Artistic Struggle Research Articles

Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven/New Insights and Perspectives ed. by Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold

Reviewed by: Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven/New Insights and Perspectives ed. by Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold Sonja Niederacher Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold, eds., Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven/New Insights and Perspectives. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. 450 pp. Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold's volume Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven: New Insights and Perspectives tells of the proceedings of an international conference bearing the same title, which was held at the University of Applied Arts Vienna on February 27, 2020. All articles are alternately in German and English. The conference organizers and editors of the book are well-known figures in the field: Bonnefoit, now a full professor at the Institute for Art History and Museology at the University of Neuchâtel, served as a curator for the Fondation Oskar Kokoschka in Vevey for ten years from 2006 to 2016. Reinhold has been the director of the Oskar Kokoschka Center at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna since 2008 and authored the 2022 biography on the artist under the title Oskar Kokoschka und Österreich. Both editors have contributed significantly to the scholarly discourse on the artist and have taken part in shaping the basis they now can build on to explore "new insights and perspectives" on Kokoschka. Equally distinguished in their fields of expertise are the contributors to this volume. As is made clear in the introduction, the main intention was to confront the myths surrounding Oskar Kokoschka, of which there are many. The guiding question was whether and to what extent Kokoschka himself was the creator of these legends about his life and thus whether these are basically the result of self-promotion. The authors take up this approach and deliver manifold studies on Kokoschka's art and biography. The eleven articles are grouped in five chapters. Under the title "Self-positioning and Marketing Strategies," Birgit Kirchmayr analyzes how the artist contrived his autobiographical writings to represent the topos of an artist's life. Keith Holz meticulously lays out Kokoschka's efforts to gain ground in the US art market. Oskar Kokoschka's famous doll that was modeled after his former lover, Alma Mahler, demands contextualization in gender discourse, a task fulfilled by Reinhold herself, who interprets dolls as a "figuration of Modernism." Katharina Prager elucidates the whirling gender discourses in Vienna at the turn of the century, fortunately guiding the reader away from the misogynistic writings of Oskar Weininger, which have long dominated the retrospective perception of the [End Page 114] period (primarily for their shock potential) and instead offers more diverse elaborations of the subject. Anna Stuhlpfarrer and Barbara Lesák portray in their texts Oskar Kokoschka in other roles, as playwright, director, and set designer, again showing Kokoschka's constant efforts to shape his image retrospectively (Stuhlpfarrer) and the artist's struggle with gender relations in his expressionist plays (Lesák). Aglaja Kempf analyzes the influence of "Japonisme," so fashionable in Vienna at the time of Kokoschka's work, which is actually the only art-historical text on the artist's paintings. Whereas the text on Japanese aesthetics as well as those that deal with gender questions look at theories and concepts that emerged from society as a whole, the text on the sixteenth-century reformer and educator Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky), written by Bonnefoit, shows Kokoschka's very personal source of inspiration. Based on Comenius' writings, Kokoschka developed his concept of "seeing," as realized in his annual seminars held at the International Summer Academy for Visual Arts in Salzburg, called "Schule des Sehens." Kokoschka's postulate of the artist's role as "eye-opener" also derives from Comenius. Günter Berghaus explores the reception of German Expressionism in Brazil exemplified in a production of "Murderer, Hope of Women" in Rio de Janeiro in 1997, directed by the author himself. This broad approach that allows multiple perspectives on the artist and his oeuvre has proven fruitful. Likewise, new hitherto unexplored archival sources enable interpretations from different angles, as shown in the first chapter, on Kokoschka's political engagement. Ines Rotermund-Reynard draws from her research in the Moscow Special Archive to depict the artist's...

