Imaginary Museum Research Articles

Музейный экфрасис в русской прозе ХХ века

This paper offers an analysis of museum ekphrasis as a subgenre of ekphrasis, understood in literary studies as a description and interpretation of works of art in poetry and prose. Previously, the concept of museum ekphrasis has not been considered by researchers as the definition of an independent genre, while description of museum exposition and museum exhibits not only had been significantly represented in literature but often had the quality of hypertext. The author analyzes museum ekphrasis in the texts of A. Bitov, Y. Dombrowski, S. Dovlatov, A. Ivanov, K. Vaginov, and contemporary authors, where museum discourse is not limited to the description of real and imaginary museums but the museum represents the metaphysical projection of reality, or hypertext, symbolically associated with the cultural paradigm of the era.

The Musical Work Reconsidered, In Hindsight

1. Introduction and Outline of the Argument Certainly, the concept of the musical work has not always existed. Yet deciphering precisely when the work emerged has proved an immensely difficult task for musicologists. (1) In particular, the publication of Lydia Goehr's The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works--in which she famously argued that the work-concept crystallized around 1800--has provoked an endless litany of modifications and outright rebuttals. (2) In many cases scholars have retained the gist of Goehr's argument but have sought to push the date backwards, often to the period of their own specialization. Several scholars of Baroque music have argued that musical works existed in the seventeenth century (although not before) while several scholars of the Renaissance have argued that the musical work emerged during that era (although not earlier). (3) Indeed, there have been attempts--although somewhat muted--to locate the advent of the musical work in the Medieval period. (4) In particular, the question of whether J. S. Bach composed musical works has received a great deal of attention. Although he died a full fifty years before 1800, several scholars have argued that Bach did compose musical works and have used this argument as a refutation of Goehr's 1800 hypothesis. (5) Most recent studies have in fact been written as direct confrontations with Goehr's seminal text. Goehr (2000, 2007) herself has occasionally been pulled into the fray and has defended her position valiantly and with gusto. Indeed, there are many reasons to take her arguments seriously and in some ways the historical archive seems to support the 1800 hypothesis. Nonetheless, if we consider the sheer number of scholars who have contested her hypothesis (or at least her dating) there is reason to suspect that perhaps the puzzle has not been adequately solved. In this essay, I revisit this crucial issue by shifting the emphasis from dating (that is, from the question of when the musical work emerged) to historiography. If quibbling about the precise date of the emergence of the musical work has proved largely ineffectual, then perhaps it is time to radically rethink our mode of historical investigation. I suggest that one useful way to proceed is to shift the emphasis from a search for origins to a focus on the very notion of historical change. Every discussion, historicization, or analysis of the musical work must face the dilemma of defining what a musical work is in the first place. Few musicologists today would have difficulty accepting the argument that the musical work is historically contingent, that is, that it is not a transcendental category. (6) I take it as a given that the musical work is historical and, moreover, contested. One common--and, I would submit, quite reasonable--criticism of Goehr is that she too narrowly defines the parameters of the musical work. Perhaps the work-concept was not operative in the early eighteenth century in the same way that it was in the early nineteenth, but should this mean that there was no conception of a musical work in any way at all? (7) In other words, could we not argue for a pluralization of the very notion of work-ness and subsequently recognize different types of musical works at different historical periods? It seems to me that we do need a flexible definition of the musical work. It is efficacious, in other words, to move away from a single moment at which the musical work emerged and to instead examine various types of related concepts and practices both before and after 1800. At the same time, it is not unreasonable to recognize major musical transformations where they have occurred. And indeed, few (if any) researchers deny that something we may call the musical work (however broadly defined) emerged at some point during the past five hundred years. The question is simply at what point it did so, under what conditions, and to what musical and social ends. …

Promenade Among Words and Things: The Gallery as Catalogue, the Catalogue as Gallery

