scholarly journals Painting, Poetry and the Interference of the Genres in English Art: The Case of William Blake

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-42
Author(s):  
Atanas Karaçoban ◽  
Patricia Denisa Dita

Throughout the history of Western culture and art, there are numerous examples of those who, in their creativity, went beyond the limits of a particular art, embarking instead on attempts to combine in one artistic discourse the practices of various arts, such as music and poetic text, drama and dance, literature and sculpture, literature and painting, and so on. One of these artists is William Blake, acclaimed as a major poet and painter of romanticism in English and world art. He is accredited as the founder of a whole new and original method of producing artistic works, called “illuminated printing”, which is a remarkable combination of poetic text, decoration, and picture. Apart from revealing Blake’s appurtenance to romantic tradition, the present study aims to present the specificity of his technique and, primary, to disclose the ways in which it combines the artistic practice of poetry with that of painting as to render and strengthen the meaning by mutually sustaining and illuminating each other.

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-336
Author(s):  
Zosia Kuczyńska

The Brian Friel Papers at the NLI reveal a long and relatively unexplored history of major and minor influences on Friel's plays. As the archive attests, these influences manifest themselves in ways that range from the superficial to the deeply structural. In this article, I draw on original archival research into the composition process of Friel's genre-defining play Faith Healer (1979) to bring to light a model of influence that operates at the level of artistic practice. Specifically, I examine the extent to which Friel's officially unacknowledged encounter with a book of interviews with painter Francis Bacon influenced the play in terms of character, language, and form. I suggest that Bacon's creative process – incorporating his ideas on the role of the artist, the workings of chance, and the extent to which art does violence to fact – may have had a major influence on both the play's development and on Friel's development as an artist.


Author(s):  
Ryan Dohoney

Saving Abstraction takes up the conflicted history of Morton Feldman’s most important collaboration—his work with Dominique and John de Menil on music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. These collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of artistic practice and its potential translation into religious feeling. At the center of this study is the question of ecumenism—that is, in what terms can religious encounters be staged for fruitful dialog to take place? And how might abstraction (both visual and musical) be useful to achieving it? This was a dilemma for Feldman, whose music sought to produce sublime “abstract experience,” as well as for the de Menils, who envisioned the Rothko Chapel as a space for spiritual intervention into late modernity. Saving Abstraction develops two central concepts: “abstract ecumenism” and “agonistic universalism.” The former characterizes a broad spiritual orientation within postwar musical modernism and experimentalism that aspired to altered states of ego-loss. This emerged as a renewed religious sensibility in late modernist experimentalism. The latter concept describes the particular religious form that Feldman’s music achieves within Rothko Chapel—an ascetic mode of existence that endures hopefully the aporia of postwar modernization’s destructiveness and modernism’s failure to effectively counter it.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. van den Berg

Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book is the first study of the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Sivak

Lewis, J. P. Black Cat Bone: the Life of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Illus. Gary Kelley. Mankato: Creative Editions, 2006. Print.Although this book is designed as a large-format picture book, Black Cat Bone is more likely to appeal to older children (middle school and adolescents) as a poetic text, with its rich illustrations and unusual narrative flow. The foreword of the book addresses a reader who knows some about blues musicians, as well as has some hint of the history of blues music in the United States. The language of the text is not trying to tell a linear story, but to be more evocative of a time, and of some of the historical context. The book actually has several texts: the address of the historical context that bookends the work, the bluesy poems which make up the majority of the text, excerpts from Johnson's own lyrics, and a footer running throughout the book, which provides aphoristic summaries of Johnson's story: “He was destined for legend not a field hand's work.” Each text tells a part of the interpretation of Johnson's story. With the images, it adds up to a faceted narrative of the man and his musical legacy. The illustrations alternate between impressionistic pastels in deep dark colours, reinforcing the air of mystery around Johnson's life as understood by popular culture. Kelley's other illustrative style is reminiscent of Indonesian shadow-puppets, dramatic and exaggerated in their execution. A particularly lovely example is show in full on the cover, a depiction of Johnson and the devil facing each other, each with a hand on the guitar. This image is reproduced in the text, split by the page turn in a clever design turn. Recommended: 3 stars out of 4Reviewer: Allison SivakAllison Sivak is the Assessment Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Library and Information Studies and Elementary Education, focusing on how the aesthetics of information design influence young people’s trust in the credibility of information content.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Stravens

