Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions

James A. W. Heffernan

CULTIVATING PICTURACY

Visual Art and Verbal Interventions

Cultivating Picturacy

Cultivating Picturacy Visual Art and Verbal Interventions

James A.W. Heffernan

Baylor University Press Waco, Texas USA

Copyright ©2006 by Baylor University Press Waco, Texas 76798 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press. Book Design by Diane Smith Cover Design by Joan Osth Cover Photo by Dick Johnson, The “Hey, Wayne” (1991). Collection of

Paul J. Leaman, Jr. Used by permission of Mr. Leaman and the artist.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heffernan, James A. W. Cultivating picturacy : visual art and verbal interventions / James A. W. Heffernan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-932792-41-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Visual communication. I. Title. P93.5.H44 2006 302.2'22--dc22 200601930

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper with a minimum of 30% pcw content.

For Tom Mitchell primus inter pares

Contents List of Illustrations

ix

List of Abbreviations

xvii

Acknowledgments

xix

Introduction

1

1

Literacy and Picturacy How Do We Learn to Read Pictures?

11

2

Speaking for Pictures The Rhetoric of Art Criticism

39

3

Alberti on Apelles Word and Image in De Pictura

69

4

Text and Design Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience

83

5

Marginal Language 101 Word and Image in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion

6

Painting against Poetry Reynolds’s Discourses and the Discourse of Turner’s Art

115

7

Wordsworth, Constable, and the Poetics of Chiaroscuro

141

8

Self-Representation in Byron’s Poetry and Turner’s Art

159

9

Looking at the Monster Frankenstein and Film

179

10

Love, Death, and Grotesquerie Beardsley’s Illustrations of Wilde and Pope

201

vii

viii

Contents

11

Hockney Remakes Hogarth A Gay Rake Progresses to America

231

12

Peter Milton’s Turn An American Printmaker Marks the End of a Millennium

253

13

Reza, Pollock, Richter Language and Abstract Art

287

Notes

311

Works Cited

373

Index

397

List of Illustrations

Color Plates 1.

John Constable, Dedham Vale (ex. 1828). National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

2.

John Constable, Dedham Vale. Detail.

3.

William Blake, “Infant Joy,” Songs of Innocence (1789).

4.

William Blake, “Infant Sorrow,” Songs of Experience (1794).

5.

William Blake, Frontispiece to Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793).

6.

J. M. W. Turner, Light and Colour . . . Morning after the Deluge (ex. 1843). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

7.

J. M. W. Turner, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (ex. 1829). National Gallery, London. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

8.

Sir George Beaumont, Peel Castle in a Storm (1806). Dove Cottage Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere, England.

9.

John Constable, Landscape Sketch: Hadleigh Castle (?1828–1829). Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

10.

Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five (1947). Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

11.

Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Fire, Detail of upper right.

12.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948. Digital Image. © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

13.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948. Detail of center.

ix

x

List of Illustrations

14.

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Picture (Rhombus) #5 (1998). Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Gift of Caroline Weiss Law.

15.

Gerhard Richter, No. 648-2 (1987); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris © Gerhard Richter.

16.

Gerhard Richter, War Cut (2004), page 91. Used by permission of Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig.

17.

Gerhard Richter, War Cut (2004), page 230. Used by permission of Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig.

Figures Int.1 Mural fragment. Delos, c. 100 B.C.E. Photo: Vincent Bruno. 1.1

5

Alexander Gardner, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, July 1863.

17

Unofficial White House Photograph (1988). American Postcard Company, Inc.

18

1.3

Duck-Rabbit, detail from page in Fliegende Blätter (1892).

19

1.4

Grenadier entering a tavern with a rifle over his shoulder and a dog beside him. Hypothetical reconstruction of a drawing made by William Hogarth.

19

René Magritte, Le Soir qui Tombe (1934). Menil Foundation, Houston. © 2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

23

René Magritte, Ceci n’est pas une pipe / La Trahison des Images (1929). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. ADAGP/Art Resource, NY.

24

Dick Johnson, The “Hey, Wayne” (1991). Collection of Paul J. Leaman, Jr. Used by permission of Mr. Leaman and the artist.

26

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Wedding (1434). National Gallery, London. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

28

Carved Ivory Panel, Land of the Meuse (c. 1100). Treasury of the Cathedral of Aachen, Germany. © Domkapitel Aachen, Photo: Ann Münchow.

31

1.2

1.5

1.6

1.7 1.8 1.9

1.10 Michelangelo Bonarotti, Original Sin and Expulsion from Paradise. Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace, Vatican State, Rome. SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

35

1.11 Sally Mann, Sunday Funnies (1991). Edwyn Houk Gallery, NY.

36

List of Illustrations

2.1

xi

Raphael, Deposition. Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy. SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

49

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Girl with a Dead Canary (1765). National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

52

Vincent van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes (1886). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam/Art Resource, NY.

56

Jackson Pollock, Echo: Number 25, 1951. © 2006 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

63

Jasper Johns, Shade (1959). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Art © Jasper Johns. Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: Rudolph Burckhardt.

64

Sandro Botticelli, Calumny of Apelles (c. 1494–1495). Uffizi, Florence. Erich Lessing /Art Resource, NY.

81

Girolamo Mocetto, Calumny of Apelles after Mantegna (c. 1506). Copperplate engraving. Used by permission of the British Museum.

82

4.1

William Blake, Title page for Songs of Innocence (1789).

88

4.2

William Blake, Title page for Songs of Experience (1794).

89

4.3

William Blake, Frontispiece to Songs of Innocence (1789).

95

4.4

William Blake, “The Lamb,” Songs of Innocence (1789).

96

4.5

William Blake, “The Tyger,” Songs of Experience (1794).

97

5.1

William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), plate 3.

104

William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), Title page.

105

William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), plate 6.

109

William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), plate 7.

112

J. M. W. Turner, Buttermere Lake (ex. 1798). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

120

J. M. W. Turner, Norham Castle on the Tweed, Summer’s Morn (ex. 1798). Watercolor. The Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, England.

122

J. M.W. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise (late 1840s). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

124

2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

3.1 3.2

5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2

6.3

xii

6.4

Cultivating Picturacy

J. M.W. Turner, Dido Building Carthage (ex. 1815). Used by permission of the National Gallery Picture Library, London.

130

J. M. W. Turner, Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (ex. 1817). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/ Art Resource, NY.

131

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii (1784). Paris, Musée du Louvre. © Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/ Art Resource, NY.

132

J. M. W. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (ex. 1812). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/ Art Resource, NY.

134

J. M. W. Turner, Vision of Medea (ex. 1828). Tate Gallery, London.

135

J. M. W. Turner, Parting of Hero and Leander—From the Greek of Musaeus (ex. 1837). Used by permission of the National Gallery Picture Library, London.

138

Rembrandt, The Mill (c. 1650). Image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

143

John Constable, Hadleigh Castle (ex. 1829). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

156

David Lucas after John Constable, Hadleigh Castle (c. 1832). Mezzotint with etching, engraver’s proof. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

157

J. M. W. Turner, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—Italy (1832). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

161

8.2

J. M. W. Turner, Self-Portrait (c. 1798). Tate Gallery, London.

169

8.3

J. M. W. Turner, Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom House, Venice: Canaletti [sic] Painting (ex. 1833). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

171

J. M. W. Turner, The Fifth Plague of Egypt (ex. 1800). Indianapolis Museum of Art. Gift in memory of Evan F. Lilly.

172

S. W. Parrott, Turner on Varnishing Day (c. 1846). Collection of the Guild of St. George, Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust.

174

J. M. W. Turner, Snow-Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (ex. 1842). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/ Art Resource, NY.

175

6.5

6.6

6.7

6.8 6.9

7.1 7.2 7.3

8.1

8.4 8.5

8.6

List of Illustrations

8.7

Horace Vernet, Joseph Vernet Attached to the Mast Studying the Effects of the Storm (1822). Musée Calvet, Avignon.

xiii

176

10.1 Aubrey Beardsley, Salomé with St. John’s Head. From The Studio 1.1, April 1893. Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

203

10.2 Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax. From Oscar Wilde, Salomé (London: Elkin Matthews & John Lane, 1894). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

205

10.3 Aubrey Beardsley, The Tail-Piece. From Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1894). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

211

10.4 Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilette of Salomé. From Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1894). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

213

10.5 Aubrey Beardsley, front cover from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock. (London: L. Smithers, 1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

214

10.6 Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilet, from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

215

10.7 Aubrey Beardsley, The Baron’s Prayer, from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

219

10.8 Aubrey Beardsley, The Rape of the Lock, from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

222

10.9 Aubrey Beardsley, The Cave of Spleen, from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

224

10.10 Aubrey Beardsley, Battle of the Beaux and Belles, from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

226

11.1 William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, Plate 1, Third State (1735). Line Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

232

11.2 William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, Plate 8, Third State (1735). Line Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

233

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Cultivating Picturacy

11.3 David Hockney, Receiving the Inheritance, A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963). Plate 1A. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney. 235 11.4 David Hockney, Marries an Old Maid, A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963). Plate 4A. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney. 236 11.5 David Hockney, The Drinking Scene, A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963). Plate 4. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney.

237

11.6 David Hockney, Bedlam, A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963). Plate 8. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney.

238

11.7 David Hockney, The Start of the Spending Spree and the Door Opening for a Blond, A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963). Plate 3. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney.

240

11.8 David Hockney, Meeting the Good People (Washington), A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963). Plate 2. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney.

244

11.9 David Hockney, The Student: Homage to Picasso (1973). Etching. © David Hockney.

244

11.10 David Hockney, Artist and Model (1973–1974). Etching. © David Hockney.

245

12.1 Peter Milton, Daylilies (1975). Artist’s Collection.

257

12.2 Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882). Courtauld Gallery, London. Photo: Marburg/ Art Resource, NY.

261

12.3 Peter Milton, Points of Departure I: Mary’s Turn (1994). Artist’s Collection.

263

12.4 Mary Cassatt, Girl Arranging Her Hair (1886). Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Image © Board of Trustees.

265

12.5 Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery. © 1879–1880 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Katherine E. Bullard Fund, in memory of Francis Bullard, by exchange. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts.

267

12.6 Peter Milton, Points of Departure II: Nijinsky Variations, first state (1996). Artist’s Collection.

273

12.7 Peter Milton, Points of Departure II: Nijinksy Variations, second state (1996). Artist’s Collection.

276

List of Illustrations

xv

12.8 Peter Milton, Points of Departure III: Twentieth Century Limited (1997). Artist’s Collection.

280

13.1 Agnes Martin, Untitled (1967). Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Purchased through the William S. Rubin Fund and the Contemporary Art Fund.

289

13.2 William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty (1753). Title page.

297

13.3 Gerhard Richter, Schattenbild (1968). Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal. Serralves Foundation Collection.

301

13.4 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man. Venice, Accademia. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

303

13.5 Gerhard Richter, Abstract Picture (1997). Collection Isabel and David Breskin.

305

List of Abbreviations For complete information on each source listed here, see Works Cited starting on p. 373. AI B&J BL CAR CE CHC CHP CP CPW DHDH DoA “EDFF” EIB “ELS” F F “FN” FTC GE H HAL HGW

Gombrich, Art and Illusion Butlin and Joll, The Paintings of Turner Coleridge, Biographia Literaria Mathews, Cassatt: A Restrospective Peter Milton, Complete Etchings 1960–1976 Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Peter Milton, Complete Prints 1960–1996 Thomson, The Complete Poetical Works Hockney, David Hockney by David Hockney Diderot, Diderot on Art Broude, “Edgar Degas and French Feminism” Blake, Early Illuminated Books Wilton, Constable’s “English Lanscape Scenery” Faille, Vincent van Gogh Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Schapiro, “Futher Notes” Braudy and Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism Dickens, Great Expectations Hulsker, Jan, The Complete Van Gogh Paulson, High Art and Low 1732–1750 Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works

xvii

xviii

IB INA JCC JCD JC:FDC JMWT LA LP MC MSF “PD” PI PL PM/MT PPWB Prelude PT PW Salons SIE SW Truth TWI VP

List of Abbreviations

Erdman, The Illuminated Blake Gombrich and Gregory, Illusion in Nature and Art Constable, John Constable’s Correspondence Constable, John Constable’s Discourses Constable, John Constable: Further Documents and Correspondence Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Art and Life Goodman, Language of Art Graham Reynolds, Later Paintings and Drawings of Constable Mathews, Mary Cassatt Branagh, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstien Frye, “Poetry and Design in Blake” Baxandall, Patterns of Intention John Milton, Paradise Lost in The Complete Poetical Works Peter Milton, unpublished, untitled notes to Mary’s Turn Blake, Poetry and Prose Wordsworth, The Prelude: Or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind Mitchell, Picture Theory Wordsworth, Poetical Works Diderot, Salons Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience Baudelaire, Selected Writings Derrida, The Truth in Painting Hockney, That’s the Way I See It Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze

Acknowledgments For this book a number of editors and publishers have generously allowed me to reuse material that has been previously published elsewhere. I warmly appreciate too all of the ways in which Dartmouth College has supported the preparation of this book—especially in the excellent resources of its library and the admirable efficiency of its library staff. I am also grateful to those who have read, heard, and commented on portions of this book. Chapter 1—the title essay—began its life some years ago as a talk that Richard Wendorf invited me to give to participants in his NEH Summer Seminar on literature and visual art at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and later became the keynote lecture at the Conference on Cultural Functions of Interart Poetics and Practice, organized by Hans Lund at the University of Lund, Sweden, in May 2000. Likewise, the original version of chapter 2 was a keynote address delivered at the conference on ekphrasis held at the University of Tel Aviv in March 1997, and for important help in developing its argument I am very much indebted to Adrian Randolph and Jim Jordan, who also advised me on chapter 13. I first presented chapters 3 and 5 at two other academic conferences: “Alberti on Apelles” at the third meeting of the International Society for the Classical Tradition held at Boston University in March 1995, and “Marginal Language” at a symposium on English book illustration organized by Joachim Müller at the Technische Universität of Berlin in 1989. Much of chapter 6 was presented at the Bucknell Conference on Revolutionary Romanticism in April 1990 and again—a few months later—at the Second International Conference on Word and Image in Zurich. In 1995 I delivered an early version of chapter 9 to audiences at U Cal/Berkeley, U Cal/Irvine, and Middlebury, and along with comments from them, questions raised by the editorial staff of Critical Inquiry led me to rethink and recast it. By invitation of Catherine xix

xx

Acknowledgments

Golden, I delivered chapter 10 as the Hannah Adler Lecture at Skidmore College in November 1999, and the following year—by invitation of Peter Wagner—I gave it at the conference on Representations of Women that he held at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, in June 2000. Chapter 11 was written for the Tercentenary Symposium on Hogarth held in April 1997 at the Clark Memorial Library of UCLA, and—thanks to Ronald Paulson—was also delivered at the Paul Mellon Centre in London the following November; for this chapter the late Tim Mara of the Royal College of Art in London kindly informed me about David Hockney’s work there. For chapter 12 I had the continuing cooperation of Peter Milton, a longtime friend, as well as the research assistance of Gretchen Saegh. Finally, chapter 13 was first drafted for presentation in May 2004 at a conference organized in Berlin by Haiko Wandoff of the Free University there, and shortly afterwards became the keynote address at a conference on writing and seeing organized by Rui Carvalho Homem of Oporto University in Portugal. One person deserves a special salute: virtually every chapter owes something to my wife, Nancy Coffey Heffernan. I must also say what a pleasure it has been to work with Baylor University Press. Ever since I first proposed this project to Carey Newman, the director, he has warmly supported it, and I have consistently enjoyed the admirably efficient aid of his staff—in particular Ms. Alathea Sloan, who greatly facilitated the task of securing permissions to reproduce nearly one hundred pictures; Diane Smith, who oversaw the production of the book; and Galen Schroeder, who compiled the index. I dedicate this book to W. J. T. Mitchell, who is unmatched by anyone else I know in the range, acumen, and audacity of his work on the relations between verbal and visual representation. J. A. W. H.

