Peter Altenberg: The Fabricated Self

Abstract

for battle. The setting of the painting, which shows a woman mourning in a traditionally English countryside, is poignant because the Pre-Raphaelites were so strongly associated with a national school of English art. Shaw picks up on that theme by placing the woman in a lush, naturalistic and unmistakably English landscape which, Barringer argues, acts as a geographical juxtaposition to the harsh, dry terrain of Africa where her husband or fianc6 has apparently died. Shaw's painting is repositioned as commenting on the futility of Imperial policy, a view that was apparently common in the early twentieth century. It shows that Boer War 1900 expresses the same anxieties as the work of artists consciously working in the modernist style, but approached from a different technical perspective. The crisis of masculinity is also the theme of Pamela Fletcher's chapter on John Collier's 'Problem Pictures'. The press played a significant role in the reception of these paintings, which were exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1903 to 1908. The works normally featured women in ambiguous narratives which newspapers then publicised and encouraged readers to write in with solutions. Nevertheless, Collier's painting of 1908, The Sentence of Death, which featured a man being told he had a terminal illness, received unfavourable reviews. The reviews complained that there was no problem to solve because the narrative was obvious; but the real problem, Fletcher argues, was with masculinity. According to Fletcher, only the working-class Reynold's Newspaper addressed the question of what the illness could be and concluded it was hereditary syphilis. The reviewers of the painting generally maintained a silence about the true narrative because it showed a man who was