Artistic Commitment Research Articles

Ingres's Second Madame Moitessier: ‘Le Brevet du Peintre d'Histoire’

Despite their ubiquity throughout his career, Ingres's portraits of women are generally understood to stand outside of, and in opposition to, the artist's academic practices and priorities. An examination of Ingres's Portrait of Madame Moitessier (1856) suggests rather that the portraiture lay at the crux of Ingres's particular relation to ‘nature’ and the ‘ideal’. Portrait‐making, with its attendant demands for verisimilitude and the insistent presence of the sitter's own body and desires, presented a challenge for the history painter, whose work was based upon a process of distillation from the studio model. And, while the portrait genre had long been haunted by the imagined threat of artistic servitude, Ingres responded to the problem of invoking the specificities of the sitter by simultaneously effecting her translation towards the general and by painting the portrait as history. In painting the portrait of Madame Moitessier in such terms, Ingres demonstrated how artistic practices and commitments which are generally understood to be mutually exclusive were instead, for Ingres, profoundly imbricated. Through an excavation of the processes and techniques used in the creation of the portrait of Madame Moitessier, this article argues that portraiture is the place to understand Ingres's notion of ‘history painter’ as something other than simply ‘painter of history‘.

Don't Lean on the Window

Don't Lean on the Window

Domestic Realism: Is It Still Possible on the American Stage?

There is no doubt that the American theatre has changed dramatically since the 1956 production of Samuel Beckett's Waitingfor Godot. Here was a form of theatre that challenged not only the optimistic vision of a country that still believed in causality, moral responsibility, and the American dream but also the artistic commitment of several generations of realistic playwrights. During that opening run of Godot, taxis queued outside the theatre at intermission anticipating fares from those unwilling to sit through a second act in which nothing happens, again-testimony to the fact that American audiences were not prepared for such radical disruptions of the familiar realistic paradigm. Careers took unexpected turns after that and, as public sensibilities became more flexible, new American playwrights found themselves more willing to experiment with form, to explore the non-realistic devices that had defined European drama since the period between the wars. There was room now in the American theatre for Edward Albee's absurdist American Dream in which dissatisfied adoptive parents systematically hack off the body parts of their baby, whose hands kept touching its you know what, then demand a refund from the adoption agency. There was room for the Happening, a spontaneous theatrical event that co-opted the audience, was performed only once, and was not recorded. There was room for Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theatre, which celebrated nudity, sex, and freedom, employing provocation, intimidation, seduction, and shock. These were the years when the off-off-Broadway movement got underway, with Caffe Cino and LaMama setting the pace for New York's alternative theatre. Despite an abundance of experimental activity, however, which continues today, the charac

Lawrence the Anti-Autobiographer

Lawrence the Anti-Autobiographer Stanley Sultan (bio) Although it is a critical commonplace that most of his early fiction is radically autobiographical, in fact, D.H. Lawrence evolved, almost at the beginning of his career, a very different relationship between his fiction and his personal history. It obtains even in his Künstlerroman, with Joyce’s the most famous novel in this century about the forming/education (Bildung) of a young person whose name is different from the author’s, whose life experience closely duplicates the author’s, and who adopts the vocation of artist. His evolution of a practice in fiction radically different from what has been generally assumed antedates that novel; but Sons and Lovers documents his practice. Young Lawrence completed his first novel, The White Peacock, before 11 April 1910, 1 and by October 18 he had “plotted out” and begun a draft of his third, as “Paul Morel” (Letters, I, p. 184). He abandoned the (lost) draft by the end of the year, but began a second one in March 1911. 2 By the summer he found himself unable to finish it (pp. 297–300). And “some time after our brief meeting in October” 1911 he sent the manuscript to Jessie Chambers, the young woman with whom he had had a decade-long intellectual and emotional relationship, “and asked me to tell him what I thought of it”: “So in my reply I told him I was very surprised that he had kept so far from reality in his story. . . . Finally I suggested that he should write the whole story again, and keep it true to life.” 3 Although he was the ostensible subject of his Künstlerroman, he had (in her phrases) “invented,” with little concern for “what had really happened.” Moreover, his attitude to personal history as the material of the autobiographical “Paul Morel” was strictly pragmatic: [End Page 225] as his abortive second draft reveals that he had no artistic commitment to his own life experience for its own sake, so his response to Chambers affirms that he was ready to use his life for the sake of his art: He fell in absolutely with my suggestion and asked me to write what I could remember of our early days, because, as he truthfully said, my recollection of those days was so much clearer than his. 4 And her assertion that he had undertaken his historically inaccurate novel fragment about a facsimile of himself, while knowing that he lacked adequate “recollection,” further confirms his pragmatic attitude to the relations of a writer’s life and art, for he showed it to be well-founded. On 3 November 1911, was shortly after his request that she “write what I could remember,” he began “the third and last” draft of his autobiographical novel (Letters I, p. 321), then came down with double pneumonia. Convalescing, he went to see her in February 1912, secured the pages of “recollection” that she had written over the three months, and resumed work on “Paul Morel.” 5 She reports that “His descriptions of family life” became not only “vivid” but also “exact.” 6 What is revealed by the young writer’s work on the aborted 1911 second draft of his autobiographical novel is that he was subordinating self-presentation to a pragmatic concern with making effective art. And the same artistic end caused him readily to accept Chambers’ recommendation and make himself the true subject of his next and final draft. Lawrence’s process of composition documents the status which he was giving to the facts of his young life by the time he began composing Sons and Lovers. * * * * D.H. Lawrence appears to have been the subject of more biographical writing than any other English(-speaking) author of this century. 7 The value of this small library of biographical material for a study of Lawrence and autobiography is apparent; but two points about it need to be made. Although the facts of Lawrence’s life are generally accepted in the formal biographies, a few originate in the testimony of a single witness. And all who mention [End Page 226] his early fiction consider it to be basically autobiographical, not...