Introduction This book takes its point of departure from a word that cannot yet be found in any English dictionary. The word picturacy obviously evokes the word literacy, but it also raises questions about why we have no word to denote the visual counterpart of literacy, no word that designates the capacity to interpret pictures. In the opening chapter of this book I examine the assumptions that underlie this curious lacuna in the English language. Chief among them is the assumption that painting is a record of perception, and that what it presents—or represents—can be instinctively recognized by anyone who can see. Quite apart from all of the ways in which abstract art undermines this assumption, it has been strongly attacked even when applied to what is broadly called “representational art.” More than twenty years ago, Norman Bryson assailed “the doctrine of Perceptualism” as propounded by E. H. Gombrich: the idea that painting simply recreates for the viewer what the artist has seen, generating on a two-dimensional canvas the illusion of three-dimensional space. Contesting this doctrine, Norman Bryson defined painting as “an art of signs, rather than percepts.” Amplifying Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of meaning as the product of binary oppositions among signs in a self-enclosed system, Bryson argued that painting “is an art in constant touch with signifying forces outside” it. Signs, therefore, must be decoded in light of the world that surrounds the production of them, which includes the viewer as someone not timelessly “given” but historically constructed—diachronic rather than synchronic. The viewer thus becomes “an interpreter.” 1* *

Notes begin on p. 311, and each source is fully cited on the first reference. Thereafter—except where noted otherwise—I cite sources parenthetically by author’s name and page number(s), with a short title or abbreviation between them where needed. A list of all works cited begins on p. 373. 1

2

Cultivating Picturacy

The concept of the viewer as interpreter trails a long history of its own. As noted in chapter 2 of this book, it dates at least as far back as the third century of the Christian era, when a Greek rhetorician named Philostratus described a series of paintings “for the young, that by this means they may learn to interpret paintings.” 2 Fourteen centuries later, Nicolas Poussin advised a viewer of his Fall of the Manna in the Wilderness (1667) to read the painting as well as the biblical story it represents in order to see how everything in it fits the subject. “Lisez l’histoire et le tableau,” he wrote, “afin de connaitre si chaque chose est appropriée au sujet.” 3 What Poussin meant by reading a painting closely resembles what Philostratus did, which was to convert each painting into a narrative, or deliver the narrative implied by the moment of action it represents.4 But as Bryson presents it, the semiotic approach to painting moves well beyond narrative. It construes each element of a painting as a historically determinate sign of the culture that generated it, and the painting itself as a site of “interaction between political, economic, and signifying practices” (VP xiii). In the years since Bryson’s book appeared, semiotics has come to exert a formidable influence on art history and art criticism. But it has definitely not vanquished perceptualism. Anyone who thinks otherwise need only consider the stream of commentary generated by the publication of David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge in 2001.5 In this book, Hockney argues that from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, painters ranging from Van Eyck to Ingres used optical devices to help them reproduce the visible world with remarkable fidelity. Starting about 1430, Hockney says, painters such as Jan Van Eyck achieved an unpredecented naturalism by using a concave mirror to project well-lit objects onto a canvas; and about the end of the sixteenth century, painters such as Caravaggio started to project images onto the wall of a camera obscura by means of a convex refractive lens. Hockney’s thesis, which sparked a highly contentious colloquium at New York University in December 2001, has been criticized by both art historians and optical scientists. While the latter question Hockney’s thesis on technical grounds, the former dismiss the notion that any great artist would have resorted to copying an image produced by a mechanical device.6 But some scholars find this entirely possible. Michael John Gorman, an optical scientist, has recently shown that Giambattista della Porta explained in 1589 how to project an image by using a concave mirror together with a convex lens in a camera obscura.7 Still more recently, Susan Grundy, an art historian, has argued that della Porta’s new

Introduction

3

device enabled Caravaggio to produce his two San Luigi paintings of 1599–1600, Matthew Called and Matthew Killed.8 Regardless of which side one takes in this debate, it prompts at least one clear inference: in the field of art history, or at least in the borderlands where art history meets the history of optical science, the concept of painting as a record of perception remains very much alive. Whatever its answer, the question that Hockney’s book raises—how did the old masters begin to achieve such remarkable verisimilitude at a certain point in the fifteenth century?—presupposes that they aimed to do so, that they sought to reproduce the three-dimensional world as faithfully as possible in two dimensions, and thus to present each work as if it were a record of perception. Both sides in the debate implicitly reaffirm what E. H. Gombrich long ago wrote about the history of art, which he defined as a process of making and matching: travelling “a long road through schema and correction” toward the goal of illusion, artists gradually adjust the conceptual construct—the provisionally “made” figure—by reference to the natural world, and thus “match” their paintings to it.9 Hockney’s book has provoked a debate about how the old masters made this match. But it has also revived the assumption that matching was their chief objective. In so doing, it suggests that perceptualism will never give way entirely to the semiotic conception of art—because it is scarcely possible to banish the sense of perception altogether from the act of viewing pictures. Bryson himself acknowledges the illusionistic effect of painting when he writes that “painting in the West manipulates the sign in such a way as to conceal its status as sign” (VP xiii). Thus hidden, the sign prompts us to construct a meaning that we experience as given by perception rather than produced by interpretation. “Viewing,” declares Bryson, “is an activity of transforming the material of the painting into meanings, and that transformation is perpetual; nothing can arrest it” (VP xiv). Yet we can observe and study it, as the semiotic approach to painting leads us to do. In some ways, the process of watching ourselves as interpretive viewers resembles what Stanley Fish long ago defined as the affective approach to the reading of a text.10 In Vermeer’s The Artist in his Studio, for instance, Bryson notes a telling inconsistency between the “high fidelity transcription” of the map and the broadly stroked reflections of the chandelier, as well as the generalized “out of focus” rendering of the curtain at left. “The curtain is depicted,” he writes, “yet in addition the image displays, announces, exaggerates, the work of the signifier in transcribing the curtain.” Because Vermeer thus makes it

4

Cultivating Picturacy

impossible for us to “accept the image in perceptualist terms,” to see it all clearly and sharply at one single distance from the painting, we are compelled to recognize the idealized, notional status of the viewer. “The viewing subject assumed by the image,” Bryson concludes, “has no existence in tangible space” (VP 114–16). Bryson’s analysis goes some distance toward anticipating and answering an objection made by James Elkins, who argues that in focusing on figures in paintings, semiotics overlooks the meaning of the “subsemiotic” marks that constitute them, such as chiaroscuro and “nameless brushstrokes.” 11 Semiotics, says Elkins, “slights the meaning of marks,” turning pictures into texts by viewing or reading only their nameable figures (“Marks” 824). In response, we may note that Bryson’s account of Vermeer’s painting takes explicit account of its brushwork: more precisely of the collaborative roles played by broad strokes and “high fidelity” precision in signifying the status of the viewer. Nevertheless, Bryson’s analysis rests on what might be called the pre-semiotic assumption that we can readily recognize certain objects in this picture (such as the curtain and the map), and that we need not even ask ourselves how the lines and colors on the canvas signify an object, and thus lead us to a meaning we can name. For the most part, semiotic approaches to art avoid raising this kind of question because it is very difficult to answer without falling into the language of perceptualism, without reducing interpretation to recognition. To be sure, the task of interpreting pictures would soon become impractical if we had to explain how every figure in a picture is signified before explaining what the figures themselves mean. So for the most part I take figures as given, or as more or less instinctively construed before the work of interpretation begins.12 But sometimes the status of figures must be carefully scrutinized. In chapter 1, I question Erwin Panofsky’s claim that the iconographic interpretation of painting—the forerunner of visual semiotics—may safely rest on the “factual” basis of recognition. When a few dots of paint in Constable’s Dedham Vale (1828) may or may not signify a figure in a landscape, the indeterminacy of the dots themselves comes to signify something crucially important about the meaning of the figure in the painting as a whole. On the other hand, I freely admit that the meaning of the dots largely depends on their capacity—within a particular pictorial context—to suggest a figure that can be named. Likewise, I freely admit that I can no more escape language in the interpretation of art than I can forswear perception in the experience of it. “Is there,” Elkins asks, “any such thing as visual semiotics, apart from the application of linguistic models to nonlinguistic forms?” (“Marks” 824). Elkins answers no.13 He

Introduction

5

Int.1 Mural Fragment. Delos, c. 100 B.C.E. Photo: Vincent Bruno.

then proceeds, almost heroically, to attempt a mapping of subsemiotic terrain, to confront what he calls “the crucial moments of darkness” in art, “when the picture, in all its incomprehensible, nonlinguistic opacity, confronts us as something illegible” (“Marks” 834). Elkins reads such “illegible” images as a mural fragment painted on the Greek island of Delos around 100 B.C.E. (fig. Int.1). He explains how its marks and colors collaborate, and how the making of a mark turns the surface of the wall into “a region with definite boundaries” . . . “a field” (“Marks” 842). But if reading a picture means identifying the figures that it represents—where the word figure denotes a three-dimensional object rather than a two-dimensional shape—this fragment is indeed illegible, at least to my eye, without the intervention of the words that identify its figures. Elkins found the picture not in Delos but in a book about the Delos fragments that labels as well as reproduces this one, which is called “Fragment of a white monochrome frieze with a ram being led to sacrifice.” 14 Guided by that information, I eventually found the ram in the painting, but I could not have found it otherwise, and I do not believe that Elkins could have done so either. For Elkins does not

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explain how the marks and colors in this picture by themselves work to signify a ram. Instead he starts by declaring the “facts” of the picture: “a ram being led to sacrifice has suddenly stopped and planted its hoofs on the ground,” and “a man leans forward, apparently, to give the ram a tug” (“Marks” 843). Only after stating these facts can Elkins confidently speak of such things as the depiction of the “joint and its bony continuation” in the ram’s left leg, where a “single modulated area of white” is “so clearly both bone and milk, or gristle and paint, that it is not easy to see the leg as a color field and the edge as a mark.” 15 Yet once again, without the help of the label supplied for this picture, it would be well nigh impossible to see the leg as anything but color field and mark. In making this objection I do not mean to argue that a label is more informative than the picture it denotes, as Mark Twain once claimed, or that a label should dictate what we see.16 Just as no poem can be perfectly paraphrased, no painting can be perfectly translated into words. Likewise, just as no linguistically based theory of signs can exhaust the meanings generated by visual art, no label can predetermine or predict all that we can discover in the patient scrutiny of a painting, and some of its most poignant features may be impossible to name.17 Nevertheless, words are indispensable to the understanding of pictures. It is not just obvious—banally obvious—that the interpretation of a painting must be couched in words; it is also clear that any attempt to think about the meaning of a painting, about what it signifies, requires them.18 In my own efforts to understand painting, I need all the verbal help I can get. Words permeate the history of art—not just in picture titles and art criticism but in works of art themselves, where they may be signified by reading matter or directly represented as visible, paintable objects.19 In Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, the words of the angel to Mary—“Ave gratia plena”— often appear on a scroll floating between the two. In René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, which I discuss in chapter 1, the title words are inscribed within the painting and play a crucial role in making the meaning of what we see. In Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing (1956), the room in which a narcissistic couple display their hypertrophic bodies brandishes the language of modern media in brand names, a newspaper, a comic book cover, and a theater marquee shining through the window.20 In modern and contemporary art, words appear so often that the French publisher Flammarion has recently published a set of notecards called Les Mots des Artistes/Painted Words (1998), with examples ranging from

Introduction

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Picasso and Matisse to Jean-Michel Basquiat.21 And in the contemporary lexigraph, painted words displace images altogether. The painting becomes a wall of words, almost literally—as in Mark Tansey’s Close Reading (1990), where a climbing figure slowly crawls up a precipitous cliff that is covered with printed letters. Yet this wall of words includes the figure I’ve just mentioned, and as Garrett Stewart observes, the printed phrases with which it is “apparently incised (though in fact Xeroxed) [are] mostly undecipherable” (363). This painting of reading—of close reading, painstaking scrutiny of words—thus exemplifies one of the many ways in which the depiction of words intervenes in our experience of them, complicates it, and thus enriches it. To deploy the language of antagonism, Close Reading might be called painting’s revenge upon the word for its recurrent invasion of the painted surface. Alternatively, it may be seen—or read—as the mirror image of that invasion, reversing it. Or as a sign of what I aim to do in this collection of essays. I aim to read pictures closely with the aid of words. In chapter 1, I argue that learning to construe pictures—to understand what they represent or signify, to decode the language of art—resembles in many ways the process of learning to read the written word.22 But as I try to show with examples ranging from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the family photographs of Sally Mann, pictures often challenge our reading of them and contest the authority of the words we use to intervene in the experience of viewing. While semiotics gives us a powerful alternative to the notion that pictures are windows on reality, picturacy—as I conceive it—entails the capacity to see that pictures may resist decoding quite as much as they invite it. What I try to develop in chapter 1, therefore, is not so much a theory as a method of reading pictures that is supple enough to accommodate what Elkins calls their “painted strangeness” (“Marks” 824). Chapter 2 turns from the reading of art to the act of writing about it, or speaking for it. To speak for pictures is to articulate our silent understanding of them. But if a picture is silent, can anyone speak authoritatively for it, or is the language of art criticism bound to be both rhetorical and ventriloquistic, the voice of the critic masquerading as the voice of the painting? In quest of an answer, I scrutinize the work of Philostratus, the ancient Greek rhetorician sometimes called the father of art criticism, and four of his successors: Giorgio Vasari, sixteenth-century chronicler of Italian art, sometimes called the father of art history; Denis Diderot, the eighteenth-century French encyclopedist, who brings to

