lord Leighton at the Villa Stuck
Charlotte Ribeyrol on Louis Comfort Tiffany at the Luxembourg
Marion Thain on the Pre-Raphaelites
Michael Tilby on Darwin at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge

Review by Michael Tilby

‘ENDLESS FORMS’: CHARLES DARWIN, NATURAL SCIENCE AND THE VISUAL ARTS

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 16th June–4th October 2009

Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, edited by Diana Donald and Jane Munro, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, in association with the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Yale Center for British Art, 2009, xiii + 344 pp., Hb, £40. ISBN 978-0-300-14826-8.

Such is the originality of this bold and intelligent exhibition, curated by Diana Donald and Jane Munro and first seen at Yale, that more than one visitor will have arrived with little idea of what to expect with regard to its scope and contents. There may even have been those who harboured a suspicion that it would be a mere sideshow in the celebrations occasioned by the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth, one in which satirical caricatures of the naturalist’s more instantly controversial ideas, depictions that placed apes to the fore, were likely to have pride of place, whereas in fact the exhibition shows them to have been only one small part of the story. A sceptical view of its likely importance is indeed supported by a number of known facts. Darwin was not a collector of paintings or drawings. Nor did he write about contemporary visual art or form friendships with artists themselves. As the exhibition again reveals, and as Jonathan Smith emphasizes in his contribution to the accompanying volume, Ruskin derided Darwin’s ideas on colour.[1] While apparently considering himself ‘an ignoramus in all matters of art’ (Donald and Munro, 2009: 13), Darwin nonetheless had scant respect for the professional art critic. Moreover, as the curators are quick to point out in the first of the chronologically arranged rooms, he possessed, to his own considerable regret, no talent for drawing and had to have recourse to others for his illustrations, some exceptionally fine examples of which are on show.

Careful scrutiny of Darwin’s autobiographical references reveals, however, that, as a Cambridge undergraduate, he was a frequent and, he would maintain, discriminating visitor to the picture collection bequeathed to the University by the 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam. As Richard Bankes Harraden’s watercolour records, the collection was at the time ‘temporarily’ housed in the town’s Perse Grammar School, a state of affairs that in fact lasted for some twenty-five years, prior to the opening of the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1842. From these visits, Darwin derived a lasting memory of the effect of Titian’s ‘Venus and Cupid with a lute-player’, notwithstanding his later, rueful claim to have lost ‘the higher aesthetic tastes.’ He is also to be discovered in the guise of willing participant in discussions relating to the appropriateness of an aesthetic dimension in botanical and ornithological drawings. Where one might have expected him to be critical of anything resembling an aesthetic heightening of the image, he was ready to argue that Dean Wolstenholme the Younger’s illustrations for Eaton’s Treatise on the Art of Breeding and Managing Tame, Domesticated, and Fancy Pigeons (1852), were ‘not more exaggerated than the Apollo Belvedere compared with man or the Venus de Medici compared with beautiful woman. – They represent the standard of perfection’ (Donald and Munro, 2009: 17). As Diana Donald points out in her Introduction to the volume, Darwin’s thinking on aesthetics, which began with his early (and conventional) study of Reynolds’s Discourses, constituted a significant activity for him for much for his life, even if it took place in the context of such matters as the function of beauty in the male pheasant.

But for all the undoubted significance of this demonstration of the lasting influence on Darwin of his early exposure to art and aesthetics, the importance of Endless Forms lies in its unexpected excavation of the impact, both conscious and otherwise, of Darwinian ideas on a remarkably diverse range of artistic practices and credos in the second half of the nineteenth century, to the extent that they may be regarded as constituting a collective reflection on both evolution and sexual selection. Examples of illustrations of orchids and humming birds were only to be expected, but also brought together here, in a manner that transforms our habitual, more purely painterly, ways of seeing them, are landscapes that feature prominent strands in exposed rock faces together with representations, by Landseer and others, of faithful canine companions, which we are invited to see as part of a wider contemporary discourse on the relation of human to animal. (The emphasis in Landseer’s immensely popular, if ‘pre-Darwinian’, illustration of La Fontaine’s fable ‘Le Singe et le chat’ is clearly on the monkey’s sadism; the very change of title to ‘The Cat’s Paw’ draws attention to the cat’s cry of anticipated pain.) The existence of a link between Darwin and Félicien Rops’s three etchings entitled ‘Transformismes (Darwiniques)’ is patent enough,[2] though Jane Munro’s illuminating discussion of their meaning is appropriately circumspect. As Munro says, it is not impossible that these quasi-pornographic prints (which are preceded by a warning as to their nature by the Fitzwilliam authorities) were, notwithstanding Rops’s insistent attraction to scenes of bestiality, intended to highlight the danger attached to the reading of Darwin by women (Donald and Munro, 2009: 286; Munro is here following Dawson, 2007). In the final analysis, however, it is emphasized that it is difficult to regard them as ‘Darwinian’. There can be little doubt that Darwin himself would have been nonplussed, not to say scandalized by Rops’s images; what he had in mind when discussing the origin and function of the male peacock tail was certainly not what Rops would depict in his heliogravure, The Beautiful Peacock, in which the bird’s body assumes the unmistakable form of an erect phallus. The Darwinian perspective in Odilon Redon’s characteristically strange lithograph series, Les Origines, which, as David Bindman stresses in his wide-ranging essay (Donald and Munro, 2009: 155), will be of particular interest to students of Huysmans’s A Rebours (published the year after the appearance of Redon’s prints), may be less explicit, but it is both irresistible and, as in the case of Rops, ultimately elusive. We learn, nevertheless, that they were undertaken under the influence of the botanist Armand Clavaud, who is described as ‘an ardent Darwinist’ (Bindman in Donald and Munro, 2009: 154). Here again, it may safely be assumed that Darwin’s response, had he not died the year before their publication, would have been one of incomprehension.

In all these instances, the curators have had the courage to show items that are not to be understood solely in relation to Darwinism and which, in some cases, may only exhibit a point of contact. Eschewing a narrow concern with influence, they work with a fluid notion of context that, however, allows even the perception of tangential contact to prove illuminating. The discriminating captions, which are of a rare quality, are especially adroit in drawing attention to the way in which, in the same work, the Darwinian may co-exist with implications that run counter to Darwin’s thinking. (It is duly pointed out, for example, that the Rops prints present ‘a very un-Darwinian image of woman’!) In addition to bringing together many works of art that are unfamiliar, Donald and Munro succeed brilliantly in making the familiar seem different, altering our sense of it in a lasting way. This is nowhere more evident than in the decision to hang Herkomer’s representation of a grim-faced striking miner (On Strike, Royal Academy of Arts, Fig. 1) next to Landseer’s depiction of the mortal outcome of an encounter between two rutting stags in Morning (Philadelphia Museum of Art), two paintings that are, in fact, separated by dates of composition almost forty years apart. In isolation, Herkomer’s painting invariably invokes a dominantly socio-political intention on the part of the artist, but the juxtaposition of which it is part here gives it a resonance that lifts it out of the realm of documentary anecdote, however powerful the effect it exerts when viewed in such terms.