In the mid nineteenth century new casting techniques allowed for the production of huge architectural fragments. Well-selected collections could ideally display perfect series in galleries in which the visitor could wander among monuments and experience architecture history on full scale. The disembodied material of plaster was considered capable of embodying a number of modern historical taxonomies and aesthetical programs, most importantly chronology, comparison, style, and evolution. Veritable showcases of historicism, the casts could illustrate in spatial arrangements new conceptions on the history, contemporaneity and future of architecture. Plaster cast became a main medium in which to publish antiquities as novelties for grand audiences, taking the printed and published beyond the two-dimensional space of words and images. However, due to the increasing market of casts and their sheere size and weight, the reproductions as mounted in the galleries often behaved as unruly as architecture does outside curatorial control. In the end only the catalogues, the paper versions of these imaginary museums were capable to create the orders that their plaster referents constantly aspired to destroy. An important chapter in the history of the architecture museum these plaster monuments belong to a part of architectural print culture in which catalogues were curated and galleries edited. Metaphors drawn from the realm of writing saturated the discourse on the display of casts. Images and texts fluctuated and the image-objects were compared to books, paper, pages, documents and libraries but above all to illustrations inviting promenades in time and space.

In the museyroom: a speculative genealogy of post-criticism

This paper explores the compositional processes of this post-critic, his errant and wandering trajectories, as he faces a crisis of academic genre. Addressing a parodic tone recently adopted in critical writing, it performatively enacts what Ulmer terms ‘post-criticism’, a strategy of textual demonstration (explanation, exposition, exhibition; but also protest) and détournement (a critical copying and correction, remixing; morphological mimicry as textual transgression and politico-poetic subversion) which applies the devices of modernist art to critical representations. The narrative conceit of an imaginary museum exhibition is deployed to demonstrate this more oblique style, exemplary, dramatic, performative, tracing its speculative genealogy through some convergent twentieth-century avant-gardes.

O museu de cada um: montagens e fantasmas

Para Warburg, cada imagem é o resultado de deslocamentos temporais e culturais, que se sedimentam e sobrevivem como forma, fazendo com que cada imagem seja um momento energético e dinâmico que, ciclicamente, reaparece de maneira fantasmática, denominada por Warburg de Pathosformel e que aflora nas fricções. Nessas considerações, avalia-se, também, o que fez André Malraux ao constituir o seu Museu imaginário, em que desenvolve, como exercício, uma história da arte por similitudes (formais e retóricas), mas não por influências, cuja principal relevância recai em uma espécie de montagem visual experimental, que pensa dar conta, em arte, de uma herança cultural maior e mais expandida que a produção ocidental de matriz greco-latina

Le voyage dans l’art des autres, d’André Malraux au musée du quai Branly

This article makes links between travel literature, history of art and museology in André Malraux’s autofiction, Miroir des limbes, written in 1965, a founding text bringing together travel, aesthetics and museology. As a creator of the “imaginary museum” notion in 1947, Malraux is the forerunner of the museum of Primitive Arts. In France, the Quai Branly is an exemplary model of the art of others. Defined by the writer as “the largest field of images known to mankind”, the Imaginary Museum is both a dialogue of civilisation and a dialogue of works between themselves.

