German Painter Research Articles

A PXRF and TXRF study of The Portrait of a young gentleman (1539), by Lucas Cranach the Elder

Lucas Cranach the Elder is one of the most important German painters of the XV and XVI centuries. It is presented and discussed the technical examination of The Portrait of a Young Gentleman, a wood panel from the collection of São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1539. In situ PXRF and laboratory TXRF were employed for the elemental characterization of the pigments. The results allowed us to characterize the materials present in the original painting as well as in past interventions. Among the obtained results, some of the original materials identified were Lead White, Chalk, Bone Black, White Vitriol, Azurite, Vermilion and earthy pigments, such as Red, Yellow and Brown Ochres.

ИОГАНН ЭЛИАС ГРИММЕЛЬ (1703-1758) - НЕМЕЦКИЙ ХУДОЖНИК НА СЛУЖБЕ В РОССИЙСКОЙ АКАДЕМИИ НАУК

The article examines the creative work of the German painter Johann-Elias Grimmel, who headed the Drawing Chamber of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The research is based on documentary materials, including archival ones. For the first time in the domestic historiography the paper introduces information on Grimmel’s pictures created in Germany and analyses in detail his achievements in the sphere of book illustration, painting, restoration. The author concludes that this German painter, having been an active participant of the Russian artistic life, contributed considerably to the development of the Russian visual arts.

Escritura sobre la imagen: El caso crítico de "Monje frente al mar" de Caspar David Friedrich

En este artículo se presenta el análisis de una de las críticas coetáneas realizadas a la pintura Monje frente al mar (1810) de Caspar David Friedrich. Se trata de “Empfindugen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft”, escritas por Clemens Brentano junto a Achim von Arnim, modificadas y publicadas en Berliner Abendbläter por Heinrich von Kleist. Los objetivos son, por un lado, encontrar y exponer una relación entre este ejercicio crítico-dramático con la crítica posterior sobre la obra y cómo es vinculada en ella Monje frente al mar con el arte contemporáneo; y por otro, plantear un nexo entre la forma dramatizada de esta crítica de arte y las novedades formales y semánticas presentes en el lienzo del pintor alemán.

LOOKING THROUGH LIDLESS EYES

The German painter Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (1808–10), a picture that has played an important role in accounts of the prehistory of twentieth-century abstract art, is significant among other reasons because it bravely refused painting’s narrative vocation and in so doing radicalized the optics characteristic of the contemporary aesthetics of the sublime. Friedrich’s contemporary, the novelist and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, intuited precisely this in his scintillating comments on the painting at the time it appeared. Invoking the shocking idea that looking at The Monk by the Sea is like seeing through eyes whose lids have been cut off, he recognized that Friedrich had transformed the canvas into the locus not so much of narration and signification as of sensation. This article leans on the terms devised by Gilles Deleuze to explain the paintings of Francis Bacon in order to explore the seminal shift in the relationship between spectator and composition that Friedrich’s canvas dramatizes with such compelling power.

War, Art and Ideology: Can Art Help Us Understand Bellicosity?

Amongst the different images of war that are currently being updated and analysed, one of them could serve as the starting point for this reflection, as it brings together old and new questions. The picture in question is Die Heimkehr [The Return], painted by the German painter Hans-Adolf Buhler in 1940. Rather than the actual painting, its reproduction in the form of a postcard is what is discussed in the book Histories in Conflict: the Haus der Kunst and the Ideological Uses of Art, 1937-19...

Fidus (1868–1948)

The German painter Hugo Höppener (1868–1948) received the nickname “Fidus” from self-styled prophet Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851–1913), who regarded him as his most trusted disciple. Later, Fidus abandoned Diefenbach for Theosophy, and remained a Theosophist to the end of his days. As he emerged as an extremely popular Art Deco artist and illustrator, he sided with the Adyar Theosophical Society against the schism of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). After World War I, however, he regarded Nazism as the only hope for Germany, joined the Nazi Party in 1932, and did not protest the Nazi ban of Theosophy in 1937. Esotericism remained a dominant theme of his art, and he never became a regime artist, although his association with Nazism made him an embarrassment for both Theosophists and art critics, and his important role in the history of German art was acknowledged only recently.