Fig. 1 Hubert von Herkomer, On Strike, 1891, oil on canvas, Royal Academy of Arts, London

Endless Forms also makes it clear that in the context of the visual arts, Darwin is by no means to be regarded solely as the author of The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Prominence is given to The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which, one learns, was read in French translation by, amongst others, Degas, who is represented here by several works that highlight his studies of facial expression, including the Sainsbury Centre’s cast of the ‘Little Dancer Aged Fourteen’ and drawings of the café singer Thérèse viewed in profile. While this does not substantially modify existing perceptions of the artist, this is not the case with regard to certain other examples of French Impressionism (or Post-Impressionism), which overall occupy a much more prominent position within this exhibition than was necessarily to be expected. A Cézanne oil from the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City featuring ‘Marion and Valabrègue Setting out to Paint from Nature’ (1866) is used to demonstrate that the artist’s friendship with the painter and geologist Fortuné Marion (whose volume L’Évolution du règne végétal: crytogames (1881), co-authored with the marquis de Saporta, is exhibited here in the form of the copy from Darwin’s own library) exposed him to frequent expositions of Darwinian ideas. This encounter is discussed, amply and authoritatively, by Richard Kendall in his essay ‘Money and the Monkeys’ (Donald and Munro, 2009: 294 & 298-302). With the aid of two sketchbook pages (not exhibited), Kendall shows how Marion kindled Cézanne’s scientific interest in geology, while the artist’s unforgettable ‘Pyramid of Skulls’ (1898-1900, private collection) is linked by the same scholar to the traces of early man found some thirty or more years earlier in the shadow of Mont Sainte-Victoire. As for the more familiar Cézanne on permanent loan to the Fitzwilliam from King’s, namely ‘The Abduction’ of 1867, it appears in a totally different light when ‘freed’ from its mythological frame of reference and viewed in the context of popular science. When it comes to Monet’s cliffs (and still more his Rouen cathedral series, one example of which is included in the exhibition), it might seem as if no reference to anything external to the art of painting is necessary, but we are invited to consider them not only with regard to the view of one of his contemporaries, according to which his paintings showed him to be ‘most terribly near the source and origin of things’ (Donald and Munro, 2009: 308), but also in the context of his friendship with the future statesman Georges Clemenceau, author of a thesis on the Generation of Anatomical Elements that betrayed the depth of his reflection on Darwinism.

In all probability, it is the exhibition’s treatment of the traces of Darwinism in Degas, Monet and Cézanne that is likely to occasion the most substantial re-writing of art history, yet equally original, and, arguably, still more far-reaching in their implications, are the (related) sections on ‘Darwin, Beauty and Sexual Selection’ and ‘Darwin and the New Woman’. Here, a depth of research and reflection moves beyond Darwin’s theses concerning the evolution of beauty in the male of the species for mating purposes, in order to highlight the way in which, in the contemporary worlds of fashion and art, the reverse establishes itself, with women, in their concern to become objects of sexual display, duly beautifying themselves with the aid of objects from the natural world: ‘flowers, foliage and minerals, and especially the feathers of male birds.’ The thesis finds its most categorical illustration in the pre-Raphaelite Frederick Sandys’s ‘Vivien’ (Manchester City Art Gallery, Fig. 2), which shows Tennyson’s enchantress depicted against ‘a halo of peacock feathers.’ In the context of sexual selection, Tissot’s ‘The Artists’ Wives’ (Norfolk, VA, The Chrysler Museum of Art, Fig. 3) takes on an unexpected suggestiveness, especially in the light of the observation that the beautified women are in counterpoint to men who ‘sport fine examples of facial hair.’

Fig. 2 Frederick Sandys, Vivien (detail), 1863, oil on canvas, Manchester City Art Gallery

Fig. 3 James Tissot, The Artists’ Wives, 1885, oil on canvas, The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and The Grandy Fund, Landmark Communications Fund, and ‘An Affair to Remember’ 1982

The ‘wives’ (the inverted commas would seem appropriate) might be regarded as forming a point on a spectrum that also includes the dominatrix seemingly beloved of Rops. As for the illustrated volumes conceived and executed by one of Rops’s collaborators, the prominent and popular Octave Uzanne, now much prized by bibliophiles, they are shown, by Jane Munro in the closely argued and richly documented essay that is designed to be read as an accompaniment to the sections in question, to incorporate a ‘pseudo-scientific’ discourse that, as the exhibition caption put it, ‘drew heavily on Darwin’s theory – and even his vocabulary − of sexual selection.’ Munro also demonstrates the crucial importance of Grant Allen’s discussions, most notably in The Colour Sense (1879), of the implications of Darwin’s theories of sexual selection for the aesthetic experience. This context also serves to dissipate our over-familiarity with Rossetti the colourist by providing a perspective that allows that artist’s blurring of the sensual and the sexual to regain much of its original force. Munro refers here to Dawson’s study of the way the reception of Darwinian theories of sexual selection ‘became tainted by association with the poetry of William Morris, Swinburne and Walter Pater,’ and, with reference to Rossetti’s ‘Girl at a Window’ (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum), observes that Robert Buchanan’s attack on Rossetti’s eroticized art, though launched just prior to the appearance of The Descent of Man, incorporated an explicit longing for a return to the ‘asexual state described in Mr Darwin’s great chapter [in The Origin of Species] on Palingenesis’ (Donald and Munro, 2009: 269 & 271). At the risk of caricaturing the situation, one might, with regard to these two sections of the exhibition, speak of Darwinism becoming a phenomenon out of control, directing the choice of subject matter, and dictating the terms of reference, but unable to control the purpose to which the perspective is put, so that certain Darwinian-influenced representations constitute nothing less than a betrayal of the original scientific argument or agenda.

In short, this is an exhibition that, admirably, refrains from seeking to establish an incontrovertible case, in favour of fostering, with the aid of an abundant richness of material, both a debate and, more importantly, a deeper understanding of the questions in play. It is remarkable, given its scope, that one is troubled but little by apparent lacunae. It is true that although there is due recognition in the section devoted to ‘Darwin in France’ of the indigenous context of ‘transformisme’ deriving from Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, there is no reference, even in the form of contrasting practice, to the geological features of Courbet’s landscapes or to the way, for example, the Norman cliffs bordering the English Channel appeared to the authors of the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’Ancienne France (vol. 2, 1825), for whom they were, inter alia, ‘débris d’un monde inconnu.’ Similarly, the absence of any reference to French Naturalism in general or to Zola’s notion of ‘la bête humaine’ in particular might be taken as an ignoring of still more crucial reference points. But this is only to say that the French perspective, which is so obvious an enrichment of Endless Forms, could easily become the subject-matter of a major exhibition in its own right, while the visitor’s continuing reflection on the material is wholly in the spirit of Donald and Munro’s commitment to an opening up of additional perspectives. The extent to which the exhibits come from obscure museums and galleries or private collections across the globe will scarcely have been apparent from the examples presented above, but this is, likewise, one of the hallmarks of the originality of the exhibition’s conception and execution.