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painting the imagination of a litterateur; Meyer Schapiro, one of the most renowned art historians of the twentieth century; and Leo Steinberg, equally renowned for both art criticism and art history. The remaining chapters treat notable points in the history of the relation between image and word. Chronologically, these chapters move from the fifteenth century to our own time: from the rhetoric of painting in Alberti’s De Pictura to the language of abstract art by Gerhard Richter, whose War Cut of 2004 juxtaposes news stories on the invasion of Iraq with photographed details from one of his abstract paintings. Chapters 4 and 5 treat the collaboration of word and image in the illuminated poems of William Blake, specifically in his Songs of Innocence and Experience and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Further tracing the filaments stretched between word and image in the English Romantic period, chapters 6–8 treat the poetics of chiaroscuro in the work of Wordsworth and Constable; J. M. W. Turner’s struggle to forge a discourse of art against the discourse of poetry in paintings that he repeatedly juxtaposed with quoted lines of poetry; and the knotty question of just how Turner and Byron represent themselves in their respective arts. Moving from the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, chapters 9–12 show how various artists and filmmakers evoke the work of earlier periods even as they reconstruct the relation between image and word. Chapter 9 explores the conflict between verbal and visual representations of monstrosity in film versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Chapter 10 assays the monstrous beauty of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations to Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Chapter 11 treats David Hockney’s remaking of William Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress as the pictorial autobiography of a young gay artist. Then, turning to a contemporary American artist, chapter 12 explains the graphic stories told by Peter Milton’s Points of Departure, a series of prints that by their astonishing draftsmanship recall and rival the art of photography. In the final chapter, I set myself the task of explaining what language has to do with abstract art. Because abstract art seems to renounce all reference to recognizable objects and thus to any stories we might tell about them, it has become notorious for its taciturnity, its will to silence. Paradoxically, however, the white-out of reference in abstract art can be what Melville calls a “dumb blankness, full of meaning,” like the enigmatic whiteness of his great whale. In Yasmina Reza’s play, Art, a pure white canvas bought by one of her characters is finally construed as the picture of a skier disappearing into a snowstorm. Conversely, the words inscribed beneath an instantly familiar image in René Magritte’s Ceci

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n’est pas une pipe prompt us to seek its meaning not in tangible objects but in abstractions. If a work of visual art need not resemble what it signifies, as Nelson Goodman argues, the forms of abstract art can be just as significant as the forms of what is normally called representational art, and just as conducive to discourse—including narrative. By examining the work of Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Gerhard Richter, I seek to show that the line between abstraction and figuration is no more impermeable than the line between images and words. In treating these encounters between words and images, or between pictures and narratives, I pursue a cluster of questions. To what extent does language facilitate or obstruct our experience of visual art? In any kind of visual art that openly confronts literature, whether by complement (as in Blake’s composite art), juxtaposition, illustration, translation to film, or literary illustration, can we discern the language of art as something distinct from verbal language, as a rival medium of representation inexplicable by lingusitic codes? If so, is there any way of speaking authentically for a work of art, or translating it faithfully into words? And what does it mean to speak of a pictorial narrative as distinct from a verbal one? As the foregoing set of topics and questions suggests, this book is driven not so much by a single dominating argument as by the conviction that for better or worse, language plays a crucial role in our experience of art—just as soon as we begin to think about what we are seeing. My chief aim is to show how the interdependence of image and word inspires, drives, and complicates the work of poets, artists, and art critics from ancient times to our own.

Chapter 1

Literacy and Picturacy How Do We Learn to Read Pictures?

“Many can read print and cannot read mezzotint.” —John Constable 1

Some years ago, when he was the anchorman for CBS nightly news, Dan Rather gave a speech to the national press club at one of its regular luncheon meetings in Washington, D.C. Rather’s topic was television news broadcasting, and he tried to give a candid account of its strengths and weaknesses. Even in the question period afterwards, when he was inevitably asked to compare televised news with printed news, to compare the broadcasting of images with the dissemination of words, he gamely admitted that journalists were typically more thorough than broadcasters. But having put that concession on the table, Rather played his ace. Television, he said confidently, does one thing that newspapers can’t: when it reports on what is happening somewhere, television “puts you there.” And not long afterwards, when CBS was reporting on the U.S. invasion of Panama, Rather repeated the point. “Through the magic of television,” he said, “we take you there.” This kind of statement could be dismissed as an innocuous metaphor if it were not calculated to take us in a sense quite different from the one Rather intended—that is, to take us in, to foster the illusion that the television screen is a perfectly transparent window which allows us to see exactly what is happening anywhere in the world. In fact, television is a device that transmits and distributes pictures, just as the printing press is a device that duplicates and thus makes possible the distribution of 11

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words. A well-told story of an event or a vivid description of a place can “put us there” just as well as, if not better than, a picture can, but neither words nor pictures can literally put us there. They can only represent what is there, or what was there, and every act of representation is a construction of meaning. We can begin to read pictures only when we grasp the implications of this simple fact. Simple as it is, the concept of pictures as representations is difficult to grasp because we are conditioned, virtually from childhood, to regard them as having a privileged relation to what they represent: a relation so intimate that we grasp it instinctively, with no sense of mediation or translation or decoding. That is what makes looking at pictures seem so different from reading words, and why the title of this essay sounds so strange: there is no such word as picturacy in the English language because the ability to read pictures is commonly thought to be—so to speak—written into the eye at birth, a product of instinct rather than education. Children commonly learn to read from picture books. In the child’s picture book, the word is the signifier, and the picture is the signifié, the thing signified. When the child sees the word tree under the picture of a barked pole sprouting leafy branches, he or she is invited to learn the arbitrary, conventional link between the picture and the word, but at the same time to see the picture—to recognize the picture—as virtually identical with what it represents. To begin to read, to begin to acquire literacy, is to begin developing one of the most fundamental assumptions about the difference between pictures and words: that words are arbitrary and pictures natural, that words represent things by convention alone while pictures represent them by natural resemblance. Even E. H. Gombrich, who has written at great length about the role that convention plays in art, declares that “images of Nature . . . are not conventional signs, like the words of human language, but show a real visual resemblance, not only to our eyes or our culture but also to birds or beasts.” 2 And Jonathan Culler, well known for his untiring pursuit of signs, firmly locates pictures outside the domain of semiotics—the science of signification—because, he says, semiotics cannot account for “natural resemblance.” 3 The first thing to ask about “natural resemblance” is whether it is truly natural or merely naturalized by inculcation and habit. When a child sees a picture of a cozy little rose-covered cottage surrounded by a white picket fence and labeled “home,” does the child recognize a natural resemblance between the picture and the homes that he or she has actually seen, or is the child being subtly taught to take this picture as a

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graphic sign of what we want to believe a home is? How often do children’s picture books place the word home beneath a picture of a crowded, messy, one-bedroom apartment? How often does the word home appear beneath the picture of a tent—which is exactly where one family in my part of New Hampshire spent the summer some years ago, camping out while trying to save enough money to rent an apartment for the winter. Would any picture-book publisher dare to put the word home beneath the picture of a tent—or a cramped apartment? So long as pictures present themselves as windows on a world of stable objects with fixed meanings, so long as pictures enjoy a privileged relation to what they represent, questions like these do not arise. Our whole educational system is in fact designed to suppress them, to forestall questions about the meaning of pictures, because pictures are quite literally read out of the curriculum we give children to study. Literacy, the ability to read words alone, is the universal criterion of cultural advancement. When children learn to read and write, they are systematically taught to move from finger painting to forming letters, from picture books to illustrated books and finally to words alone, black letters stamped on a pure white page. And in this individual movement from pictures to words, ontogeny endlessly recapitulates philogeny. The educational development of the individual child repeats the cultural development of the human race, or at least a widely accepted version of that development. In the eighteenth century, in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau plainly defines the movement from pictures to words as a process of cultural ascent. “The depicting of objects,” says Rousseau, “is appropriate to a savage people, signs of words and of propositions to a barbaric people, and the alphabet to a civilized people.” 4 In our own time, Ernst Cassirer has redefined this development as an ascent from resemblance to signification. For Cassirer, language undergoes three stages: the mimetic stage of “sound painting,” wherein sounds are onomatopoetically used to reproduce individual sensory impressions as faithfully as possible; the analogical stage, wherein a sequence of sounds designates a sequence of contents; and the symbolic stage, wherein language achieves its “true freedom” by casting off its sensuous covering and becoming, “precisely in and by virtue of its otherness, . . . the vehicle of a new and deeper spiritual content.” 5 In this Puritanical or quasi-Platonic polarization of flesh and spirit, we see even more clearly what is ideologically at stake in the separation of words from pictures—from their contaminating and corruptive influence, from their pernicious tendency to drag us back to infancy and

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barbarism. Plato vilified painters just as much as he vilified poets— because painters, he argued, aim to deceive and manipulate our senses, the lowest part of us.6 And when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the words of God written on two tablets and discovered that Aaron had made a golden calf, he broke the tablets, pulverized the calf, and returned for a new set of tablets that begin by forbidding every form of visual representation: “You must not carve an image for yourself in the shape of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is on the earth below, or that is in the waters under the earth.” 7 Happily for the history of art, Christianity has widely ignored this commandment. Only the Moslems take it literally—from the Moses they call Mohammed. Yet a powerful strain of iconoclasm permeates the history of Western culture, and anyone who has ever been on either side of an argument about how much television children should be allowed to watch knows that iconoclasm and iconophobia—the fear of images—are very much alive and well in our society. Normally, however, the guardians of verbal culture, the culture of literacy, do not go about smashing television sets or slashing canvases or hacking statuary to pieces. Recognizing that images are here to stay, the guardians of the word simply aim to keep images at a suitable distance, to wall them out as much as possible, to establish a border and guard it firmly. Hence their cries of alarm when the border between word and image is crossed. Here is Wordsworth in the middle of the nineteenth century, a grand old man of seventy-six voicing his Mosaic outrage at the spectacle of illustrated books and newspapers: Discourse was deemed Man’s noblest attribute And written words the glory of his hand; Then followed Printing with enlarged command For thought—dominion vast and absolute For spreading truth, and making love expand. Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit The taste of this once-intellectual Land. A backward movement surely have we here, From manhood—back to childhood; for the age— Back towards caverned life’s first rude career. Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page! Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!8

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Discourse—words—are man’s noblest attribute. Written words are the product of civilized adult minds raised far above the level of infancy and barbarians scratching and daubing on the walls of caves. Art is dumb, which means silent, and has no right to enter the domain of discourse, to trespass on the sacred precincts of the printed page. This little-known sonnet could of course be dismissed as the irrelevant squawk of a cranky old man. But however intemperate Wordsworth may sound, his iconoclasm reflects a long tradition of thought about what the relation between words and pictures should be, and to a large extent, these views persevere and prevail in our own time. Newspapers and magazines use pictures often, and various kinds of picture books abound, but the illustrated novel is (or was) a nineteenth-century phenomenon that we have left behind us: virtually all of what now we consider literature—fiction, poetry, and nonfiction—consists of texts unaccompanied by pictures. The only significant exception is the graphic novel exemplified by Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which uses a comic book format to tell the story of how a Polish Jew survived the holocaust. (The Jews are mice, the poles are pigs, and the Germans are cats.)9 In using pictures to tell a story, Spiegelman is violating what is commonly taken to be a law essential to pictures, or at least to painting, to high art, to art that is worthy of the name. When art tries to tell stories, it regresses to the primitive age of fresco cycles or descends to the childish, semi-literate world of the comic book. Since the Renaissance, the dominant conception of what a painting does—or rather should do— derives from Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura (1435): a painting represents what can be seen from from one point of view at one moment of time.10 It is this conception of painting that informs the most influential of all treatises on literature and the visual arts, namely G. E. Lessing’s Laocoon, first published in 1766. Setting out to reestablish “the Limits of Painting and Poetry,” as his subtitle tells us, Lessing argues that painting is fundamentally spatial and literature fundamentally temporal. “Succession of time,” he writes, “is the province of the poet just as space is that of the painter. It is an intrusion of the painter into the domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction, when the painter combines in one and the same picture two points necessarily separate in time” (98). What is striking about this well-known formulation is not just the categorical rigor of its language, but the geo-political metaphors in which it is couched: province, domain, intrusion. Lessing even goes on to talk about aggression across the frontiers (91). As Michel Foucault has

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shown us, the making of categories is an exercise of power, and Lessing’s whole treatise is a classic piece of legislation calculated to reaffirm the power of the word and contain the power of the image. In fact, Lessing explicitly says, “The plastic arts . . . have an effect that demands close supervision by the law” (14). For Lessing, the first duty of art is to be beautiful, to represent beauty in space. All else—expression, narration, meaning—must be subordinate to the law of beauty, which demands silence. What would happen to the Mona Lisa, he might say, if the lips of that hauntingly inscrutable face were suddenly to open and speak? What would come out of them? A question about the weather? A Medician recipe for lasagna? We cannot have speech from paintings, for paintings must be beautiful and silent, pretty and dumb. To recognize here the terms in which men have traditionally defined the role of women is to see more clearly how visual art has been subordinated to language. It is no accident that the female face and figure, clothed and unclothed, has for centuries occupied such a central place in painting and sculpture, in beautiful works of art presented for the gaze and voyeuristic delectation of men. The notion that pictures are silent or should be silent goes hand in hand with the notion that they are windows through which we see a reality that speaks for itself without words, a reality that speaks directly to the eye. To see pictures in this way is to believe that they give us direct, unmediated access to what they represent instead of requiring that we decode and interpret them as graphic signs, cultural constructions of meaning.11 In the late seventeenth century, John Dryden wrote that painting speaks “the tongue of ev’ry land.” 12 What was claimed for painting in the seventeenth century is claimed even more insistently now for photography. A recently distributed poster proclaims: “The world speaks in 1994 languages, but sees in only one: Photography: the universal language.” Unsurprisingly, this poster is published by the International Photography Council, which has a more than incidental interest in promoting the notion that photographs are universally intelligible. In fact of course they are not, which is why most photographs are printed with captions that determine their meaning. Take for instance the photograph of a man lying beside a stone wall with a rifle propped against it (fig. 1.1). He might be sprawled there in sheer exhaustion; he might be posing for some reason (this could be a movie still); or he might be dead. But even supposing him dead, we can only guess how he died—heart attack, knife in the back, accidental wound from his own rifle, bullet from someone else’s rifle—and we have no idea where. In fact this picture was

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1.1 Alexander Gardner, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, July 1863.

taken just after the Battle of Gettysburg, and when it was published the caption identified it as a rebel sharpshooter slain at his post.13 What the caption did not say is that the photographer had earlier snapped the same corpse in a different place and from a different angle and identified it as a Union soldier. He then dragged the corpse up to a stone barricade in order to make—or make up—this picture of a slain rebel.14 Many pictures can be interpreted without the aid of captions, of course, but only by those already familiar with the graphic signs they deploy. Consider the Unofficial White House Photograph (fig. 1.2).15 Hardly a record of anyone’s perception, this would-be photograph is something constructed to represent Nancy Reagan as the one who wore the pants in the Reagan family when Ronald was in the White House. To read this picture correctly, we must have some knowledge of the culture that it represents. We must have seen at least one other picture of the Reagans with an identifying caption (which is how we learn to recognize famous faces), and we must have been trained to recognize certain kinds of clothing—pants, neckties, and dresses—as culturally generated signs of gender: signs that are manipulated here.

