VICTORIANS LIVE Sussman, Herbert
Victorian literature and culture,
03/2013, Letnik:
41, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Art for the Nation: Sir Charles Eastlake at the National Gallery HILARY FRASER Apocalypse Then and Now LYNDA NEAD Exhibiting Dickens at 200 ANNE HUMPHERYS
This Cover Collaboration seeks to convey the atmospheric materiality of the studio-home of Frederic Leighton in the Holland Park area of West London. Five short films made by Jonathan Law highlight ...particular features of Leighton House, including the tiles of the Arab Hall imported from Turkey and the Middle East, the glittering golden chandelier, the sonorous tinkle of the fountain, and the peacock-inspired colours and textures of the interior design. The films are accompanied by texts chosen by Mary Roberts, author of an article on “The Resistant Materiality of Frederic Leighton’s Arab Hall” in this issue of British Art Studies.
This article, based on a plenary lecture for the conference Alma-Tadema: Antiquity at Home and on Screen, explores the attractions of the artist’s house as a site of display in the late Victorian ...era, the early twentieth century, and today. Comparing the houses of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton with Charleston Farmhouse, home of the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, I invoke the comments of viewers from Walter Sickert to Patti Smith in order to examine the relationship between the look of surfaces and viewers’ perceptions of psychological depth.
Reading Victorian Sculpture Dunstan, Angela
19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century,
6/2016, Letnik:
2016, Številka:
22
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This introduction reflects on reading sculpture in Victorian culture, and in Victorian studies. How did the Victorians read sculpture? How should we read it today? What might a sculpture connote in ...different contexts: the home, the street, the gallery, the colony? How broadly should we define what we describe as ‘Victorian sculpture’, in light of nineteenth-century industrial and technological innovation? For the Victorians, as for modern readers of Victorian sculpture, legibility remains a prime preoccupation when addressing these questions. This introduction suggests that Victorian sculpture’s resistance to reading renders it fertile ground for revisiting and reinterpreting individual works, their creators, textual responses to them, and the greater significance of their cumulative cultural imprint.
Frederic Leighton’s Holland Park home, a collaboration with George Aitchison, William De Morgan, and Walter Crane, was one of London’s most famous nineteenth-century orientalist interiors. Built ...between 1877 and 1879, Leighton’s Arab Hall houses historic tiles of exceptional quality from İznik, Damascus, and Persia, distinguishing his orientalist project from the homes of his peers. The Arab Hall was conceived as a gesamstkunstwerk, a secular aestheticist fantasy of suspended time in which historic Near Eastern craft production was synthesized into an harmonious aesthetic present tense. De Morgan undertook the challenge of replicating tile fragments to repair some of these historic panels. In doing so, he submitted to an apprenticeship across time, as the products of his kiln were answerable to the superb precedents of Near Eastern master craftsmen. But the dislocation of these historic tiles is often legible in their fragmentary remnants and scarred surfaces. In this article, Roberts addresses the ways in which this obdurate materiality posed an impediment to an aesthetics of synthesis.
This article studies gender construction in George Eliot’s "Romola" and Lord Leighton’s illustrations in the novel. In offering new insights into the collaboration between a writer and a painter from ...the Victorian era, this work draws substantially on a crucible of feminist scholarly responses to demonstrate how Eliot encrypted her resistance to and rejection of Victorian misogynist discourse on gender and women’s inferiority. Both works bond together despite the discrepancies, which prefigure significantly in the novel’s discourse on gender, and when considered in conjunction with the illustrations, "Romola" lays itself open to new readings and in so doing, challenges no more now than before pigeonholing and reductionism. Notwithstanding the asymmetrical nature of the relationship between the text and the illustrations, this essay contends that Lord Leighton’s radical construction of gender is triggered by Eliot’s narrative agenda and the subversive use of the myth of the Madonna. The novel’s narrative path as a bildungsroman imposes on the illustrations a rather radical “feminist” agenda, despite the aesthete’s visible antifeminism in his paintings, and the resulting subversive nature of the titular heroine in Leighton’s and Eliot’s work takes the debate on the Woman Question further afield. This article will argue that "Romola" foregrounds the protagonist’s grandeur and her ethical supremacy as opposed to all male characters. Her crossing over the dividing lines of the domestic into the public sphere is a serious endeavor on the part of Leighton and Eliot towards a more radical and forward thinking.
This article examines New Sculpture in the context of the emergence of cinema, arguing that chronophotography had a major impact on the temporalization of sculpture in late nineteenth-century ...Britain. Departing from the demonstrable impact of motion studies on Rodin’s sculpture, the article compares Sir Frederic Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877) to Rodin’s work on the basis of the works’ shared temporality and self-reflexivity. The article charts the influence of cinema’s prototypes on the democratization of sculpture in the Victorian period, the contingencies of the viewer’s temporal encounter with the work extending to sculpture’s ‘everyday’ context of exhibition and its ‘everyday’ subjects.
How can display deal with lost time? Can it only offer the historical data which provide a map of the past, or can it redeem experience, the inhabitation of the world that map describes? This essay ...examines how Greek sculpture was used in late-Victorian Britain to answer these questions, and to consider the theoretical problem of the fugitive object through visual, spatial and textual strategies. This is about neither display in a literal sense, with regard to the arrangement of objects and their relationship to museum architecture, nor what is generally called the reception of Greek sculpture. Rather, looking at the work of John Addington Symonds and Frederic Leighton through a Proustian lens, it speculates on the ways in which fantasies about Greek sculpture served to make sculptural objects personal and social symbols of both loss and redemption.
In this volume “exhibition culture” takes several forms: reference to the works of art which characters see, or which they hang in their homes; the use of language normally associated with the fine ...arts; the growth of art criticism; and the discussion of the merits and disadvantages of restoration. Various measures made it possible for poorer people to visit galleries, and the foundation of the South Kensington Art Gallery (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in 1874 was specifically intended to introduce newcomers to artworks of all kinds. Among these were the Bethnal Green Museum, The People’s Palace in the Mile End Road, the South London Art Gallery and the Whitechapel Art Gallery.
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