Story Of Art Research Articles

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Resetting the Table of Modernist Art

Racism has often been expressed in the form of physical violations of human rights, soul destroying emotional taunts and deliberate policies of social exclusion. Many educators who oppose such an approach would be horrified to find racist origins embedded in the aesthetic discourses which they have taken up as their own. In this paper I trace racist imagery and ideology in my own childhood, early schooling and adult art learning, and connect this with the persistent silencing of the black ‘other’ in the story of modernist art. As an educator of future art teachers the deconstruction of racist discourses is as essential as it is for pre‐service students in their own emergent art pedagogy.

Portrait of the Artist as a Hebrew Writer

Portrait of the Artist as a Hebrew Writer Barbara Mann Avner Holtzman . Melekhet maḥashevet: teḥiyat haʿumah—hasifrut haʾivrit lenokhaḥ haʿomanut haplastit [Aesthetics and National Revival: Hebrew Literature against the Visual Arts]. Tel Aviv: Zmora bitan / Haifa University Press, 1999, 352 pp. In a small north Tel Aviv neighborhood, there is a group of connecting streets named after Jewish artists: Bezalel, Lilien, Struk, Antokolsky, Soutine, Modigliani, Lesser Ury, Glicenstein. To the extent that street names reflect a city's sense of self, the naming of these particular streets was an ingenious gesture—a collective homage from "the first Hebrew city," suggesting a sweeping connection between the biblical figure of Bezalel, designer and architect of covenantal art, and a group of disparate modernist and Symbolist artists. The relative Jewishness of these artists and their work was beside the point. As a group, their presence "proved" the degree to which modern Hebrew culture and its direct heir, Israeli culture, had "overcome" Jewish culture's ambivalent relation to the fine arts, deriving from the Second Commandment prohibition on certain aspects of visual representation. The nexus of Jews and pictures has proved fruitful ground for a number of recent critical and historical studies. Whether debunking notions of Jewish iconoclasm,1 offering ample evidence of how the fine arts and museum collections have influenced the construction of modern Jewish identity,2 or turning a "Jewish eye" upon the writing of art history,3 these volumes have made the old claim that Jews are an auditory, not a visual, nation virtually irrelevant. Virtually, but not actually. The question that now motivates contemporary scholars and students of Jewish culture is no longer "is there" or "what is" Jewish art, the details of an enormous corpus of Jewish art having been copiously cataloged by the Hebrew University's Index of Jewish Art. Rather, scholars from a variety of disciplines, working in a broad range of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches, are investigating the degree to which normative Jewish notions about visual forms have permeated and informed larger arguments about culture and identity. Avner Holtzman's new study of the relation of Hebrew literature and the fine arts is a welcome contribution to this burgeoning and [End Page 248] interdisciplinary field and will certainly be the starting point for any future investigations. These reevaluations of the relationship between Jews and art should be understood within the wider context of evolving notions of Jewish identity and acculturation. Historians have often viewed the Jews as a "people of time," whose belief system derived from a God that could be heard but not seen. This assumption undergirds an entire constellation of attitudes toward textual production, attitudes that have evolved and been shaped by contact between Jewish culture and the societies within which it existed. The fundamental belief in a God who reveals Himself primarily in time or history, and rarely in space, has also influenced ideas regarding the physical locus of collective identity—a homeland—which, until modern times, had existed primarily within textual discourse. Modern Jewish culture has largely attempted to reconceptualize these normative notions of space and the relative location of the sacred and the profane. This sea change in spatial configurations was accompanied by a wide range of new ideas regarding the natural world, the body, and visual representation.4 Whether suspicious or laudatory, claims about the relation between Jews and art are necessarily intimately tied to larger arguments about the relation of Jewish culture to many of Western culture's central, Christian-deriving leitmotifs. The Tel Aviv neighborhood of Jewish-artist street names is also bisected by Rembrandt Street, either a mistake on the part of an ill-informed city planner or, more likely, an ironic nod to the enormous presence of Jewish motifs in the Dutch artist's work and the place of the artist himself and his work in modern Hebrew writing. Indeed, the story of Jews and art cannot be told without the central presence of a non-Jewish artist; that is, it should not be told in isolation. Neither, according to Holtzman's study, should the story of Hebrew literature and the fine arts be told in isolation from other mutations...

