Linen Boxes and Slices: Raoul De Keyser and American Modernism in Belgium in the 1960s and 1970s

Before his international breakthrough shortly before the turn of the century, Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser (1930–2012) had a long career that reaches back to the 1960s, when he was associated with Roger Raveel and the so-called Nieuwe Visie (New Vision in Dutch), Belgium’s variation on postwar figurative painting that also entails Anglo-Saxon Pop Art and French nouveau réalisme. Dealing with De Keyser’s works of the 1960s and 1970s, this article discusses the reception of American late-modernist art currents such as Color-Field Painting, Hard Edge, Pop Art, and Minimal Art in Belgium. Drawing on contemporaneous reflections (by, among others, poet and critic Roland Jooris) as well as on recently resurfaced materials from the artist’s personal archives, this essay focuses on the ways innovations associated with these American trends were appropriated by De Keyser, particularly in the production of his so-called Linen Boxes and Slices. Made between 1967 and 1971, Linen Boxes and Slices are paintings that evolved into three-dimensional objects, free-standing on the floor or leaning against the wall. Apart from situating these constructions in De Keyser’s oeuvre, this article interprets Linen Boxes and Slices as particular variations on Pop Art’s fascination for consumer items and on Minimalism’s interest in the spatial and material aspects of “specific objects”.

IRVING JOHN GILL: THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN MODERNISM

The story of the life and the fi rst stages of the work of the American architect Irving John Gill, which led to the emergence of modernist architecture “on the very edge of America,” in Southern California, is presented. The author describes in detail the infl uences that the architect experienced in his work and which, in their totality, led him to the creation of the principles of new architecture and new style. The infl uence on their formation of the Chicago school is emphasized, in particular his work in the workshop with Adler and Sullivan, and the theoretical ideas of Louis Sullivan. The principles of Gill’s architecture are compared with the principles of the architecture of European modernism that appeared ten years later, as set forth by Walter Gropius.

¿Un cronista provinciano? Dos textos desconocidos de Rubén Darío en El Orden de Tucumán

Hand in hand with recent theoretical and empirical developments related to the notion of archive, the field of Spanish American Modernism Studies is currently undergoing a stage of profound transformation. The validity in Literary Studies of a “new” philology not only highlights problems in the editions of classical texts from the fin de siècle period, but also invites researchers to review the clichés associated with this movement. In this sense, the case of Rubén Darío (1867-1916), whose texts remain in a state of notable precariousness, is exemplary. This article comments and recovers two unknown chronicles published in El Orden, a local newspaper in the Argentine province of Tucumán, that were written by this author. Besides their evident documental value, these texts, which were conceived at the farewell to his residence in Buenos Aires in 1898, acquire relevance if they are connected to the concerns that Darío will cultivate on his imminent trip to Europe. On one hand, they can be read as yet another episode of Buenosairean “calibanism”; on the other hand, they can be understood as an anticipation of a critical perspective towards the mythification of the concept of progress in the Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1900.

Bazaar, merchandise and decadence: Antonio José Ponte and Julián del Casal

The fascination of Latin American modernism for 19th century French fashion merchandise has been widely addressed in literary theory. Texts filled with diverse cultural materials, textures and objects configured a poetics of the bazaar that became part of a series of strategies through which Latin American literature defined and linked itself to hegemonic aesthetics of the 19th century. The poems and chronicles of Cuban writer Julián del Casal (1863-1893) are no exception; this proliferation of merchandise reveals how the gaze and the images become configured as empty fictions, filled by a cosmopolitan desire. This feature, tied to the function and configuration of images in Cuban modernism, makes possible an anachronical reading of the presence of State merchandise at the other end of the century: Antonio José Ponte’s decadent reality in post-Soviet Cuba.

The late 19th century archive in contemporary Latin American literature

Late 20th and early 21st century Latin American literature rereads and problematizes late 19th-century Latin American Modernism. This article examines some of these genealogies in order to analyze the significance of this literary dialogue in our present time.

In Opposite Directions: A. Alvarez and Thom Gunn

This chapter focuses on literary journalist A. Alvarez and his views on the work of Thom Gunn. Alvarez, who was appointed poetry editor of the Observer in 1956, was primarily an academic through much of the 1950s. He studied and taught at Oxford and at Princeton, where he was a protégé of R. P. Blackmur. His university posts resulted in two critical books aimed largely at an academic audience: The Shaping Spirit (1958) about the poetry of English and American modernism, and The School of Donne (1960) on the metaphysical poets. Alvarez was initially an admirer of Gunn, who was as Donnean poet as he could have wished for. He would later change his mind, claiming that ‘apart from a handful of early poems, Gunn has never shown much interest in the style of exacerbated intensity that attracted his Cambridge contemporary, Ted Hughes’.