Cézanne's Parrot by Amy Guglielmo

Reviewed by: Cézanne's Parrot by Amy Guglielmo Elizabeth Bush Guglielmo, Amy Cézanne's Parrot; illus. by Brett Helquist. Putnam, 2020 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-525-51508-1 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-525-51509-8 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad 5-8 yrs As nineteenth-century artist Paul Cézanne runs up against critical censure by taste-makers at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the progressive Impressionist exposition, even his parrot Bisou seems to concur with their dismissal. When Cézanne insists, "'Repeat after me … Cézanne is a great painter!' Bisou opened his beak as if to speak … But he just yawned instead." After rounds of frustration, scads of advice, and years of convincing himself to stick to his own vision, the artist finds success, and Bisou finally confers approbation. The parrot storyline that propels this picture book bio is, according to Guglielmo's concluding notes, based on an observation by a contemporary art critic, with invented dialogue mixed into the text along with credited quotations. It's an amusing concept, but it's not really enough to carry the slight and familiar story. Helquist's oil paintings are calibrated to the light-hearted but ultimately extraneous parrot plot, with the balding, pink-nosed artist looking perpetually grumpy and disappointed, and his critics looking gleefully mean-spirited. End matter includes source notes and a thoughtful recap of the artist's struggle and eventual acclaim; a list of Cézanne's paintings depicted in the book (page reference is made, but the pages themselves are unnumbered) is helpful. There's a missed opportunity, though, to label and/or likewise credit the many paintings in the background of Helquist's scenes, which could help viewers compare Cézanne's paintings with those of his peers. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Ortega's razón vital and Lorca's duende in ‘Poema doble del lago Edén’

The present article examines two aesthetic concepts that inform Lorca's ‘Poema doble del lago Edén’ and shows how these impact the process of signification and the evolving subjectivity in the poem. The first of these is Ortega y Gasset's razón vital, which places the contemplation of the problem of life at the centre of artistic endeavour and also emphasizes the importance of circumstances in the contemplative process. The second is Lorca's duende, which identifies the struggle with a truth-bearing and creative power as the artist's essential task. In ‘Poema doble’ this power is the poet's voz antigua, and represents the early inception of what Lorca later identifies as the duende. This article, which undertakes a comparative reading of ‘Poema doble’ and the works dealing with these aesthetic theories—Ortega's ‘Adán en el paraíso’ and ‘Meditaciones del Quijote’ and Lorca's ‘Juego y teoría del duende’—re-examines the Vermont experience heretofore eclipsed by Lorca's more publicized and longer sojourn in New York City. It also discusses ‘Poema doble del lago Edén’ as a window on to Lorca's own artistic struggle with the duende, cast in the vein of aesthetic mysticism that was nurtured in Lorca's generation by Ortega.

Wajda meets Lem: Przekładaniec/Roly Poly (1968) as an example of early Polish science-fiction cinema

ABSTRACTPrzekładaniec/Roly Poly (1968), based on a Stanisław Lem script, is a frequently overlooked oddity in Andrzej Wajda's body of work. The film occupies a curious place amongst the director's films of the 1960s, a period marked by his experimentation with new genres and modes. Furthermore, as part of a Polish television series of science-fiction shorts, Roly Poly is an interesting example of an exclusively Polish film made when the genre was dominated by international co-productions. This paper aims to trace the genesis of Roly Poly, particularly its script and Wajda's relationship to Lem. It also briefly traces 1960s and 1970s Polish science-fiction cinema and the implications of Wajda's choice of the genre. I propose a reading of Roly Poly as the reflection of Wajda's own artistic struggle. The protagonist's gradual identity loss through the gradual substitution of his defining characteristics in some ways mirrors the filmmaker's own creative and personal crisis at that time. Roly Poly is here interpreted as a palate cleanser, or an artistic break from Wajda's signature themes and stylistics preceding the opening of a successful second act in the director's career.

The Inward and Outward Trajectories of the Shaman's Journeys: Mediation in Ben Okri's Dangerous Love and Zakes Mda's The Sculptors of Mapungubwe

SummaryThis article teases out a dialogue between Zakes Mda's The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013) and Ben Okri's Dangerous love (1988), fictions that foreground art and delineate it as a shamanic ritual site. Having provided synopses of ritual in these two novels, the discussion then goes on to remark on the concern with this key subject in these novels’ respective scholarships. Thereafter, the examination moves on to suggest that these overlapping highlight the tendency in African literatures to turn to spirituality and to the figure of the shaman during challenging political transitions. The proposal is that the shaman reconfigures memory into secular mediations of other subjects’ trauma, making these intercessions operate in mutually inclusive private and public complexities. The rest of the article considers the depictions of two such intricacies: the artist's struggle to establish a narrative of mourning in Dangerous love, and the socially oriented dance and sculpture in The Sculptors of Mapungubwe.