The magnificent and lavishly illustrated volume that accompanies the exhibition is not, in the strictest sense, a catalogue, but a series of essays closely related to the various exhibits, and to which Julius Bryant adds a fascinating opening chapter devoted to ‘Darwin at home: observations and taste at Down House.’ The volume contains, in the form of an appendix, a list of the items on show with details of their format and provenance but organized in terms of the chapters in which they receive the fullest discussion. While this deprives the visitor of an aide-mémoire to help in the reconstruction of the physical layout of the exhibition, this is abundantly compensated for by the scholarly depth and originality of the essays themselves. Rather than merely providing a commentary on the works on display, each is the product of sustained research and succeeds in advancing a coherent argument or thesis in relation to the overall subject. In several cases, essays relate to forthcoming works, by the authors themselves, of what may confidently be regarded as major, innovative scholarship, most notably an English translation of Julia Voss’s Darwins Bilder and, further down the pipeline, Painting without God, a study by Richard Kendall of ‘atheism, Darwinism and Impressionism.’ At the same time, such is the tightness of the interweaving of book and exhibition that it is clear that the research of the individual contributors has influenced the shape of the exhibition to the extent that they may be regarded as serving, to all intents and purposes, as joint curators, just as the curators themselves may be presumed to have provided invaluable stimulus for each contribution through the originality of their conception. Produced to the highest standards by Yale University Press, the volume is destined to become a milestone in the field of interdisciplinary studies of nineteenth-century art and aesthetics, one that may be expected, in turn, to stimulate much subsequent research and informed debate. Less portentously, more than one English devotee of Proust (or Huysmans) is likely to take delight in the discovery that the origin of cattleya resides in the name of the introducer of the Cattleya labiata to Europe, one William Cattley, of Barnet, North London.

References

Dawson, Gowan. 2007. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Donald, Diana and Jane Munro (eds). 2009. Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, in association with the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Yale Centre for British Art.

v Michael Tilby is Fellow in French at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has published widely on the literature and visual arts of nineteenth-century France, particularly on the works of Balzac.

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Review by Nele Martina Putz

A little bit of everything?

The exhibition Frederic Lord Leighton (1830-1896) – Maler und Bildhauer der viktorianischen Zeit im Museum Villa Stuck, München (30.5. - 13.9.2009). An English version of this review is promised for our next issue.

Frederic, Lord Leighton: Orpheus and Eurydice

Dank der umfassenden Renovierung der Künstlerresidenz Frederic Lord Leightons ist dieser bedeutende viktorianische Künstler erstmals mit einer Werkschau auf dem Kontinent gewürdigt worden. Dem Renaissance-Ideal des Universalkünstlers nachstrebend tat sich Leighton, wie sich der Besucher der Ausstellung überzeugen konnte, in jeder künstlerischen Disziplin hervor. Der Engländer, dessen Werk von den Einflüssen venezianischer Meister, der Präraffaeliten, der Nazarener und französischer Klassizisten zeugt, unternahm ausgedehnte Studienreisen nach Südeuropa und in den Nahen Osten, die sich als prägend für sein Kunstschaffen erwiesen. Leighton verweilte jeweils längere Zeit in den Kunstzentren der damaligen Jahre: Er studierte nicht nur in Berlin, Florenz, Rom und Paris, sondern auch am Städel in Frankfurt. Sein wohl bekanntestes Werk, Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence, begründete den Erfolg: Das zwischen 1853-1855 entstandene Bild wurde 1855 in der Royal Academy ausgestellt und als sensationell gefeiert. Queen Victoria erwarb das Gemälde und initiierte das anhaltende Interesse der viktorianischen Gesellschaft an der Kunst Frederic Leightons. 1878 ernannte man ihn zum Präsidenten der Royal Academy, wenige Jahre später wurde ihm gar als erstem britischen Künstler der Titel des Baronet angetragen. Während der Zeit seiner Präsidentschaft erlangte die Royal Academy ein zuvor ungekanntes Ansehen innerhalb der europäischen Kunstinstitutionen.

Leightons künstlerische Bandbreite ist äußerst vielfältig: Neben biblischen Themen, die insbesondere in die Zeit seiner verstärkten Hinwendung zum Mediävalismus fallen, beschäftigte er sich intensiv mit historischen Sujets wie den Künstlerviten der Frührenaissance. Seit den 1860er Jahren bildete die griechische Antike das Hauptaugenmerk seines Interesses, sowohl in Bezug auf Kunstobjekte als auch hinsichtlich kunstphilosophischer Aspekte.

Der Besucher der Ausstellung konnte sich von der großen Detailgenauigkeit und der handwerklichen Raffinesse überzeugen, die die künstlerische Tätigkeit Leightons kennzeichnen – zahlreiche Studien und Skizzen belegen sein hervorragendes Verständnis von Körper und Bewegungen. Leightons aufwändige Vorbereitungsmaßnahmen der Gemälde erklären die erstaunlich perfekte Oberflächenbehandlung seiner Werke, die sich durch eine überaus brillante Farbigkeit und Lichtführung auszeichnen.