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1.2 Unofficial White House Photograph (1988). American Postcard Company, Inc.

This line of analysis can lead us to the position taken by Nelson Goodman, who argues that there is no such thing as resemblance between pictures and what they represent, that what we call “realism” is purely a matter of inculcation. “Almost any picture,” he says, “may represent almost anything; that is, given picture and object there is usually a system of representation, a plan of correlation, under which the picture represents the object.” 16 Goodman’s point could be illustrated by the photograph of the man on the ground, which—as we’ve just seen—can be made to represent any one of a number of things. Or by deliberately ambiguous pictures such as that of the duck-rabbit, which may be seen as a duck, a rabbit, or a composite of the two (fig. 1.3).17 Or by drawings such as the one made by William Hogarth—the great eighteenth-century English printmaker—to show that with just three lines he could represent a grenadier entering a tavern with a rifle over his shoulder and a dog beside him (fig. 1.4).18 In all these cases we are told what to see. We see

Literacy and Picturacy

1.3 Duck-Rabbit, detail from page in Fliegende Blätter (1892).

1.4 Grenadier entering a tavern with a rifle over his shoulder and a dog beside him. Hypothetical reconstruction of a drawing made by William Hogarth.

19

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by means of language and graphic convention, which together forge the link between the drawing and what it represents. But examples like these, which seem to confirm Goodman’s theory, must be set against examples that challenge it. What are we to say, for instance, about works of Super Realism such as John Salt’s ’58 Ford with White Hood (1973)? To this question Goodman might reply that what the picture resembles is not an object but a photograph. It takes the photograph as its model of representation, and its realism of effect depends— as Linda Chase has noted—on its heightening of certain effects that we normally associate with photography: its unsentimental sharpness of focus, its capacity to capture a fleeting moment of light, and its acute sensitivity to shiny and reflective surfaces.19 “Realism is relative,” says Goodman, “It is determined by the system of representation standard for a given culture or person at a given time” (LA 38). If it is fair to say that the photograph now constitutes the prevailing standard of realism in our culture, then Salt’s picture could be called conventionally realistic. It looks realistic only because it deploys the conventions we now associate with realism, and thus confirms Goodman’s theory. But suppose we consider some of the oldest known examples of representation extant: the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, dating from what Wordsworth calls “caverned life’s first rude career”: the paleolithic era, about 14,000 B.C.E. Among other things, the Lascaux paintings represent what are generally acknowledged to be a variety of animals: a bison, horses, stags, and a bull. These pictures come to us without words (writing did not come along until about 6000 years later) and without any contextual information; we have no other access to the culture that produced these pictures, or to the graphic conventions on which they depend. Yet we can recognize what these pictures represent. And whatever makes this recognition possible, it cannot be explained—at least not fully explained—by common access to a set of culturally generated conventions.20 What can explain it? A possible answer comes to us from E. H. Gombrich, who posits something like a graphic or right-brain counterpart of our inborn capacity to learn languages—what Noam Chomsky calls “linguistic competence.” Gombrich has developed a theory of what might be called “pictorial competence.” The effect of resemblance or the illusion of reality that we get from pictures, he says, is created by visual clues corresponding to the bits of information we seek from natural objects in order to know what they are. For Gombrich, a picture is not a facsimile of nature but a “relational model” which stimulates mental

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activities similar to those aroused by natural objects (AI 90). Thus the contrast between white and grey pigment in a picture may lead us to “see” a patch of brilliant sunlight on a white tablecloth—even though neither one of the pigments matches the color it represents.21 For Gombrich, then, painting is an act of encoding. Its images are not replicas of natural objects but signals that must be decoded before their meaning as representations can be understood. With all of this emphasis on encoding and decoding, Gombrich sounds very much like Nelson Goodman. But the two are quite different. For Goodman, who is a thoroughgoing conventionalist, the connections we make between a picture and what it represents are wholly relative, wholly determined by acculturation. For Gombrich, the experience of pictorial resemblance or illusion is made possible by natural or “automatic” mechanisms of recognition: mechanisms that prompt even animals and primitive peoples to respond to pictured objects as if they were real ones. According to Gombrich, we are universally “programmed” to decode visual signals, so that, as he says, “what looks like a leaf to modern Europeans must also have looked like a leaf to predators in fairly distant geological epochs.” 22 For all the intricacy of his analysis, then, Gombrich ends up reaffirming the familar notion that painted objects naturally resemble real ones, so that we need no more than an animal instinct to decode them. To prove that painted objects naturally resemble real ones, he “like[s] to remind extreme relativists” that paintings can deceive animals.23 In so doing, he recalls Pliny’s story of the birds who came to peck at the painted grapes of Zeuxis, or Leonardo’s list of similar examples: dogs barking and trying to bite painted dogs, and a monkey doing “an infinite number of stupid things in front of a painted monkey.” Ironically enough, this comment comes from an essay written to show that painting has intellectual and spiritual ends, that it reveals “the action of the mind in bodily motions.” 24 But how much mental activity can painting signify if it aims simply to duplicate visible appearances, to deceive the eye, to make a monkey out of the viewer? So long as viewing a picture means being deceived by it, we cannot experience representation as such, which requires a consciousness of the difference between painted objects and real ones, between signifier and signified. The barking dog who tries to bite a painted one does not construe a painted shape as the sign or simulacrum of a dog; it sees a dog. So the concept of painting as illusion is ultimately fatal to the enterprise of reading pictures, or learning how to read them. This is why Gombrich’s version of art history finally reaches a

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dead end. For Gombrich, the history of art is a “progress” toward ever more exact resemblance between the appearance of a painting and the appearance of the world it represents: painting proceeds by a sequence of making and matching, constructing a schema and then correcting it as artists gradually become more expert in forging the “keys” with which to open “the locks of our senses” (INA 201). Renaissance art, therefore, is more sophisticated than medieval art because the techniques of linear perspective make it seem much more “realistic” than its two-dimensional predecessor, much closer to the three-dimensional world of our experience. But to conceive the history of art as a progress toward ever more exact resemblance is to be balked and bewildered by the abstract art of the twentieth century, and to be visually dyslexic before any art that is culturally coded. Gombrich’s theory can accommodate “equivalence” between abstract paintings and invisible things (moods, sounds, states of mind), but cannot explain or evaluate any work of art except insofar as it matches what it represents.25 The matching game too easily becomes a trap. “The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive,” writes Richard Rorty, “is that of the mind as a great mirror. . . . Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself. Without this latter notion, the strategy common to Descartes and Kant—getting more accurate representations by inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror, so to speak—would not have made sense.” 26 Gombrich’s theory of making and matching in the history of art amounts to inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror or window of art, the two metaphors that have traditionally dominated theories of graphic representation.27 Learning to read pictures, even representational pictures as distinct from abstract ones, means cracking the mirror and breaking out of the windowpane paradigm. In a painting of 1934 (fig. 1.5), René Magritte represents a broken window under which we can see fragments of a painted sunset; the painting is called Le Soir qui tombe—the night that falls. Magritte playfully literalizes the trite metaphor even as he deconstructs the metaphorical equation of painting with a window. With its self-shattering illusionism, the picture simultaneously draws the eye through the window and balks our vision; the sunset that we seem to see through a frame of jagged edges in the middle of the picture is just as opaque and two-dimensional as the images we find on the fragments at the bottom.

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1.5. René Magritte, Le Soir qui Tombe (1934). Menil Foundation, Houston. © 2000 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

A more disturbing statement about graphic representation is made by a painting Magritte produced a few years earlier than this one: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1929) (fig. 1.6). This picture has provoked a steady stream of commentary.28 But Rudolph Arnheim probably speaks for all first-time viewers of it when he says, with endearing simplicity, “Unfortunately, a pipe is all it is.” 29 A little more thought about the picture and its legend leads to the next step, which is to say that what we are looking at is not a pipe but a picture of a pipe. (I once heard E. H. Gombrich say this with the greatest of scorn, as if he had boldly exposed some monstrous sham.) Having seen that this is not a pipe but a picture of a pipe, we are now ready to take the next step, which is to consider just how the pipe is pictured. Since the pipes we see in the real world do not usually present themselves in perfect profile or hang suspended in midair with no visible

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1.6 René Magritte, Ceci n’est Pas une Pipe /La Trahison des Images (1929). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. ADAGP/Art Resource, NY.

means of support, we must conclude that this is not, after all, a picture of a pipe but rather, as Michel Butor observes, a picture of depiction, a picture of the way pipes are commonly represented in advertisements and textbooks: isolated, radically decontextualized, and labeled “pipe” (77). Thus Magritte’s title or legend, which is literally written along the bottom of the painting itself, parodies the textbook labeling of pictures and undermines the assumptions on which such labeling is based. Instead of implying—as labels typically do—that the picture is identical with a particular object, the label denies that identification and turns the picture into an arbitrary sign: a pipe-picture, as Nelson Goodman would call it, just as one would say a round picture or a square picture: a pipe-picture that can signify anything at all: dreams, complacency, desire, narcissism, Freud, what you will. Its meaning is no more bound to a particular object than is the meaning of the word Ceci below it, which can mean any one of several things: “this” image above it, “this” whole painting in which it appears, or “this” very word itself, Ceci, which presents itself not only verbally but visually. Ceci is at once a sliding signifier and a graphic sign, the carefully drawn picture of a written word. In fact the calligraphic shape of the c’s in this word makes them visually rhyme with the pictured shape just above them. Thus Magritte deconstructs the opposition between the “natural” meaning of images and the arbitrary signification of words even as he cuts the cable binding images to real objects, to determinable reference.

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In cutting the cable of referentiality, Magritte’s images also radically challenge the concept of viewing that has governed traditional art history. Traditional art history posits a viewer, gazing objectively and unilaterally at a painting from one fixed point, operating within the Albertian system of perspective.30 But as Michael Holly observes, Magritte’s work undermines this paradigm. In The False Mirror (1928), where a cloudscape is set within a huge staring eye, the viewer becomes an object of sight, and the traditional opposition between subject and object breaks down (Past 87–88). To read the history of art itself in light of such a painting is to be reminded that works of art are not simply passive recipients of the spectator’s univocal gaze, but agents of scrutiny that can look back at us, like the painter in Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656) and the nude in Manet’s Olympia (1863).31 Furthermore, whether or not they represent eyes or figures looking back at us, pictures can challenge the supremacy of the viewing subject by refusing to submit to a unilateral act of visual appropriation or repeatedly resisting our inferences about what they mean. Learning to read pictures, then, means learning to heed the often ambiguous or contradictory messages they convey as well as grappling with their indeterminacy, their refusal to be categorically identified with either material objects or words, verbal articulations of their meaning. At one extreme, this double refusal seems to have been epitomized by the abstract or nonobjective art of the earlier twentieth century, which programmatically renounced both referentiality and language. In 1940, in an essay called “Toward a Newer Laocoon,” Clement Greenberg saluted what he called the “purity” of abstract art, its noble retreat behind the border that Lessing had drawn between literature and painting. To Greenberg’s immense satisfaction, art by 1940 had purged itself of “literature’s corrupting influence”; it had turned away from verbalizable meaning to concentrate on “the physical, the sensorial.” Paradoxically, the shift from word to flesh and matter was for Greenberg a rite of purification. “The avant-garde arts,” he wrote, “have in the last fifty years [up to 1940] achieved a purity and a radical delimitation in their fields of activity for which there is no previous example in the history of culture. The arts lie safe now, each within its ‘legitimate’ boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy. Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art.” 32 But art did not long endure the Orgone box of this purity. If the arts were ever “safe” from literature and referentiality, as Greenberg claimed, they have long since been corrupted again. With Pop Art and Super Realism, actual words and precisely recognizable

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images returned to the canvas. On the left side of Roy Lichtenstein’s Eddie Diptych (1962), words displace the image. In Dick Johnson’s The “Hey, Wayne” (1991) (fig. 1.7), words invade the image. This picture is flagrantly transgressive. Like Lichtenstein, Johnson crosses the border between high art and low by adopting the comic-book device of using a balloon to signify speech, and the whole painting ruptures the border between the image and the word. As the punning title indicates, John Constable’s celebrated painting of a hay wain or wagon crossing a stream (The Hay Wain, 1821) is here displaced by a pickup truck labelled “Wayne the Painter,” a phrase that reminds us how the very word painter can straddle the border between artist and workman. So here is a picture that quite literally demands to be read as well as seen. But since reading pictures goes well beyond reading whatever words they may happen to contain or display in their titles, we may consider the work of Erwin Panofsky, who has probably done more than any other art historian of the earlier twentieth century to explain just how visual art generates meaning.33 Panofsky’s theory of pictorial meaning applies only to representational art, however, and is useful chiefly for the reli-