Strange Bedfellows: Writing Love and Politics in Angels in America and The Normal Heart

As critics have worked to solidify the divisions between and second generation AIDS plays, important similarities between texts relegated to opposing ends of this great divide have been rendered increasingly invisible.1 Two of the most celebrated AIDS plays written in the U.S.—Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1993) and Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1985)—have rarely been viewed in terms of what they have in common, in large part because of the years that separated their writing. Nonetheless, both plays contain a remarkable number of similarities, ones which can be traced to the dual commitments of their respective authors: a personal commitment to political struggle, especially in relation to AIDS (both writers were AIDS activists), and an artistic commitment to reaching out to as wide and mainstream an audience as possible.3 Kramer and Kushner address this first commitment through an explicit treatment of AIDS politics in their plays: both Angels in America and The Normal Heart raise audience consciousness as to the complicity of government players in the spread of the epidemic, as well as to the political struggles that will be necessary if the epidemic is to end. Political struggle is not a particularly popular topic, however, and what has simultaneously allowed these plays to reach broad audiences is their organization around one or more love stories, a dominant theatrical convention that can render a story about homosexuals and AIDS palatable—even recognizable—to mainstream audiences. These two plot lines—love and politics—make strange bedfellows, however.4 While the love story in literature focuses on private relations, politics is generally about public struggle. While a focus on love tends to privilege the individual and the couple, a focus on politics—and especially AIDS politics—generally privileges collective forms of action.5 Most importantly, in imaginative literature about AIDS at least, love and politics possess an opposing relation to the question of narrative closure. On the

A Casebook on Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest ed. by George J. Searles

346 WesternAmerican Literature sive and cogent “Historical Essay” proves, however, the most useful of the scholarly elements. Gracefully summarizing the materials, methods and con­ texts surrounding the creation and publication of O Pioneers!, Stouck’s essay captures not only the life ofCather’stext, but also provides insight into Cather’s imagination and artistic process. It demonstrates the unifying energy of Cather’swriting, the wholeness of her art as it develops from the many sources, and the artistic commitment that found its first great expression in Cather’s second “first”novel. This edition may seem immoderate in its level of scholarly detail, but its apparatus does not intrude. Rather, text and context reveal the splendor of O Pioneers! and enrich both the experience and study of Cather’s extraordinary prose. KEVIN A. SYNNOTT The Sage Colleges A Casebook on Ken Kesey'sOne Flew Over The Cuckoo’sNest. Edited by GeorgeJ. Searles. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. 209 pages, $27.50.) Casebooks achieved their greatest prominence in America in the 60s as aids for the teaching of the undergraduate research paper and as modes for focus­ ing on the various kinds of activism on our college campuses that characterized the decade academically. Conventionally, such collections defined a subject (e.g., desegregation, the military/industrial complex, the death penalty, The Catcher in the Rye) in historical and philosophical context, identified seminal issues, provided a representative sampling of key essays on the subject, formu­ lated questions for analysis and writing, and supplied a comprehensive bibliog­ raphy. This casebook on Cuckoo’sNestdoes some ofthese things. In lieu ofoffering a historical and philosophical context, the introduction presents a cursory summary of the content of the essays to follow—no study questions. The selection of essays is uneven and far from a broad cross-sampling of major work. Terence Martin’s excellent interpretation from Modem Fiction Studies is in­ cluded, as is Elizabeth McMahan’s strong statement of the feminists’objections to the novel. But four of the fifteen essays are taken from the special double issue of Lex et Scientia, one from Literature and Psychology, one from Literature and Film Quarterly, and one (a cartoon strip) from Mad Magazine, thus one third of the book has a pronounced non-literary or pop-culture bias. One essay is even a kind ofecumenical sermon (from The Christian Century) using Cuckoo's Nest and Slaughterhouse Five as homiletic texts. No material is included from the three scholars who have written critical monographs on Kesey’swork, though they are identified and their books briefly annotated in the bibliography, which is adequate but not as inclusive as its headnote would suggest. I once traded with a bait shop called Fats Tackle Box (Fats didn’t hold with apostrophes),where a commercial fisherman named Buckler would often taunt Fats about his competitor’s business practices. “Old Taylor guarantees his baits, fat man,”he would say. “Are these worms guaranteed?” “Damn right,”Fats would reply. ‘They’re guaranteed to be exactly as good as they are. One hundred percent.”As Buckler chuckled his way out the door, Fats would add, “If they ain’t, you bring ’em back and I’ll double-check ’em for you.” This casebook is guaranteed to be exactly as good as it is. M. GILBERT PORTER University ofMissouri Reviews 347 Ace ofHearts: The Westerns ofZane Grey. ByArthur G. Kimball. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1993. 278 pages, $27.50.) The thesis of this confused, contentious, and condescending treatise is that Zane Grey was a writer of romance. It is not, despite the author’s claim, an original idea, but the book’s crippling flaw is its lack of a clear definition of the term, which appears at various times as simple boy-gets-girl love interest, pruri­ ent eroticism, or the high romance ofHugo or Stevenson. Kimball seems almost completely unfamiliar with Grey’s own writings on the subject: his two 1924 American Magazine articles and “My Answer To The Critics,” in The Zane Grey Collector#* (1978). These writings might have helped him locate Grey accurately where Grey himself thought he fit as a writer of romance. They also would have indicated something of Grey...

