‘Nothing is really statically at rest’: Cézanne and Modern Still Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Rainer Maria Rilke ◽  
Still Life ◽  
Wassily Kandinsky ◽  
Paul Cezanne

This introduction introduces the shifting terms and characteristics historically ascribed to the still life genre, in order to open up a more nuanced discussion of the significance of stillness and still life for modern cultural practices across different media, in literature, painting, sculpture and dance. The still life paintings of the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) are paradigmatic in this exploration of modern still life and the phenomenon of the ‘animate inanimate’. This introduction examines a range of textual responses to his still lifes by Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky and (in an extended exploration) D.H. Lawrence, in order to explore a constellation of motifs, concerns and desires that shape the still life in the ‘age of speed’.

‘Quivering yet still’: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and the Aesthetics of Attention

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-75
Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
The Relationship

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.

Modernism and Still Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Still Life ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Unstable Medium ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Original Approach

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It proposes that still life can be understood not only as a genre of visual art but also as a mode of attentiveness and a way of being in the world. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cézanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris. Modernism and Still Life reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement. The still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm, an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.

Hair Art Character Applying the Still Life of Paul Cezanne

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-239
Author(s):  
Seung-Hyun Oh ◽  
Gi-Hyung Kwon
Keyword(s):  
Still Life ◽  
Paul Cezanne

Modersohn-Becker, Paula (1876–1907)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verena Borgmann
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Training ◽  
Rainer Maria Rilke ◽  
Only Child ◽  
Egyptian Mummy ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Paul Gauguin ◽  
Teacher Training College ◽  
Paul Cezanne ◽  
Old Masters ◽  
First Time

Paula Modersohn-Becker was born in Dresden and moved to Bremen with her family in 1888. After finishing her studies at a teacher training college, she enrolled in an academy of drawing and painting for women in Berlin. In 1898 she moved to the artists’ colony Worpswede, a village north of Bremen, to continue her education under the painter Fritz Mackensen. There she met Heinrich Vogeler, Clara Westhoff, Rainer Maria Rilke and Otto Modersohn. She married Modersohn in 1901. She traveled to Paris for the first time in 1900. Three subsequent stays in this cultural metropolis led her to develop a new, distinctive and monumental style of painting. Her work was particularly influenced by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and the Nabis. However, Modersohn-Becker was also fascinated by antiquity, especially Egyptian mummy portraits and the works of the Old Masters she saw in the Louvre. Following her last stay in Paris from February 1906 to March 1907, she returned to Worpswede where she gave birth to her only child, Mathilde, in November 1907, and subsequently died of an embolism two weeks later.

scholarly journals The Case of Lady Anne Clifford; or, Did Women Have a Mixed Monarchy?

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1682-1689 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Modern Period

I became a feminist critic of the renaissance in 1989, when a professor, in answer to my question about why there were no women on the syllabus, replied that there were no women writers in the seventeenth century. This comment took me to the library, where I discovered what he should have known but did not have to: not only were there women writers in the period, but feminist literary critics were retrieving them from the archives and rewriting literary history in the light of their contributions. One of these women writers was Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), the author of a singularly massive amount of genealogical, historical, and personal writings and a subject of interest, long before the 1980s, for Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. In 1985, the Marxist feminist critic Katharine Hodgkin wrote an essay about Clifford's conflicted status as a woman (victim of patriarchy) and as a landlord (oppressor). Clifford has received different treatment in recent years, considered primarily as a diarist (with the attendant and often ahistorical assumptions the genre solicits [see Kunin]) and as a heroic resister of patriarchal forces. My goal here is to use Clifford as a case study for the role of feminist criticism today, not only because she has raised such complex issues for feminist critics of the Renaissance and early modern period but also because the issues her life and work raise about kinship and the household, property and political agency, and the intersectionality of determining forces of identity and power are of continuing relevance to feminist methodologies and politics. I am particularly concerned with feminist claims that have become axiomatic—for the early modern period as well as others—both at the level of historical progression (the march toward modernity) and in more synchronic analyses of social and cultural practices and relationships (including our assumptions that we know what patriarchy, kinship, and household mean). By unsettling these axioms and reconsidering the stories Clifford tells, I hope to illustrate the truth that feminist criticism is by its nature a reconsideration, a form of doing rather than being.