The Red Rose Girls: an uncommon story of art and love

This is the biography of illustrators Jessie Wilcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Muralist Violet Oakley, who took over the Red Rose Inn, a picturesque estate on Philadelphia's Main Line. They made a pact to live together forever - until one of them created havoc by marrying.

Dialogues with Berkeley: Idealist Metaphysics and Epistemology in Nabokov's Bend Sinister

Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/1999) DANA DRAGUNOIU (Toronto) Dialogues with Berkeley: Idealist Metaphysics and Epistemology in Nabokov's Bend Sinister I admit that the night has been ciphered right well but in place of the stars I put letters, and I've read in myself how the self to transcend and I must not be overexplicit. Vladimir Nabokov, "Fame" Three citations constitute my point of departure. The first comes from Brian Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, where he argues that "[f]he true story of Nabokov's art is the story of his finding the formal and fictional inventiveness to express all the problems his philosophy poses" (292). The second is from Vladimir Alexandrov's Nabokov's Otherworld, where he claims that "Nabokov's textual patterns and intrusions into his fictional texts emerge as imitations of the otherworld's formative role with regard to man and nature: the metaliterary is camouflage for, and a model of, the metaphysical" (18). And the third comes from Strong Opinions, where Nabokov supplies us with one of the very rare occasions where he acknowledges influence. In his response to Jeffrey Leonard's critical article on Ada, he writes: "Mr. Leonard would have lost less of it had he gone straight to Berkeley and Bergson" (290). While scholars have explored the relationship between Nabokov's fiction and Bergson's philosophy, the Berkeleian aspects of his work have been ignored. This essay combines the three statements quoted above to offer a new interpretive framework for Nabokov's philosophical concerns and metaliterary techniques . It argues that Bishop Berkeley's idealist cosmogony not only informs the problems posed by Nabokov's philosophy mentioned by Boyd, but also offers a metaphysical framework which correlates with Nabokov's metaliterary model referred to by Alexandrov. I will contend that a crucial concern in Nabokov's epistemology is the tension between philosophical realism (the view that the external world exists independently of the mind) and idealism (the view that the external world is dependent on the mind). Nabokov was not alone in grappling with this ques- 48 Nabokov Studies tion: the realist-idealist debate was a familiar one on the broader intellectual scene at the turn of the twentieth century. In Paris, Bergson published his Matière et mémoire (1896), where he claimed to be able to reconcile the conflict between Cartesian realism and Berkeleian idealism with a new epistemology . In England, Bertrand Russell addressed the debate in The Problems of Philosophy (1912), where he first praised Berkeley for questioning traditional theories of appearance and reality, and then proceeded to refute him. Also in England, F. H. Bradley (the idealist whose work would become the subject of T. S. Eliot's doctoral dissertation) was teaching at Oxford, while J. M. E. McTaggart was converting G. E. Moore to idealism during Moore's first years at Cambridge. In 1903, Moore published his famous work "The Refutation of Idealism," which had a direct influence on Leonard Woolf, J. M. Keynes, and E. M. Forster (then students at Cambridge), and an indirect impact on other members of the Bloomsbury Group (see Rosenbaum). Evidence that this realist-idealist debate permeates the work of these and other writers is seen in the introductory passage of Forster's The Longest Journey, in Andrew's description of Mr. Ramsay's work in Woolf s To the Lighthouse, in the Berkeleian epigraph to Beckett's Film, and in Yeats's adoption of his own pagan version of Berkeley's idealism. As Yeats wrote, "Descartes, Locke, and Newton took away the world and give us its excrement instead. Berkeley restored the world.... Berkeley has brought back to us the world that only exists because it shines and sounds" (41-42). As his comment in Strong Opinions suggests, Nabokov did not remain unaffected: his familiarity with and interest in the philosophies of Bergson and Berkeley made him a participant in an intellectual debate that was taking place both in England and France during the first half of the twentieth century. This philosophical debate poses the fundamental and as-yet unanswered question regarding perception and the nature of reality. The "problem of perception " (as it has come to be known...