POP UP THE EPHEMERALITY LOOKING FOR ITS DESIGN

Since the 1990s, we have been witnessing a joint global change in society, economics, politics and culture. From the acceleration of these changes and erosion that causes its perception, it can be deduced an urgent and present need of society to seek ethical and moral values. The research contributes to knowledge when it holds a significant problem, which challenges the intellect with visionary, entrepreneurial and sustainable strategy, seeking a greater result through a scientific approach that seeks the unity of knowledge. As an abstract concept of event, the Pop Up can be defined as a body in constant motion and adaptable to the place, responsible for the vital regulation of the being. As research legitimizes the abstraction, the virtues of Pop Up - transgression, contamination, portability, revelation, mishap and ploy - qualify it as a model in the dynamics of consumption, culture and art, contributing to sociocultural homeostasis. The Pop Up lacks investigation that integrates its assumption as a concept for retail strategies, culture and art. Its ephemerality - revelation and concealment – may also contribute to Sustainable Design. It is intended to guide the practice of architecture and design, optimizing the knowledge in abstraction for the development of theories and methods, through transdisciplinary studies, seeking to encourage a new understanding of reality, articulating elements that pass between, over and across disciplines to understand complexity. Human beings, who react affectively to the event (Pop Up) and set it strategically, can contribute to sociocultural homeostasis, recognizing who we are presently and concerning ourselves with what we may be. The Pop Up can contaminate design in the construction of an equilateral triangle whose vertices are the retail design, the exhibition design and the urban and conceptual art. This triangulation does not seem well documented for its definition, characterization and life cycle. In retail design, Pop Up designates a category of temporary shops with event character, narrating a story and acting as a link between different events in space/time for an experiment and in identifiable areas other than the retail design. In urban art, Pop Up, as a social practice, allows the appropriation of urban space, from graffiti to performance, involving social, political and cultural significance. In conceptual art, Pop Up, as an idea, overlaps the execution of the work, and the process is more important than the hold object. It requires an overvaluation of reflective and experiential activity. It rejects the commercial aspect of consumption and tries to imbue its activity with social, ecological and intellectual values. In a context of artistic exploration, the meeting of certain masterpieces and the absence of others from a museum, invites all of them to meet within the human spirit through imagination: the imaginary museum aims to add as much as possible to the incomplete collections of real museums. Through internet we have the most significant works and images able to expand our memory. The Pop Up also revises itself as an instrument that can expand the mental museum that stimulates creativity and imagination for knowledge. By philosophy and poetic we reflect our condition of existence, and the Pop Up can be applied as a model to stimulate creativity. The possibility of a place to stimulate creativity may involve the use of a non-place (Pop Up) which, in his own amazing action, can boost the affective state of the human being in relation to others and to objects on a design ambition. The Pop Up, as hermeneutic perspective, can help to achieve balance in all aspects of our existence, pursuing perfection in other areas and beyond the tangible world of technology and consumption. Keywords : Ephemerality, Pop Up, Architecture, Retail Design, Exhibit Design, Urban Art, Conceptual Art.

Hannah Feldman. From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962.

In From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962, Hannah Feldman posits that the expression “postwar” attached to the normative history and culture of France in the era between 1945 and 1962 is misleading, and that it speaks for a nation that refused to see the wars that divided France over the future of its colonies and over the memory of Vichy at that time. Looking for contesting voices, Feldman dusts off and contextualizes a selection of art-related testimonies dating from those years, created by individuals who were most likely to be sensitive to the “decolonization” issues of their time given their origins and/or views on colonialism, and finds little reassurance from most. An interdisciplinary art historian with sympathies for postcolonial criticism, Feldman starts her text with André Malraux's art survey Les voix du silence from 1951, a text known for its disregard of chronology and for its intriguing juxtapositions of art from colonizer and colonized cultures on the pages of an “imaginary museum.” As a young man, Malraux opposed colonialism and later fought the Nazis. For Feldman, however, Les voix du silence follows the official formalist line, for it “severs objects from their own history in order to render them mute participants in the one he wants to construct around the temporality of the present” (p. 27). Feldman also condemns Malraux's plans for the beautification of Paris, especially the gentrification of the old Jewish neighborhood Le Marais, for ignoring the expulsion of the Algerian workers living there to ugly suburbs.

REAL MUSEUM, IMAGINARY MUSEUM: REFLECTIONS ON THE CONCEPT OF THE MUSEUM AS A STAGE FOR METAMORPHOSIS = MUSEO REAL, MUSEO IMAGINARIO: REFLEXIONES EN TORNO AL CONCEPTO DE MUSEO COMO ESCENARIO DE METAMORFOSIS

Ever since its inception as public institution in the 18th century, the museum has favoured several interpretations of the work of art, alterations that imply both a change in its semantic and a revision of the very same concept of art. These metamorphoses take place not only within the confined walls of the traditional museum but also in many wall-less museums. Approaches such as the imaginary museum, virtual and endless repertoire of pieces of art, open countless perspectives to how the museums are perceived as containers of the western memory. This paper focuses on the role of the museum as metamorphosis scenery through the thoughts of artists, writers and intellectuals that have felt attracted to this question since the dawn of the museum.

