A VISUAL FIELD: MICHAEL FIELD AND THE GAZE

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 553-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Art Criticism ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
The Times ◽  
Cultural Connections

In 1892, Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913) published a volume of poetry with the titleSight and Songbased on their response to a series of paintings in British and Continental public galleries. Bradley and Cooper, aunt and niece, devoted lovers, who over the three decades of their writing lives produced numerous volumes of poetry and plays collaboratively under the authorial signature “Michael Field,” had already made their name with a volume published in 1889 entitledLong Ago, comprising translations and elaborations of the Sapphic fragments, which has been read as an intriguing and (for the times) audaciously explicit celebration of love between women. The concept of “translation” was as fundamental to the project ofSight and Songas it had been toLong Ago; however, in the later volume it refers not to the literal translation of poetic fragments written in an ancient and other language (asLong Agoostensibly did) but to the rhetorical act of interpreting visual images. The aim of their new collection of ekphrastic poems was, as they explained in the Preface toSight and Song, “to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves” (Michael Field,Sight and Songv). The synaesthetic complexity of Michael Field's language here suggests the multidimensional sensory experience of looking at and responding to visual art works, something the women try to capture in the various kinds of writing they undertake around the production of this volume – their journal and their letters, as well as the poems themselves – in their attempt to provide such a translation. In this essay I should like to explore howSight and Songcontinues the project ofLong Agoin the sense both of articulating their lesbian experience and of locating them in a cultural tradition, only that experience is here specifically associated with visual hermeneutics and with the circulation of the verbal and the visual, and the cultural connections they make are not with a classical lesbian heritage but with recent and contemporary aestheticians and writers on art – most notably, I suggest, with two other couples who wrote art criticism in collaboration: Bernard Berenson and Mary Costelloe, and Vernon Lee and Clementina (“Kit”) Anstruther-Thomson.

scholarly journals ‘The Eyes of an Intellectual Vampire’: Michael Field, Vernon Lee and Female Masculinities in Late Victorian Aestheticism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frankie Dytor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Difference ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Gender Variant ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Katharine Bradley

Abstract This article reframes debate on the intersections of female aestheticism and cultural dissidence by focusing on the construction of queer masculinities at the end of the nineteenth century. Looking at the diary of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), it examines the descriptions of Vernon Lee, Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther-Thompson and Maud Cruttwell during the Fields’ trip to Italy in 1895. The ambivalent presentation of these figures in the diary reveals a conflicted legacy of aestheticism, centred around the inheritance, interpretation and embodiment of queer masculinity. The article argues that the Fields developed themes associated with a previous generation of male aesthetes in order to articulate gender difference between themselves and other female-bodied aesthetes. In particular, it considers how the gender-variant Fields rejected Lee, Anstruther-Thomson and Cruttwell’s trans-masculinities as perversions of their sex.

scholarly journals THE IMAGE OF SOARES DOS REIS’ SCULPTURE IN ART HISTORY, ART CRITICISM AND LITERATURE: EPOCHS, MODELS AND REPRESENTATIONS

ARTis ON ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 74-85
Author(s):  
José Guilherme Abreu ◽  
Salomé Carvalho ◽  
Rui Bordalo ◽  
Eduarda Vieira
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Rorschach Test ◽  
Mental Images ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Artistic Work ◽  
Huge Challenge

A hundred thirty years after his dramatic death, António Soares dos Reis (ASR) remains a huge challenge for art history understanding and art criticism interpretation, since he has been seen simultaneously as “a Greek, […] a realist, […] a classical, […] and a naturalist” (Arroyo, 1899: 78). His major sculpture – O Desterrado – being “an existential work” (França, 1966: 454) escapes from the classic orthodox aesthetic analysis, standing apart from the typical sculptural work of late 19th century. Our hypothesis is that ASR art works like a Rorschach test, for the narratives referred to it, instead of unveiling its character, reveal the concepts and beliefs upon which successive art studies have been produced. No visual images are displayed in this text, since the aim of our study is to detect the mental images associated to the insights and models that art historians and other authors traditionally used to assess ASR’s artistic work.

scholarly journals Art Criticism and the State of Feminist Art Criticism

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Katy Deepwell
Keyword(s):  
Women Artists ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
The State ◽  
Art World ◽  
Feminist Art ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Third ◽  
Fourth Part ◽  
State Of Art ◽  
First Offers

This essay is in four parts. The first offers a critique of James Elkins and Michael Newman’s book The State of Art Criticism (Routledge, 2008) for what it tells us about art criticism in academia and journalism and feminism; the second considers how a gendered analysis measures the “state” of art and art criticism as a feminist intervention; and the third, how neo-liberal mis-readings of Linda Nochlin and Laura Mulvey in the art world represent feminism in ideas about “greatness” and the “gaze”, whilst avoiding feminist arguments about women artists or their work, particularly on “motherhood”. In the fourth part, against the limits of the first three, the state of feminist art criticism across the last fifty years is reconsidered by highlighting the plurality of feminisms in transnational, transgenerational and progressive alliances.

