Window/Picture: L'assassin menace and Artist Descending a Staircase

Abstract

It only when imagination dragged away from what eye sees that a picture becomes interesting. Tom Stoppard, Artist Descending a Staircase 39 It a commonplace of Stoppard criticism that Tom Stoppard writes by engaging in what Susan Rusinko neatly dubbed creative (96). With 1972 publication of After Magritte, Stoppard extended his plagiarism from verbal to visual. Critics have pointed out not only conceptual similarities between that play and Rene Magritte's painting but also a visual similarity between opening of play and a specific Magritte painting, L'assassin menace. [1] title of Stoppard's Artist Descending a Staircase rewardingly led critics to examine relationship between that play and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. [2] But it also led them away from seeing a much stronger relationship between that play and, once again, L'assassin menace. Artist Descending a Staircase, a play about artists, turns on a particular painting that one of central characters made in 1920 and on love of a blind girl, Sophie, for its creator. Beauchamp, a sound artist in play, might describing Stoppard's project in writing it when he speaks of liberation of the visual from limitations of visual art... to create images--pictures--which are purely mental (36). [3] When play was commissioned by a consortium of European broadcasting companies, Stoppard set himself challenge of writing a play that to be for radio rather than stage (qtd. in Mayne 34). [4] He self-reflexively set blind Sophie in audience's position. The first duty of artist, Beauchamp says, as if commenting on play, is to capture radio (20). In 1990, Elissa S. Guralnick argued that Artist Descending a Staircase not only captured radio station but was perhaps Stoppard's finest play: prejudice against drama for radio had led scholars to see work as minor (286-87). wittiness of Stoppard's response to L'assassin menace manifest in his use of aural medium and in both structure and content of play. As Magritte critic Suzi Gablik observed, L'assassin has all character of one of those psychological games in which one supposed to make up one's own story from image (49). And it would seem that Stoppard done so twice, first in After Magritte and then, in much more detail and more elaborately, in Artist Descending a Staircase. While no scene in Artist Descending a Staircase directly comparable to that in painting, play can understood to tell story of L'assassin. painting at center of Stoppard's play may itself a witty inversion of window at center of Magritte's painting. Magritte, most notably in La condition humaine, calls into question Renaissance concept of painting as a window on reality by setting a painting in front of a window. We assume from continuity of painting with view through window that painting a representation of that view. But because painting largely occludes view, we cannot sure. Indeed, we become aware that all of La condition humaine a painting; there no view through a window. Thus Magritte points out that perception inevitably a function of representation, of human creation. Stoppard's play similarly about entrapment of humans in their representations. characters believe they are seeing reality as if through a window, but what they see their pictures of reality. In play, Stoppard also considers responsibility of artist to attempt to conscientiously repr esent reality. L'assassin highly suggestive of a play in a proscenium theater, one that a playing area at either side in front of proscenium, a main playing area within proscenium, and at rear center, an inner stage--the center rear window. …