Musing with the muse in the photographically illustrated Marble Faun

This paper proposes a new reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Marble Faun, as this novel directly addresses the topics of the “Musing in the Museum„ session: it is famous (infamous!) for its long descriptions of Roman museums and the artworks therein, leading it to be actually used as a guide book; from about 1865 to 1920, English and American tourists would make their own choice of illustrations by selecting between 15 and 150 small photographic prints sold by Italian booksellers, who mounted them and rebound their now “extra-illustrated„ volumes. It is the world's first interactive book, and no two copies are the same. So much is known, and well documented. This paper follows on from my previous work (mostly historical) and examines two phenomena in particular.Firstly, the hybrid nature of the personalised, portable museum: how certain readers, whose copies have come down to us, have allowed their personal interpretations and affinities to seep through merely by their choice of “exhibits„ how the walls of the museums disappear thanks to collections of photographs that create an “imaginary museum„ how the logic of the collection, and the logic of the novel, both conspire with the tourist to “level„ the different photographic subjects, so that a monument and a “peasant in typical costume„ both become “museum pieces„· and literary fictions.

Musing in and out of the museum with James Joyce’s Ulysses

Ulysses became part of the literary canon almost from the moment it was published, and it did not take long before it was turned into a literary monument. As such, it is often celebrated and commented upon; it is perhaps less eagerly visited, except maybe in the form of cursory strolls through selected passages and along a certain number of critical avenues. It will therefore not be surprising to claim that Ulysses is not just about Dublin: the book itself is city, world, and world cultural heritage.Ulysses has long been considered one of the works perfectly embodying the modernist ideal of totality. Even though the claim may sound disputable today, the notion that this novel might constitute a museum of Western civilisation is alluring. James Joyce and Ulysses have spawned several actual museums and ‘historical houses’ in Dublin, as well as inspired a whole gallery of visual works, thus making up an imaginary multimedia museum. What is more, Bloomsday has reached the status of national holiday, and Bloom’s footsteps engraved on the pavement in the distinctive places along his one-day journey are meant to celebrate Joyce’s epic. It could be argued that Joyce has been turned into a national monument at the same time as Dublin has been museified, but I will show that Joyce’s writing also provides the necessary antidote, that is, the profanation of the sacred.This paper explores the unique way in which Ulysses creates a utopian place in which consciousness can feed on memory and consume the cultural heritage, as well as probe into the past and forget it. In such a space, readers are recreated as flâneurs or nomads wandering aimlessly and egoistically, while provisionally forming an impossible community.