"To Keep the Present and Future in Touch with the Past"- Lewis Wickes Hine:

Lewis Wickes Hine exploited the powerful impact of the visual image to arouse the reforming spirit among the middle and upper classes and to inspire them to do something about the living and working conditions of thousands of America's poor. Hine was acquainted with many of the men and women who were involved in the Progressive social reform campaigns that were popular in the United States during the early twentieth century. A trained sociologist, he became interested in photography while teaching at the Ethical Culture School. Hine quickly realized that photographs could be powerful instruments of social reform and was able to effectively combine his interests in social welfare and photography. Hine believed that this efforts as a photographer should be guided by a social conscience and referred to his work as "social photography." His photographs of men, women and children enduring dangerous and inhuman working conditions were both sensitive and intense. As a result of his social conscience and artistic commitment Hine raised the cultural and social awareness of his contemporaries and made a significant contribution to social reform efforts in the United States.

Michelangelo at the Campidoglio: Artistic Identity, Patronage, and Manufacture

Michelangelo's design for the facade of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, which essentially dates from the late 1530s, articulates the functional and symbolic character of the existing building. It had two stories, with the offices of the municipal government housed in the upper one and those of the leading local guilds in the ground floor portico. The new facade reflects this distinction between political order and reason and the city's commercial life. The facade is strictly architectural; statuary is confined to the balustrade. The assertively heterodox Ionic order of the portico contrasts sharply with the Vitruvian Corinthian ordi of the upper story. Yet the hierarchical ordering of forms of human activity and of artistic idiom is deconstructed by the subtle insinuation of transgressive motifs from the lower into th upper story. The resultis a dynamic composition that expresses both Michelangelo' s artistic commitments and his response to the evolving sociopolitical environment.

