Visual Art Devices and Parallels in the Fiction of Henry James

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (5) ◽  
pp. 561-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viola Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
The Future

No better “optical symbol” can be found for one aspect of Henry James than the photograph taken in 1906 showing him in top hat, cane and gloves in hand, bending slightly forward in the classic Daumier pose, taking in impressions of a painting. This is a portrait, however, not merely of the occasional James— the art critic, friend and befriender of painters, biographer of a sculptor—but also of the essential James—the master of the art of fiction. That his love of pictures and familiarity with the studio world were grist to his mill is evident in stories and novels such as “The Madonna of the Future” and The Tragic Muse in which his depiction of the artist and exploration of aesthetic questions are thematically central. Reflecting his experience of art less obviously but more significantly are the pictorial effects and art allusions permeating his fiction, both early and late. For though James was first and foremost a literary artist preoccupied with the problems of his own craft, his responsiveness to the visual arts was so keen, was so much an integral part of his consciousness, that it inevitably made itself felt in his literary technique. Clearly, a study of the pictorial aspects of his fiction is justified for the light it may cast on his method as well as on individual works.

scholarly journals Artful Inquiry and the Unexpected Ethical Turn: Exploring Identity through Creative Engagement with Grades 9-12 Students in Guatemala and Canada

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Mindy Carter
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Classroom Environment ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
The Future

This paper presents a research project conducted with Grades 9-12 students in Canada and Guatemala where the visual arts were used to explore identity. Participants engaged in a short-term artful inquiry in which they were asked to create a piece of visual art that represented their cultural roots, self in present society and hopes for the future. Various modes of representation including drawing and collage were used. When considering the data, emergent themes and the overall project, unexpected reverberations about the ethical impact of doing arts based work emerged. These questions led to further questions about how creative engagement, individual and collective transformation within the classroom environment does/does not occur as a result of creative engagement.  

Future of Visual Arts and Their Social Role

2017 ◽  
pp. 73-87
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Art Market ◽  
Future Trends ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Cost

Here we contemplate the future and look also back to see where we have arrived. Art has responded to the ever-increasing presence of images available to people everywhere by maintaining its authenticity and originality. The proliferation of images in newspapers, magazines, books, posters and postcards has deeply influenced people and increased the number of images around them. Next the television, videos and movies introduced moving images and further accelerated this process. This whole phase has taken roughly two hundred years. More recently, the digitizing and Internet together have further made the spreading of images much easier and the quality of copying and receiving images gets all the time better. Meanwhile, the cost of reproducing images has drastically decreased. After this I will cover the present and future trends in art market and new ways of creating visual art and marketing it. There are some people who early on started to wonder whether authenticity really matters any more. My answer is that it matters more than ever and that art is still going strong.

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Brazil
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
New Left ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
William Gaddis ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War up to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.

Mutable Views

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-70
Author(s):  
Johanne Sloan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Landscape Art ◽  
Experimental Films ◽  
Contemporary Artists

This chapter addresses the contemporary renewal of landscape art in Canada, arising at the intersection of visual art and cinema. Artworks, installations, and experimental films are discussed according to four categories: figure/ground, spatial illusions, the historicity of landscape, and digital scenery. Landscape—as a distinct art historical genre, conventional cinematic background, and ideological ground—has historically played a key role in Canadian visual culture. The contemporary artists and filmmakers in question have remade landscape in pictorial terms by remixing legacies from the visual arts and cinema and also in political terms, by calling attention to the damaged natural world of the Anthropocene, confronting Indigenous claims to the land, and foregrounding struggles over nationhood, identity, and collective memory.

scholarly journals Medialness and the Perception of Visual Art

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic Fol Leymarie ◽  
Prashant Aparajeya
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Medial Axis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mathematical Representation ◽  
Creative Performance ◽  
Core Feature ◽  
Art Analysis ◽  
The One ◽  
Cartoon Animation

In this article we explore the practical use of medialness informed by perception studies as a representation and processing layer for describing a class of works of visual art. Our focus is towards the description of 2D objects in visual art, such as found in drawings, paintings, calligraphy, graffiti writing, where approximate boundaries or lines delimit regions associated to recognizable objects or their constitutive parts. We motivate this exploration on the one hand by considering how ideas emerging from the visual arts, cartoon animation and general drawing practice point towards the likely importance of medialness in guiding the interaction of the traditionally trained artist with the artifact. On the other hand, we also consider recent studies and results in cognitive science which point in similar directions in emphasizing the likely importance of medialness, an extension of the abstract mathematical representation known as ‘medial axis’ or ‘Voronoi graphs’, as a core feature used by humans in perceiving shapes in static or dynamic scenarios. We illustrate the use of medialness in computations performed with finished artworks as well as artworks in the process of being created, modified, or evolved through iterations. Such computations may be used to guide an artificial arm in duplicating the human creative performance or used to study in greater depth the finished artworks. Our implementations represent a prototyping of such applications of computing to art analysis and creation and remain exploratory. Our method also provides a possible framework to compare similar artworks or to study iterations in the process of producing a final preferred depiction, as selected by the artist.

