Walter Sickert’s Miss Earhart’s Arrival: Collapsing Paint and Flight in a Topical Painting

Abstract

This article considers Walter Sickert’s Miss Earhart’s Arrival (1932) in relation to contemporary discourses on heavier-than-air flight. I look at the negotiation of the future in paint, and through discourse analysis of its reception I conclude that Arrival questions the capacities of new technologies. By examining a cross-medium practice concerned with transcribing found press images of historic events, I situate this work in my larger argument that Sickert’s late work offers us perspectives on painting’s mediation of changing interwar notions of historical time, Utopia/dystopia, and the capacity of paint to critically engage technologies of memory and transit, both materially and temporally.