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

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.

Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler and Transfigured Things

Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, and Transfigured Things Modernism and Still Life concludes by examining the writings of Aldous Huxley in his analysis of still life painters from Mark Gertler to Cézanne. Reading Huxley’s early art criticism in the light of his later meditation on visionary experience, The Doors of Perception (1954), returns this inquiry to a series of concerns about the ethics of the contemplative versus the active, the animate and the inanimate, which were first raised in the Introduction in Lawrence’s writing on Cézanne.

‘Inactive contemplation’: Wallace Stevens and Charles Mauron

The final chapter of Modernism and Still Life crosses the Atlantic to consider the American poet, Wallace Stevens. It argues that his creative project was underpinned by the desire for a transformative attentiveness to the everyday, an ‘illumination of the usual’, which coincides with the still life aesthetic. The chapter is structured around the poet’s annotated personal copy of Aesthetics and Psychology (1935), authored by the French aesthetician, Charles Mauron (1899–1966). Mauron’s text, which Stevens read and closely annotated during the 1930s, provides a unique paradigm through which to approach the poet’s still life meditations in his lyric poetry and criticism, with particular focus on Parts of a World (1942). This chapter reads Stevens’s ‘still life’ poems in the light of two traditions in the pictorial representation of the genre: one characterised by sensuous abundance and the other by ascetic abstinence. Such an approach illuminates the poems’ internal debates about aestheticism and asceticism, absorption and detachment, contemplation and activity and uncovers the ways in which Mauron’s theory of ‘inactive’ and ‘active’ contemplation shaped the poet’s ‘still life aesthetic’. The chapter ends by revealing the nexus between Bloomsbury, Mauron and Stevens.

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

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’.

Still Life in Motion

This chapter explores two European movement practices of the early to mid-twentieth century: the Margaret Morris Movement, established c. 1910 by the British dancer, Margaret Morris (1891–1980) in partnership with the Scottish painter and sculptor, J. D. Fergusson (1874–1961); and eurythmy, the synthetic art form and system of spiritual movement established in 1912 by the Austrian scientist and philosopher, Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). This chapter uncovers the contribution of movement practitioners to the project of re-imagining aesthetic categories through hybrid sculptural, pictorial and poetic forms that engaged the ‘moving stillness’ of the body. It argues that Morris’s dance system constituted a vitalist expression of ‘still life in motion’, which was informed by the influence of Bergsonian philosophy and the currency of ‘rhythm’ in her circle of artists. The second section of the chapter investigates sculptural stillness. It examines Fergusson’s understudied sculptural practice and Morris’s role as a model who sought to revaluate the gender politics of stasis and movement. The final part of the chapter examines eurythmy as a form of ‘moving sculpture’ that complicates the relationship between dance and sculpture.

‘Past the gap where we cannot see’: Still Life and the ‘Numinous’ in British Painting of the 1920s–1930s

The relationship between still life, spiritual contemplation and the ‘numinous’ comes to the foreground in the work of British painters, Winifred Nicholson, Ben Nicholson, David Jones and Ivon Hitchens, in the context of the artists’ different commitments to the ‘spiritual’, from Christian Science to Catholic theology. This chapter proposes that still life - and in particular the ‘still life at a window motif’ - functions in their work as a mode through which to explore the relationship between the material and the immaterial, as well as to tease out fundamental aesthetic questions. It offers close readings of their still life and flower paintings of the 1920s and early 30s and of writings by contemporary collectors and by the artists, to make the case for the emergence of an ‘enchanted’ domesticity in their circle, which was intimately related to still life and its transformation of the everyday object world. It concludes with an excursion into Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, the former home of Jim Ede, the collector and friend of the Nicholsons, to propose a reading of his domestic space as an extended still life.