SERPENTINE RIVERS AND SERPENTINE THOUGHT: FLUX AND MOVEMENT IN WALTER PATER’S LEONARDO ESSAY

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 455-482
Author(s):  
Lene Østermark-Johansen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Prose Passage ◽  
Mona Lisa ◽  
Art Dealer

ON AUGUST 21, 1911 THE MONA LISA was stolen from the Louvre, not to reappear again until well over two years later when the thief tried to sell the work to a Florentine art dealer. The patriotic Italian workman who had stolen the painting had wanted to bring some of the Italian masterpieces in French collections back to where they belonged, and he had commenced his grand project with the Mona Lisa because, as he explained, “mi sembrava la piú bella” — she seemed to him to be the most beautiful of them all.1 For Bernard Berenson the disappearance of the Mona Lisa brought about a major rebellion against the ideals he had cultivated as a young man. In his early books on the Florentine painters and their drawings he had sung the praises of Leonardo,2 and ever since he was a student at Harvard in the early 1880s he had been a professed devotee of the writings and thought of Walter Pater.3 Pater’s most celebrated prose passage — his evocation of the Mona Lisa — was one of the pieces of nineteenth-century art criticism which had influenced Berenson more than anything else.4 Like so many other people of his generation, he had learnt the text by heart, and his first visits to the Louvre appear to have been as much in honor of Walter Pater as of the Italian masters.

scholarly journals ‘A Supreme Fiction’: Michael Fried and Art Criticism

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-102
Author(s):  
Alison Green
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
French Painting ◽  
Supreme Fiction ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
Prior Relationship

One of the striking aspects of the trenchant legacy of Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ is its status as a piece of art criticism. Widely perceived as difficult and personal, philosophical and explicatory, doxa or sermon, the essay stands out. To explore its singularity, this article compares Fried’s conception of the period criticism of 18th-century French painting in his book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) and the method of criticism enacted in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) which he saw as connected. The author pursues this and other crossings between Fried’s art historical writings and art criticism, tracking it to an extended endnote in Fried’s Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002). ‘Art and Objecthood’ is a key essay in this story aimed at Fried’s thinking about criticism, its history, theory and practice. Doing this matters because it puts the critic in a particular relation to art and to Fried’s idea of an ‘ontologically prior relationship between painting and the beholder’.

Art and the Literary

2014 ◽  
pp. 636-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Victorian Period

This essay explores the creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the Victorian period evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated books and magazines; narrative and genre paintings; pictures with accompanying texts; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction about art; ekphrastic poetry; and the new genre of art literature. It asks, what were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the dynamically transformative contexts (a vastly expanding periodical press, new and diversified exhibition cultures, widening opportunities for travel) within which such visual/textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? The chapter reflects upon ‘visuality’ as a nineteenth-century coinage, and the concept of ‘translation’ between media, discussing work by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

scholarly journals CARICATURA NA DESTERRO DO SÉCULO XIX O Periódico Crítico Matraca

Palíndromo ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabiana Machado Didoné
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Social

RESUMO O Periódico Crítico Matraca circulou em Nossa Senhora do Desterro no período de 1881 a 1886, registrando, com humor e crítica, acontecimentos políticos, sociais e culturais, como também as peculiaridades da vida da cidade. Esse periódico, editado pela Oficina  de Tipografia e Litografia de Alexandre Margarida, tinha como ilustrador e caricaturista seu filho, Joaquim Margarida. Durante o século XIX, era prática comum entre artistas do Brasil e do exterior se valer da caricatura e da sátira como instrumento para representar com ironia os acontecimentos da sua época. A caricatura e sátira, gênero que combina arte, crítica e humor, fornecem um rico e pouco explorado material que possibilita compreender as relações sociais, culturais e políticas de uma sociedade.Palavras ChaveCaricatura, periódico crítico, Desterro.  Abstract The journal Critical Matraca circulated in Nossa Senhora do Desterro in the period 1881 to 1886, recording with humor and criticism, political, social and cultural as well as the peculiarities of city life. This journal, published by the Oficina de Tipografia e Litografia de Alexandre Margarida, had as an illustrator and cartoonist his son, Joaquim Margarida. During the nineteenth century it was common practice among artists in Brazil and abroad take advantage of caricature and satire as a tool to represent irony in the events of his time. The caricature and satire, genre that combines art, criticism and humor, provide a rich and unexplored material allowing to understand the social, cultural and political society.Key wordsCaricature, critical jornal, Desterro.

scholarly journals La peinture à vue de nez ou la juste distance du critique d’art, de Diderot à Zola

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Érika Wicky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Art Critics

Since the emergence of exhibition practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there has been a progressive normalization of the material conditions for observing paintings, such as their placement and the spectator’s distance to them. Just like painters and Salon visitors, art critics needed to move closer to their object of inquiry in order to gain better knowledge of it, but paradoxically, they could not claim objectivity without stepping back. The ideal distance that would allow viewers to simultaneously grasp the whole and the details was a contentious topic of discussion for nineteenth-century artists, critics, and scientists. Among the different ways in which this question was formulated in art criticism, one in particular reveals the presuppositions of the time about proximity: the constant reference to the smell of the painting. Associated with proximity, smell metaphorizes the pleasure or trouble spectators feel when they get close to paintings, to their pictorial materiality, or even to the figures depicted. Because smell always functions as a sign of the substance from which it emanates, art critics’ reference to it allowed them to consider the problem of proximity within the social and aesthetic issues of their time.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Peta Mayer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Domestic Fiction ◽  
Undue Influence ◽  
Female Friendships ◽  
Historical Methodology ◽  
Mixed Responses ◽  
The Military

This chapter establishes connections between Brookner’s novels A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1998), Falling Slowly (1999) and Hotel du Lac (1984); her French Romantic art criticism in The Genius of the Future, Romanticism and its Discontents and Soundings; andthe queer nineteenth-century literary canon of the Romantics, Decadents and aesthetes including Stendhal, Baudelaire, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Karl-Joris Huysmans. It outlines the strange behaviour of the solitary yet homosocial ‘Brooknerine’ and her female friendships in the domestic fiction, and the mixed responses of Brookner’s early reception from 1980-2010 frequently organised by gender, temporal and heterosexual normativity which tethers behaviour to a unilateral historical context. Alternatively, Brookner’s performative Romanticism is delineated as a queer cross-historical, intertextual, temporal literary practice which combines nineteenth-century and contemporary behaviours, tropes, narrative devices and temporal periods to expand historical context and subject to cross gender and historical temporalities. The book’s queer lesbian, intertextual, cross-historical methodology is illuminated, along with its performing cast of Romantic personae of the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller.

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