This piece discusses the online and offline discourses on the lives and bodies of Black femme and nonbinary individuals and the harm that is so casually inflicted upon us. Through popular stories of harm performed around famous Black women, such as with rapper Megan Thee Stallion, I connect the history of Black women in popular culture to current online spaces that continue to minimize and trivialize our trauma. I seek to highlight that these stories are not an anomaly, but rather sentiments rooted in the misogynoir that is so entrenched in western culture and have been expanded and weaponized within the online sphere. In addition, the piece challenges the universality of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in its implementation, criticizing its propensity to forget its feminine victims. It is important to emphasize where it has failed and where it needs to be intentional about the people it has overlooked, as this is a movement that began online, where this harm is currently taking place, and at the hands and energies of Black femmes, the very people getting hurt. This piece has manifested from many conversations already occurring in online Black feminist spaces about our treatment and our needs. It invites others into the fold and seeks to encourage individuals to critically reflect on how Black femme and non-binary individuals are presented on their timeline in-between the numerous BLM posts that claim to protect them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (3) ◽  
pp. 82-93
Author(s):  
V. Chechyk ◽  

This article is dedicated to the study of the nature of E. Agafonov’s creative ties with the theater – a topic that has been insufficiently covered in the native art history. The author’s field of view is set in the artist’s early Kharkiv period, marked as the years of 1905–1913. The article focuses on the exceptional role of E. Agafonov in the organization and the artistic practice of the first modernist theater “Blakytne Oko” in Kharkiv (1909–1911). Agafonov belonged to the constellation of masters who was very sensitive to the problem of evolving the artistic speech. He viewed the theater as a convincing platform for promoting and approving of the latest artistic values, discovered by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Experiments in easel art (with color, plastic, line, techniques, materials, etc.), largely inspired by the work of D. Burliuk (1906–1908), were directly reflected in Agafonov’s stage practice, namely in numerous designs of the modernist productions based on plays by M. Maeterlinkc, A. Schnitzler, S. Pshybyshevsky and O. Blok. In turn, it was established that theatrical motives were reflected in E. Agafonov’s easel art, as well as in the art of the students of his artistic studio – O. Rybnikov, I. Terentyev, M. Sinyakova, and K. Storozhnichenko. In this regard, a special attention is given to the linocuts by F. Nadezhdin. It was found that the program of “total” design of theatrical space (stage and auditorium), as well as the implementation of production ideas in the cabaret theater “Blakytne Oko” were the result of the master’s fascination with the concepts of artistic synthesis, actualized in the era of Modern. Agafonov moved from dramatization of paintings (of A. Beklin, F. Malyavin, and O. Rodin) to staging experimental show-programs like “The Evening of Autumn”, “Visiting Pierrot” and “In the Middle of Nowhere”, partial reconstruction of which was undertaken for the first time by the author of the article. Agafonov was close to the idea of artistic synthesis, identified by him in F. Malyavin’s paintings, in V. Komissarzhevska’s theatre and I. Duncan’s choreography. The study of E. Agafanov’s theatrical art expands the understanding of the history of formation and development of Ukrainian scenography at the beginning of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Maaheen Ahmed

The second chapter elaborates on the history of Romantic monsters and their connections to comics monsters as well as the medium of comics. It describes the context of the burgeoning romantic visual culture, including the perpetuation of imaginative prints by William Blake and Francesco de Goya as well as the increase in freak shows and other forms of entertainment based on visual illusions. This underscores the close ties between entertainment, 'spectacularity' (which combines theatricality and the spectacle while also alluding to specters) and monsters, while also showing how more rebellious, anti-Enlightenment strains crept in through the interest in the abnormal and the increasing space offered for unbridled emotionality at the ends of both production and reception. The inclinations towards ambiguity and even human-like renditions discernible in the literary monsters created by Mary Shelley and Victor Hugo are discussed. Three monsters with strong romantic inclinations—Frankenstein’s monster, Baudelairian ennui, and the trickster (included for his playful ambiguity and love for the spectacle)—are introduced which personify the different potentialities of the medium while having commonalities with comics monsters.


2018 ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail

This chapter lays out an original method for the study of the history of ontology. It also critiques two major problems in the study of ontology: stasis and reductionism. Ontological practice is a historical and kinetic activity, and it therefore makes an important intervention into the study of ontology more broadly. What is at stake, therefore, in the development of an ontology of motion is a solution to these two problems. In addition, the chapter develops a theory of ontology as a practice of graphism. Finally, it provides an outline of the plan of the book and the major theses that will be argued herein.


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