Comparisons of Perspective in the Empfindsamer Stil: How the music of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach represents a microcosm of an emerging cultural initiative

Name: Kristen Huebner Main Subject: Traverso Research Coaches: Inês de Avena Braga and Jacques Ogg Title of Research: Comparisons of Perspective in the Empfindsamer Stil: How the music of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach represents a microcosm of an emerging cultural initiative Research Question: What are the musical tools available to musicians which can be used to unlock the complex understanding of the Empfindsamer Stil? Research Process: My research process has been the result of years working and performing the 1788 Quartets for Keyboard, Flute and Viola by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach. Besides a deep musical analysis of these three works, the main body of my research has dealt with the developing style which is commonly associated with this music, that of Empfindsamkeit or Empfindsamer Stil. The English translation equating to “sensitive style” is often associated with the Sturm und Drang, a highly influential literary movement of the 1770s. After reading much of the actual literature of the Sturm und Drang, including Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, I set out to draw a distinction between the terms Empfindsamkeit and Sturm und Drang. Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach’s ersuch ber die ahre rt das lavier u spielen provided the springboard for my musical analysis of the Quartets and a subsequent categorization of three distinct musical characteristics used to describe the music of the Empfindsamkeit. Summary of Results: Having its origins in literature, the Sturm und Drang aimed to represent an artistic struggle showing the depths and extremes of the human experience, working most often in contradiction with the mainstream Enlightenment ideology of the time, which was founded and based on man’s ability to reason. Breaking away from this restrictive model, the Sturm und Drang influence crept further into cross-disciplines of poetry, theater and painting, yet striking deepest in the most ambiguous and indefinable of arenas, music. The Quartets of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach surprised and demanded a more explicit and contemplative attitude in order to perform with any real consciousness or effect. In addition to shifting roles in instrumentation with the keyboard asserting dominance over the supporting flute and viola, I have explored rhythmic manipulation and surprise, in addition to dynamic juxtaposition. Perhaps most taxing for the performer of these Quartets is the abruptness with which one must make changes in mood and character; drastic intervallic leaps, modulation to strange keys and an intentional disruption of the rhythmic pulse all contribute to a sense of impulsiveness, the suggestion of something that cannot be predicted and should be performed with an equal amount of surprise. The presentation will take the form of an informative demonstration combining live musical examples with visual representations of paintings and portraits of key figures in a PowerPoint presentation.

Giovanni Bellini, the San Giobbe Altarpiece, and the imitatio Christi

This article explores some of the unexplored details of Giovanni Bellini's rightly famous altarpiece for San Giobbe: the choice of the six saints depicted, the emphasis on the gaze of each, the unusual expression of the Christ-child, the curious gesture that the Madonna makes with her left hand, and the function of the eye-catching angel-musicians. Its purpose is to illustrate Jung's insistence that one should “stick” with the image, to suggest that an artist's struggle to realize his or her inner vision is about being able to see and understand intuitions that others miss, and to propose that a work of art can harbor a struggle with “meaning” that is just as intense as that which faces the analysand who wrestles to understand the deepest implications of his or her dreams and fantasies.

Artaud, Barney, and the Total Work of Art from Avant-Garde to the Posthuman

In their article "Artaud, Barney, and the Total Work of Art from Avant-Garde to the Posthuman" Matteo Colombi and Massimo Fusillo discuss the aesthetics of Matthew Barney's video-performance art and the theater of Antonin Artaud. Colombi and Fusillo highlight the characteristics of the posthuman: the rejection of Western anthropocentrism and its subversion through hybridization with human, animal, and mechanical elements, the incorporation of Dionysian imagery of the body, and a commitment to the idea of the total work of art in its blending of different artistic mediums, and indeed, of art and life. Using examples from Artaud's writings on theater, Colombi and Fusillo suggest that these features are also to be found in avant-garde aesthetics. The most evident link between Artaud's théâtre de la cruauté and Barney's video circle Cremaster appears the ambition to create a total work of art in which a kaleidoscope of stages/landscapes is brought to life by performers whose corporal training — one centered on the energy produced by means of contraction and relaxation — resembles that of an elite athlete. While both Artaud's and Barney's aesthetics are similar in their rejection of the clear, stable distinctions of rational thought, they differ in their structuring of the artist's struggle to reshape the human body. While Artaud's theater is tied to an avant-gardist utopian teleology, Barney stresses the inevitable inconclusiveness of every total work of art.