GOMBRICH'S STORY OF ART

Journal Article GOMBRICH'S STORY OF ART Get access Richard Woodfield Richard Woodfield The Nottingham Trent UniversityNottingham, UK. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 36, Issue 3, July 1996, Pages 313–316, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/36.3.313 Published: 01 July 1996

Hysterical (Hi)stories of Art

(1867-1938), who produced, on the one hand, biting satires of Bengali hybrid society, and, on the other, a poetic version of Cubism. In general, however, Abanindranath's followers continued the sterile formula of 'Indian art', never resolving the hiatus between the modern and the traditional painter. Even though these artists proclaimed their antipathy to material success, they nonetheless dominated art institutions all over India. In the 1920s, Santiniketan replaced Calcutta as the centre of nationalist art with Nandalal Bose, the most influential of Abanindranath's pupils, creating his own style of art that was no longer tied to archaeologising the past, thereby inspiring later painters like K. G. Subramanyan. The Making of a New 'Indian' Art reaches the following conclusion: despite its claims, the Bengal School did not enjoy a monopoly over the definition of indigenism, though it turned into an establishment art. Actual modern artists emerged outside its parameters, following the exhibition of Bauhaus artists in Calcutta in 1922. Furthermore, the art school in Calcutta never lost its importance as a focus of artistic activity, while elite academic painters continued to enter the lucrative market of cheap prints for the masses. Academic artists like Hemen Majumdar created their alternative images of women that challenged the success of oriental art. By the end of the 1920s, Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy supplanted Abanindranath in Bengali esteem, as the new leaders of modern national art. Tapati Guha-Thakurta is among the best of the younger generation of Indian art historians. Her monograph is well-argued and painstakingly researched. I recommend it warmly.

From Image into Art: Art after Byzantine Iconoclasm

This paper argues that within a history of the medieval image, there remain some stories of art. The changing patterns in the discussion of the image during Byzantine iconoclasm provide the material for this argument. These indicate that later iconophile writers needed to construct a notion of the image that rejected the implications of presence apparent in the writings of earlier iconophiles and iconoclasts. In so doing, these later, ninth-century iconophiles produce theories of the image that suggest echoes of later theories of art in their stress upon the formal relation between the painting and the one painted.

Nella Larsen's Quicksand: Untangling the Webs of Exoticism

In 1925, when Josephine Baker went to Paris to perform Revenue Negre, she drew attention for her comic faces and ways which she could move her body. Baker's biographer Phyllis Rose writes, Every part of her seemed to go a different direction, flung from some central volcano of spirit. She made faces and flailed about. She shook her year end, then drew it and strutted place. The radiance of her personality and her joy life seemed to express themselves her (4). The female body is frequently figured as text--the uncontrolled body that flails around is frequently sexualized. That body described by these lines is a black body adds yet another dimension to this already problematic figuring of body. Josephine Baker's body has become, for her audiences, personification of exotic primitive.(1) When managers of Theatre de Champs-Elysees, where Revue Negre was to be performed, first saw performance that dancers and musicians from Harlem had brought to Paris, they were reportedly in despair. To remedy situation they brought an outside producer to spice up show. Jacques Charles agreed that show needed something. It was noisy and inelegant, and worst of all it wasn't black enough (Rose 5). The blackening of Revue Negre was a move to domesticate and homogenize black American performers show--to create authentic blackness as already figured stereotypes of It can be read as a move to sensationalize and dramatize blackness--the move to personify and embody stereotypical performances of blackness for pleasure of an audience. Black performers needed to be blacker. By this definition, blackness was constructed as exotic, coming from jungle. No performer has signified this move more than Josephine Baker, whose famous banana dance had its origins Paris. Originally called Danse Sauvage, Baker's trademark topless dance came from this move to authenticity. Rose reports, For this piece of Josephine Baker and her male partner were dressed Charles's notion of African costume--bare skin and feathers (6). Baker, female exotic, was to dance topless, and the Revue Negre excited its audiences by reminding them of a world that was both mysterious and sexually available, alien, yet subject. Rose quotes a review of show which states, |As for reality, we like it exotic' (23). Baker's Danse Sauvage situates theoretical points of intervention I want to make into discussion of black female sexuality and ways it is always already figured as exotic. The move toward construction of jungle discussed above is illuminating its attention to specific already circulating notions of what constituted and still constitutes blackness. This complex relationship between female bodies and notions of black authenticity is a tangled web. As a critique of authenticity, James Clifford, examining New York's 1984 Museum of Modern Art show entitled |Primitivism' 20th Century Art: Affinity of Tribal and Modern, asserts that if there had been different stories told exhibition, then they might have been stories of race instead of art. What was constructed for show, however, was a story of art which neatly situated high and low art by juxtaposing with modern. Under this umbrella, Clifford writes, modernism is thus presented as a search for |informing principles' that transcend culture, politics, and history.... tribal is modern and modern more richly, more diversely human (191). By presenting show this manner, drive for humanness, other questions are shut out. What show's configuration does not permit are questions of history, race, and politics. Instead exhibit is presented as a non-problematic desire on part of West to collect world--the notion that tribal arts did not any way exist as arts before they were discovered by modernist painters, specifically Picasso (Clifford 1%). …