Die Initiatoren der Ausstellung hatten es sich zum Ziel gesetzt, Frederic Lord Leighton als viktorianischen Maler und Bildhauer zu verorten, eine Schwerpunktlegung wurde zunächst durch den Titel nicht impliziert. Der durch die Räume schreitende Betrachter konnte sich des Eindrucks nicht erwehren, dass ein großer Teil der Bilder eher nach ihren Maßen denn nach einer inhaltlichen Stringenz gehängt wurden. So erfuhren die Greek Girls Playing at Ball (1889) eine übergroße Aufmerksamkeit, da sie prominent im Eingangssaal der Ausstellung präsentiert wurden, wohingegen die frühen Portraits mit wenig zugänglichen Nischen vorlieb nehmen mussten und ihnen damit eine minderwertige Bedeutungsperspektive anhaftete, die ihrer tatsächlichen Qualität nicht entsprach. Es erstaunt nicht, dass die zur Ausstellung zugehörige Publikation [[3]] denn auch den Klassizismus Leightons in den Vordergrund stellt (einer der insgesamt zwei Aufsätze befasst sich damit). Was allerdings irritiert, ist die Wahl der darin behandelten Werke – es findet sich nicht eine der gesehenen Leinwände in Elizabeth Prettejohns (im Übrigen sehr gelungenen) Argumentation wieder.[[4]] Im Obergeschoss wurde der Betrachter von einer Überzahl an Studien empfangen, die das Œuvre der Ausführungen in Öl bei weitem überstieg und in ein Missverhältnis rückte. Sollte der hier präsentierte Anteil des Werkes des viktorianischen Künstlers dazu dienen, den Blick des Betrachters einem Röntgenstrahl gleich zurück zu den Ursprüngen der unten gesehenen Bilder zu führen? Die Antwort auf diese Frage blieb die Ausstellung schuldig – jedenfalls wäre eine andere Abfolge wohl logischer gewesen. Neben diversen Studien zu jedwedem Thema fanden sich im obersten Stock auch Entwürfe für die Künstlerresidenz Leighton House. Hierbei sah man sich mit der zweiten Schwerpunktlegung konfrontiert, die der begleitende Ausstellungskatalog vorschlägt, nämlich dem Künstlerhaus Rechnung zu tragen, das von Leighton selbst maßgeblich gestaltet wurde. Der Verweis auf diese außerordentlich sehenswerte Künstlerresidenz stellt die Verbindung Leightons zu Franz von Stuck da.

Grundsätzlich wäre es wünschenswert gewesen, man hätte der Ausstellung mehr Profil verliehen: Die im Ausstellungskatalog aufgeworfenen Themenkomplexe ließen sich in ihrer Tiefe keinesfalls anhand der Hängung erkennen – diese vermittelte eher den Eindruck, man habe „von allem ein bisschen“ zeigen wollen. Handelt es sich dabei vielleicht gar um eine Fehlinterpretation des frühneuzeitlichen Topos des Universalkünstlers?

Großes Lob verdient die Idee, den prominenten viktorianischen Akademiker dem deutschen Publikum nahe zu bringen. Zu lange ist die britische Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts zu Gunsten der französischen Zeitgenossen vernachlässigt worden. Es ist an der Zeit, jenes fortwährende Paradigma der Überlegenheit französischer Kunstproduktion zu hinterfragen. Umso bedauerlicher scheint es, wenn eine solche Chance nicht vollständig genutzt wird, insbesondere, wenn man eine inhaltlich so pointiert konzipierte Ausstellung zu Honoré Daumier zur selben Zeit unter einem Dach beherbergt und sich ein Vergleich der zwei Präsentationen kaum vermeiden lässt.

v Nele Martina Putz is currently writing her doctoral thesis in Münich on Zwischen Kunstideal und Konsumwirklichkeit -- die Inszenierungsstrategien anglophoner Portraitkünstler im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert. Eine Studie am Beispiel von James McNeill Whistler, John Everett Millais und John Singer Sargent.

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Literature and Aesthetics

Review by Bénédicte Coste

Francesca Orestano and Franscesca Frigerio, eds: Strange Sisters. Literature and Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century. Bern, Peter Lang, CISRA, vol. 9, 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-840-3

This collection of essays covers the long nineteenth century and part of the twentieth century. Discussing English, Italian, French, German art and literature, the contributions start from the thesis that the nineteenth century witnessed ‘an estrangement between word and image, partly due to new optical technologies, along with mass spectacularisation, which led to a new kind of vision, redefined as a non-referential system of meaning, undermin[ing] those modes of realism based upon the safety of perspective’ (2). The book is divided in five sections engaging in various methodological approaches and discussing different textual and visual works.

The first section, ‘Verbal versus Visual’, is mainly devoted to texts. Luisa Calle convincingly explores the diffusion of the culture of spectacle in early nineteenth-century literature through Edgeworth’s Belinda, where pictures functions as tools for reading and seeing in order to allow the protagonists a certain degree of emancipation. In ‘Fishing in a Strange Element: Harriet Martineau and the Visible World’, Lucy Bending gives an overview of Martineau’s constant attention to the epistemology and verbal expressions of vision through her writings (from Society in America [1837] to the posthumous Autobiography [1870] including Life in the Sick-Room [1844]). Her reflection led her to adopt a clear-cut language that cuts out the language of social nicety. More complex is J. B. Bullen’s ‘Mid-Nineteenth Century British Primitivism and the Continent of Europe’, devoted to expressions of primitivism in nineteenth-century architecture, painting and literature. Relying on Lovejoy and Boas’ History of Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, Bullen distinguishes a chronological primitivism that posits a Golden Age, and a cultural primitivism that seeks to retrieve a lost innocence out of discontent with the present. The Gothic revival and Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the Kings’ both testify in their ways to the influence of cultural primitivism; however, chronological primitivism may also be found as a minor but undeniable artistic undercurrent. Sara Losh’s romanesque ‘Saint Mary’s church in Wreay’ (1842) is an interesting example of primitive-like architecture that truly defamiliarises its viewer by its un-Englishness. Such a defamiliarisation is also at play in Rossetti’s ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ through the use of early painting techniques which are meant at the same time to reinvigorate the pictorial conventions of the times. In literature too, Rossetti engaged in primitivism when he started to translate some Stilnovisti poets in The Early Italian Poets. But conversely to Tennyson who enacted a revival of the medieval era, Rossetti engaged in an archaising style aiming at defamiliarising his readership. [A]stringently ascetic’ in their tastes, Losh and Rossetti adopted a principle of alienation to convey the vitality and strangeness of their experiences, thus inscribing archaism in the visual field.

Whatever its relevance to a book on the verbal and the visual, Paola Spinozzi’s Journeying through Translation: Dante among the Victorians, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Medieval Italy’ is a thoughful consideration of two translations of Due and Trecento poets: C. Lyell’s (1835) and Rossetti’s (1861-1874), both of which sought to present Dante to a wider, non-scholarly audience. Lyell’s translation was incomplete and partial whereas Rossetti avowed aim of fidelity’ understood as the coherence with the idea of beauty conveyed by the text to the translator’ (80) had the far more ambitious objective of reconstructing Due and Trecento literature and set it as an example for nineteenth century readers. Lyell neutralised all original terms that might indicate the existence and the role of desire, Rossetti chose to express its physical dimension, although obliquely, thus transforming Dante’s love into a passion that dominates men’s action and becomes divine. His epoch-making translation had the effect not only of mediating but of reinterpreting the dolce stilnuovo . Maria Luisa Roli’s ‘A Voyage by Balloon: Stifter’s Condor’ may respond more fully to the purpose of this collection by exploring how Stifter’s text (1840) shows the potential of a balloon journey to achieve personal freedom by looking at the world from above. But in spite of a careful recontextualisation of the epistemological and cultural point of view of Condor, her essay remains unconvincing.

