The paper aims to advance the scholarship on Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) with a study that situates her writing in its art historical context. While critics often acknowledge her extraordinary ...visual perceptiveness, none has examined her descriptive landscape prose in relation to turn-of-the-century developments in landscape painting. Dorothy's The Alfoxden Journal (1798) and The Grasmere Journals (1800-3) coincide with the intensification of sketching the landscape en plein air (c. 1800) among painters in Britain and Europe. Specifically, I discuss these two journals in relation to sketches by John Constable, the most committed and sustained practitioner of plein-airpainting in early nineteenth-century England. Natural effects that Dorothy describes in the Alfoxden and Grasmere journals closely resemble features that Constable was simultaneously depicting in the open air: natural light observed at specific times of day; a broad and vivid range of colours; and fluctuating atmospheric and weather conditions. Similarities between Dorothy's prose and Constable's sketches not only reflect their shared engagement in the aesthetic turn towards naturalism during this period, when direct observation of nature's widely varied and transient features was replacing classically derived principles of ideal form and compositional order characteristic of landscape art in the eighteenth century, but also reveal the deliberateness with which Dorothy sought to replicate in her writing the intensity of observation and particularity of description that she admired in visual art.
The influence of process metaphysics on the development of abstraction between 1800 and the second half of the 20th century can best be exemplified with the case of the American Expressionist painter ...and theoretician Robert Motherwell (1915-1991). Taking as its starting point Motherwell's exposure to the History of Idea of Romanticism, Arthur O. Lovejoy's yearlong seminar at Harvard (1937-38), the artist's affinity with fluid forms through motion brushstrokes in Romanticist painting is analyzed as a preformative stage of his own transitory creations. This is done by structural comparison between Motherwell's written reflections and Romanticist art theory. Motherwell's specific perception through Bergson's and Whitehead's lens of immanence and multiplicity, I argue, resonates Lovejoy's principle of "Romantic Evolutionism," in its turn from being to becoming, derived from the philosophies of the Spiritualist Maine de Biran and the Idealist-Empiricist George Berkeley. 29952_UF0001.jpg Dr. Manfred Milz is currently the Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Art and Design at the Department of Architecture at Gediz University, Izmir, Turkey. Sponsored by the German Research Foundation, he was a contributor to the long-term research project Emotive Standards in Fine Arts, at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (1999-2001), within which he authored a comparative study devoted to the early sculptures of Alberto Giacometti and the first novels of Samuel Beckett (published in 2006). While teaching and researching in the Middle East, he edited in collaboration with Fatima Zahra Hassan Agha and Charles Melville the catalogue of the Contemporary Shahnama Millenium Exhibition Painting the Persian Book of Kings Today--Ancient Text and Modern Images, at the Prince's Foundation Gallery in London (2010). He also guest-edited and co-authored Bergson and European Modernism Reconsidered, a special issue of the "European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms" (2011). Dr. Milz's specialization in 20th century roots of visual culture around 1800 resulted in editing and co-authoring the volume Facing Mental Landscapes. Self-Reflections in the Mirror of Nature (2011).
Elizabeth Helsinger's iconoclastic book explores the peculiar power of rural England to stand for conflicting ideas of Britain. Despite the nostalgic appeal of Constable's or Tennyson's rural scenes, ...they record the severe social and economic disturbances of the turbulent years after Waterloo. Artists and writers like Cobbett, Clare, Turner, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot competed to claim the English countryside as ideological ground. No image of rural life produced consensus over the great questions: who should constitute the nation, and how should they be represented? Helsinger ponders how some images of rural life and land come to serve as national metaphors while others challenge their constructions of Englishness at the heart of the British Empire.
Drawing on recent work in social history, nationalism, and geography, as well as the visual and literary arts, Helsinger recovers other possible and alternative readings of social ties embedded in the imagery of land. She reflects on the power of rural images to transfer local loyalties to the national scene, first popularizing then institutionalizing them. By turning a critical gaze on these scenes, she comments on the difference between art and ideology, and the problems and dangers of asserting any kind of national identity through imagery of the land.
Originally published in 1996.
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