Au revoir Man Tine par Mérine Céco

dédouanant la mère de toute culpabilité. Thomas, lui, a changé et s’installe avec Pénélope. Même s’il garde ses jouets, il les a remis dans des vitrines. Collector, bien écrit et rondement mené, opère sa propre magie sur les lecteurs qui ont connu les eighties et offre à tous une réflexion profonde sur l’Enfance. Eastern Connecticut State University Michèle Bacholle-Bošković Céco, Mérine. Au revoir Man Tine. Paris: Écriture, 2016. ISBN 978-2-35905-211-4. Pp. 176. 17 a. This author is quickly becoming an up-and-coming representative of a new Martinican créolité. After her first novel, La mazurka perdue des femmes-couresse (2013), she has now written a short story collection, a complex work that demonstrates both intertextuality with Martinican literature and distinctive developments beyond that tradition. The book can be read on several levels. First, as a collection of short stories, it builds on that genre in the Caribbean tradition. In addition, because the short stories are autobiographical, Céco continues the tradition of autobiographical writing so important within French literature (Nathalie Sarraute’s L’enfance,for example) and Martinican letters, bringing to mind collections such as Patrick Chamoiseau’s Une enfance créole or Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du devant-jour. Furthermore, Au revoir Man Tine takes as direct inspiration one of the classics of Caribbean literature, Joseph Zobel’s La rue Cases-Nègres. The conceit of the collection is that Man Tine, the grandmother of José Hassam, the protagonist of La rue Cases-Nègres, never received a proper goodbye from José after he had gone off to work in the big city. They both represent more than themselves for Céco, however. They represent entire generations—Man Tine a forgotten Martinican past, and José the newer generation that desired the best possible modern French life for their children, who are the current generation of technology-saturated, history-starved young people. Céco seeks to bid goodbye to Man Tine, literally opening her book by saying: “Il est enfin temps de réparer cette trouée de l’Histoire: au revoir Man Tine!” (10), and also by bringing the past and present together throughout the collection. In three parts (“Libellules en pluie,”“Âmes du péyi d’enfance,”and“Autoportraits”), with four short stories in each part, Céco recounts her childhood, adolescence, and ultimately her adulthood and motherhood. Using a distinctive stylistic feature, she often ends her stories with a paragraph or two of reflection on the characters, places, or traditions mentioned therein and what they are like today. For example, in her first story “Une allée de mahoganys,” Céco recounts her school days as the daughter of her own teachers and shows the clash of bringing European Catholic education into contact with rural culture of the Martinican campagne.And at the end, she tells her readers that the allée de mahoganys that led to their school no longer exists, as so much has changed with the changing of time:“L’herbe de Guinée continue de pousser devant les portes closes 266 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 267 des petits camarades qui se sont dispersés dans le monde et que je retrouve, au hasard de Facebook ou Twitter”(26). Her twenty-first-century style and content set her apart in Martinican literature as a writer who appreciates both past and present, unlike the somewhat more nostalgic créolités of Chamoiseau and Confiant. Céco has managed to produce an essential work of Martinican literature by recounting her own experiences situated in the past and present of the island while avoiding the traps of excessive nostalgia and of historical amnesia. Bob Jones University (SC) Jeremy Patterson Darrieussecq, Marie. Être ici est une splendeur: vie de Paula M. Becker. Paris: P.O.L, 2016. ISBN 978-2-8280-3906-9. Pp. 160. 15 a. This book recounts the life and early death of the German painter, Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907), from a perspective that emphasizes the tensions between her personal desires (notably marriage and domestic happiness) and her artistic ambitions. Modersohn-Becker has...

"An Unconditional Kleistian": A Note to Barbara Honigmanns Bilder von A.

This study examines the German writer and painter Barbara Honigmann’s complex relationship to the works of Heinrich von Kleist. During the last decade, Honigmann has become renowned for novels in which she describes her experience of crossing borders—geographically (from the GDR to France in 1984), linguistically (from German to French), and religiously (converting to Judaism after having been an ardent Marxist). As she explains in her narrative Bilder von A. (2011), reading, rereading, staging Kleist, and painting a portrait of the writer played an important role in the process of negotiating her identity during the years in the GDR and afterwards, in France.

Reaction to the First World War: Max Liebermann and the Kriegszeit Lithographs

Between August 1914 and December 1916, the German painter Max Liebermann created a series of lithographs for Paul Cassirer's Die Kriegszeit (The War Time) that do more than document aspects of the ...

Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum: the paintings

One of the greatest German painters of the 20th century, Max Beckmann (1884 - 1950) came to America in the mid-1940s and settled in St. Louis. There he met the retailer and collector Morton D. May. By the time May died, in 1983, he had amassed a comprehensive collection of Beckmann's oeuvre, most of which he bequeathed to the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM). The stunning breadth and power of Beckmann's work is explored in this volume, which thoroughly examines all thirty-nine paintings in SLAM's collection. In addition to featuring some of Beckmann's most celebrated images, this book offers the English-speaking public new and fascinating insights into Beckmann's life and art - in particular his underappreciated early work and previously unexplored aspects of his final years in the United States. Divided into six sections, the book traces Beckmann's involvement with the Berlin Secession; his post-World War I life and rise to fame in these years; the impact of Parisian culture on Beckmann's art; his life under Nazi rule and exile in Amsterdam; his role in the St. Louis art scene of the 1940s; and his complex relationship to his adopted country.Accompanying each chapter are discussions of relevant works, documentary photographs and comparative illustrative material that will deepen readers' understanding of Beckmann's evolution as an artistic force.

A “Ekphrasis” em Georges de Scudéry: imitação e metamorfose

In his Le Cabinet de Monsieur de Scudéry, Georges Scudéry developed a far-reaching poetic comment on some pictures painted by Italian, French, Flemish, Dutch and German painters of 15th and 16th centuries. Most of these comments were done in accordance with traditional ekphrasis, emphasizing thus the most common thematic figures and styles. In a second moment, however, this very figurative mode would easily turn into a discourse that asserts the illusionist dimension of art, and into a poetic discourse that comments on the politics of art in the seventeenth century. As he states his own legitimacy as a poet and celebrates the art of painting, Scudéry reinforces his own craft, a craft that is able to reveal simultaneously word and image. Painting, distinctively, is but a mediation between image and word. We intend here to inquire how Scudéry, as a critic and a connoisseur, took advantage of the notion of parangone in order to assert the primacy of language and the inferiority of pictorial arts

King, Averil. Isaak Levitan: Lyrical Landscape (review)

REVIEWS 755 King,Averil.IsaakLevitan:LyricalLandscape.Thirdedition.AntiqueCollectors’ Club, Woodbridge, 2011. 159 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Chronology. Select bibliography. Index. £35.00. Averil King’s beautifully illustrated monograph on Russian landscape painter Isaak Levitan (1860–1900) is the first Western study on this important artist. The book was first published to coincide with the ‘Russian Landscape Painting’ exhibition that opened in Groningen in 2004 and travelled on to the National Gallery in London. For this third edition, the text and illustrations have been expanded and the layout reoriented to a horizontal format more conducive to the landscapes that are its primary subject. That the book has now sold out of its third printing shows how successfully the author has engaged a broad, nonspecialist audience in Levitan’s life and work. As David Jackson writes in his Foreword, Levitan was Russia’s ‘national painter par excellence’ his haunting landscapes evoking a host of associations — historical, literary, political, social — unique to the Russian experience. Yet he was also very much a man of his time, whose works convey poetic introspection and often a fin-de-siècle melancholy. It is this duality that King captures in her book. Coming from a background in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European painting (her previous book was on the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker), she presents Levitan as simultaneously part of Russian and European art history. King paints in broad strokes, assembling the most diverse range of references and vignettes to bring Levitan’s world to life. The result is both panoramic in scopeandkaleidoscopic,evendizzying,indetail.Thebarefactsofhischildhood, in an impoverished Jewish family in Kibarty (misspelled in the text), are set against a lengthy description of Russian serfdom and a history of Lithuania. In following his early years as an aspiring artist at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, we meet both the Russian artists who influenced him (Perov, Savrasov, Polenov) and the Barbizon painters who inspired them all, followed up with a short history of landscape painting in Russia. The text is shot through with details of local colour (the fashions worn at court balls, Dostoevskii’s near escape from execution, a short history of Russian music, the urban growth of Vienna) that make for lively, occasionally distracting reading. The goal is not scholarly depth (the author relies almost entirely on Englishlanguage sources), but an immersive experience that transports the reader into an entire epoch. Her use of Russian literary and musical parallels will resonate with a broad lay audience, binding Levitan into an already family world of evocative associations; the treatment of his life-long friendship with Anton Chekhov is especially well handled. The writing is lyrical and evocative, with deeply felt descriptions of Levitan’s paintings. SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 756 What makes the book more than a skilful synthesis of the English-language sources is its ability to situate Levitan within a larger, inclusive history of latenineteenth -century European painting. Readers familiar with the canonical history of this period will readily appreciate King’s efforts to link Levitan with a host of artists whose works may already be familiar: Odilon Redon’s pastels, GustavKlimt’ssquare-formatlandscapes,thelandscapesoftheWorpswedeand Dachau communities, and especially Claude Monet, whose views of the Seine are interestingly paired with Levitan’s Volga paintings. These comparisons often involve a certain amount of imaginative hypothesizing (‘It is tempting to think that Klimt and Levitan made each other’s acquaintance’ p. 114), and sometimes they seem forced, as when comparing the capacity of Monet and Levitan for braving winter weather (p. 89) or the former’s love of poplars, the latter’s of birches (p. 92). But the larger point that Levitan’s paintings express the Zeitgeist of his time while remaining quintessentially Russian is persuasively made. It is this quality that endeared him to Sergei Diaghilev and the World of Art group, to which an excellent chapter is devoted. Chapters on the Vienna and Munich Secessions (Levitan exhibited with the latter beginning in 1896) reinforce these aesthetic and emotional affinities. Those already familiar with Russian art will probably not find new insights on that subject here. And there are points on which one can quibble: Ivan Kramskoi was...

