‘This spasm upon canvas’: George Eliot, Gustave Courbet and Realist Aesthetics

This article offers sustained consideration for the first time of George Eliot’s entanglement with mid-nineteenth-century French art. Taking realism’s transnational nature as its point of origin, this essay probes Eliot’s claim in Adam Bede (1859) for seventeenth-century genre painting as the most conspicuous visual precedent to define, embody and vindicate her aesthetic choices – at just the moment when Gustave Courbet makes realism scandalous in the Salons of the Second Empire. Questioning Eliot’s deliberate disavowal of influence, I trace the modes of transmission through which Courbet’s art was exported to and circulated within Britain during the 1850s; while London’s official art world was unreceptive to French art in the nineteenth century, a different picture emerges if we consider the visibility afforded by independent galleries and the periodical press, and if we take account of these diverse reading, viewing and citational practices. I then offer close readings of works by Eliot and Courbet to suggest that both evidence a discomfort with representation as the primary methodology of realism, and consider the consequences for the ideological, epistemological and affective energies of realist aesthetics. Reading Eliot alongside Courbet reveals her radicalism, but this only becomes clear when we place her realism within the orbit of a broader European tradition and understand her aesthetics as a form of praxis.

A ORIGEM DO MUNDO

A partir de uma comparação entre o quadro A origem do mundo, do pintor francês Gustave Courbet, e um determinado trecho do romance Margens das Lembranças, do escritor pernambucano Hermilo Borba Filho, este ensaio enfoca, em dois diferentes contextos histórico-geográficos, um certo olhar, um olhar arquetipicamente masculino, sobre a genitália feminina. Assim, verificam-se os distintos modos como cada autor, ao lançar o seu olhar sobre os órgãos sexuais da mulher em suas respectivas obras, abordou questões que parecem ser pertinentes à discussão sobre a sexualidade humana em qualquer tempo e em qualquer região, tais como: desejo e racionalidade, identidade e fantasia, subalternidade e dominação.

A comunidade na expropriação: modos de alteridade no cinema de Pedro Costa

O artigo discute os modos de alteridade evidenciados pelos elementos estruturais de Ossos (1997), No quarto da Vanda (2000) e Juventude em marcha (2006), de Pedro Costa. Ao descrever e analisar as formas fílmicas escolhidas para construir vias de acesso entre os corpos em cena, valorizando a constante exposição ao outro, busca-se apresentar como o cinema do realizador português constitui uma comunidade intrínseca à expropriação. O artigo opta por um viés comparatista entre os filmes de Costa e os de cineastas que oinfluenciaram, como John Ford e Yasujiro Ozu; para além da breve consulta a obras de Van Gogh e Gustave Courbet, artistas que compartilham motivos visuais e, acreditamos, uma sensibilidade social comum com o diretor.

Jeanne Duval

This particular attempt at imagining a site of memory made of words may appear irreverent at first, but it has been crafted as an homage to a formidable woman: Jeanne Duval. I have taken the liberty of fictionalizing a first-person narrator who will talk about ‘herself’, at the risk of usurping her voice and her identity. Jeanne (whose name was or was not Duval) was a woman of colour and she had a long-term turbulent relationship with the enfant terrible of French nineteenth-century poetry, Charles Baudelaire. As a result, historical accounts both magnify and marginalize her. Trying to do justice to a historical character who was so much more than a muse but may not have been happy to embrace the role of exemplary black foremother, this text puts together the numerous and often incompatible portraits of Jeanne Duval. She appears and disappears in biographies (Emmanuel Richon), novels (Fabienne Pasquet), short stories (Angela Carter), academic studies (Claude Pichois). She is both present and absent, celebrated and erased in the so-called ‘Black Venus cycle’ of Baudelaire’s Flower of Evil as well as in paintings by Edouard Manet (Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining) and Gustave Courbet (The Painter’s Studio). The objective was to question the process of memorialization that might silence or appropriate her instead of providing her with a safe space of memory. It remains to be seen to what extent Jeanne is here celebrated or betrayed.