scholarly journals Dynamic instances of interaction: The performative function of iconicity in literary texts

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (1/4) ◽  
pp. 270-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Ljungberg
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Complex Interaction ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Iconic Signs ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

According to C. S. Peirce, resemblance or similarity is the basis for the relationship of iconic signs to their dynamical objects. But what is the basis of resemblance or similarity itself and how is the phenomenon of iconicity generated? How does it function in cultural practices and processes by which various forms of signs are generated (say, for example, the cartographical procedures by which maps are drawn, more generally, the diagrammatic ones by which networks of relationships are iconically represented)? To what extent are they themselves performances (maps are always both the result of mappings and the impetus for re-mappings)? With examples from texts by Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald and Reif Larsen, I will argue that literary texts provide us with unique resources for exploring, among other matters, the performative dimension of iconicity in the complex interaction among icon, index and metaphor as a prerequisite for semiosis, the generation of signs.

Delaunay, Robert (1885–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andressa Schroder
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Abstract Painting ◽  
Wassily Kandinsky ◽  
Guillaume Apollinaire ◽  
Paul Cezanne ◽  
The Military

Robert-Victor-Félix Delaunay was one of the precursors of abstract painting in Europe. He played a critical role in establishing abstract painting before World War I and had a strong influence on the later development of abstract art. Delaunay became a representative of Orphism, a term coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in reference to Orpheus, the legendary musician and poet in Greek mythology. Delaunay wrote many letters to other artists such as August Macke, Franz Mark, and Wassily Kandinsky, which reveal that his main concerns were related to the luminous essence and to the movement of colors in nature. Robert Delaunay was the son of George Delaunay and the countess Berthe Félicie de Rose. During his childhood his parents got divorced and he was raised by his mother’s sister, Marie, and her husband Charles Damour in La Rouchère. In 1902 he started studying in the Rosin’s atelier for decorative arts in Belleville. The following year he left Rosin’s to focus only on painting and in 1904 he exhibited some of his works in the Salon des Indépendants. These first works were strongly influenced by Impressionism. Between 1905 and 1907 Delaunay began studying the color theory of Michel Eugène Chevreul. His works of this period were strongly influenced by Neo-Impressionism, particularly the works of Paul Cézanne. In 1907 he served as regimental librarian for the Military Forces in Laon.

Cubism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chara Kolokytha ◽  
J.M. Hammond ◽  
Lucie Vlčková
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Still Life ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Fernand Leger ◽  
Music Literature ◽  
Paul Cezanne ◽  
Color Treatment ◽  
Art Critics

Cubism is an influential modernist art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century. The term was established by Parisian art critics, derived from Louis Vauxcelles, and possibly Henri Matisse’s description of Braque’s reductive style in paintings of 1908. Subsequently, it soon became a commonplace term and was widely used to describe the formalist innovations in painting pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from 1907 to 1914. Cubism signals the break with Renaissance tradition through the rejection of three-dimensional illusionist composition. The dull and monochromatic palette (Picasso, Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, 1911) of early Cubist painting, in addition to its emphasis on geometry, can be alternatively viewed as a reaction against the pure bright colors of the Fauves and the spontaneous color treatment of the Impressionists. Cubist art was largely influenced by the late work of Paul Cézanne and the study of primitive art and, more precisely, African religious masks, statuettes, and artefacts. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Braque’s Maisons à l’Estaque (1908) are considered to be the first manifestations of proto-Cubist painting. However, artists such as Fernand Léger (Les fumeurs, 1912), Juan Gris (Grapes, 1913), and Robert Delaunay (Windows, 1912) developed their own distinctive styles, pushing forward the color perspectives, the shifting geometrical elements and the non-objective approach (Léger, Contraste de formes, 1913) of the Cubist synthesis. Alternative Cubist perspectives were also introduced by painters such as Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Roger de La Fresnaye, and André Lhote and sculptors such as Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens. Its influence was not limited to painting and sculpture but extended to architecture, poetry, music, literature, and the applied arts.

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