When Art becomes News: Portrayals of Art and Artists on Network Television News

This study examines the framing process on network television news as it applies to visual art and artists. Data are presented on fifteen types of art stories, the number of stories, the amount of time devoted to each, and their placement within newscasts. Comparisons are made across networks and across time. One particular type of story, the art controversy, is examined in-depth in an attempt to discover the more subtle aspects of the framing process. Throughout, comparisons are made with the art world's own media. Conclusions are drawn regarding the amount and type of visual art coverage on the network news, the various frames employed, techniques used to develop those frames, the utility of those frames for the networks, and possible effects on the art world.

When Art Becomes News: Portrayals of Art and Artists on Network Television News

This study examines the framing process on network television news as it applies to visual art and artists. Data are presented on fifteen types of art stories, the number of stories, the amot iitof time devoted to each, and their placement within newscasts. Comparisons are mnade across networks and across time. One particular type of story, the art controversy, is examinied in-deptlh in an attempt to discover the more subtle aspects of the framing process. Throuighiout, comparisons are made with the art world's own media. Coniclusionts are drawn regardinig the amount and type of visual art coverage on the netwvork news, the various frames employed, techlniques used to develop those frames, the utility of those fraines for the networks, and possible effects on the art world.

"Alice Doane's Appeal": Hawthorne's Case Against the Artist

"ALICE DOANE'S APPEAL": HAWTHORNE'S CASE AGAINST THE ARTIST Mark M. Hennelly, Jr.* In a journal-entry of 1835, the year "Alice Doane's Appeal" was originally published in the Token, Nathaniel Hawthorne considered the portrait of the artist theme: "A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate—he having made himself one of the personages."1 It is clear that, unwittingly or not, Hawthorne had already approximated this aesthetic scenario in the earlier tale of a similarly haunted ArtistNarrator . Thus far, however, "Alice Doane's Appeal" has been generally under-estimated and misunderstood because readers have completely identified Hawthorne with his Narrator and consequently accepted Seymour L. Gross' rationale for the tale's strangely convoluted structure . Gross contends that Hawthorne expurgated and then added the "frame" to the original "Alice Doane," an explicit exposé of incest, written ten years earlier in college, "so that the 'offensive' parts were subdued and subordinated."2 Reading the Narrator's clumsy attempts at displacement as Hawthorne's own necessarily provokes such negative evaluations as "an unsuccessful trial,"3 "too contrived,"4 "certainly not one of Hawthorne's better stories,"5 or Gross' own most damning judgment that "Alice Doane's Appeal" is "the most poorly structured and chaotically organized of all of Hawthorne's stories."6 Actually, however, the Narrator is no more Hawthorne than Gulliver is Swift or Stephen Dedalus is Joyce. Rather, this uniquely masterful tale is a kind of dramatic monologue in which Hawthorne ironically condemns his prying and perverted Artist-Narrator along the lines quoted from his notebook-entry. This condemnation is all the more poignant and telling because the Narrator's aesthetic crime is one which Hawthorne himself often feared he might commit. In this sense, the reader is not faced with a frame story and tale proper; the "frame" •Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., is an Associate Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento. He has published widely on British and American fiction in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, American Imago, Emerson Society Quarterly, Poe Studies, The Journal of Altered States of Consciousness, and elsewhere. 