scholarly journals Kunst kui tundenakkus: Lev Tolstoi kunstidefinitsioon analüütilises perspektiivis / Art as emotional infectiousness: Lev Tolstoy’s definition of art in the analytical perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (19) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Volt
Keyword(s):  
Art Criticism ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Action Mechanisms ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Analytical Perspective ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Insight Into

Artiklis käsitlen Lev Tolstoi kunstiteooria retseptsiooni anglo-ameerika esteetikas. Esiteks formuleerin Tolstoi kunstidefinitsiooni ja selle põhimõistete kanoonilise tõlgenduse. Seejärel analüüsin määratlust ekstensionaalse adekvaatsuse alusel, keskendudes nii tavapäraste kui võimalike uute etteheidete paikapidavuse uurimisele. Kolmandaks püstitan küsimuse, kas Tolstoi kunstidefinitsiooni kriitika ekstensionaalse adekvaatsuse alusel on üldse õigustatud. Väidan, et kuigi senistel Tolstoi meta-esteetilise rehabiliteerimise katsetel esineb puuduseid, paljastab Tolstoi kunstiteooria immanentne kriitika – teooria vaagimine eeldustelt, millelt see kritiseerib oponeerivaid teooriaid –, et ekstensionaalsest adekvaatsusest lähtuv kriitika on õigustatud. My article discusses Tolstoy’s theory of art in the context of Anglo-American aesthetics. Although Tolstoy’s What is Art touches upon a very wide spectrum of subjects (the place of art in the world, justification of sacrifices made for completing art works, criticism of previous theories of aesthetics, especially of the theory of beauty, defining of art as the expression of feelings, judging of art as such based on the religious knowledge of the era, action mechanisms of beauty/pleasure-centred art, consequences, conditions of the value of art, the relations between art and science, etc.), it has mainly been examined from the aspects of judging and defining of art.The article focuses on Tolstoy’s definition of art and consists of three notional parts. First, I present the canonical formulation of Tolstoy’s definition of art – something is a work of art if and only if the person, who lives through the feeling(s), causes by external signs that the recipients live through the same feelings. I also present the canonical interpretation of its main concepts – the conditions for creation, transmitting and reception.Second, I have an analytical insight into the criticism of the canonical treatment, displaying and commenting on, but also responding and complementing the presented arguments. The extensional adequacy-based analysis of Tolstoy’s definition of art shows that although it is possible to eliminate some of the typical criticisms, none of the three necessary conditions was necessary by itself, nor were all three of them sufficient when taken together.As Tolstoy’s definition of art has sometimes earned quite serious criticism, then, as my third point, I also examine some possibilities for rehabilitating Tolstoy’s theory of art: whether and in what sense can the extensional adequacy-based analysis of Tolstoy’s definition of art be justified at all? So far, the attempts of meta-aesthetic rehabilitation of Tolstoy (e.g., Mounce centrism) have not achieved the expected result. Furthermore, the immanent criticism of Tolstoy’s theory of art (criticism of the theory, based on the prerequisites it uses to criticize its opposing theories) reveals that the extensional adequacy-based criticism of Tolstoy’s definition of art is justified, but it is not necessarily the only yardstick for the theory.

scholarly journals The Ballet “Les Noces de Pelée et de Thetis” (1653) Preserved in Visual Images

ICONI ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Anna P. Grutsynova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
17Th Century ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Visual Impression ◽  
French Theater ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Art Works

The article is devoted to the ballet “Les Noces de Pelée et de Thetis” which was produced in 1693 in the Petit Bourbon Palace in Paris (according to the rules of the French theater of that time period) in order to complement the opera with the same name composed by Carlo Caproli. The basis for the plot of the production was the myth widely disseminated in art works about the mortal Peleus and the Nereid Thetis, transformed in correspondence with the aesthetics of that time. The Dance entrées followed each scene of the Italian opera and were connected with its each content, in its turn, forming a consistent, logically delineated narration. The published libretto conveys the plot, and at times the outer form of the action quite vividly and fi guratively. A description of the decorations and machines used in the ballet has also been preserved, as the result of which in our time it becomes possible to create a visual impression from the production. In addition, important defi ning details capable of providing a perception not only of the protagonists’ outward appearances, but also of a concrete distribution of roles between the performers are the sketches for numerous costumes preserved up to our time. Thereby, it turns out that in 17th century musical performance a considerable role is played by its visual solution, which, having been preserved in iconographic materials, is capable of helping create an impression from the overall conception of the production a few centuries after it happened.