Inspired by El Duende: One-Canvas Process Painting in Art Therapy Supervision

This article describes an art-based approach to supervision that combines clinical insights with archetypal awareness arising from painting on a single canvas throughout the internship semester. Supervision is comprised of three main components: (a) spontaneous painting, (b) complex reflective processing, and (c) aesthetically focused attention to imagery appearing in the painting that parallels the internship experience. Inspired by the artistic struggle of el duende to bring forth emotional vibrancy, a central aspect of the model is the supervisee's relationship to a single canvas that transforms awareness through sequential layering, that welcomes tension, and that potentially integrates personal and professional identities.

Villard de Honnecourt and Invention

This paper suggests that some of the drawings in the celebrated portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt shed light on medieval notions of the difficulty, as well as the ease, of invention. Frequently, Villard’s drawings are seen as disconnected ‘studies’, but it is argued here that in some cases their relationships are thoughtful, and may be understood by reference, rhetorical in origin, to wrestling as a metaphor for intellectual or artistic struggle. Though artistic invention was not discussed in the Middle Ages as much as it was in the Renaissance, it is suggested that Villard’s use of the imagery of fierce action belongs to a phase of heroic attainment in Gothic architecture particularly, in northern France around 1200.

The Traitor and the Stowaway: Persona Construction and the Quest for Cultural Anonymity and Cultural Relevance in the Trajectories of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen <br> doi:10.5429/2079-3871(2010)v1i2.6en

While wide apart in terms of cultural heritage and creative energy, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan reconfigured the figure of the oral poet as a cultural hero for the age of the mass media as they defined their basic postures – the (non)protest-singer as prophet and agent provocateur and the troubadour as high priest of the depths of the heart. 
 We propose to analyze the modalities of their many cultural struggles – their artistic struggle against their audience, their discursive struggle against the critics, and their strategic struggle against the music industry. Also of interest are how those struggles arise in their art and persona construction and how they generate specific modes of performance and a specific relationship with their audiences.
 We will see as we proceed that Cohen and Dylan’s trajectories can be seen as inverted images of each other: Dylan has spent most of his career in a cultural war against his original position of hyper-relevance, trying to obliterate his own persona and regain a cultural anonymity, while Cohen, formerly a poet with no rock credentials, had to struggle his way towards a position of cultural relevance and turn what was essentially perceived as a literary gesture into a rock statement.
 Along the way, we will be brought to reflect on the functions and uses of heroes in rock culture and assess the amount of pop pleasures taken in the enjoyment of popular singers’ masks and personae.

A Quality of Obsession Considerably Further East: The Holocaust in the Cinema of Stanley Kubrick

The Shining (1980) is the prime instance among Stanley Kubrick's films of a curious, conflicted, and creative approach-avoidance syndrome with regard to the Holocaust. Kubrick's family origins in the shtetl of Eastern Europe, together with his upbringing and movie-going in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, produced a lifelong obsession with human evil and the capacity of modern film art to portray and mitigate it. Kubrick's open narrative style of filmmaking leaves issues unresolved and ambiguous not only as a reflection of the world but also as a means toward audience reflection. In The Shining there is a deeply laid visual and aural subtext that locates the Holocaust as the benchmark for modern evil in a way that reflects not only Kubrick's own personal and artistic struggle with the subject but also his habitual method of bringing the world to artistic expression.

Taming the political: the struggle over recognition in the politics of applied theatre

The emerging sub-field of applied theatre encompasses a wide range of pro-social ‘alternative’ theatre practices, but it also refers to a discursive practice that seeks to reconcile the apparently contradictory claims of the politics of egalitarian redistribution and the politics of difference. The argument in this paper is that this emerging political position reflects a contemporary turn towards the identity politics of recognition and away from political theatre's traditional concern with the ‘old left’ politics of redistribution. A critique of the discourse of applied theatre, based on the political philosophy of Nancy Fraser and James Tully, leads to a consideration of the potential of a new left politics of recognition and dialogue in which the processes of participation in social and artistic struggle are seen as the practice of civic dialogic freedom.