Tycho Brahes supernova i 1572 set med samtidens øjne. Religiøse og astronomiske tolkninger hos Georg Busch og Rasmus Hansen Reravius

NB: Artiklen er på dansk, kun resuméet er på engelsk.The appearance of the supernova in 1572 gave rise to a series of publications on the unknown heavenly body’s nature and significance. The most famous is the work by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, De nova stella, in which the author maintained that it must be a question of a new star. But even though Tycho’s observations had far-reaching implications for the history of science, there were other contemporary interpretations of the heavenly phenomenon that attracted greater public attention. Georg Busch, a German painter, was one of the first to write about the phenomenon. According to Busch, it was a comet. He further claimed that it had been created by human sin having generated steam made up of impurities that, condensed into a tight ball, had risen into the air, where it was ignited by oxygen as a comet. Busch’s book was very popular in Germany and in Scandinavia as well, where it was published in a translation by a clergyman, Rasmus Hansen Reravius (Danish was also the written language in Norway at the time) and in a Swedish translation based on Reravius’ work. Reravius, however, published his work after Tycho, to whom Reravius refers indirectly, had made his theory public. As a result, Reravius emphasised the phrase “new start” in his title and preface and is therefore one of the first popularising authors in whose work a spillover from Tycho’s observations is evident. Reravius’ intention was, however, certainly not to make Tycho’s astronomy better known but, on the contrary, to preach repentance and penance to the population, since, for Scandinavian readers, he had put forward Busch’s interpretation of the “comet.” This interpretation, according to which the comet was not only a warning sign from God to humankind but that it had been actually, physically created by sin, does not seem to have spread very far in Europe generally but was apparently particularly appealing to Lutheran society in the 1500s. In any case, it is only in these countries that the theory was proposed, first and foremost through Busch and his Nordic translators. Closer examination of these publications thus gives us not only an insight into how new knowledge was disseminated in the 1500s. In a broader perspective, it also gives an insight into the Protestant world of ideas, in which religious and scientific explanations were interwoven.