scholarly journals Una mirada a la parodia desde el formalismo ruso: "Tristram Shandy" de Laurence Sterne

2011 ◽  
pp. 299
Author(s):  
María Djurdjevic
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Aesthetic

El artículo aborda la revolucionaria lectura de la novela Tristram Shandy (1767) de L. Sterne por los formalistas rusos (Shklovski), que subrayó la importancia de los aspectos formal y paródico de esa obra, calificada también como la primera novela postmoderna. No obstante, la parodia como herramienta de reflexión metaliteraria está en uso desde la antigüedad griega. Se aborda paralelamente el hito principal de la teoría literaria y cultural rusa –la reconexión con la tradición filosófica premoderna– que ilustra que toda labor hermenéutica depende de las normas estéticas de la tradición cultural desde la cual se estudia.The article tackles a revolutionary reading of the Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1767) by Russian Formalism (V. Shklovsky, 1921), focused on the importance of its formal and parodic aspects. The novel has also been assessed as the first postmodern novel in history. But the parody is being used as a tool for metaliterary thinking from the times of the Ancient Greece. Thus, this text also tackles the principal milestone of the Russian Literature and Cultural Theory –its reconnecting with the pre- Modern philosophical tradition– illustrating how our hermeneutic work depends on the aesthetic norms of the cultural tradition we belong to.

DISABILITY AND GENDER IN THE VISUAL FIELD: SEEING THE SUBTERRANEAN LIVES OF MICHAEL FIELD'S WILLIAM RUFUS

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Sharon Bickle
Keyword(s):  
Women Poets ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Successful Recovery ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
And Gender

When the UK'sGuardiannewspaper featured “La Gioconda” as poem of the week in January 2010, the paper's popular readership discovered what many late-Victorian scholars had known about for some time: the poetic partnership of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), known as “Michael Field.” The successful recovery of the Fields as significant late-Victorian writers – a project now in its second decade – seems poised to emerge into popular awareness driven as much by interest in their unconventional love affair as by the poetry itself. Scholars too have been seduced by the romance of a transgressive love story, and the critical nexus between sexuality and textuality has produced remarkable scholarship on the Fields’ lyric poetry: those texts in which the personas have a rough equivalence with Bradley and Cooper themselves. Yopie Prins first noted the complex engagement of multiple voices with lyric structure in Long Ago (74–111), and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Women Poets 175–95), Jill Ehnenn (73–96), and Hilary Fraser (553–56) expanded on this to uncover the transformation of the lyric's male gaze into a triangulated lesbian vision in Sight and Song (1892). In contrast to the recognition accorded their lyric verse, most critics have overlooked Michael Field's verse dramas. While there have been attempts to shift attention onto the plays, the significance of the Fields’ lesbian vision to the dramas has never been explored. This article seeks to redress this pervasive neglect and begin dismantling the boundaries that have grown up between critical approaches to the lyrics and the plays.

Seeing Stein’s Masculinity

2018 ◽  
pp. 39-67
Author(s):  
Chris Coffman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Man Ray

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this chapter reads his theories against the grain to counter arguments about the visual that reproduce binary thinking about gender. Queering his account of the gaze makes it possible to register the expanded array of masculinities mobilized in photographs of Stein by George Platt Lynes, Henri Manuel, and Man Ray as well as in their recent reception during the 2011 Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibit in San Francisco. Moreover, Stein’s own comments in The Autobiography about being photographed by Man Ray queer the heteronormative gaze that drives James Agee’s review of that book in the September 11, 1933 issue of Time whose cover featured Lynes’s image of Stein in profile. Tracking changes that have taken place between the early twentieth century and the present in attitudes toward her queer sexuality and masculinity, this chapter argues that traces of abjection remain in contemporary reactions to Stein despite greater acceptance of her gender, sexuality, and innovative writing.

Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Thain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Katharine Bradley

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.

Adept Sailing before the Storm

2018 ◽  
pp. 68-100
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
Michael Field ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Travel Diary ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Artistic Self

Woolf's next two diary books, her 1932 diary and her 1933–34 diary, help her to navigate the difficult strait between the outer and the inner conflicts. She needs these diaries’ support, for, as the gathering outer storm forms, she faces both the strains of her inner artistic self and the loss of her friends. In late November of 1933, she consciously turns from the troubling outer world to the dual-voiced diary of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the aunt and niece verse dramatists who published together under the name Michael Field. There, she finds not only lesbian playwrights and their trials but also the word “outsiders.” In February 1934, her response to a famous travel diary—Arthur Young’s Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788, 1789—shows her recoil from war.

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