Sir Charles Grandison : Richardson on Body and Character

Sir Charles Grandison: Richardson on Body and CharacterJuliet McMaster When charms of mind and person meet, / How rich our raptures rise!"carols Sir Charles Grandison to his bride, while he plays upon "a noble organ" (III, 274).' The moment forms a climax to the novel since it is the fullest expression of achieved felicity for Harriet Byron, now Lady Grandison. The full praise of her mind and body, delivered by the husband she loves and admires in the midst of a harmonious gathering of the people most dear to her, is a consummation of her happiness. Tears ofjoy ran down my cheeks. ... I was speechless. ... I thought at the time, I had a foretaste of the joys of heaven!—How sweet the incense of praise from a husband! That husband a good man!—My surrounding friends enjoying it! (Ill, 275) It is fitting that Richardson should place this climax at the moment of the declared harmony between flesh and spirit, or body and mind, as the tension between them has been a constant theme and a major source of the drama and interest of the novel. In the long battle over Richardson's reputation and the quality of his novels, the moralizing in them has been constantly attacked and justified. And the reputation of Sir Charles Grandison, in particular, fluctuates according to this argument, since it is the most overtly moral of the novels, with the least in the way of compensating sensational action. 1 The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). References to this edition, by volume and page number, appear in the text. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 1, Number 2, January 1989 84 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Richardson himself, of course, would have us believe that the "moral" is what really counts, while the "fable" is there only as a regrettably necessary sugaring of the pill. His work is "designed to inculcate upon the human mind, under the guise of an amusement, the great lessons of Christianity," and the story "was to be looked upon as the vehicle only to the instruction."2 The most dedicated fans of his own day may have professed a willingness to dispense with the fable and swallow the moral unsugared: Lady Echlin, for instance (telling Richardson just what he liked to hear), claimed she was "better pleased with musty morals than a pretty love-story."3 But the modern reader, with less patience for the aesthetic of moralizing, has much ado to rescue the pearl of drama from the clammy oyster of didacticism. Mark Kinkead-Weekes focuses on Richardson as "Dramatic Novelist."4 Carol Houlihan Flynn finds that in his best work "His artistic commitment to his characters subverted his moral intention." And she jettisons Grandison from her study as too morally ponderous: "The deadly weighted character of Sir Charles stifles the dramatic action of the book."5 Only the recent study of Sylvia Kasey Marks rejoices in the morality, finding Grandison not so much a surprisingly boring novel as a surprisingly interesting conduct book.6 Surprise seems to be characteristic of the modern reader who ventures on the now largely unread pages of Richardson's last novel. I think that the response of Mark Kinkead-Weekes is a familiar one. Sir Charles Grandison, he says, "has a curious energy that constantly surprises one, in the midst of irritations, with the knowledge that one is by no means as bored as one had thought."7 Faint praise, perhaps, for a novel that in the nineteenth century was so enormously influential, and so much admired by Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, Ruskin, and others. But it is worth exploring that curious energy, that residual interest that 2 "Postscript" to Clarissa. 3 The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (1804; New York: AMS Press, 1966), V, 54. 4 Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973). 5 Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) pp. xi, 48. 6 Sir Charles Grandison: The Compleat Conduct Book (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1986). 7 Kinkead-Weekes, p. 279. RICHARDSON ON BODY AND CHARACTER 85 still remains for...

"Desert Sun/Desert Moon" and the SKY ART Manifesto

Desert Sun/Desert Moon and the SKY ART Manifesto embody environmental sky art and future sky art projections as interpreted by the SKY ART Conferences, a series of four international conferences spanning a 5-year period from 1981 to 1986. Each SKY ART Conference brought together artists as well as scientists, engineers and public officials from many countries and included exhibitions, lectures, panels, events, installations and a catalogue. These efforts constituted a determined attempt to document the emerging field of sky art and to discover and project forms of art in space. Desert Sun/Desert Moon was a series of temporary events and installations utilizing the temporal landscape of sky and space to evoke at the same time mythic and immaterial dimensions of that sky and space. Complementing these events, the SKY ART Manifesto is a working document drafted at the ’86 SKY ART Conference. It offers artistic commitment to the future of art in space as an integral part of international exploration. The author describes Desert Sun/Desert Moon as it has emerged from the SKY ART Conferences and then presents the text of the SKY ART Manifesto. She comments on the importance of each regarding the practice and potential of sky art.

The Cappella Sagredo in San Francesco della Vigna

This study of the Cappella Sagredo in San Francesco della Vigna, Venice, seeks to relate the Chapel and its works of art to the political fortune of the Venetian family that commissioned them. Military disgraces and political achievements are examined as background to a Chapel that honors three distinguished members of the Sagredo family. Gerolamo Pellegrini, a Roman painter, executed frescoes around 1671 glorifying San Gherardo Sagredo, and the Virgin Mary. An ambitious altar tabernacle, again showing both San Gherardo and Mary, was sculpted c.1685 by Niccolo Sagredo (1606-76) and Patriarch Alvise Sagredo (1617-88) were executed c.1745 by Giovanni Gai, and a series of frescoes was painted in grisaille by Giambattista Tiepolo that show Allegorical Virtues and the Four Evangelists. It is concluded here that the Chapel stands as testimony to the intimate connections in the Serenissima linking patrician pride to artistic commitment and patriotic service.

Lino Novás Calvo and the Revista de Avance

It is significant that Lino Novás Calvo began his literary career by publishing in the Revista de Avarice, for there are certain similarities between the problems involving artistic expression with which that journal dealt and Novás’ early development of his own art. One scholar has pointed out that one can see in the works published in the Revista de Avarice“ el impulso renovador de una época ansiosa de cambios profundos.” This desire for change manifested itself in the political as well as cultural spheres and led the journal to consider the relationships between artistic expression and political commitment. Novás’ early works reveal that he dealt with this same problem, and it is the intention of this article to consider the general orientation of the Revista de Avance in regard to this conflict and to examine the evolution of Novás’ own solution as revealed in the poetry he published in that journal.