The section on Verbal and Visual at Cross Purpose’ has but one essay but one that truly engages in the collection’s argument. Francesca Orestano’s ‘Across the Picturesque: Ruskin’s Argument with the Strange Sisters’ explores Ruskin’s critical oscillation between the formal theory of picturesque beauty and the associationist picturesque’ in order to explain his position and role in the agenda of modernism’ (102). Carefully retracing the picturesque aesthetics from Gilpin to the nineteenth century, Orestano shows how ambiguous the young Ruskin was towards the picturesque and how, partly because he was unable to reduce it into a unified system, he shifted to empiricism and experimentations that brought a change in his discourse which henceforward focused on the formal quality of design per se. In Elements of Drawing , Gilpin’s little rules’ became Ruskin’s laws,’ giving rise to a newly acknowledged formalist aesthetics’ (118). Without reducing works of art to a mere aesthetic dimension, Ruskin was able to devise a verbal creativity which cannot be described as word-painting, but rather in terms of aesthetic deconstruction of a fictional fantasy engendered by the visual. ’ (120)

‘Photography versus Literature and Literary Tradition’ is quite an heterogeneous section as it has three studies, one of which focuses solely on photography. Alberta Gnugoli’s ‘Famous Men and Fair Ladies: Genius, Creativity and Beauty in the Portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron’ explores Cameron’s double standard in photographing men and women. The former were cast into embodiments of the male genius \à la Carlyle , the latter gave rise to photographs of ‘stereotyped heroines of legend and history, poetic muses and madonnas’ (123), with the exception of Julia Jackson (V. Woolf’s mother) who ‘allowed the photographer to captur[e] the variety of female roles assumed by Jackson’ (134). This overview of Cameron’s photography quite rightfully highlights her radical democracy’ in the choice of her models and the support she got from a class of viewers who relished eccentricity, but eschews a deeper analysis of her professional, social and gender position. More convincing is Francesca Frigerio’s ‘Out of Focus: A Portrait of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll.’ Retracing the reception of Carroll’s photographs though several exhibitions in order to highlight their effect, Frigerio focuses on reading Carroll’s 12 extant albums (out of 34) as texts so as to counter their prevalent appreciations as autobiographic and sensationalist material. Past exhibitions of different arrays of prints led to the construction of a man obsessed with little girls whereas Dodgson’s prints were systematically collected in albums according to strict and deliberate criteria’ (144). It is thus quite legitimate and, as is shown here, fruitful, to read the albums not only as autobiographical texts, the autobiography of a man, of his family, life as well as of his life as an artist, his formation and tastes’ (147) but also as the narration of a society and of a cultural moment in which the art of photography is defined by competing and somehow interrelated languages ‘realism /romance, biography, history, science.’ (147-8).

In Michelangelo’s Duke of Urbino in ‘Literature, Travel-Writing and Photography of the Nineteenth Century’, Graham Smith discusses the impact of Samuel Rogers’s Italy (1830) through the example of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Lorenzo da Medici in San Lorenzo. Illustrated by Stothard, Prout and Turner, Rogers’s book became quite influential in an age that witnessed the transition from the Grand Tour to the beginnings of mass tourism. Smith studies the impact of Roger’s description of Michelangelo’s sculpture on writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, Henry James, and on photographers like the Fratelli Alinari, G. Brogi and G. Sommer. Interestingly texts and prints are in accordance to celebrate Lorenzo’s brooding face. However, it might argued that the example Smith choses to argue that Rogers’s perception was framed by new practices and technologies of representation is flawed as Roger’s thoughtful analysis of Lorenzo stems from a remarkable attention to the natural process of light waning and waxing on the statue.

The section ‘History Painting and Art History versus Ekphrasis’ is more problematic as regards relevance and interest. An essay on Sir Josuah and the Historian: Portraits in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda by Marialuisa Bignami deals with the presence of famous portraits in Daniel Deronda that allowed G. Eliot to enrich her discourse’. Another by Hilary Fraser is a plea for considering women viewers and critics in the nineteenth century. ‘Through the Looking-Glass: Looking like a Woman in the Nineteenth Century’ is a loose discussion of Alice Meynell, Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley (a. k. a. Michael Field) and L. Mulvey (twentieth-century visual studies scholar) as examples of a female gaze in need of retrieval and discussion. Considering the recent publications, online and printed, on both Meynell and Michael Field, such a wish seems fortunately outdated, even though new historiographies remain to be written including women art historians and critics. It is only to be wished that these studies do not posit women as bearers of an inherently feminine gaze with the effect of essentialising gender.

The final section, ‘Three Long-Distance Strands: Hybridisation of the Arts, Colonial/Postcolonial, Victorian/Neo-Victorian’, is quite stimulating. Elisa Bizzotto’s ‘Blurring the Confines of Art and Gender: Aubrey Beardsley’s Legend of Venus and Tannhäuser, the Fragment of a Story\'94’ is a convincing reading of Beardsley’s narrative as a successful attempt to blend and hybridise genres and arts in order to achieve a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk . And Bizzotto quite rightfully questions the dystopic ending of Venus and Tannhäuser: What however the iconographic representation leaves ultimately unexplained is whether Beardsley’s unrivalled fin-de-siècle microcosm, the carnivalesque utopia of the Venusberg and its archdecadent hero, is finally meant to be turned into the gloomy dystopia of a dejected anti-hero’ (231-2).

Linda Goddard’s ‘Gauguin’s Guidebooks: Noa Noa in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Travel-Writing’ examines Gaugin’s Noa Noa (1893), a usually despised text about the painter’s residence in Polynesia. Thanks to a detailed analysis of fictional and non-fictional writings on Polynesia which Gaugin used, and to a careful analysis of the text he wrote (sometimes contrasting with his Tahiti paintings), Goddard pays a deserved tribute to Gauguin’s subtle and complex account, in which anxiety and irony have a significant role to play’ (244) which she locates within a tradition of late nineteenth-century Orientalist writings. ‘The Antimacassar Restored: Victorian Taste in the Early Twentieth Century’ is a well-suited conclusion to a book on Victorian times, as it deals with the first manifestations of neo-victorianism. At the same time as Roger Fry was bemoaning the persistence of what appeared to him as a stultifying art from stultifying times he could remember, a later writer like Evelyn Waugh was extolling Rossetti’s poetry and art and Kenneth Clark had just published The Gothic Revival as a testimony of his aesthetic and intellectual conversion. Harris’s well-documented article shows that the Victorian era was hailed by British Surrealists, interested scholars and writers, not to mention John Betjeman openly praising the Victorian taste in difficult war times. Neo-Victorianism may have been a matter of generation as Harris astutely notes, reminding us of the age gap between Fry and other neo-victorianists. Her article is a stimulating genealogy of our interest for the period that should trigger further studies in this promising area.