Adoration of the Wise Men

As told in the Book of Matthew of the Christian bible, more than2000years agoastrologers fromtheMiddle East observed a bright star in the sky and interpreted its appearance tomean that a great leaderof the Jewshadbeen born. A fellowship ofwisemen followed the star to Jerusalem, where theywere questioned byHerod, King of Judea. Perceiving a threat to his sovereignty, Herod instructed the wise men to sendhimword as soonas they found thebaby. They located thebabyJesus inthetownofBethlehemandpresentedhimwith priceless gifts, but chose not to send word to Herod and went homebyanother route.WhenHerod learned that thewisemen had betrayed him, he ordered the killing of all the babies in Bethlehem, but Jesus andhis family escaped toEgypt, beyond the king’s reach. This foundation story, with its elements of prophesy, intrigue, andthestrugglebetweengoodandevil,has resonated for centurieswith artists such as Leonardo daVinci, Albrecht Durer, Diego Velazquez, and the American painter Romare Bearden (1911-1988),whoseAdoration of theWiseMen is one of 24 paintings in his series, “The Passion of Christ.” In thecenterof thispaintingMary themotherof Jesus cradlesher infant inherarms.Toeither sideare thewisemen,bending low tooffer theirgifts.Bearden’skaleidoscopiccomposition is reminiscentof stainedglasswindowsand thedeconstructedgeometry of the French painter Georges Braque. Beardenwas born inCharlotte,NorthCarolina, in 1911.His familymoved toNewYork in 1914andsettled inHarlem.HeattendedLincolnUniversityinChesterCounty,Pennsylvania,transferred toBostonUniversity (where he pitched for the university’sbaseballteam),andgraduatedfromNewYorkUniversitywith adegree ineducation.WhileatNYU,Beardentookcourses inart andwasacartoonist andart editor for ahumormagazineabout campus life.AftergraduationBeardenworkedfor theNewYork CityDepartmentofSocialServicesandpainted inhissparetime. During the 1930s,he createdcovers andcartoons forTheCrisis, published by theNational Association for theAdvancement of ColoredPeople,andCollier'smagazine. In1935,Beardenbecame aweeklyeditorialcartoonistfortheBaltimoreAfro-Americanand the following year he studiedwith the German painter George Grosz at the Art Students League. During this period Bearden paintedDepression-era subjects suchaspoverty-stricken farmers, factoryworkers, and folkmusicians, inaplain,blockystyle reminiscent of the laborers inMexicanmurals. In1942heenlistedintheUSArmy.Forseveralmonthsin1942 and1943,his regimentwasassigned toguard theNewYorkCity subway system against sabotage andwas stationed in Harlem, not far from his studio. Bearden continued to pay the modest rent on the studio during his time in service, so he was able to paint in his off-duty hours. He was visited there by Caresse Crosby, who had recently opened a gallery inWashington, DC. Crosbyoffered to exhibit Bearden’s newseries, “ThePassionof Christ,” a narrative of key events in the life of Jesus. Bearden agreed, and the exhibition opened in June 1945. The 11 watercolors and13oils in this serieswerenothing like theempathetic realismofBearden’s pre-war paintings.His newstyle dissected and pinned the human figure so it could be viewed frommultipleanglessimultaneously,andhissubjectswerehistoricaland religious figures rather thanworking-classAmericans.Themultiple perspectives of Adoration of theWise Men can best be appreciated inthefacesofMaryandher learnedvisitors,whichare seen in profile as well as face-on. Bearden’s viewers were reminded of Braque’s paintings, cathedralwidows, and thework of theFrenchpainterGeorgeRouault,whosecompositionswere also fragmentedand illuminated in themannerof stainedglass (JAMA cover, November 19, 2008). Like Rouault, Bearden had adopted a style in keeping with his subject matter, inviting his viewers to lookcloselyandthinkabout thepictures in theirnarrative context. By choosing subjects with strong traditions, Beardenwasable tocommunicatewithhisaudienceonbothvisualandcontextual levels.“ThePassionofChrist”exhibitionwas wellattended,mostofthepaintingssoldquickly,andhewaspropelled into the ranks ofmajor American painters. ForBearden, “ThePassionofChrist” representedachange in philosophy as well as a change in style. Before the war he was under pressure to carry the mantle of “American Negro artist.” Some critics considered it his responsibility to make paintings about African American heritage. Others found his themes of oppression and poverty to be stereotypical and demeaning. Bearden found a way out of this trap by addressing universal rather than culture-specific themes. Later in his careerhewould return tohis roots, but fornowhedidwhatblack ministers,politicians, andartistshavedone throughoutAmerican history—find common ground through traditional stories of leadership and sacrifice, penance and rebirth, suffering and redemption. Thepublicwas ready for a return to values in art. AfterWorldWarItherewaswidespreaddisillusionmentwith traditionalmorality, but afterWorldWar II the Judeo-Christian imageryofartistssuchasBeardenandRouaultmadeanemotional connection with survivors of the recent world conflagration. Thosewhohadwitnessed,evenatadistance,thecrueltyofWorld War II rediscoveredthenarrativeofagoodmanwhowassingled outandtorturedbutnever losthis faith. Itwas the familiarityof theWesternworldwiththeChriststorythatBeardenfoundmost compelling.Beardenwouldlatersaythattheabidingthemeofhis artwas the“prevalenceof ritual,” referring to thepowerofcommon(orat leastanalogous)cultural traditions toconnectpeople tooneanotherandmakesomekindofsenseofhistoricalevents.

Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater

Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater Michael Fried A basic assumption behind the remarks that follow is that Kierkegaard's writings, especially Either/Or (1842) and Repetition (1843), contain long stretches that deserve to be recognized as among the most luminous and far-reaching adventures in esthetic thinking, reflection on the arts, in the entire nineteenth century. This is true, or so I contend, despite the fact that the esthetic as such is for Kierkegaard the least or lowest of what in Stages of Life's Way (1845)—a sequel to Either/Or—he calls three "existence spheres" (476; see also 440-443).1 The esthetic, he writes, is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical that of requirement, and the highest, the religious, the sphere of fulfillment, though of course the actual relationships among these, especially between the first two and the third, is anything but incremental (the crucial notion, of course, is that of a "leap of faith"). And in fact Kierkegaard's most original esthetic thinking, in the ordinary, not Kierkegaardi an sense of the term, sometimes lies elsewhere than in the esthetic existence sphere, where one might expect to find it. Thus in my book on Kierkegaard's contemporary, the German painter and draftsman Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), I try to show that Judge William's ethical reflections on marriage in part II of Either/Or, specifically his claim to the effect that the everydayness of a successful marriage—the absence in the latter of events that are essentially momentary (the absence of intensiveness, is how he also puts it)—defeats what he calls esthetic representation, [End Page 1019] amount to a marvelously original contribution to esthetic thinking in the ordinary sense of the term (Fried, Menzel's 141-166; see also Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II 87-184). Indeed I go on to relate those reflections to Menzel's thematization in numerous paintings and drawings of the subject of brickwork (another version of the everyday, one more or less identical item laid alongside another, in principle endlessly), which is to say that I suggest that Menzel in effect finds a way around Judge William's strictures (as regards the representation not of marriage but of the everyday). And I associate those strictures more directly with Theodor Fontane's novel Effi Briest (1896), which I understand as engaging explicitly with Kierkegaard's thought in the narrative's almost complete elision of more than six years of Instetten's marriage with Effi following their move from Kessin to Berlin, a transition that put an end to her affair with the practiced seducer Crampas, about which Instetten knew nothing. When by chance he learns of the affair he kills Crampas in a duel and breaks off relations with Effi, despite recognizing—it is hard to know how to put this—that the six-plus years of Judge William-style marriage that he and Effi have just experienced render his actions absurd, or at the very least mindl essly conventional and destructive. (I shall bring back Menzel briefly at the end of this paper.) Constantin Constantius's "report" in the first half of Repetition, however, takes place entirely in the existence sphere of the esthetic, so that it is without the inbuilt ethical "seriousness" of Judge William's reflections. (The second, shorter half mostly comprises letters from a young man to Constantius, who has been making a study of him; the subtitle of the book as a whole is "A Venture in Experimenting Psychology.") The pages I have in mind, fifteen or so in the Hongs' translation, begin with Constantius's ruminations about the naturalness of an as yet unformed young man's (any young man's) interest in the theater, which allows such a person—quite properly, it is implied—to imagine multiple existences. In Constantius's words, "the individual's possibility wanders about in its own possibility, discovering now one possibility, now another. But the individual's possibility does not want only to be heard; … it wants to be visible at the same time" (155). And beyond that, "in order not to gain an impression of his actual self," the hidden individual (the as yet unformed young man...

The “individual” in Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s and Franz Liszt’s Seven Sacraments

In the preface to his Septem sacramenta (1878–1884), Franz Liszt acknowledged its stimulus — drawings completed in 1862 by the German painter J. F. Overbeck (1789–1869). This essay explores what Liszt likely meant by his and Overbeck’s “diametrically opposed” approaches and speculates on why the composer nonetheless acknowledged the artist’s work. Each man adopted an individualized treatment of the sacraments, neither in line with the Church’s neo-Thomistic philosophy. Whereas the Church insisted on the sanctifying effects of the sacraments’ graces, Overbeck emphasized the sacraments as a means for moral edification, and Liszt expressed their emotional effects on the receiver. Furthermore, Overbeck embedded within his work an overt polemical message in response to the contested position of the pope in the latter half of the nineteenth century. For many in Catholic circles, he went too far. Both works experienced a problematic reception. Yet, despite their works’ reception, both Overbeck and Liszt believed they had contributed to the sacred art of their time. The very individuality of Overbeck’s treatment seems to have stimulated Liszt. True to his generous nature, Liszt, whose individual voice often went unappreciated, publicly recognized an equally individual voice in the service of the Church.

Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy by Nicholas Monk (review)

Reviewed by: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy by Nicholas Monk Darryl Hattenhauer Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy. Edited by Nicholas Monk, with a foreword by Rick Wallach. New York: Routledge, 2012. 192 pages, $133.00. This anthology consists of three parts. The first addresses McCarthy’s fiction in comparison to literary texts from before the twentieth century. The second discusses his writing in the context of painting, film, and theater. The third analyzes McCarthy’s output in relation to literary texts from the twentieth century. The first selection, “Blood Meridian and Classical Greek Thought” by David Williams, is an erudite tour de force. He begins by showing the similarities between Blood Meridian (1985) and the Iliad. Then he discusses the Judge’s quotations from early Greek philosophers. Finally, he shows that the influence of the Iliad and pre-Socratic Greek philosophy makes Blood Meridian a traditional tragedy. Williams goes on to speculate that McCarthy’s work through the Border Trilogy constitutes an examination of the necessity of force. The author of The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner: Myths of the Frontier (2012), Megan Riley McGilchrist studies the traces of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” in All the Pretty Horses (1992). McGilchrist does not claim that McCarthy created these similarities consciously. Despite all of the differences between the medieval and the contemporary, it is apparently the underlying similarities between the two ages that lead to the paradigmatic and archetypal similarities between the two texts. Scandinavia’s foremost critic of southern literature, Jan Nordby Gretlund, chronicles the process of his thinking about McCarthy’s oeuvre, [End Page 429] particularly The Road (2006). He demonstrates how McCarthy fits simultaneously in national and southern traditions. In so doing, he makes arresting comparisons between McCarthy and James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Ernest Hemingway. The author of Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period (2009), Dianne Luce combines literary and art historical criticism to analyze landscape painting’s influence on The Road. In particular, she compares McCarthy’s setting and narrative point of view with the iconography and perspectives of the Hudson River School and the Luminists. She shows that the protagonist’s vision is congruent with America’s dominant landscape tradition. Especially noteworthy is her discussion of such art historians as Barbara Novak and David C. Williams and her inclusion of landscapes by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. The author of Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism (2007), John Cant compares No Country for Old Men (2007) with its film adaptation. He focuses on the film’s inherent inability to capture the nuances of the novel’s narrative point of view. There is no technique in the film for adequately representing the contrasts between Sheriff Bell’s voice and the authorial voice. By the same token, the movie exceeds the novel’s ability to register sound. In another comparison of literature and film, Michael Madsen explores the motif of evil in Blood Meridian and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Hannah Arendt was right to indicate the banality of evil, but Madsen’s point may be even more important: that evil is ubiquitous, immortal, and inexplicable. Madsen argues that Blood Meridian’s representation of evil exemplifies the fact that McCarthy’s fiction is consonant with horror films. Like the other contributors, however, Madsen does not try to tease out the differences between horror, Gothic, and grotesque. Ciarán Dowd reveals the ambiguity that arises when critics discuss McCarthy’s alleged nihilism. In The Sunset Limited (2011), he argues, White’s ostensible nihilism “is just as much founded on faith as are Black’s religious beliefs” (115). Because White has values and beliefs, he is not a nihilist. Rather, he is a cynic—a moralist who rejects the dominant culture’s morals. When White uses the term meaningless, he means trivial. Euan Gallivan also inconveniences the notion of McCarthy as a purveyor of nihilism and meaninglessness. He builds on the recognition that McCarthy owes a lot to Samuel Beckett, especially in Suttree (1979). But he argues that it is not the Beckett of such famous works as Waiting for Godot (1948) to...

Христианские ценности в ранней прозе В. К. Кюхельбекера

This article examines Vilhelm Kyukhelbekker's narrative prose of the first half of the 1820s. For the analysis we have chosen the most significant works of this period — his book of travel notes The Journey and the novel Ado. The study reveals the writer's attitude to Christianity and Christian values in his early period of work. In this research the axiological approach is used, as well as the methods of historical, typological, structural and semiotic study of literary texts. Studying The Journey, we performed a detailed analysis of the author's letters which describe the paintings by the artists of Flemish and Dutch schools, as well as German and Italian painters of the 17th and 18th centuries exhibited in the Dresden gallery. The writer prefers the paintings of biblical subjects to those of naturalistic everyday scenes. He pays special attention to the evangelical themes. He is attracted by Christ the child's divine nature and the heavenly purity, high humility of the Mother of God's image, and the fact that St. Sebastian is portrayed as joyfully suffering for Christ. Historical events of the novel Ado date back to the time of the Baltic peoples' forced Christianization by the Order of the Brothers of the Sword. Baltic peoples are trying to keep the faith of their ancestors and rebel against the cruel governor of the Order. The novel focuses particularly on one knight, Michael, who stood up for the oppressed and like Archangel Michael found himself on the cutting edge of Good and Evil. This character of the novel is connected with the idea of Christian sacrificial love and eternal spiritual life, which was very important for Kyukhelbekker. We concluded that even in his early prose Kyukhelbekker expressed the main spiritual and moral values of Christianity.