Roger Mello: A Sea of Stories

Roger Mello:A Sea of Stories Graça Lima (bio) and Claudia Mendes (bio) Who was it taught you to swim?Who was it taught you to swim?I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you sailorman,it was the little fish in the sea. Peixinhos do Mar [Sea Fish], traditional Brazilian children’s song A deep plunge, the first seed of life that swims for its existence: without fixing the space, nor constraining the time, the trajectory of this artist flows through multiple possibilities, always ready to rethink and reinvent each territory he chooses to explore. Time is the material of his inquietude, in a continuous searching movement, always forging ahead, seeking out new objectives and concerns. From the rivers that meander through the Pantanal1 wetlands, from the calm waters of the mangrove swamp [End Page 74] to the raging waters of the sea, Roger Mello builds his visual narratives. Mello was born in Brasília, the new capital of Brazil designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa2 in the middle of the enormous natural diversity of the Cerrado.3 This environment, together with his schooling at an establishment that embraced the innovative pedagogical theories advance by Anísio Teixeira and Darcy Ribeiro4, enabled the free development of his artistic expression without prejudices or preconceived ideas. Since a very early age, Mello has had a roving, curious eye, paying attention to life in its many forms, whether human, animal or plant: I’ve always had a vivid imagination, and it has taken me on innumerous voyages. I always was a compulsive drawer fascinated by comic strips and books. I’ve always loved animals and nature in general—the woodlands, the Cerrado, the mangrove swamps. At the time, even living in Brasília, it was still possible to visit the Cerrado. On those field trips, and even in the classroom, I always had a notebook handy to draw what I was seeing or develop comic strips. (Kikuchi) Accompanied by his father on these constant incursions into the Cerrado, Mello observed the plants and animals who filled his “imaginary museum”5 with images of the local ecosystems. His encounter with the sea, during holidays spent in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Sergipe, expanded his scope of adventures with nature, in its copiously registered lines and forms. In between these trips, the books scattered about the house awoke his curiosity, and the silence of the afternoon nap gave way to the sound of turning pages. In the 1980s, after a short term at the Agronomy College of Brasília, Roger moved to Rio de Janeiro to enroll in the graphic design course at the ESDI/UERJ.6 The course was concluded in 1989 with a daring graduation project, being the fruit of his observations of the fauna and flora found in the Cerrado, while marking the birth of his ability to communicate through the colors and shapes of nature. Narrative was always of the greatest interest to Roger Mello: narrative that is manifest in widespread fields, including drama, literature, illustration, animation, cinema, and graphic design. The blurring of the genres is quite evident if we examine the visual language that Roger uses in his illustrated books. The artist passes with ease through different references and styles. His first works showed his dominium over representational drawing, from which he has slowly drifted and has moved towards the sophistication of more stylized forms. His intimacy with drawing prevails in any compositional choice, mixing styles and techniques to the benefit of narrative expressiveness. [End Page 75] Mello’s experimentation on each new project speaks highly of his artistic spirit. The world is the limit for his enormous library of references, while the different cultures of the world are his constant references. His creative power has renewed dialogue concerning the creative process in general, while still demonstrating awareness of all the different artistic offshoots that the contemporary world has to offer. For Roger Mello, the creative act is a constant pulse and can become manifest in various languages. Although the illustrated books are his most numerous and best known works, he expresses his multiple interests in varied media, which enables different interactions...

Imaginary museums: What mainstream museums can learn from them?

The world is full of museums that don’t exist fully in three dimensions – museums described in words or drawn on paper; museum catalogues; museums on the web. There are also many museums that are the creation of artists, novelists and poets, and so have a strong thread of imagination running through them. The latter cast an interesting light on ‘real’ museums and compel us to ask: What is it that the metaphor of a museum enables writers and artists to say? The question is doubly interesting because there is a long history of these 'imaginary’ museums created by artists. This paper suggests that there are five qualities of museums that writers and artists tune into: the power of objects to take us back in time; the apparent ‘alive-ness’ of objects; the power of collections (which is different to the power of individual objects); the ability of museums to shape the world and tell us stories about it; and the role of museums as powerful metaphors through which we can talk about loss, fear and yearnings for the past. So writers and artists find museums powerfully imaginative places; but then so do visitors. Visitor research shows that visitors come to museums ready to use their imaginations. So my question is: Do ‘real’ museums do enough to work with the visitors’ imaginations? Or, to put it another way, Do enough museums think that the visitors’ imagination – and indeed their own - is relevant to the museum experience? It should be. It is.

Malraux and Deloche: A conversation on the museum

This paper is dedicated to posing questions arising from contemplating the concepts of imaginary and virtual museums. Since a virtual museum, as interpreted by Deloche, primarily represents an imaginary museum (as defined by Malraux) it is necessary to establish a relation between these two similar concepts and point to their potential importance for understanding the museum as such. By implicit rejection of the distinction between museology and new museology for being futile in solving museological antinomies, this paper fully submits to the contemplation of the museum and its disciplinary definitions from the position of Deloch's interpretation of museology as a ''philosophical discipline''.