However interesting and stimulating it is, this collection appears to be quite heterogeneous as some essays, regardless of their intrinsic qualities, do not really correspond to the expectations raised by the title. Contrasting verbal and visual languages may entail a welcome tension and friction between both but the book is predicated on a somewhat loose definition of the verbal and the visual that led its editors to try to cover too wide a field with the effect of a loss of unity and purpose.

v Bénédicte Coste teaches translation at City University, London. She has translated and written mainly on Walter Pater. Her forthcoming book is Walter Pater critique littéraire to be published by ELLUG in 2010. She is currently translating The Seven Lamps of Architecture by John Ruskin.

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Review by Glyn Newman

Between Prague and Chýnov: developments in the permanent exhibitions of work by František Bílek at the premises of the City Gallery Prague

The much anticipated opening of the renovated Bílek House in Prague was scheduled to take place this September. However, due to unforeseen difficulties the project is now unlikely to be completed by the City Gallery Prague until September 2010. The house, designed by the Czech symbolist sculptor František Bílek (1872-1941) has been under extensive reconstruction and restoration since 2007 and on its completion will represent arguably the most important permanent collection of the artist’s work. Moreover, the building’s attic spaces on the second floor will house an archive of contemporary correspondence, other documents and photographic material accessible to Bílek scholars in a purpose-built study area. This, along with the restoration of both the domestic quarters of the house and the artist’s studio, will form the hub of a new František Bílek Centre.

Although predominantly a sculptor, Bílek’s involvement in the design and interior decoration of both his Prague residence and his first house, built in Chýnov, South Bohemia, revealed him not only as a skilled architect but also as a prodigious craftsman in areas such as furniture making and ceramics. The new permanent exhibition at the Bílek House in Prague is planned to emphasise the interconnectedness of all areas of Bílek’s creative practice in much the same way as the Chýnov house exhibition does currently. Indeed, the permanent exhibition at Chýnov, now entitled Between Prague and Chýnov, anticipates the important collaboration between the two exhibition sites for the future interpretation of Bílek’s œuvre.

Fig.1. František Bílek’s house in Chýnov, Tábor, South Bohemia, built in 1898
By kind permission of the City Gallery Prague

Fig. 2 František Bílek’s studio at his house in Chýnov, Tábor, South Bohemia
By kind permission of the City Gallery Prague

Built in 1898 in the artist’s birthplace, the Chýnov house (Figs 1 and 2) predates the Prague residence by thirteen years and is also under the custodianship of the City Gallery Prague. Following the completion of extensive restoration work in 1994, the building has exhibited examples of furniture and applied art by Bílek alongside his graphic and sculptural works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notably, there are a number of drawings and relief works on the theme of Christ and the Crucifixion, which preoccupied Bílek in the last years of the nineteenth century. These include the remarkable plaster relief Head of Christ Crucified (1897) with dropped lower jaw, exposed teeth and eyes rolled backward, and the equally harrowing Head of Christ (1898: Fig. 3). Visitors can also see key examples of Bílek’s sculpture such as a version of The Blind (1902: Fig. 4) which amongst other pieces of this period was inspired by the writing of his friend, the Symbolist poet, Otokar Březina (1868-1929).

Fig.3. František Bílek, Head of Christ, 1898
By kind permission of the City Gallery Prague

Fig.4. František Bílek, The Blind, 1902
By kind permission of the City Gallery Prague

Chýnov was important to Bílek throughout his life. Although the artist had travelled widely throughout Europe and had been resident in Prague since 1902, he regularly visited the Chýnov house and studio until his death in 1941. In fact much of the output of both his early and late career was created in Chýnov. One can also detect evidence of the influence of craft traditions from the Chýnov area in Bílek’s work, particularly his ceramic pieces. Furthermore, it is clear that Bílek’s design for the Chýnov house was important for his realisation of the Prague villa in 1911 (Fig. 5), with which it shares many common features.

Fig.5. František Bílek’s house in Mickiewiczova Street, Prague, built in 1911
By kind permission of the City Gallery Prague

Chýnov is relatively easily accessible by public transport from Prague. However, there are currently a number of opportunities for enthusiasts of the artist, or those as yet unfamiliar with his oeuvre, to experience the breadth of his output in the Czech capital prior to the opening of the František Bílek Centre. Many of the artefacts which ultimately will be displayed in Bílek’s renovated Prague residence can be seen currently at the Troja Palace premises of the City Gallery Prague. These include a representative selection of drawings, prints and sculptures, as well as furniture pieces such as Bílek’s seating for the surgery waiting room of his father-in-law, the Prague physician Dr. Jaromir Nečas (Fig. 6).

Fig.6. František Bílek, Bench for the Waiting Room of Dr. Jaromir Nečas
By kind permission of the City Gallery Prague

The Bílek trail can be explored further in Prague at the House of the Golden Ring, another venue of the City Gallery Prague, which has examples of Bílek’s work in its permanent collection. The Trade Fair Palace building of the National Gallery also holds a large collection of sculptures, prints and drawings by the artist. In addition, Bílek’s wooden Crucifixion (1896-99) can be seen at Saint Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague Castle, and a version of the sculpture Grief (1908-09) can be found on the tomb of the Catholic author Václav Beneš Třebízský (1849-84) at Prague’s Vyšehrad cemetery, the latter being just one example of the artist’s lifelong involvement in funerary sculpture.

It will be an asset of the City Gallery Prague to be able to exhibit Bílek’s work in his original home and studio space in both Prague and Chýnov. Accepting the potential for such exhibitions to mythologize the immediate context in which artists produce their work, visitors are nonetheless given an insight into aspects of an artist’s practice which are difficult to convey in a traditional museum space. In the case of Bílek, the curators are keen to explore the interconnectedness of the various strands of the artist’s output from his small scale pieces to the architectural design of the houses themselves. Furthermore, in travelling between the Prague and Chýnov exhibitions, visitors will become aware of the radically contrasting environments in which the artist chose to work at different times in his life. When the František Bílek centre finally opens next year, a major challenge for the City Gallery Prague will be to preserve the sense of connection between these two locations and their importance for the artist throughout his life, as well as for the future interpretation of his work.

· Glyn Newman studied Fine Art at Birmingham School of Art (1982-86) and History and Theory of Modern Art at Chelsea College of Art (1989-91). He lived and worked in Prague, Czech Republic from 1995 until 2000, when he returned to the United Kingdom to pursue research on Czech modern art and national identity at the University of Birmingham, where he has just completed his Ph.D. Has periodically taught history of art and design at undergraduate level in Birmingham, London and the South West. He currently lives and works in Devon.

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Review by Charlotte Ribeyrol

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Couleurs et lumière

Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, France

(16th September 2009 – 17th January 2010)

Exhibition Catalogue : Rosalind Pepall (ed.), Louis Comfort Tiffany, couleurs et lumière, Paris : Musée du Luxembourg, Skira Flammarion ; Montréal : Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, 2009.