Creating Madame Landowska

THE FAMOUS POLISH HARPSICHORDIST Wanda Landowska has recently been characterized as an uncommon visionary and an epochal exception. (1) Such epithets recognize her as a singularly influential musician and, at the same time, mythologize her into a modern revolutionary who almost single-handedly initiated the worldwide revival of the twentieth century by championing above all the authentic performance of Bach on the harpsichord. Over the past seventy years the legend of Wanda Landowska has become firmly enshrined in the histories and mythologies of the early music movement. This image stems from her successful and sustained international solo career--flourishing to her death in 1959--and from the worldwide impact of her midcareer recordings of the 1930s. (2) Wanda Landowska's story is one of struggle, controversy, and triumph in which personal sacrifice engenders greatness while the performer becomes anointed as the true voice of the composer. Her visual and artistic self-representation and the aura of aristocratic mystique and inspiration turned her concerts into ritualized celebrations during which she appeared as a high priestess of the cult of Bach. From her clothing to her hairstyle, every element of her public appearances was deliberate and choreographed. (3) Landowska not have dreamt of beginning a recital without first establishing the proper atmosphere: the lighting on stage had to be very dim before she would glide, wraith-like, onto the platform, hands clasped as if in prayer and eyes cast heavenward. (4) The roots of Landowska's self-representation as the goddess of the harpsichord and the myths associated with it reach back to the beginnings of her career in prewar Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. (5) The French capital provided the cultural context within which Landowska's career as performer, composer, and scholar was molded. As a young woman in her twenties she could draw on models of gendered performance tested by other female musicians in the French capital. Indeed, the strategies that she and her entourage developed in these early years created Madame as she was known, by instrumentalizing successful female career tactics in prewar Paris so as to forge her own unique artistic identity. Landowska's claim for artistic uniqueness, her increasing specialization as a harpsichordist, her (self-)representation as musical daughter of Bach, her emphasis on a special calling, the relentless rhetoric of exceptionality and artistic struggle not only characterize her (auto)biography since the 1940s but also reflect key elements of women's professional strategies in the Parisian world around 1900. (6) Her correspondence and other documents from these early years reveal that she was an active agent in the creation of her public persona while drawing on a support network that included her husband, Henri Lew, her impresario, Gabriel Astruc, and a host of wise if not always old men such as Charles Bordes and Leo Tolstoy. Paris, Women, and Harpsichord Music Women musicians in particular were attracted to fin de siecle Paris because it offered career opportunities that were scarce in other cities such as Vienna, Berlin, and London. (7) Paris had a cosmopolitan and financially well heeled audience, dozens of concert series, hundreds of salons and concert societies, many schools and conservatories--all spaces within which a young, ambitious musician could carve out a place for herself. What Walter Benjamin so famously called the capital of the nineteenth century represented not only a place full of career opportunities but also the cultural and center of a Europe that needed to be conquered for any major international career to flourish. (8) Paris presented thus an ideal milieu for the ambitious young pianist and fledgling composer Wanda Landowska, who moved to the French capital in 1900 at the age of twenty-one to fulfill her mad desire to be famous. …

Music for the End of Time (review)

Reviewed by: Music for the End of Time Hope Morrison Bryant, Jen Music for the End of Time; illus. by Beth Peck. Eerdmans, 200532p ISBN 0-8028-5229-7$17.00 Ad Gr. 4-7 Based on the real-life story of French composer Olivier Messiaen, Bryant's illustrated [End Page 171] biography chronicles how it came to be that a French prisoner of the Nazis was allowed to compose and perform his Quartet for the End of Time for an audience of over 5,000 at the Gorlitz prison camp. Messiaen arrives at the prison camp with a bag full of music clutched to his chest; as luck would have it, a compassionate German officer becomes aware of his interest in music and not only allows Messiaen to work on his compositions but provides him with a small room, a piano, a cello, and other musicians. The four members of the quartet rehearse in the washroom for many months before their debut performance in January of 1941. This is a fascinating story that unfortunately fails to flesh out some of its key descriptions. Although an appended author's note describes the factual occurrence on which the story is based, there are not enough details in the narrative to allow the reader to suspend disbelief over the unusual freedoms that Messiaen was allowed. Further, the plot lacks tension—from the beginning Messiaen is allowed to compose, and he eventually performs his piece without encountering any obstacles along the way. Peck's charcoal and pastel illustrations boast broad strokes and thick lines; while some details are muddied, there is a sense of fluidity in her compositions that matches the topic of musical composition. Those seeking historical information will be disappointed, but young readers interested in music may find hope in this tale of an artist's struggle. Copyright © 2005 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Britten’s Musical Syllables

In Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, we are told that the protagonist, Aschenbach, first interprets the sounds of Tadzio’s name as two ‘musical syllables’. By setting the syllables and related words in a network of leitmotifs, Britten’s operatic version of Mann’s tale creates a large-scale rhyme scheme that enriches the narrative with a wealth of sonorous signification. Bits of libretto text become linked with Tadzio’s name, and their musical and phonemic development is traced from ‘addio’ to ‘Adgio’ to ‘ah no’ and beyond, illustrating how notions of departure, desire, and dissolution resonate within Tadzio’s acoustical persona. Observations gleaned from studying Britten’s sketches and libretto drafts support this interpretation, as do recent perspectives from phonology and cognitive poetics. The discussion ultimately demonstrates how transformations of the Tadzio syllables enact not only the repressive process that underlies Aschenbach’s artistic struggle, but also the restoration that comes even at the moment of his death.

Charles Koechlin, Catherine Urner, and the Shatto-Urner Manuscript Collection at the University of California, Berkeley

After the death of the organist Charles Shatto on New Year's Day 1983, the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) inherited a substantial collection of manuscripts by Shatto himself, his wife Catherine Urner (1891-1942), and their composition teacher and mentor, Charles Koechlin (1867-1950). This article refers mainly to the Koechlin part of this archive, which I studied in detail after being first asked to assess it by John Emerson in 1984. An abbreviated checklist (with index) can be found in an appendix, and the manuscripts in question are now housed in the new Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library at Berkeley. But we should remember that, without Charles Shatto, there would have been no archive to classify, so I am sure we are all deeply grateful to him. The Urner part of the archive, which is presently being digitized at the F. Eugene Miller Foundation offices under the direction of Michael Meadway, contains over eighty songs by Catherine (ten of which were published in Paris by Maurice Senart in 1928), many American Indian songs, twenty-four choral works, eight orchestral works (including The Bride of a God, written in collaboration with Koechlin in 1929), seventy-four piano, and forty-three organ pieces, and thirty chamber works. Charles Shatto's arrangements of his wife's music are also included in the archive. Koechlin's status as a composer has risen considerably over the last decade or so, thanks largely to the many superb compact disc recordings by conductors such as David Zinman, Leif Segerstam, and Heinz Holliger. Indeed, his complex and visionary symphonic poems need repeated hearings before they can be fully appreciated. During his lifetime, Koechlin suffered from the vicious circle that music must first be known to be played, and vice versa, and the prevailing quest for unknown pieces by great composers at the expense of great pieces by unknown composers has not helped his case. Neither has the substantial [End Page 48] body of potentially worthy French composers who were Koechlin's contemporaries and, in most cases, friends. Although Koechlin worked constantly to get his music performed, his brief spate of publications and critical recognition in the early 1920s was overshadowed by his growing reputation as a teacher and pedagogue by the early 1930s. In 1942 the equally visionary writer Wilfrid Mellers championed him as being "among the select number of contemporary composers who really matter."1 His astute prophecy came true, for Koechlin is now rated alongside Debussy (whose ballet Khamma he orchestrated in 1912-13) as an independent and original contributor to the development of modern French music. He was a pioneer of polytonality and polymodality from the early 1900s onwards, besides being a master contrapuntist whose idol was J. S. Bach. But above all, it was the sheer scale, luminous orchestration, and the enduring rhythmic freshness of his visionary symphonic works that have justified his elevation. Koechlin's reevaluation has also been helped by his devoted offspring, especially Madeleine and Yves Koechlin; by Otfrid Nies, who has established an archive of his music and writings in Kassel, Germany;2 and perhaps a little by my own monograph on his life and works. This was originally written at the request of Professor Charles Cushing of UCB, and has since been published by Harwood Academic Publishers.3 Whilst on the subject of books, I must also recommend Barbara Urner Johnson's superb new monograph on her aunt, entitled Catherine Urner andCharles Koechlin: A Musical Affaire.4 Through her wide-ranging research, and her access for the first time to the full range of correspondence between the two composers, she has uncovered a story of courage, devotion, and self-sacrifice that has shed new light on Koechlin, and on the musical scene in Paris and California in the 1920s and 1930s. Her book has also provided a unique perspective on the artistic struggle of a woman composer...