Goliath among the Giants: Monster Decapitation and Capital Display in 1 Samuel 17 and Beyond

2021 ◽  
pp. 030908922095034
Author(s):  
Madadh Richey
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Biblical Allusion ◽  
The Future ◽  
1 Samuel

A single verse near the conclusion of 1 Samuel 17 mentions that after defeating Goliath, David took the giant’s severed head to Jerusalem (1 Sam. 17.54). The present paper argues that this text’s communicating of David’s preeminence through his act of decapitation draws on the widespread understanding of heads as uniquely powerful and vulnerable, while triumph over a giant or monstrous body casts the future Israelite king as uniquely dominant over monstrous enemies at the physical extreme. Narratives of monster-combat that center an adversary’s head and its subsequent display are widespread; the present paper discusses the Gilgamesh/Ḫumbaba and Perseus/Medusa narratives, with their corresponding visual art manifestations, to show how the biblical allusion to monstrous capital display functions socially and literarily to constitute David’s power.

Axis: broadening the constituency and extending the sphere of influence of visual art

1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-11
Author(s):  
Doug Sandle
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Information Resource ◽  
Text Data ◽  
Widening Access ◽  
Visual Text ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
National Information

The Axis database is the only national information resource on British artists and craftmakers. It contains visual-text data on over 2,500 contemporary British practitioners and is a rapidly growing source of data for researchers, students, curators, commissioning agents, architects, planners and patrons and purchasers of visual arts. Axis also has an important national role in promoting contemporary art and artists and widening access to visual culture.

scholarly journals Changes in the themes, aesthetics and functions of public images in Kyiv due to the influence of socio-cultural processes in the society of 1990-2010

2021 ◽  
pp. 183-194
Author(s):  
Mariia Ospishcheva-Pavlyshyn
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Practical Aspect ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Theoretical Developments

On the back of the rapid development in public art in recent decades, and in particular graffiti and muralism, interest in them has grown significantly among cultural studies scholars, art critics, architects, sociologists, and urban planners. Numerous works that have appeared in the West and in Ukraine are devoted to various aspects of the visual public art existence. This theme continues to be one of the most relevant for contemporary visual art. This article complements the bunch of acquired knowledge with a detailed study of the impact of socio-cultural processes in society on the changes that took place in monumental painting, graffiti and muralism in Kyiv during 1990–2010, i.e. during the most important changes in politics and society in recent decades. The peculiarities of each historical stage of this influence are analysed and outlined in the study, and the theoretical analysis is displayed by the description of the most characteristic works. Most of them are researched in detail. In addition, the process of decline of monumental painting in the late 1980s and early 1990s is analysed, the factors of graffiti flourishing in the 1990s are identified and highlighted, and the origins of the rapid development of muralism after 2004 and especially after 2014 are explored. At each stage, changes in the themes, aesthetics and functions of public images are traced. The definitions, such as muralism and graffiti, are updated in this paper, taking into account changes in art and the latest achievements in its analysis. The manifestations of the national-patriotic themes in the contemporary art of muralism are considered in detail, the classification of art work on this subject is given, the corresponding examples are given. Such concepts as public art, synthesis of arts, monumental painting, graffiti, muralism are attentively aligned. The study of the nature of the socio-cultural processes and visual arts correlations is promising for further scientific and theoretical developments and the practical aspect for better understanding of the specific works

scholarly journals Co to znaczy być artystą/artystką?

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-99
Author(s):  
Marek Krajewski ◽  
Filip Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Nationwide Survey ◽  
Social World ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Artistic Career ◽  
Depth Interviews

Who is an artist? Questions over how to define this role divided the makers of the project The Invisible Visual: Visual Art in Poland—Its State, Role, and Significance. The authors’ sources of data were the results of a nationwide survey, a survey of graduates of the Polish Academy of Fine Arts in the years 1975–2011, and in-depth interviews with seventy individuals in the field of visual arts. The authors were able to establish, first, that persons working in the art field give different definitions from those beyond its bounds; second, that artists, decision-makers, curators, and critics try to defend the sense and autonomy of their activities against ways of thinking and acting that are typical of other areas of the social world (while they are themselves engaged in disputes over who has a right to call him- or herself an artist and what is and isn’t good art); and third, being an artist is marked by a difficult-to-cross boundary, as is shown by the common necessity of supplementing artistic work by other sources of income and the high risk of failure in an artistic career.

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