This exhibition, curated by Rosalind Pepall, is hosted by the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. It is the first French exhibition wholly devoted to Louis Comfort Tiffany (1838-1933), the American painter, craftsman, decorator, and designer, internationally recognized as one of the major forces in the Art Nouveau style.

Louis Comfort Tiffany was born on 18th February 1838. He was the son of the American jeweller Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany & Company in New York. However, Louis did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps at first and decided to become a painter. He studied drawing at the National Academy of Design in New York and then travelled to Paris and North Africa in the early 1870s. At that time, he was particularly drawn to orientalist painting, as shown by some of the delicate oils and watercolours on display in the first rooms of the exhibition. Beyond the lure of exoticism, this fascination with painting sheds lights on much of his later work, especially his stained glass, which calls to mind the works of Pre-Raphaelites painters such as Edward Burne-Jones (especially the Mermaid stained glass, 1899, in the second room).

The exhibition is not wholly organized chronologically, so as to put forward the striking unity of Tiffany’s work, whether in painting, stained glass, jewellery or the decorative arts. The central room is devoted on the one hand to Tiffany’s elaborate and varied stained glass techniques, illustrated by the collection from the Montreal Museum of Fine Art; and on the other by his flower vases and lamps directly inspired by forms and colours drawn from nature (for example the Woodbine or the Wisteria lamps beautifully displayed on the central tables of the room) (fig.1).

Fig.1 Louis C. Tiffany
Lampe " Glycines" (Wisteria lamp), c.1901
Favrile glass, lead, bronze
Richmond, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis
©Photograph Katherine Wetzel

The genius of L.C. Tiffany consisted in combining his delight in natural forms with technical prowess. This is well exemplified by his revolutionary invention of “favrile glass” – that is the iridescent and freely shaped handmade glass which he used for most of his vases, including the Water lily vase (1902). To fulfil both these artistic and technical requirements, Tiffany collaborated with the chemist Arthur J. Nash and painters such as Clara Driscoll and Agnes Northrop who designed the beautiful Magnolia stained glass panel (1900) for instance (fig.2).

Fig.2 Louis C. Tiffany
Vitrail "Magnolias" (Magnolia stained glass), c.1900
Glass, lead
The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
© Photograph Yuri Molodkovets

These artistic innovations were further encouraged by Siegfried Bing, a well-known collector of Japanese art based in Paris, whom Tiffany met in 1894. Bing then visited Tiffany’s workshops in New York and ordered a series of stained glasses inspired by the works of French avant-garde artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Felix Vallotton or Edouard Vuillard. The exhibition displays one of those highly pictorial stained glasses after a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec Au Nouveau Cirque (1895). This stained glass, almost verging on abstract art, brings together different types of glass, with more relief, movement and colour than in the original painting, which almost pales in comparison. Tiffany’s collaboration with Bing laid the foundations for a new style in the world of art and design, named after Bing’s gallery in Paris: Art Nouveau.

The exhibition ends with a series of sea-life stained glasses blurred so as to render the movement of water and with three beautiful mosaic panels, combining glass and bronze, with aesthetic and poetic names such as the Panneau de mosaïques aux cacatoès à huppe jaune, 1908 (fig.3).

Fig.3 Louis C. Tiffany
Panneau de mosaïque aux cacatoès à huppe
jaune, (Mosaic panel with sulphur-crested cockatoos), 1916
Glass mosaic tiles
Accrington, Haworth Art Gallery
© Photograph The Haworth Art Gallery

These beautiful works of art from various museums around the world (Montréal, New York, Richmond, Paris) make up a dazzling collection set in a perfectly lit décor conceived by Hubert Le Gall. The visitor may regret, however, that no mention is made of English-based fin-de-siècle artistic influences. The peacock, a recurrent motif in Tiffany’s vases and lamps, inevitably brings to mind the works of James McNeill Whistler and his Peacock Room (Freer Gallery of Art, Washington). Similarly, the profusion of flowers and other vegetal or animal motifs are reminiscent of the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. The delicate face of the Angel designed by Frederick Wilson in the stained glass Montreal collection may also evoke Simeon Solomon’s androgynous figures. Moreover, the whole Tiffany enterprise recalls the Arts and Crafts Movement launched by William Morris in the early 1860s, the aim of which was to bring together the decorative arts and the fine arts. Tiffany’s pictorial eye, technical inventiveness and business flair thus succeeded in creating and popularizing the total work of art the previous generation had dreamt of, as well as paving the way for abstraction in which light and colour were to become the main focus of art.

Fig.4 Louis C. Tiffany
L’Ange de la Résurrection (The Angel of Resurrection), 1902
Glass, lead
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
© Photograph Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

v Dr. Charlotte Ribeyrol, former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, is a Senior Lecturer in 19th century British literature and painting at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Her research focuses on the influence of Hellenism on the Aesthetic Movement in England. She has published several articles relating to Swinburne, Pater, and Victorian painting.

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Review by Isa Bickmann

Masques – de Carpeaux à Picasso

Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 21st October 2008–1st February 2009
Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, 8th March–7th June 2009, extended until 14th July 2009
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen 6th August –25th October 2009

‘A mask tells us more than a face’. This citation from Oscar Wilde was one of the slogans in Darmstadt. And not without cause. The fin de siècle, especially in the visual arts, is full of mask motifs. Thus, researches on this theme were very much required. Édouard Papet, chief curator of the Musée d’Orsay, conceived the idea of an exhibition with the focus on masks and assumed this commendable task.

In 2009 the exhibition toured through three European Museums (France, Germany and Denmark) and was absolutely well worth seeing. The catalogue is a standard work with a lot of texts in a small type.

The German station, curated by Ralf Beil, transposed the concept very well. Within restrained blue or red walls the masks ranging from antique Greece (Dionysos) to Goethe’s life mask, Japonism, Auguste Rodin, Jean-Joseph Carriès, Zacharie Astruc, Auguste Préault, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, Franz von Stuck, Antoine Bourdelle, Medardo Rosso, Picasso and Pevsner. Well presented and illuminated giving the objects sublimity and pointing up their quasi religious stylisation, the rooms in Darmstadt were full but not excessively so. The only point of critique is that there were only photographs of Medardo Rosso’s work, not original artworks. But this I know depends on the courtesy of the consignor.

The catalogue gives an introduction on the History of the Masks in the 19th Century by Édouard Papet. Death masks (which Delacroix – by the way – disliked), masks from theatre and carnival, physiognomic studies and caricature, Manga masks and portrait masks and the medusa cult pass through his explanations. Texts by Juliette Becq on Antique Masks, by Pierre-Yves Le Pogam on the mask in the Middle Ages and by Christine Shimizu on Japanese masks follow. Three chapters are added: ‘In the Studio of the Sculptor’ (on Rodin, Carriès and Bourdelle) and ‘In the Vicinity of Symbolism (Félix Vallotton, Félicien Rops, the Beethoven-masks, masks in the decorative arts, James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff, Niels Hansen Jacobsen). The symbolists loved the worrying, mysterious connotations of masks.