Torturer and Servant: Samuel Beckett'sHow It Is

Hoy low It Is (Comment c'est) is a difficult and puzzling text which has elicited varied approaches from critics. Some commentators view the novel through the lens of philosophy, focusing, for example, on Beckett's relationship to Sartre, or Camus; the Beckett/Geulincx connection; or on the influence of Democritus of Abdera.1 Others concentrate on Beckett's use of The Inferno,2 or read the novel as an illustration of Beckettian aesthetics by drawing on his critical statements in Three Dialogues and in his essays on painters. These aestheticians underscore the vain compulsion to impose unity and meaning on human experience through art3 or see How It Is as a representation of the artist's struggle against, and submission to, suicide.4 The novel is also seen as the creation through torture of a social being.5 Nearer to my own reading, Frederik N. Smith describes Beckett's attempts to catch the flux of the writing process as it happens. The contest is between imagination (spontaneous creation) and revision. However, Smith does not go beyond his argument that the novel represents the genesis

‘To rise from generation’: The sublime body in William Blake's illuminated books

While the history of the interest in and debate about the sublime has established it as the most important influence on English aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contemporary critical views of the sublime and its significance have in turn rejected, misunderstood and oversimplified the contributions of its most revolutionary theorist and practitioner: William Blake's theory and practice of the sublime is a radical reinterpretation of the English tradition of aesthetics in its rejection of the division of sublimity and beauty in the arts. The Blakean sublime is the result of the artist's struggle to envision the infinite as the instant of realization of the imaginative potential of the human form in poetry and visual art. Loudly, if only along the edges of pages, Blake enters the debate about the sublime with his attack on Reynolds' Discourses. Blake's marginalia identify Reynolds' thought as part of a tradition based on, 'Burke's Treatise on the Sublime & Beautiful . on this Treatise Reynolds has grounded many of his assertions in all his Discourses. . They mock Inspiration & Vision' (E 660).1 Blake's theoretical positioning of himself in opposition to Edmund Burke's landmark A Philosophical Enquiry best suggests Blake's notion of the sublime.

The artist, his model, her image, his gaze: Picasso's pursuit of the model

Although Pablo Picasso's name is virtually synonymous with modernity, his late graphics repeatedly turn back to the traditional theme of the artist and model. Had the aging artist turned reactionary, or is Picasso's treatment of the theme more subversive than anyone has suspected? In this innovative study, Karen L. Kleinfelder rejects the claim that Picasso's later work was a failure. The failing, she claims, lies more in the way we typically have read the images, treating them merely as reflections of an old-age style or of the artist's private life. Focusing on graphics dating from 1954 to 1970, Kleinfelder shows how Picasso plays with the artist-model theme to extend, subvert, and parody both the possibilities and limits of representation. For Kleinfelder, Picasso's graphic work both mystifies and demystifies the creative process, venerates and mocks the effects of aging and the artist's self-image as a living old master, and acknowledges and denies his own fear of death. Using recent interpretive and literary theory, Kleinfelder probes the three-way relationship between artist, model, and canvas. The dynamics of this relationship provided Picasso with an open-ended textual framework for exploring the dichotomies of man/woman, self/other, and vitality/mortality. What unfolds is the artist's struggle not only with the impossibility of representing the model on canvas, but also with the inevitability of his own death. Kleinfelder explores how Picasso's means of pursuing these issues allows him to defer closure on a long, productive career. By focusing on the graphics rather than the paintings, Kleinfelder contradicts the primacy of the painted masterpiece; she steers the reader away from the assumption that the artist must work toward creating a final body of work that signifies the culmination of his search for a coherent identify. Picasso's search, she argues, realizes itself in the creative process. She interprets the late graphics not as a biographical statement but as a tool for investigating the possibilities of representation within the limits of Picasso's medium and his lifetime. Richly illustrated, Kleinfelder's book will open up new approaches to the late work of this complex artist.