Creator, collaborator, critique or consumer: Frameworks of citizens' participation in heritage making

Even though discussions and practices around citizens' participation in heritage were at their peak during last five years, the ideas about levels and ways of citizen participation through heritage making are by no means recent or unified. These distinctive ideas under the umbrella of 'engagement' form a variety of possible, even contradictory frameworks through which the role, rights, privileges, and responsibilities of the citizen and the community are defined in relation to those of the national state, public memory institutions and heritage professionals. They range from those asserting the rights of citizens in dissent and critical thinking towards dominant institutionalized practices, to those advocating participation as an effective way of engaging citizens in consuming authorized heritage discourses. Participation is thus neither good nor bad in acheiving citizens' rights to heritage, but is driven and influenced by the framework which utilizes it. The proposed paper aims to examine and structure the four key frameworks through which citizens' participation in heritage making is asserted, in order to shed light on what we are thinking, talking and practicing around participation. The first framework is heritage without institutions tracing back from Marlaux's imaginary museum performed by every individual, to the ways in which global civic communities perform practices around heritage that challenge dominant politics of heritage. The second relates to group of ideas around community museums, in which heritage is participatory even in the decision making, but the process is being mediated and curated by the professionals. The third is participatory museum framework in which citizens participate within an institutionalized environment to become more emersed in it, but could (possibly) challenge and shape it by forming their own meanings around musealization. The fourth group is related to critical, discursive museum, derived from critical heritage studies in which professionals are creating civic forums for citizens, thus fostering critical thinking around heritage-making.

Writing and Heritage in Contemporary Spain: The Imaginary Museum of Literature by Stuart Davis (review)

Writing and Heritage in Contemporary Spain: The Imaginary Museum of Literature by Stuart Davis (review)

GENERIC TRAITS * The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound. By FRANCES DICKEY

The title of Frances Dickey's book is playfully suggestive of her aims: she not only tells the story of the portrait poem from the mid-Victorian to the modernist era but asks that we see the modern portrait as a gift, ‘From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound’, as well as to Pound's contemporaries. She observes early that modernists often presented themselves as the heirs and debtors of Robert Browning, whose dramatic monologues inspired modernist personae poems in which masks are self-consciously worn, and whose historical expeditions liberated modernists to raid the imaginary museum, collating and juxtaposing voices and source materials from across cultures and eras. Pound, who features prominently in Dickey's story, cherished Browning deeply and conspicuously; particularly stentorian and lacerating in his critical asseverations, he is often remembered nowadays as being in the vanguard of the modernist rejection of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. But Rossetti, like his contemporary Swinburne, whom Dickey also takes up, remained a crucial figure for modernist poets, and not only as an ancestral influence to be opposed and resisted. We can see this, she points out, in Pound's Umbra, where he lists his pre-1918 works as ‘Portraits and Personae’. Why is ‘Portraits’ a giveaway of the influence of the fleshly Victorian masters? Because, she explains, it is through the genre of the portrait poem that these masters were particularly relevant for the modernists. Rossetti and Swinburne achieved in their portrait poems a new way of understanding and representing individuals, which the modernists further developed; these Victorians are leading actors in a tradition that was modified by modernist poets.

Writing and Heritage in Contemporary Spain: The Imaginary Museum of Literature by Stuart Davis (review)

Writing and Heritage in Contemporary Spain: The Imaginary Museum of Literature by Stuart Davis (review)

Reordering and Redistributing the Visual: The Expanded ‘Field’ of Pattern-Making in Parallel of Life and Art and Hammer Prints

In August 1954, the artist–photographer Nigel Henderson and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi set-up Hammer Prints Ltd to sell and promote their designs for wallpapers, curtains and ceramics. Marginalised by art history as a category of applied arts, Hammer Prints was, however, inextricably tied into the ideas and experimental cross-media work of both artists at this time. This article resituates the ethos and designs of Hammer Prints within the wider aesthetic concerns and strategies of the Independent Group which the two artists were engaged with and, in particular, to the reordering of the visual first proposed by the artists in collaboration with the architects Alison and Peter Smithson in the seminal exhibition Parallel of Life and Art (Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1953), the year before Hammer Prints was established. As the article argues, a more complex account of Hammer Prints exists once it is reconnected to both artists’ interest in gestalt principles of perception, contemporary theorisations of ‘pattern’, and ontological questions of art posed by Malraux’s idea of the ‘imaginary museum’ and Duchamp’s idea of the ‘portable museum’. It concludes by locating the designs of Hammer Prints within the new field of communication theory developed by Gregory Bateson.