1.7 Dick Johnson, The “Hey, Wayne” (1991). Collection of Paul J. Leaman, Jr. By permission of Mr. Leaman and the artist.

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gious art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance: for art in which religious or intellectual meanings are demonstrably embedded, or—to put this another way—for art that seems to demand decoding. In this kind of art, says Panofksy, lie three layers of meaning. First, we recognize the factual meaning of pictured forms as objects (a hat, a peach, a knife) from “practical experience” modified by a knowledge of the history of style—of the way objects are represented in different historical periods. Second, we discover the conventional meaning by iconographical analysis of the meanings assigned to particular objects in Scripture and literature. Third, we divine the symbolic meaning by synthesizing all the other meanings we have gleaned from the first two layers of the picture.34 Basically, then, we need two things to read the kind of art Panofsky treats: iconography and the history of style. We learn iconography from labeled images like the Italian Quattrocento relief of an old man with three faces, where the label (Prudenza) tells us that the three-faced head is not a freak but a graphic sign of prudence as circumspection, the art of looking out on all sides (Meaning 151). We also learn iconography from Scripture and other literary sources, which may link particular images to specific abstractions or saints.35 Besides iconography, we must learn something about the history of style, about the way objects are typically represented during a given period. Thus, in the medieval miniature called Christ Resurrecting the Youth of Nain (ca. 1000), a walled town seems miraculously to hover in midair over the figures. But in early medieval painting, empty space does not signify actual space, or the sky; it is just the pictorial “ground” on which images are drawn. Like Magritte’s pipe, the walled town is detached and decontextualized except for the semicircular base line of each tower, which suggests—as Panofsky says—the hilly ground from which the town has been uprooted. Placed over the figures, it represents the town where the resurrection took place (Meaning 34). On the other hand, when an infant floats in the sky of Roger Van der Weyden’s fifteenth-century Vision of the Three Magi, the comparatively “realistic” qualities of the picture authorize us to see the space at the top as the sky, and therefore to read the floating infant as an apparition.36 The great merit of Panofsky’s approach is that it prompts us to move beyond the windowpane paradigm for painting, to construe pictured objects as graphic signs, and to see how those signs work together to generate visual meaning. The problem with his system is that it can too easily become formulaic and reductive, translating images into words with the aid of an iconographic dictionary that makes no allowance for ambiguity or indeterminacy, for the ways in which the painting looks back at

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1.8 Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Wedding (1434). National Gallery, London. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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us and questions our inferences. Consider for instance what Panofsky does with Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait of 1434 (fig. 1.8). Panofsky reads this painting as the record of a religious ceremony: a marriage vow taken without benefit of a priest but witnessed by the painter himself (“Jan van Eyck fuit hic,” the inscription reads) and sacralized by such objects as the dog, the shoes, and the mirror, all of which can be iconographically decoded as signs of faith, purity, and salvation.37 To interpret the discarded sandals at lower left, for instance, Panofsky cites Exodus 3:5, where Moses approaching the burning bush is told to “take off your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you tread is a holy place.” But as Jacques Derrida points out, Moses himself links sandals with dignity (“I have led you forty years in the wildnerness . . . and your sandals have not worn off your feet” [Deut. 29:5]) and the prodigal son is given sandals, along with a robe and ring, to celebrate his homecoming (Luke 15:22).38 Hence the naked foot, as Derrida says, can signify either purity or indignity (351)—possibly even (though Derrida doesn’t say this) an unabashed eagerness for the marriage bed which stands conveniently beside the couple. Likewise, in a provocative rereading of the Arnolfini portrait as the visual record of an essentially secular contract, Linda Seidel challenges Panofsky’s claim that the mirror in the background is the speculum sine macula, symbol of the immaculate Virgin Mary. “The mirror we see,” she writes, “is, after all, profoundly ‘spotted’; it is extravagantly marked by the domestic and narrative reflections its environment lends to its surface.” 39 A further problem with Panofsky’s method of reading pictures—not just with his reading of this particular picture—is that it tells us virtually nothing about pictures “in which the whole sphere of secondary or conventional subject matter has been eliminated . . . as [in] European landscape painting” (Meaning 32). Such pictures, says Panofsky, effect a “direct transition” from motifs—that is, pictured objects—to content. Yet the transition from motifs to content is often anything but direct in European landscape painting, especially when the “factual” meaning of a graphic configuration—the object it represents—cannot be readily identified. Take for instance Constable’s Dedham Vale (1828) (plate 1). Here is the kind of composition Constable learned to produce from his study of Claude Lorrain, particularly Claude’s Hagar and the Angel (1646), a painting Constable practically worshiped.40 In Constable’s painting, as in Claude’s, foreground trees at left and right form wing screens framing a vista where a river meanders through the middleground to the seacoast town with its church tower in the background and billowing white

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clouds overhead. The lure of the vista is reinforced by chiaroscuro, which draws the eye over the shadowy foreground to the sunlit vista beyond. But if we resist this picturesque lure and look carefully into the shadows we can see what is just barely discernible there (plate 2): a vagrant mother with her infant, cooking on an open fire beside a crude tent that mimics in its triangular shape the roof lines of the far more comfortable and substantial dwellings shown in the middle distance. Just what is the factual meaning here—the objects depicted? This is precisely the question raised by the picture as it challenges our view of its picturesque composition. Since the structures in the middle distance look much more like the way homes are commonly depicted (especially in picture books) than the shadowy tent in the foreground, we are unlikely to recognize that tent as a home unless, perhaps, we happen to have spent a few months camping out in one for lack of rent money. The composition literally tempts us to overlook the tent and the figures beside it, who merely hover on the edge of determinable signification, of factual meaning. According to John Barrell, a critic of distinctly Marxist persuasion, Constable does not allow the impoverished mother and child to emerge from the shadows and solicit our pity.41 Instead, they are little more than a spot of red and a spot of white. Mother and child become protoimpressionist bits of chromatic texture in a composition governed by the formal patterns of chiaroscuro, and their shadowy lair is merely a foil to the glowing vista that we alone—not they—can see. This is a plausible line of interpretation except for one thing. It does not explain why Constable enables us to recognize the destitution of the figures, and why—for all their shadowiness—they are the most conspicuous figures we see in the painting. They are also the only counterpart we can find to the biblical figures that appear in the foreground of Claude Lorraine’s Hagar and the Angel, the picture Constable was reconstructing. When we recall that Hagar was an outcast, a serving woman expelled from Abraham’s household after she conceived his child, then it becomes more than possible to see the foreground figures in Constable’s painting as contemporary outcasts, figures that society has no place for, but that the artist—whatever his politics—cannot fail to notice and represent. They cannot simply be reduced to bits of picturesque texture. Dedham Vale, then, is Constable’s way of recreating what was once called “history painting”—the painting of a biblical or mythological subject. Reconceiving the traditional relation between landscape and the figures who populate it, he makes Claude’s biblical outcasts give way to the human debris of contemporary history: to barely personified spots of

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life, nameless figures who play no visible part on the stage of public events, but quietly insist on taking their place in the landscape of contemporary human experience. In recalling Claude’s Hagar, Constable’s painting aligns itself with precisely the kind of formal structures that Panofsky’s theory of pictorial meaning is equipped to explain. But in radically destabilizing the factual meaning of the figures in this picture, in painting daubs of color whose meaning depends on the very fact that we can barely recognize what they materially signify, Constable denotates the ground on which Panofsky’s theory of pictorial meaning rests. When the factual meaning of a picture cannot be taken for granted as a ground on which reading proceeds, Panofsky’s theory of pictorial meaning will not apply. But consider again the kind of work that his theory is designed for: an ivory panel carved about 1100 in the valley of the Meuse and now in the Treasury of the Cathedral of Aachen, Germany (fig. 1.9).42

1.9 Carved Ivory Panel, Land of the Meuse (c. 1100) Treasury of the Cathedral of Aachen, Germany. © Domkapitel Aachen. Photo: Ann Münchow.

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It presents three scenes from the life of Christ arranged in ascending order: the nativity at the bottom, the baptism in the middle, and the crucifixion at the top. A strong center line points down from the crucifix through the head of the dove and the standing figure of Christ in the middle scene to the cradled infant near the top of the bottom scene, so that as we move up from one scene to another, Christ gradually appears to rise to the cross. To read this carving, we need some knowledge of Scripture and iconographical lore, but we must also rely on the spatial relations of the objects here to tell us what they mean, and what this arrangement of them means. At bottom center, then, a reclining Mary laid within the scalloped arch of a cavelike enclosure gestures to the newborn infant Jesus above her in his cradle; at lower left shepherds and sheep look up; at upper left and right angels gesture in greeting; at lower right Joseph turns away in meditation or sleep. But how do we construe the heads of the donkey and the ox just under the top of the lowest panel—heads that seem to be suspended in air along with the cradle? If, as Panofsky suggests, empty space in the art of the early Middle Ages does not count as a three-dimensional medium, where are the animals supposed to be? If neither they nor the infant are apparitions in the sky, like the infant in Van der Weyden’s much later Vision of the Magi, why do the shepherds seem to be looking up at them? The answer lies in the angels at upper left and right. Since neither of the animal heads has wings attached, we can only infer that the shepherds are looking up at the angels, not the animals. The donkey and the ox are just as earthbound as the shepherds, the lambs, and Mary herself. The animals stand behind the cradle, which in turn stands right behind Mary’s bed, stilted up on legs tall enough to make the cradle visible (two of the legs appear just left of Mary’s right hand). In this part of the carving, then, elevation is a sliding signifier. Even though the donkey, the ox, and the angels are all on one raised level, elevation denotes earthbound recession for the animals and airborne height for the angels. To read the carving, we must do more than Panofsky’s formulae allow; we must reckon with the multiple meanings of graphic space within just one work of art. We must also reckon with the multiple meanings of certain figures or motifs, such as the ox that reappears in the lower right corner of the topmost scene, where he is represented as winged but also—curiously enough—resting on the base of the panel, which presumably signifies the earth. Here we need iconographic lore. Unlike the wingless ox represented in the lowest scene, a winged ox signifies Luke the evangelist,

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just as the eagle, the winged lion, and the winged man at the three other corners respectively signify the other three evangelists: John, Mark, and Matthew.43 Unlike the wingless ox of the lowest scene, this winged ox is not physically present at the upper scene, not resting on the ground in which the cross stands. Set off within a spandrel, he signifies the fact that Luke and the other evangelists bore witness to the crucifixion in their gospels, and that what we see is a graphic representation of their words. To read the top scene, then, we must reckon with more than one moment of time. We must recognize not only the moment represented, but also the temporal process of representation itself, which in this case is first verbal (the words of Scripture) and then graphic (the figures of ivory). Lessing separates literature from visual art by means of the border between time and space: temporal succession, he argues, is best reenacted by the verbal flow of “poetry” (by which he means poetic narrative), while spatial arrangement is best recreated by the forms and colors of painting and sculpture.44 Lessing thus requires that visual art be essentially unitemporal, the record of what can be seen at a single moment of time.45 But to read graphic signs is to see how an artist can depict more than a single moment. In Botticelli’s Sacra Conversazione (1485), the virgin and child sit between John the Baptist at left and John the evangelist at right. The title of the picture suggests that Mary is conversing with the two saints, but neither one is looking at her—which is the first sign that they may not be conversing with her at all. John the Baptist, in fact, is looking at us and gesturing to the infant—to the one whose coming he was ordained to announce. While in real time John the Baptist was only six months older than Christ, here a mature Baptist heralds the newborn Christ. While in real time John the evangelist wrote his gospel after Christ’s death, here the writing is juxtaposed with Christ’s birth and death—the death signified by the crucifix at the bottom of the picture. The evangelist writes in words the text that is rewritten in pigment for us. A single picture signifies many moments: the beginning and end of Christ’s life, the announcement of his coming, and the act of verbally recording it all. Three centuries later, J. M. W. Turner likewise yoked a biblical event and the recording of it in a painting titled Light and Colour . . . Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (plate 6). When the picture was exhibited in 1843, it was censured for “an anachronism that the meanest scholar at a parish school could rectify.” 46 The reviewer simply could not read a multitemporal work of art.

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To read such a work, we must of course suspend the longstanding assumption that painting is unitemporal. Born in the fifteenth century with Alberti’s rules for perspective and codified by Lessing in the eighteenth century, the notion that painting can represent only what can be seen at a single moment from a single point of view came to assume the status of an immutable law—at least until Cubism pulverized it at the beginning of the twentieth century. This law severely constrains pictorial narrative. A single painting, it decrees, can represent what Lessing calls the “most suggestive” moment of a narrative so as to imply what precedes and follows it (78), but the painting cannot actually depict more than one moment of time, cannot show one or more figures performing temporally successive acts. But why should painting have ever been forbidden to repeat one or more figures to show them performing temporally successive acts? Is this prohibition essential to visual art—or just a historically imposed convention? The very existence of paintings that defy this convention prove it to be historically imposed—widely but not universally accepted, and by no means essential to the medium of painting. Benozzo Gozzoli’s quattrocento Dance of Salome and Beheading of St. John the Baptist represents three temporally distinct episodes. In the center foreground, Salome dances for Herod while her mother stands watching by the end of the table; at left, John the Baptist is beheaded; in the rear, Salome presents the head to her mother.47 This of course is not quite a self-explanatory narrative. Since Gozzoli’s picture does not chart an itinerary for the eye, we cannot know for sure the order of these episodes without a prior knowledge of the story depicted, nor does the picture explain the causal link between Salome’s dance and the beheading of John. But literary works can likewise tell stories in drastically edited form, and they too can presuppose prior knowledge. In a poem called “Leda and the Swan,” Yeats begins by describing the rape of Leda and then writes: A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.48

To read these lines, we must already know how to supply the missing narrative links: Leda begot Helen, and Paris’s abduction of Helen begot the Trojan war, which led to the breaching of the Trojan war and ultimately (by another long chain of events) to the death of Agamemnon. It may be argued, of course, that whether or not painting is inherently capable of

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narrative, the invention of perspective in the fifteenth century made pictorial narrative obsolete. But are Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes obsolete? Painted in the early sixteenth century, these not only work in sequence to represent successive moments of biblical history; some of them are multitemporal all by themselves. Original Sin and Expulsion (fig. 1.10) is a single fresco that can be read sequentially even as it is viewed spatially. Spatially, the strong central trunk of the serpent-wound tree divides the picture into symmetrical halves, with the two bending figures on the right balancing the two on the left, and the outstretched arms of the figures on top forming an arch that embraces all of them. Temporally, the tree is a pivot on which the figures are turned, as if by serpentine torque, from temptation to expulsion. The arms are eloquent. While the outstretched arms of the figures at left express seduction and desire, the outstretched arms of the figures at right signify menace and fear. In addition, the pressure of sequence and change affects the spatial symmetry of the whole composition, keeping the left-hand figures well within the left