The egg, the vessels and the words.From Izdubar toAnswer to Job1For an imaging thinking

This essay on The Red Book seeks to underscore a characteristic specific to Jung's approach to psychoanalysis. In this book, and more generally, in all of his writings, Jung's thinking is based on his personal experience of the unconscious, in which he leaves himself open to progressive encounters. Some of them, in the years 1913-14 and 1929-30, particularly his meeting with the giant Izdubar, were quite threatening. As a result, he forged an original way of thinking that is qualified here as 'imaging' and 'emergent'. The Red Book served as the first vessel for theories Jung would later express. His way of thinking, with its failures and semi-successes, all of which are always temporary, of course, is compared to the art of the potter. The author shows the kinship between the formation of the main Jungian concepts and the teachings of the French poet, professor, and art critic Yves Bonnefoy. He also considers certain recurrent formal themes in the work of contemporary German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. Lastly, this epistemological study, constantly aware of the demands of Jungian clinical practice, demonstrates the continuity in Jung's work, from The Red Book to Answer to Job, where Jung ultimately elaborated a conception of history that defines our ethical position today.

Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks (review)

Reviewed by: Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks Stephen Thursby Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks. By Daniel H. Foster. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xx, 377 p. ISBN 9780521517393. $95.] Music examples, appendices, bibliography, index. In his autobiography Richard Wagner credited The Education of Dionysos by Apollo's Muses by German painter Buonaventura Genelli with helping to inspire his Art-Work of the Future, in which ancient Athens served as a model artistic culture (see Wagner, My Life, trans. Andrew Gray [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 426). Scenes from this painting grace the cover of Daniel Foster's new book, Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks. While not the first book-length treatment of the influence of Greek drama on Wagner (see Michael Ewans's Wagner and Aeschylus: The "Ring" and the "Oresteia" [London: Faber and Faber, 1982] and M. Owen Lee's Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003]), Foster's is the first book-length study of Wagner's use of Greek epic and lyric styles as well. His main thesis is that every opera in the Ring represents a "particular phase in the cultural evolution of a mythic world modeled in part upon the ancient Greek world" (p. xi). He connects Wagner's development of the Ring with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's evolutionary model for Greek poetry (epic precedes lyric, which precedes drama) as expounded in his Aesthetics, also taking into account the primary and secondary sources on antiquity that Wagner is known to have studied, and how the composer used Greek aesthetics to support his ideological goals. Following Hegel's poetic model, Foster argues that Das Rheingold and Die Walküre represent the epic stage in a culture's development and Siegfried the lyric stage, whereas Götterdämmerung functions as a tragicomedy about civic identity and the individual's failure to fit into a corrupt society. Although Wagner often wrote disparagingly of Hegel and never mentioned having read the Aesthetics, Foster argues that there is good reason to believe that this work influenced both his thinking and his music: Hegel was "in the air" (according to Friedrich Engels) during Wagner's lifetime; the philosopher taught Johann Gustav Droysen, one of Wagner's favorite Greek scholars; and Wagner certainly read Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History and likely explored other works by the philosopher (pp. 6-7). Foster makes a compelling case for the applicability of Hegel's poetic model to the poetic and political development of the Ring, even if the case for Wagner's having read the Aesthetics is not rock-solid. Many scholars have been reluctant to take Wagner's theoretical writings seriously, perhaps because of the unwieldy prose, obtuse ideas, and the composer's seeming dilettantism. Foster argues that it is irresponsible to overlook them, since they are so abundant and because overlooking these theoretical pronouncements might be construed as "tantamount to dismissing" some of Wagner's "destructive ideological pronouncements" against the Jews, the French, and the Italians (p. 13). In part 1 ("Epic") Foster examines Greek epic poetry and its influence on the Ring. Chapter 1 focuses on epic's role in defining national identity through depicting collisions between a nation and its enemies. He argues that both Wagner and Hegel used the ancient Greeks to seek answers to their questions about epic, and through this they Hellenized the genre of epic and also German national identity. In chapter 2 Foster discusses Wagner's use of Homeric retrospective narrative. Wagner began the Ring by depicting Siegfried's death, before conceiving the first three operas as a prelude to what happened in the fourth (a massive example compared with Homer's recounting of how Odysseus received his leg scar in the Odyssey). Foster defends Wagner's lengthy and seemingly redundant narrative sequences by arguing that the composer may have used them to "demonstrate his theoretical arguments" against epic (p. 59). In chapter 3 Foster argues that Wagner's orchestra functions like an objective narrator in a novel and as a mediator [End Page 571] between stage and audience. The orchestra expresses primarily through leitmotifs, and Foster...