Remembering Joseph Frank

Remembering Joseph Frank Ann E. Berthoff (bio) Joseph Frank died in early March at the age of ninety-four. His biography of Dostoevsky was, from the first, hailed as a masterpiece of incomparable importance for scholars and as a fascinating study for all readers. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," published in the Sewanee Review in 1945 when he was still in his twenties, was destined to be influential (and controversial) throughout the rest of the century. I want to note his other contributions to literary criticism and the history of ideas—and to remember him as a friend for over fifty years. Warner and I first met Joe in 1955, the new husband of Marguerite (Guiguite) Straus whom we had known from graduate-school days. The ship carrying us to Sicily (for my husband's Fulbright professorship at the University of Catania) stopped for a day at Cannes; Joe and Guiguite were spending the summer in a nearby village, and true to their radiogram received in mid-Atlantic—"Rendezvous Cannes"—they met the boat and transported us to a house set in a Bonnard garden. After admiring one another's children and the local wine on their terrace, we went in for lunch at a Bonnard table—rabbit, as I remember, followed by fresh cherries. The conversation begun on the terrace continued at lunch—and for decades thereafter. Joe was profoundly American, but his attachment to Europe, to France especially, helped define him. He knew the languages, the literature, the intellectual history of Europe; and for many Europeans he had deep sympathies, along with an occasional amused impatience. Among his friends he counted European and emigré poets and philosophers, critics and scholars. He wrote about them, championed them, and as director of the Gauss seminars at Princeton he invited them to present whatever ideas they wished to have considered in circumstances that, with Joe's careful questioning and easeful geniality, made for conversation enjoyed by everyone in attendance. Joe was at home with French and German critics and philosophers, both contemporary and from earlier times. In any conversation about the state of criticism, we would anticipate his amused cry, "It's all in Hegel!" When he wrote about pretentious critics, he didn't waste time scolding; but, when it came to illogical argument or mistaken allusion, he was a master of the put-down. When Lionel Trilling cites Hegel on Gemütlichkeit, the defining characteristic of art as he wished it to be understood, Frank observes that it is "unfortunate that Mr. Trilling decided to venture into such deep philosophical waters. . . . The ideas he so generously attributes to Hegel are [End Page 496] entirely of his own devising." (And in a long footnote he shows that in the context of Hegel's disquisition, Gemüth means barbaric stupidity. Ouch!) In explaining the significance of the Yeatsian title of his first collection of essays—The Widening Gyre (1963)—Joseph Frank defined the terms which were to engage him throughout his writing career: "The image it evokes seems to me to picture one of the crucial dilemmas of modern culture, a culture whose creations more and more tend to deny or negate some essential aspect of the human agency at their source and to escape from its control. Whether through a preference for the mythical imagination, the dehumanization of art, or the depreciation and renunciation of spirit, the same dialectic may be observed at work all through modern culture. The falcon cannot hear the falconer." Together with articles on Mann and Ortega and four Americans, The Widening Gyre includes two long essays that had originally appeared in the Sewanee Review: "Malraux's Metaphysics of Art" and "Spatial Form in Modern Literature." In the Malraux essay Frank describes the "the imaginary museum"—Malraux's idea that photography has made available the entirety of world art, thus transforming "the relation of modern man to his past." "The chief architect of the imaginary museum" is modern art, which has rediscovered "the power of art to transform the world independently of verisimilitude or representation." He defends Malraux from the scorn of certain art historians as well as from uncritical appreciation, concluding the powerful essay with this...