126Mark M. Hennelly, Jr. is the real story, and the interpolated history of the Doanes and the final nightmare vision of Cotton Mather both function like sustained allegorical insets. Their plots are Doppelgängers to the drama between the Artist and his two listeners in the same way that Alice, Walter, Leonard, and the Wizard are all secret sharers. In fact, the last three named are all dark alter-egos of the Narrator himself; Hawthorne's sketch for a story of supernatural art indicates his awareness of such projection—"It might shadow forth his own fate,—he having made himself one of the personages." In Studies in Classical American Literature, D. H. Lawrence's discussion of Hawthorne's insights into the diseased personality is consequently a good starting point for an approach to "Alice Doane's Appeal": "It is a certain sign of the disintegration of the psyche in a man . . . when [he] takes to spiritualism, and table rapping, and occult messages, or witchcraft and supernatural powers of that sort. When men want to be supernatural, be sure that something has gone wrong in their natural stuff."7 Due to the noted disparagement of the tale, critical response to "Alice Doane's Appeal" has been slow in coming. What does exist follows one of three main lines of argument. The psychoanalytic approach , first of all, focuses upon the themes of incest, fratricide, and the more latent patricidal dream-vision of Leonard. Some commentators see this family romance as the essential ingredient of any Gothic potboiler; others, like Frederick Crews, find in it proof of Hawthorne's own disturbed past: " 'Alice Doane's Appeal' is striking evidence that Hawthorne's own sense of guilt, rooted in the twin themes of incest and patricide, informs his idea of history and sabotages his efforts at moral objectivity."8 The second reading looks upon the clinical fratricide as...

Hegel on the Sublime

Hegel's treatment of the Sublime is both self-consistent and distinctive. He not only defines sublimity, but discovers and ranks its types or stages from one select point of view—the viewpoint of God-world relation; and the way he does this, on the one hand, distinguishes him from many others who have contributed to an understanding of the concept, and, on the other hand, enables him to suggest, if but implicitly, a criterion for distinguishing the sublime from allied concepts. Besides, he discusses the matter in the wide context of diverse cultures, making quite a few insightful references to Eastern literature; and, consistently with his own conception of philosophy, also from the viewpoint of historical necessity, so that the sublime appears, in his Aesthetik, as a specific stage which the evolving story of art must in fact traverse.

The fats: A story of nature's art

AbstractThe fatty acids that constitute the glycerides of natural fats are, over wide ranges of biological species, remarkably uniform in kind, although the particular acids vary in fats of different biological origin, e.g. those of land flora, those of land fauna and those of aquatic origin. Concurrently with this very marked regularity in qualitative composition, striking although rare exceptions occur, in all sections of natural fats, in which the fat of a single family, and even of a single species of a family, consists largely of an acid which is uniquely different from any of the more prevalent and characteristic acids.The overwhelming preponderance of natural fats that contain only a few specific mixtures of component acids is contrasted with the much less frequent and apparently erratic instances in which quite exceptional acids are to be observed.The composition of the mixed glycerides, as shown by many examples in which a natural fat has been studied by the modern method of preliminary segregation into relatively simple mixtures of mixed glycerides by intensive crystallization from solvents at low temperatures, is much more regular. Each acid behaves in exactly the same way and as an individual, with the result that it tends to be distributed as evenly or widely as possible among all the glyceride molecules. Exceptions to this generalization occur only in a very few seed fats, and in certain animal body and milk fats (chiefly those of ruminant animals).