Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

Virginia Woolf’s work responds not only to her extensive reading of literature, but also to debates about visual art circulating within her intellectual circle: her friend Roger Fry introduced ‘Post-Impressionism’ to England; her sister Vanessa Bell and Bell’s lover Duncan Grant were both painters. From early stories like ‘Kew Gardens’ through major novels like To the Lighthouse, Woolf conceived the task of fiction in terms that address the premises of Impressionist painting and literature and Post-Impressionist painting. Her 1925 essay ‘Modern Fiction’ influentially argues that new fiction must register how the mind really apprehends the world: as ‘impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel … an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’. Her fiction raises questions about abstraction and form that are central to Post-Impressionist painting. This chapter provides readers with the context to see how Woolf’s writing shares aesthetic questions with contemporary art.

«[E]n utmærket dagbok»

Artikkelen undersøker hvordan Hamsun bruker skisser og skisseestetikker i sin prosa fra 1890 til tidlig 1900-tall. Dersom skissen via Alison Byerlys «Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature» kan teoretiseres som et sjangerbegrep, en teknikk, en estetikk og som et memento for hukommelsen (aide-mémoire), kan skissen sies å ha en rik og variert bruk i denne modernistiske delen av forfatterskapet. Hamsun bruker skisser, notater og kladder på ulike måter i sin prosa, og en avlesning av forfatterskapet med skissen som optikk kan derfor lansere begrepet både historisk, estetisk, litteraturkritisk og -historisk. I romanene Sult (1890) og Mysterier (1892) kan skissen sies å rekontekstualisere interne tekstgrep, mens i reiseboken I Æventyrland (1903) går forfatteren i direkte dialog med sine dagboksnotater for å konfigurere ulike motiver i verket og for å vise frem viktigheten av skissen ikke bare som en narrativ devise, men som en grunnleggende og integrert del av reiseprosjektet.

Facets of Lü Dongbin in Korean Painting and Literature

This paper explores the representation of Lü Dongbin, a celebrated scholar and poet of the Tang dynasty, in painting and literature of the Chosǒn period. He was recognized not only as a member of the Eight Immortals assembly, but also as a symbolic figure in his own right, and was depicted as a separate painting subject. By taking an interdisciplinary approach and analyzing the ways his figure was treated as a theme in visual arts and reminisced in literature, the present study aims to cast light on the multiple facets of perception of Lü Dongbin by Korean intellectuals and painters.

La couleur rouge et sa valeur pathétique dans l’expressionnisme abstrait et le surréalisme tardif

This essay analyses the dialogue between automatism and late surrealism on the color red, with a focus on the intensity shared by painting and literature. The starting point is a collective prose poem by André Breton, Élisa Breton, and Benjamin Péret. This poem, « Riopelle », written for an exhibition of Jean-Paul Riopelle’s automatist paintings in 1949, is included in Breton’s <em>Le</em> <em>Surréalisme et la peinture</em>.<p><br /><em></em></p>

James’s Criticism of Existing Theories of the Impression, 1872–88

Chapter 1 explores the anomaly that while James was critical of French impressionist painting and literature, he nevertheless made the impression the centrepiece of his representation of the novelist at work in ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884). It addresses this anomaly by reading some of James’s early art criticism, literary criticism, and travel writing as a remaking of existing models of the impression, arguing that James’s impression combines the best of the French novel’s attention to sensation with the English novel’s attention to reflection. It also places the impressions of James’s criticism in dialogue with those of painterly impressionism. It observes that James attributes as much importance to the making of impressions as to the receiving of them. It thus introduces a distinction, fundamental to the argument in later chapters, between ‘performative’ impressions and ‘cognitive’ impressions.

Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti (b. 1906–d. 1976) was one of Italy’s foremost directors of cinema, theater, and opera. A cultural figurehead of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Visconti was seen as a major cinematic interpreter of the Italian Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. To this political affiliation, one can also attach his upbringing as a Milanese nobleman and background as a gay man that would also influence interpretations of his films. Following a tutelage under French director Jean Renoir on films Une partie de campagne (1936) and Tosca (1940), Visconti inaugurated his own career in cinema with Ossessione (1942), the presumptive first film of Italian neorealism when directors in Italy turned their attention to the plight of the commoner, struggling in the wake of the Fascist dictatorship and the Second World War. Ossessione was followed by neorealist landmarks La terra trema (1948) and Bellissima (1951), and a few years later, the neorealist-inspired Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960). These films introduced the conflux of realism, formalism, and melodrama for which Visconti’s cinema would be subsequently associated. Such characteristics were also evident in his parallel career on the Italian stage, where Visconti established himself as one of the nation’s pre-eminent directors of prose theater and opera. This activity on stage would contribute to Visconti’s reputation for working across media. In his cinema, structures from and allusions to theater, painting, and literature abound. Twelve of his eighteen films were based on one or more literary works, with Morte a Venezia (1971) celebrated as a groundbreaking chapter in European literary adaptation. His 1967 film, Lo straniero (1967), on the other hand, was panned for its slavish illustration of Camus’s book. To these and other literary-inspired works, Visconti added a few documentaries and numerous films set in contemporary Italy (episodes of Anna Magnani [1953] and Il lavoro [1961]; Le notti bianche [1957]; Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa [1965]) together with some of the largest-scale historical films in postwar European cinema. Senso (1954) and Il Gattopardo (1963) instantiate historiographically-rich analyses of Italian independence in the late 19th century. The biopic Ludwig (1974) is set in Bavaria during the same period, while La caduta degli dei (1969) pictures the rise of Nazism in Germany of the 1930s. During the filming of Ludwig, Visconti suffered a stroke that would cast a pall over Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (1974) and the posthumous L’Innocente (1976), an ornate tragedy based on a novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Europe as Ideal Landscape

This chapter displays an ideal landscape of Europe by interpreting the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus from Pieter Brueghel the Elder, giving hint to a constellation of concepts that circumscribe the European identity through the poetic metaphor of the Western World as the archipelago of the sunset referring at the same time to a constellation of Ancient Greek myth, which represents the basic tales of Europe conceived as a geopolitical, linguistic, and cultural problem. However, it acquires a deeper connotation and meaning if it is looked from a metaphorical point of view, considering Europe as an ideal landscape with a peculiar mood or disposition. Europe as a cultural identity consolidated since Renaissance, along the maritime explorations and the emergence of the concept of landscape, which developed from the fields of painting and literature into the scientific description of different world regions up to a new philosophical discipline called the philosophy of landscape.