1.10 Michelangelo Bonarotti, Original Sin and Expulsion from Paradise. Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace, Vatican State, Rome. SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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edge while pushing the other two up to the right one—as if they were being driven right out of the picture. Michelangelo’s fresco prefigures what might be read as a contemporary version of the story of the fall: Sally Mann’s Sunday Funnies (1991, fig. 1.11).49 This photograph of three children sprawled on a large bed and separately entranced by various pages of comics is—among other things—a picture about reading, and thus takes its place in the fascinating but so far unrecognized genre or sub-genre of what might be called lectoral art, including works such as Jan Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657) and Winslow Homer’s The New Novel (1877).50 Lectoral art is an art of absorption, which is what Sunday Funnies offers us. Wholly absorbed by their reading, the children ignore both the camera and each other. Unlike the female nude seated in the foreground of Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), who looks straight out at us, they give no sign of awareness that they are on display, objects of our gaze.51 But of course they are. Their absorption in reading cannot mask the emergence of their sexuality or the imminence of their fall into sexual difference. In Mann’s photograph as in Manet’s painting, this difference is highlighted by the contrast between female flesh and male clothing:

1.11 Sally Mann, Sunday Funnies (1991). Edwyn Houk Gallery, NY.

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Mann’s two girls lie totally nude in the foreground while the boy in the background wears shorts.52 Resting on his back with his head on a pillow propped against the corner of a wall, chin on his chest, body half turned on its side, he looks down at a folded page of the comics that he stands up with his left hand. The slightest raising of his eyes would let him see the naked girl stretched out immediately before him, and this alluring creature—a veritable Lolita—personifies the ambiguity of preadolescence.53 She looks somewhat older than the girl lying prone on the left with her chin in her hands—a girl whose plump little body is still that of a child. The older girl is already on her way to womanhood. While the hand of her fully extended left arm—the only straight limb in a cluster of bent ones—absently and childishly hooks a finger around the big toe of her right foot, which has been crossed with her left one, the bright thick ponytail of hair falling straight down over her shoulder frames the nipple of her nascent left breast, and between that and her bent knees, the cave of her slim midsection is mystified by shadow. Shadows assume a special force in this picture because it is shot in black and white, a medium that negates the garish—one might say childish—colors of its nominal subject matter, the Sunday funnies. Lying on a bed covered with what seems to be a hand-stitched quilt (its colors too are blanked out), reading the comics by sunlight pouring through the big screens of their tree-fringed country cabin with a river flowing just outside, the children evoke a would-be golden age before our cultural fall: a time when children lived, played, and even read in the sun instead of hunkering down by a flickering screen filled with nothing but rivers of violence, sex, and endless exhortations to buy. Reading the pictures and words of the comics, the children even recall the girl and boy on the title page of Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789; fig. 4.1): children shown reading outdoors under a tree from a book that may well be the Songs itself, a set of illustrated or illuminated poems etched and hand-colored (“stain’d”) for the enjoyment of “Every child.” 54 But Blake’s Songs of Innocence are quite literally bound to his Songs of Experience, and even on the title page of Innocence the vine encircling the tree prefigures the serpent of the Fall. In Mann’s photograph, a serpentine life seems to inform the bodies of the children themselves, twisting them, bending their limbs, and undulating the right arm of the girl with the ponytail. Also, what entrances these children—none of whom laughs or even smiles at the funnies—is nothing handmade or homemade like Blake’s Songs or the quilt they are lying on, but rather a product of print technology. Technology brought color to comics just as it later brought color to television, where the use of black

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and white in commercials now typically signifies the unspecified “past.” What do the colorless lights and shadows of this photograph signify? An innocent sunlit past? The imminence of a darkening future? If the story of Genesis tempts us to read the process of growing up as a reenactment of the Fall, or to read the onset of puberty as the beginning of all the pain bred by the expression and repression of sexual desire, is there any way that sunlight itself—the very lamp of time—can be shielded from the effects of its passage? On the other hand, do we know for certain that growing up into a world of sexual longing and difference will—on balance—merely drive the children deeper into shadow? The picture leaves these questions unanswered. Even while prompting us to read the supple bodies of the reading children, it makes them finally indeterminate, indecipherable, unreadable—beyond the reach of our words.




To learn to read pictures, we must first unlearn most of what we have been conditioned to think of them: that a picture is a window or mirror, that it offers a perfectly transparent view of what it represents, that it constitutes a record of perception, that it cannot show more than what can be seen from a single vantage point at one point in time. Pictures, I suggest, are not records of momentary perception but deliberate constructions, compositions made of graphic signs. To read these signs, we need more than a capacity to appreciate the beauty of formal patterns; we need all the help that our experience of reading verbal signs—in language and literature—can give us. Yet as we have also seen, learning to read pictures also means listening to the questions they raise and the challenges they pose to two kinds of authority: the authority of a univocal perspective and the authority of the word. Any attempt to say what we see in a picture is subject to revision as soon as we begin to see how the picture looks back at us. Mann’s young girl is a figure that arrests the mind as well as the eye, for while the shadowed nudity of her developing form may provoke a voyeuristic pleasure, her mind is also growing—in ways we cannot see—by the simple act of perusing the comics. To consider this a childish pastime we have long and well outgrown is to deny that pictures can make us think—a notion flagrantly contradicted by the very picture we are looking at as well as by all the others I have discussed above. The largest question raised by this and any other picture worth looking at is not what to say about it, but how far—or whether—we can speak for it at all. That is the question I pursue in the next chapter.

Chapter 2

Speaking for Pictures The Rhetoric of Art Criticism It has long been a commonplace that pictures say more than words, or (to quote the original version of an old cliché) that “One picture is worth ten thousand words.” This statement comes to us from one Frederick R. Barnard, and since he made it in an advertisement that appeared in a periodical called Printer’s Ink in 1927, I venture to infer that he meant it unambiguously as a statement of fact about mass communication. A picture, he clearly implies, can take the place of ten thousand words, can say at once to the viewer everything that forty pages of text—or forty columns of newsprint—can arduously articulate for the reader. When Donald Rumsfeld saw photographs of Iraqi prisoners abused by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, he felt “outraged” far more than words could ever make him.1 Painting likewise can wordlessly ambush the heart. So said Quintilian, the celebrated teacher of rhetoric in ancient Rome. “Pictures,” he writes, “which are silent and motionless, penetrate into our innermost feelings with such power that at times they seem more eloquent than language itself.” 2 Seventeen centuries later, Quintilian’s point was cited and amplified by an English clergyman named Robert Anthony Bromley. In the course of his two-volume history of the arts, Bromley compared the cartoons of Raphael with the scriptural passages they depict: Let any man read any of those subjects in the sacred book, and then take a view of the carton [sic]. Let him turn over the divine page ever so often, and as often return to the carton: he will assuredly carry back from the picture not only nobler and more enlarged conceptions of the greatest part of those subjects than the sacred writer has left upon him, but nobler and more enlarged conceptions newly encreasing at every view. These 39

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effects are not produced, because the sacred writers were defective, but because they were writers, and because words can never convey such ideas as may be brought to flow from such a pencil as Raphael’s.3

I quote this passage from an obscure historian of art not because it bears any great weight of authority but because it conveniently exemplifies the highest possible claim that can be made for the eloquence of great painting: even the inspired words of Scripture can “never” match the expressiveness of pictures wrought by artists such as Raphael. Such a claim inevitably provokes resistance, and Quintilian—whose authority indirectly sponsors it—would probably be the first to disavow it. While granting that a picture might “sometimes” speak more forcefully than words, he condemned the practice of using a picture of a crime to rouse the feelings of a judge. “For the pleader who prefers a voiceless (tacens) picture to speak for him in place of his own eloquence must be singularly incompetent.” 4 We must of course respect the difference between Raphael and the ancient Roman precursor of the police photographer. But even after doing so, we can see that Quintilian would never allow a “voiceless” art to usurp or supplant the art of rhetoric, to speak for the orator himself.5 Recalling Simonides’ definition of painting as “mute poetry” (poiesin sioposan), Quintilian’s tacens reminds us that belief in the singular eloquence of painting is no more powerful or enduring than the conviction that painting cannot even speak for itself, much less for the victim of a crime or for anyone else. Art history rests on this conviction. As W. J. T. Mitchell observes, The “otherness” of visual representation from the standpoint of textuality may be anything from a professional competition (the paragone of poet and painter) to a relation of political, disciplinary, or cultural domination in which the “self” is understood to be an active, speaking, seeing subject, while the “other” is projected as a passive, seen, and (usually) silent object. Insofar as art history is a verbal representation of visual representation, it is an elevation of ekphrasis to a disciplinary principle. Like the masses, the colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere, visual representation cannot represent itself; it must be represented by discourse.6

The history of art cannot be told without ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual representation. When Leon Battista Alberti in De Pictura (1435–1436) explains Timanthes’ Immolation of Iphigenia and Apelles’ Calumny, or when Franciscus Junius treats the paintings of Apelles and Parrhasius in Painting of the Ancients (1638), they are both

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writing of works they never saw—except in ancient descriptions of them. Words are the only form in which most ancient paintings survive, and “from the standpoint of textuality,” as Mitchell says, even works of art that have survived in their original form remain silent. Since they cannot speak for themselves, art history and art criticism must speak for them. To speak for a work of art is first of all to speak on its behalf—to praise or defend it. This is what Alberti and Junius aim to do for ancient paintings, and it remains a leading motive for both the art critic and the art historian. Traditionally they salute verisimilitude. Writing in the sixteenth century of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1525), Vasari commends its “wonderful realism.” 7 Two centuries later, reporting on the Salon of 1759, Diderot says that he asks nothing more than “to be happy and to admire” (d’etre heureaux et d’admirer) the pictures, and in Chardin’s work he sees “always nature and truth.” 8 In the nineteenth century, William Hazlitt calls Murillo’s Spanish Beggar Boys a “triumph” of realistic depiction (10:25), and Baudelaire finds Delacroix’ Last Words of Marcus Aurelius “one of the most complete examples of what genius can achieve in painting.” 9 Encomia like these may seem closer to art criticism—the assessment of individual works—than to art history, the story of their genesis, reception, and relationships.10 Yet evaluation thoroughly informs both. By the very act of treating a work—or body of work—as a link in a developmental chain or a moment in an art historical narrative of “development, filiation, evolution, descent, progress, regress,” the art historian ranks the work and proclaims its importance.11 The urge to praise works of art, however, goes hand in hand with the equally powerful urge to vie with them, to reenact the competitive move that art itself makes in emulating as well as imitating the visible world. As Bernard Vouilloux has noted in connection with Diderot, the act of describing a picture is at once self-effacing and self-assertive. While descriptive words putatively “efface themselves behind the mental images they excite” and description presents itself as nothing more than the “verbal double of the picture,” the originality of a critical voice nonetheless makes itself heard as master of the pictorial image.12 Diderot exemplifies this kind of mastery. Describing Fragonard’s Coresus and Callirhoe (1765) for readers who could see it only in his words, he notes that several of its faces express fright. But in making this point with a succession of clauses repeatedly ending in the word effroi, he aims to rival Fragonard: to generate for his readers a rhetorical effect matching if not surpassing in its cumulative impact the visual display of startled looks.13 In our time, such rhetorically vivid descriptions of pictures might seem both overwrought and dated. Michael Baxandall argues that the

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growing availability of reproductions—from engravings in the eighteenth century to colored slides or photographs in the twentieth—has fundamentally altered the discourse of art criticism. Instead of recreating in words the appearance of a picture that readers cannot see for themselves, as Diderot did for the privileged subscribers to his reports on the Salons, the modern critic need only point to the picture that all can see, point to whatever he or she finds important in it. Yet description has hardly disappeared from art criticism. It continues to play a crucial part in grounding the critic’s interpretation of a picture by determining how we see it. Commenting on Goya’s Third of May, for instance, Robert Hughes writes that the blood depicted on the ground “is a dark alizarin crimson put on thick and then scraped back with a palette knife, so that its sinking into the grain of the canvas mimics the drying of blood itself.” 14 Moving beyond traditional description—an account of what the picture shows—Hughes explains how the paint was applied to produce a specific effect (“sinking into the grain of the canvas”) that in turn mimics the drying of blood. In identifying the texture of the pigment as well as the objects it represents, Hughes describes what reproductions seldom show us and at the same time lays the groundwork for his claim that the picture is “tragically expressive.” As Hughes’s comment demonstrates, speaking for pictures means not just praising them and emulating their impact in words but also interpreting them. It is here that art criticism does its most distinctive and essential work, the work that above all justifies its existence. Art criticism speaks for pictures because pictures cannot interpret themselves. Even metapictures—self-referential pictures about pictures such as Velazquez’s Las Meninas—cannot explain what they mean; they can only present themselves to be viewed, understood, and explained, to be seen, read, and interpreted.15 In the previous chapter I argued that pictures demand to be read as much as viewed, to be construed in ways analogous—but by no means identical—to the process of construing a verbal text. Interpretation differs from construing as speaking differs from hearing. Construing is the private and silent prelude to the public act of interpretation, of expressing in words what we infer from our study of a picture, sculpture, or text.16 Ideally, we might say, the interpreter of a painting elicits its own voice. Leo Steinberg says art historical interpretation aims to make “visible what had not previously been apparent” so “that the picture seems to confess itself and the interpreter disappears.” 17 Yet the very act of imputing a voice to a picture is not only subjective and fetishistic but rhetori-

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cal—a figure of speech (in every sense) that art historians typically find irresistible.18 Even if we suspend our disbelief in the articulateness of pictures, anyone who reads Vasari or Diderot or Steinberg himself knows that the interpreter never disappears, that his distinctive voice is audible in everything he says about a work of art. As a public act and a performing art, interpretation presents itself and its language for scrutiny. Whether or not it assumes the putatively disinterested form of art history, art criticism—verbal commentary on particular works of art—is always interpretive, and may itself be construed and interpreted. To scrutinize the language of art criticism is to see that it typically circles around what pictures show. Since not many words directly refer to the shapes and colors in a painting (round, straight, green, and so on), Michael Baxandall observes that most art criticism deploys three kinds of indirect language: comparison words identify what the painted shapes resemble in appearance or effect; cause words suggest the causes or processes that generate the picture and its effect; and effect words specify the effect of the painting on the beholder.19 Baxandall’s comparison words include not just explicitly comparative terms, such as “cloud-like” applied to a patch of white, but any terms “referring to the colours and patterns on the picture surface as if they were the things they are representing” (PI 6, emphasis mine): the tree in the foreground, the bridge in the middle distance, the fortress in the background, and so on. Presumably comparison words also include anything said about the meaning of a represented object, though words about meaning can easily become words about cause or effect: the fortress signifies power (meaning); the fortress seems to intimidate the viewer (effect); the placement of the fortress makes it dominate the picture (cause). As that example shows, the walls between Baxandall’s three categories are by no means impermeable. But Baxandall’s tripartite formula does two important things. By positing a class of “effect words” or “ego words,” as Baxandall also calls them (“Language” 458), it highlights the role played by the beholder, who is of course also the interpreter. Secondly, by identifying both cause words and effect words, it allows us to see the narrative structure at work in almost all art criticism, which—as Baxandall says—implicitly treats the work of art as “something with a history of making by a painter and a reality of reception by beholders” (PI 7). To see the durability of this formula, we need only recall that the oldest account of a work of art in western literature—Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in the eighteenth book of the Iliad—includes an extensive history of its making. When the history of its making is