‘The beginning of the 20th Century’ forms the last chapter of this catalogue: Art Nouveau, Jugendstil and Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), founder of the theatre magazin ‘The Mask’ 1908, who was very important for the development of theatre and stage design and worked with masks, referring to the antique theatre and the Japanese Nô-theatre. The love of the analytic cubism and early surrealism (Picasso, Breton) for masks and their role in photography are the content of the last subchapter.

The catalogue has been printed in French (Editeur Hazan Eds, ISBN 2754103481), German (Hatje Cantz, ISBN 978-3775723879) and Danish (ISBN 9788774523062).

v Isa Bickmann is an independent art historian, critic and curator

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PRE-RAPHAELITES

Review by Marion Thain

Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, by Elizabeth Helsinger (Yale University Press, 2008)

This rethinking of the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris through their visual arts offers an innovative study of aesthetic modernity that is both a delight to read and a brilliant intervention in the field of Pre-Raphaelite studies. Indeed, this book should be taken up by scholars of modernism as well as of Victorian studies because it does much to undo the boundaries between not only the textual and visual arts, but also between the still too-entrenched scholarly communities of Victorianism and modernism. Following in a rich tradition of aesthetic criticism of which Jonathan Freedman is an important precursor[5], this book thinks about the value and purpose of art as it reflects contemporary anxieties and as it offers a response to those concerns. It should also be noted at the outset that the publication of the book with Yale University Press has enabled a good number of colour and black and white illustrations in this book that are crucial to its argument, from the repeated, stylised, flower motifs of the Morris wallpaper to the paintings, and photographs of interiors.

The first, introductory, chapter sets out the remit for Helsinger’s study, based around three tropes that she finds central to the renewal of poetry she identifies within the work of these major Pre-Raphaelite figures: ‘acts of attention’ (‘explored as a mode of perception demanded by poetry and the arts, but potentially crucial to social and cultural health in ordinary, everyday activities’); ‘textual and historical patterns created through repetition’; and translation (‘across languages and cultures but also across media’) (2). Yet the study is unified very powerfully by the single trope of repetition, which is explored through the acts of attention (which call on memory, historical recurrence and repetition in forms of spatial organisation), and through the process of translation (which is itself a repetition with a difference), as well as through formal repetition. The dominance of this theme is premised, in turn, on the new importance of mass production which, as has been well established, was such a motivating factor for the Pre-Raphaelite agenda: both in its reactionary turn to archaic forms of production and its intense interest in objects and their material qualities.

This defining trope of repetition is central in holding together Helsinger’s study of visual and poetic arts because it is essentially a study of ‘pattern’. Poetry might, in a most basic sense, be defined as a genre in which linguistic pattern is prominent. Pretty much all that distinguishes it from prose is the density and significance of its patterning. Seeing the prominence of pattern in poetry allows Helsinger to explore afresh the significance of repeated motifs in the pre-Raphaelite arts, in which ‘pattern’ and has sometimes been seen as damning proof of the ‘merely decorative’ function of this work in opposition to the unique and unrepeatable genius of high art. In turn, it was the highly ‘patterned’ nature of Victorian verse that the modernists rejected in their turn to free verse; as if they believed the poetry to be as tainted with the purpose of the ‘merely decorative’ as was the Morris wallpaper. This intensity of linguistic patterning (rhyme, rhythm, lexis) focuses on the medium of language within such poetry, while the modernists frequently rejected such an emphasis on material production (with all its associations of Victorian industry and craft) in favour of an exploration of the mediums of consciousness and history. Helsinger is fascinating in her location, throughout the book, of the objects of Pre-Raphaelite art as ‘both like and unlike the manufactured objects whose primary and default status was the commodity among repeatable commodities’ (10): their multi-layered response to, rejection of, and place within, the industrialised, ‘modern’, world.

Chapter 2 takes as its topic primarily Rossetti’s ekphrastic sonnets, and the intensity of attention the pictures are given poetically through an investment of the poet in liminal figures that allow him to explore the paintings from the inside (the ‘inner standing point’). Chapters 3 and 4 explore the translation of colour between the visual arts and Morris’s poetry, with The Defence of Guenevere as the topic for chapter 3, and the early lyrics and The Earthly Paradise as the main texts for chapter 4. The first concentrates on the use of colour for lyric intensity in the poetry, while the second brings in a much broader context for thinking about colour in the nineteenth century, including colour theory, and political and philosophical investment in colour.

Chapters 5 and 6 look at Rossetti’s interest in portraiture: the first examining the long narrative poem, ‘The Portrait’ as well as some of his prose fiction; the second, Rossetti’s famous portrait-like pictures of beautiful women which play with the boundary between art and decoration. Rossetti wrote poems as companion pieces for some of these paintings, and this provides Helsinger with another route into the complex interplay of art and literature that is her primary subject. Chapter 7 and 8 turn to the book design that was such a significant framing device for Pre-Raphaelite poetry, and an element that further blurred the boundary between art and craft, the literary and the decorative. Chapter 7 looks at Rossetti’s book designs (most notably for Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress, as well as his own Poems), while chapter 8 takes as its subject Morris’s attempted design for The Earthly Paradise. Chapter 9 turns, finally, to Rossetti’s mature work, ‘The House of Life’, with a bravura reading of cultural, aesthetic, and historical significance of repetition across this long sonnet sequence that is so important to the making of modernity, even as it is at the heart of what modernism rejected.

Helsinger’s conclusion – that pattern and repetition in poetry of the period is a response and alternative to the disintegration and alienation of modernity – is reached in a manner which makes meaningful and vital many of the characterisations of Pre-Raphaelite art and literature that have become truisms in the current critical age. This book reinvigorates debate around Pre-Raphaelite art by offering a new frame in which to situate it: one that both makes new sense of old observations, and introduces new ways of looking that productively complicate and give further layers to our engagement with pictures and poems which are themselves, paradoxically, premised on an appeal to familiarity through their multiple repetitions. It is in key part through close attention to and close-reading of art objects that Helsinger manages this; it is a process that defamiliarises and refocuses. It is its ability to forge a fresh understanding of key topics in Pre-Raphaelite studies, at the same time as it makes complex and more interesting those images and lines which have at times threatened to become part of the Victorian wallpaper, that makes this book such a work of distinction and originality.

v Marion Thain is Senior Lecturer in the English department at the University of Birmingham, U.K), who works primarily on literature, culture and poetics of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Recent publications include ‘Michael Field’ (1880-1914): Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and forthcoming work includes pieces on Swinburne and literary modernity.

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