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complemented by the story of its reception, we can also see the potentiality for dramatic antagonism. If art criticism tells a story of creation and reception, it is a story in which the receiver or beholder plays a dominant role—whether or not “ego words” permeate the critic’s language.20 As verbal storyteller, he or she constructs a work of syntagmatic, linear progression that radically reconstructs the haphazard, desultory way we view a painting.21 To show how the rhetoric of this storytelling impulse is manifested by art criticism ranging from ancient times to our own, I will examine the work of five major critics: Philostratus, Vasari, Diderot, Meyer Schapiro, and Leo Steinberg. My aim is not to sketch a history of art criticism or tell the story of its “progress” but rather to demonstrate that its language is always rhetorical, that its ostensibly descriptive moves are always interpretive, that it seeks to regulate what we see, and that its pictorial “facts” as well as its stories are designed by an interpreter who is cast as the verbal representative of visual art. Neither the advent of reproductions nor the canonization of abstract art has fundamentally altered the language of art criticism. Though a reproduction may pose a visual test of the critic’s words for those who do not have the original before them, the critic aims precisely to make us see the picture—whether original or reproduced—through a verbal frame. Even when abstract art threatens to silence the critic by detonating the representational ground of visual art, the very absence of recognizable forms excites the critic’s rhetorical powers and prompts new ways of telling stories about what pictures represent, new ways of verbally representing what they visually say. From Philostratus to Steinberg, as we will see, the art of speaking for pictures is above all a rhetorical performance.22

Philostratus: The Art Critic as Narcissus To read the Imagines of Philostratus is to see that art criticism originates from literature and the study of rhetoric. Born in Greece about 190 C.E., Philostratus was a sophist and teacher of rhetoric who could draw from an already rich ekphrastic tradition in Greek literature: from work such as Homer’s account of the sculpted shield of Achilles in the Iliad and Lucian’s description of Apelles’ Calumny, which—as we shall see in the next chapter—Alberti recycles in De Pictura. Descriptions of art in Greek literature included imaginary as well as actual works (like the Calumny). This may partly explain why Philostratus makes no special effort to authenticate the existence of the paintings he describes—apart from claiming to have seen them in a luxurious seaside villa outside Naples. Philostratus avoids art history. Though he studied (he says)

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under Aristodemus of Caria, who had written the lives of some ancient masters, he deliberately chooses not to deal with painters nor yet with their lives; rather we propose to describe examples of paintings in the form of addresses which we have composed for the young, that by this means they may learn to interpret paintings and to appreciate what is esteemed in them. (5)

What Philostratus offers sounds very much like a course in art appreciation. But it derives from the progymnasmata or preliminary exercises given in Greek schools of rhetoric during the early centuries of the Christian era. Though ekphrasis was—strictly speaking—a rhetorical exercise in description, Philostratus’s carefully composed “addresses” exemplify interpretation, more specifically the rhetoric of interpretation, which is emphatically verbal. In the fiction of the frame story that introduces these addresses, Philostratus says that he saw the paintings while lodging in a villa, where he was asked to interpret them by the ten-yearold son of his host. It is to this unnamed boy that Philostratus speaks, though the young men of Naples who had come to hear this noted orator are allowed to listen. The frame story also indicates that the paintings Philostratus talks about are plainly visible to his audience. He is therefore wholly free to focus on the task of interpreting them. Typically, Philostratus interprets a painting by turning it into a narrative: not the story of its making, as in Homer’s account of Achilles’s shield and most art criticism that comes later, but the story suggested by its shapes, which are identified with the figures they represent. Sometimes he generates the story by explicit inference. In a painting of the Bosphorus, for instance, he says that the figure of Eros stretching out his hand from a rocky promontory symbolizes a story of suicidal lovers (51). Elsewhere he finds the whole story of Hermes’ childhood depicted “in the painting” (en te graphe) of him. According to Philostratus, the painting not only shows Hermes in swaddling clothes driving Apollo’s cattle into a cleft of the earth; it also shows that he was born on the crest of Olympus, that the Horae swaddled and cared for him there, and that when they turned to help his mother Maia, he slipped out of his swaddling clothes and walked down the mountain (99–101). Philostratus says nothing of how these episodes are composed in a single painting, for he never mentions composition at all, let alone discusses the agency behind it. Yet in his own way he aims not only to turn the painting into a narrative but to make the work “confess itself ”—in Steinberg’s phrase—

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through the inferred speech of its characters. From the expression on the face of Apollo confronting Maia, says Philostratus, he looks as though he were about to say to Maia, “Your son whom you bore yesterday wrongs me; for the cattle in which I delight he has thrust into the earth. . . .” (103)

Philostratus hears in paintings sounds as well as voices: shouting women (49), the echoing music of shepherds’ pipes (53), and the shouting of fishermen filling their net (57). Yet these are crudely literal ways of making pictures speak. To see how Philostratus constructs the meaning of a picture without breaking its silence, consider his commentary on a painting of Narcissus standing over a pool. Philostratus treats this painting as a metapicture, a painting about painting. In so doing, he anticipates Alberti, who later calls Narcissus “the inventor of painting,” and who asks, “What else can you call painting but a similar embracing with art of what is presented on the surface of the water . . .?” (Spencer 64). Philostratus likewise begins by reading the reflected image of the youth as a painting within a painting. “The pool paints Narcissus,” he writes, “and the painting represents both the pool and the whole story of Narcissus” (89).23 Unlike Alberti, however, Philostratus does not consider Narcissus himself a painter. On the contrary, he sharply distinguishes Narcissus from the painter and—just as importantly—from the viewer of the painting that represents him. Philostratus first praises the verisimilitude of the painting in traditional terms: a bee shown settling on flowers looks so realistic that we cannot tell “whether a real bee has been deceived by the painted flowers or whether we are to be deceived into thinking that a painted bee is real” (89–91).24 Leaving this question open—perhaps only a risky fingering of the bee could decisively settle it—he continues: As for you, . . . Narcissus, it is no painting that has deceived you, nor are you engrossed in a thing of pigments or wax; but you do not realize that the water represents you exactly as you are when you gaze upon it, nor do you see through the artifice of the pool, though to do so you have only to nod your head or change your expression or slightly move your hand, instead of standing in the same attitude; but acting as though you had met a companion, you wait for some move on his part. Do you then expect the pool to enter into conversation with you? Nay, this youth does not hear anything we say, but he is immersed, eyes and ears alike, in the water and we must interpret the painting for ourselves. (91)

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Philostratus treats the painting as a study in illusion. For him Narcissus could hardly be the inventor of painting because he does not even know how to look at a painting, or in this case at a visible metaphor for painting: a reflected image. As the bee (if real) mistakes painted flowers for real ones, Narcissus mistakes the natural “artifice” of his reflected image for another person, and instead of moving his own head or body to view this picture-like image from various angles, he waits—transfixed— for the other to move. Baxandall defines effect words in art criticism as “substantially passive” (“Language” 461). But in viewing the painting of Narcissus, Philostratus does not simply receive its illusionistic effects. He assumes a position of dominance and judges those effects. He sees only too clearly how Narcissus is deceived.25 Almost contemptuously, he asks of the painted figure gazing on his reflection: “Do you then expect the pool to enter into conversation with you?” Yet this very question destabilizes Philostratus’ critical stance. By asking it, he reveals that he himself has already entered into conversation with the painted figure. Earlier, speaking of the bee deceived by the painted flowers, he admitted that he himself—or more precisely “we,” he and his listeners—might have been deceived by a realistically painted bee. The viewer’s implied claim to intellectual superiority, then, rests only on the shaky ground of his consciousness that he—not the bee—may be deceived. And while he knows that the painted figure of Narcissus is deceived, his certainty rests on the assumption that such a figure is capable of being deceived, and likewise of hearing the statements and question addressed to him by the viewer—if only he were not entranced by his reflection. The speaker’s question is “rhetorical” in presupposing its answer, and the speaker clearly sees that “this youth does not hear anything we say.” Yet to interpret the painting, Philostratus must embrace the illusion that he can converse with it. If “we must interpret the painting for ourselves,” we must also, paradoxically, enlist the help of our painted companion. This is what Philostratus does in the rest of his commentary—with a curious combination of confident inference and hesitant speculation. The spear held by the painted figure shows that he has “just returned from the hunt” (89), and he is said to be “panting” (91). But not everything about the figure speaks to the viewer clearly: Whether the panting of his breast remains from his hunting or is already the panting of love I do not know. The eye, surely, is that of a man deeply in love, for its natural brightness and intensity are softened

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by a longing that settles upon it, and he perhaps thinks that he is loved in return, since the reflection gazes at him in just the way that he looks at it. . . . The youth stands over the youth who stands in the water, or rather who gazes intently at him and seems to be athirst for his beauty. (91–93)

Sliding from assertion to tentative inference, from “surely” to “perhaps” and “seems,” Philostratus hears and transmits as much as he can of the painting’s confession. He not only tells the story it implies (a youth just returned from the hunt stands entranced by his own reflection in a pool), he also articulates the feelings signified by the silent figure, and in so doing, he inevitably imputes to it a conscious, sentient life. So the Narcissus wrought by this commentary is considerably more than the deceived “Other” exposed as such by the knowing, sophisticated “Self” of the viewer. Though not the inventor of painting, he is, if anything, a figure for the interpretation of it. Like Narcissus, art critics gaze on a still and silent image to which they impute an independent life and from which they seek to solicit a voice, to hear a confession. But no matter how attentively they listen, the voice is inevitably their own, a product of their own reflections.

Vasari and the Birth of Art History Vasari’s chief difference from Philostratus is signaled by the titles of their respective works. Beyond the fact that his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1551) appeared some thirteen centuries after the Imagines, Vasari foregrounds precisely what Philostratus neglects: the lives of the painters. If Philostratus is the father of art criticism, or one of its fathers, Vasari is the father of art history, and the history he writes is essentially the history of families. “Vasari’s concept of the artist’s own family,” writes Paul Barolsky, is closely tied to his vision of the noble families, who make up the commune, who are the patrons of artists. No less is it informed by the ideals of biblical families and by the ecclesiastical metaphors of family. If Vasari’s vision of the commune, linking “chiesa” and “stato,” is informed by the ideals of family, what Dante calls the “umana famiglia,” his view of artists, as part of this community, is similarly inspired by such familial ideals. The genealogies of noble Florentine houses, modelled on the patriarchy of the Hebrew Bible, are an important model for Vasari’s very concept of art history—which is a genealogy of artists both

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real and imaginary. These families of artists are part of the larger family of the Florentine state.26

Familial stories—genealogies of artists and art—frame Vasari’s descriptions of paintings. In telling such stories, Vasari sustains the tradition of ekphrasis, and specifically recalls Philostratus’ habit of turning pictures into narratives. To Philostratus’ story of the action represented in each painting Vasari adds the story of the painting itself, implicitly or explicitly placing it within the life of the artist or the evolution of Renaissance art as a whole.27 But as Barolsky notes, Vasari’s familial stories are literary as much as historical, freely mixing fiction with fact (xvi). When Vasari tells us, for instance, that Raphael’s “good and loving” father personally placed the boy with Pietro Perugino because he knew that he himself could not teach his son much about painting, Perugino appears as a surrogate father, the father of Raphael’s art (Lives 2:222). Though Raphael’s father actually died several years before the artist joined Perugino, the story creates a familial context for Vasari’s account of pictures such as Raphael’s youthful Deposition (fig. 2.1), painted for Atalanta Baglione in 1507:

2.1 Raphael, Deposition. Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy. SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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This divine picture represents Christ carried to burial, so finely done that it seems freshly executed. In composing this work Raphael imagined the grief of loving relations in carrying to burial the body of their dearest, the one on whom all the welfare, honor, and advantage of the entire family depended. Our Lady is fainting, and the heads of the figures in weeping are most graceful, especially that of St. John, who hangs his head and clasps his hands in a manner that would move the hardest to pity. Those who consider the diligence, tenderness, art and grace of this painting may well marvel, for it excites astonishment by the expressions of the figures, the beauty of the draperies, and the extreme excellence of every particular. (Lives 2:226)

Mary (Our Lady) is the only figure linked familially to the corpse in this picture, but Vasari reads it as the story of a family tragedy. For Vasari, reading the picture means reading the mind of the artist. While Philostratus hears the silent confession of the figure in a painting, Vasari claims to know what the artist himself imagined as he painted: the grief with which members of a family see the head of it borne to the tomb.28 Mindful perhaps of Alberti, Vasari finds these feelings expressed or confessed through the posture of the figures: Mary’s sinking body, the weeping heads, the bent head and clasped hands of John.29 Wrought with “art and grace,” these figures provoke in the beholder—for whom Vasari speaks quite as much as for the artist and painting—two distinct feelings: pity from even “the hardest” and astonished admiration for “the extreme excellence of every particular.” This final point separates Vasari from Philostratus. While Philostratus salutes the illusionistic realism of paintings, he makes no explicit reference to the painter’s virtuosity; as Svetlana Alpers says, he “assumes technical ability” (“Ekphrasis” 198). Vasari, who aims to tell the story of artists as well as of paintings, divides his focus between effect and cause, between the emotive impact of the figures and the virtuosity revealed in Raphael’s depiction of them, between the painfulness of the subject matter and the beauty of the forms used to express it. To read Vasari’s description in light of an actual painting—something we do not have for any ekphrasis of Philostratus—is also to see which details he finds significant. Though the clasped hands of John in the Deposition are barely visible just beside his head, they help Vasari make the Albertian point that Raphael’s figures express their souls through their bodies and thus move the beholder. But even while noting the inconspicuous hands of John, Vasari overlooks the plainly visible hand clutching the cloth under Christ’s knees in the very center of the

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picture. He also says nothing about the composition of the picture, which is dominated by a wedge of diagonals converging at the sunken waist of Christ and supported by two legs standing beneath his sinking body like columns—one of them bent with strain. Here, as elsewhere in his commentaries, Vasari reads the painting not as a linear or geometrical structure but as the centerpiece of two stories: a story of familial mourning that excites our pity, and a story of artistic creation that astounds us. Binding these stories together is the art-historical triumph of art over death, as genius passes from Perugino to Raphael, from surrogate father to artistic son. Vasari thus draws from the painting the story that he wants it to tell.

Diderot: Art Criticism as Fiction A still more powerful narrative impulse drives the art criticism of Denis Diderot, who brings to the study of art the talents of a novelist and playwright as well as the insatiable curiosity of an encyclopedist. Besides flaunting his passion for pictures and sometimes treating painted scenes as three-dimensional sites, Diderot gives the beholder a major role in the story generated from the painting. In Diderot’s criticism, the story of a picture typically usurps the technical attractions of color, composition, and line, which hardly affect him so much as the purely emotive appeal of the painter’s subject matter.30 Of his commentaries on the Salon of 1767 he declares: “I extol or censure in accordance with my own feelings” (DoA 2:17). Sometimes he dissolves the pictorial medium altogether, treating the painted scene as a place to be entered on foot. Writing of Jean-Baptiste Leprince’s Russian Pastoral in the Salon of 1765, he imagines himself joining the figures, listening to their music, and then walking back with the old man to his cabin (DoA 1:125). Yet for all his passionate eagerness to penetrate the picture plane, Diderot is hardly indifferent to pictorial technique. Starting to write of seven landscapes by Joseph Vernet that he has seen in the Salon of 1767, he decides instead to explore a mountainous region with a native of it. In doing so, he seems to be forsaking art for nature—until we learn that he recognizes in nature exactly what Vernet has painted (DoA 2:86–88). He thus uses nature to return to art. His account of the pictures becomes at once the story of a rural tour and of a conversation with the native cicerone in which he argues that nature is surpassed by Vernet’s art.31 Conversation permeates Diderot’s art criticism. While Philostratus tries to speak with a painted Narcissus, Diderot’s art criticism springs

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from at least two kinds of conversation: the actual discussions he held with artists and various other people attending the public Salons at the Louvre, and the silent dialogue he conducted with the paintings.32 The conversational origin of Diderot’s art criticism is repeated in the conversational form of his reviews, which are variously addressed to fictive companions, to figures in the paintings, and to his readers, the privileged few subscribers to Melchior Grimm’s Correspondance Litteraire. Diderot’s way of speaking for pictures, then, is to make them part of a conversation in which he plays the dominant role. Consider what he says of the following picture (fig. 2.2) in the Salon of 1765.33 What a pretty elegy! What a pretty poem! . . . A delicious painting, the most attractive and perhaps the most interesting in the Salon. She faces us, her head rests on her left hand. The dead bird lies on top of the cage,

2.2 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Girl with a Dead Canary (1765). National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

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its head hanging down, its wings limp, its feet in the air. How natural her pose! How beautiful her head! How elegantly her hair is arranged! How expressive her face! Her pain is profound, she feels the full brunt of her misfortune, she’s consumed by it. What a pretty catafalque the cage makes! How graceful is the garland of greenery that winds around it! Oh, what a beautiful hand! . . . Note the truthful detailing of these fingers, and these dimples, and this softness, and the reddish cast resulting from the pressure of the head against these delicate fingers, and the charm of it all. One would approach this hand to kiss it, if one didn’t respect this child and her suffering. Everything about her enchants, including the fall of her clothing; how beautifully the shawl is draped! How light and supple it is! When one first perceives this painting, one says: Delicious! If one pauses before it or comes back to it, one cries out: Delicious! Delicious! Soon one is surprised to find onself conversing with this child and consoling her. (DoA 1:97–98)

To read this passage in light of Baxandall’s formula is to see that Diderot highlights effect words, skimps on cause words (such as the vigorous handling he mentions later [DoA 1:100]), and makes room for comparison words—in this case words identifying the objects represented as well as describing how they are arranged. Diderot knows that Grimm’s subscribers can see this picture only through his words. So even while calling it “delicious,” he enables his readers to visualize the girl’s head resting on her left hand and the dead bird lying on its back atop the garlanded cage, which thus becomes a catafalque.34 But Diderot stresses above all the effect of the picture on the beholder.35 Vasari, we have seen, says that Raphael’s superlatively graceful depiction of grieving figures in the Deposition stirs both admiration and pity. Diderot makes a comparable claim for Greuze’s lachrymose girl. While the beauty and disposition of its forms gives him (or the depersonalized “one”) a “delicious” pleasure, the “pain” expressed by the girl’s face is so profound that the beholder feels moved to console her. Diderot knows, however, that the death of a bird cannot plausibly justify anything like the pain induced by the death of Christ. To redeem the picture from sentimentality, he reconstructs the story of the pain it represents. Dismissing its title, he claims to elicit the true meaning of the picture from the painted girl herself, who is not so much consoled as made to confess by the critic as interrogator, as grand inquisitor. From her “melancholy air” and the way her lowered eyes somehow manage to “look at [him]” he constructs a melancholy narrative: a young man comes during her mother’s absence, makes promises, then reluctantly leaves; the mother scolds her for her self-absorption, then consoles her; the bird dies

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from the girl’s neglect and the girl wonders if this prefigures the death of her love affair.36 In short, as Diderot insists to an evidently skeptical friend, she grieves not for a bird but for “something else, I tell you”—a lover (DoA 1:99). This erotic tale woven by Diderot rivals the childish story told by the painting, which perfectly exemplifies what Michael Fried calls “absorption” because the girl is wholly oblivious of the beholder, utterly preoccupied with her grief.37 When Diderot says to the painted girl, “How you look at me!” he imagines her silently admitting the truth of his story, but at the same time he misrepresents her to readers who can know her only through his words. For the painting shows her left eye wholly cupped by her left hand and her barely open right one looking straight down at the bird.38 Diderot speaks for a painted girl whose expression and pose seem to tell us all we need to know about her grief and yet also hide what he considers the true source of it. In speaking for the picture, Diderot dictates what it said to confess. He thus narrows the gap between “cause words” and “effect words.” Because the painting strikes him as both “delicious” and poignant (two effects), it moves him to raise questions that precipitate the very look depicted: “You lower your eyes, you don’t answer.” Diderot as beholder thus aligns himself with the causes of the girl’s melancholy. Though he later makes causal inferences about what the artist did—“The striped handkerchief is loose, light, beautifully transparent, everything’s handled with vigor, without compromising the details” (DoA 1:100)—he chiefly aims to wrest his own truth from the girl’s expression. Its voiceless female figure is doubly dominated by male subjects: first by the young man who threatens the girl with abandonment, and then by the inquisitorial viewer bent on extracting her confession. In the conversation he conducts with the girl as well as with his skeptical friend, Diderot makes himself the voice of the painting. More boldly inventive than Vasari, whose commentary on Raphael’s Deposition largely follows the biblical story it signifies, Diderot scripts the story told by Greuze’s Girl.

Meyer Schapiro and the Facts of Art History In turning from Diderot to Meyer Schapiro, we enter the domain of twentieth century art history as a specialized academic enterprise. While Diderot brings to art criticism the passion of the amateur (in the root sense of amator, lover), Meyer Schapiro brings the erudition of the professional art historian. While Diderot tells how paintings and sculptures affect him on their first exhibition, Schapiro concentrates—for the most

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part—on works already canonized, ranging from Romanesque sculpture to modern art. To individual pictures, therefore, Schapiro brings a knowledge of the artist’s life and cultural milieu as well as of art historical scholarship—the history of periods, the genealogy of styles. Schapiro’s critical method has a genealogy of its own. When he reads paintings in light of the artist’s life and historical period, Schapiro recalls Vasari. Yet when he construes and explains the meaning of a particular work, when he strives to make it speak, he recalls Diderot. He also follows Diderot in scrutinizing various sources, both verbal and visual, for the contextual light they shed on a work. For Diderot not only studied paintings but also gathered opinions about them from those who attended the Salon exhibitions. Of course scholarly research differs from collecting comments at a public exhibition, from interviewing—so to speak—the man on the street. But if Schapiro studied the life of an artist through the printed as well as visual record, Diderot personally interviewed some of the living artists whose work he represented in words. Even the conversational format in which he typically writes about art anticipates the modern art-historical practice of injecting one’s own voice into a scholarly debate, or intervening in the debate to challenge an existing interpretation. Finally, Schapiro follows Diderot in claiming privileged access to the works of art he professes to explicate. Like Diderot, he presents his own voice as the authentic voice of the painting, the voice in which it confesses itself. Consider Schapiro’s commentary on van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes, painted in July–September 1886 (fig. 2.3).39 Schapiro takes up this painting chiefly to overturn what has been written of it by Martin Heidegger, who construes it as a painting of shoes belonging to a peasant woman and symbolizing the story of her whole life: From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stands forth. In the stiffly solid heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the farspreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field, swept by a raw wind. On the leather there lies the dampness and saturation of the soil. Under the soles there slides the loneliness of the field-path as the evening declines. . . . This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety about the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the advent of birth and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment rises to its resting-in-self.40

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2.3 Vincent van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes (1886). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam/ Art Resource, NY.

All of this, Heidegger proclaims, is revealed or “told” by the painting, which discloses “what the equipment, the pair of peasant’s shoes, is in truth” (“Origin” 664). Like Diderot, Heidegger presents his own voice as that of the painting, which in this case speaks a language unmistakably Heideggerian. The shoes cannot speak; the peasant woman who allegedly wore them is “wordless”; the painting is silent. Only Heidegger can speak for them all, and for the truth uncovered by the painting we are asked to take his ventriloquized word. Schapiro demurs. First of all he contends that Heidegger’s comment could apply just as well to a real pair of shoes as to a painting of them. In other words, he complains that Heidegger wholly identifies the painting with what it represents. Second, against Heidegger’s existential truth Schapiro posits a would-be historical fact. We cannot say, he writes, “that a painting of shoes by van Gogh expresses the being or essence of a peasant woman’s shoes and her relation to nature and work. They are the shoes of the artist, by that time [summer 1886] a man of the town and city.” 41 This would-be statement of fact (“They are the shoes of the artist”) actually blends fact and interpretation. Though van Gogh was indeed living in Paris when he painted this picture, nothing about the

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picture identifies it as urban; if anything, the shoes in this picture look more rural than the quite different Pair of Old Shoes (H 469/F 461) that van Gogh painted in August 1888, when he had left Paris for Arles.42 Still more problematic is the claim that the shoes depicted in the earlier work “are those of the artist.” While Schapiro complains that Heidegger’s comment could apply just as well to a real pair of shoes as to a painting of them, Schapiro himself assumes—in the words of Jacques Derrida—that “painted shoes can belong really and really be restituted to a real, identifiable, and nameable subject.” 43 Even if they could be, the only evidence that van Gogh’s 1886 A Pair of Shoes depicts his own shoes is Gaugin’s recollection that three years later in Arles, van Gogh made from “a pair of big hob-nailed shoes” in his studio “a remarkable still life painting” which Schapiro himself cannot identify with any certainty.44 On close inspection, then, Schapiro’s statement of fact becomes only a statement of possibility. Whether or not we share Derrida’s conviction that all representation is indeterminate and his aversion to “monoreferential naiveté” (Truth 309), nothing of Schapiro’s verbal or visual evidence securely ties A Pair of Shoes to the feet of the artist. Yet on the gossamer thread of a would-be tie Schapiro hangs his autobiographical reading of the picture. The shoes, he says, are things that have touched [van Gogh] deeply, . . . things inseparable from his body and memorable to his reacting self-awareness. . . . In isolating his own old, worn shoes on a canvas, he turns them to the spectator; he makes of them a piece from a self-portrait, that part of the costume with which we tread the earth and in which we locate strains of movement, fatigue, pressure, heaviness—the burden of the erect body in its contact with the ground. They mark our inescapable position on the earth. To “be in someone’s shoes” is to be in his predicament or his station in life. For an artist to isolate his worn shoes as the subject of a picture is for him to convey a concern with the fatalities of his social being. Not only the shoes as an instrument of use, . . . but the shoes as “a portion of the self” (in Hamsun’s words) are van Gogh’s revealing theme.45

Schapiro uses cause words to define the work of the artist: isolating the shoes on the canvas and turning them toward us. In thus observing what the artist does, Schapiro clearly moves beyond Heidegger’s referential identification of pointed shoes with real ones. But otherwise he offers no more than a variation on a Heideggerian theme. Once again the shoes are said to tell the particular story of a strained and anxious life, as well as

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the universal story of “our inescapable position.” When Schapiro claims that van Gogh “makes of [the shoes] a piece from a self-portrait,” he slides from causation to speculation, prompting us to wonder what stylistic features of this picture link it to van Gogh’s actual self-portraits, which never show his legs, let alone his shoes. Does A Pair of Shoes evoke self-portraiture any more than it exemplifies still life, which is what van Gogh chiefly painted in the summer of 1886? 46 He painted no selfportraits in this period, but to compare the laces of the painted shoes with the bending and twisting stems in a picture such as Jug with Red and White Carnations (H 1126/F 327) is to see that the laces might almost be tendrils reaching for light and air: the one at left snaking across the toe of the shoe, the pair at right jerking and undulating and finally blooming into a C-curl below.47 But Schapiro sees only self-portraiture here. In “Further Notes” on A Pair of Shoes, he writes: One can describe van Gogh’s painting of his shoes as a picture of objects seen and felt by the artist as a significant part of himself—he faces himself like a mirrored image—chosen, isolated, carefully arranged, and addressed to himself. Is there not in that singular artistic conception an aspect of the intimate and personal, a soliloquy, and expression of the pathos of a troubled human condition in the drawing of an ordinarily neat and in fact well-fitted, self-confident, overprotected clothed body? The thickness and heaviness of the impasto pigment substance, the emergence of the dark shoes from shadow into light, the irregular, angular patterns and surprisingly loosened curved laces extending beyond the silhouettes of the shoes, are not all these component features of van Gogh’s odd conception of the shoes? 48

To “describe” the painting as a self-portrait is of course to interpret it that way. Here again words identifying the cause or agency behind the painted shoes—“chosen, isolated, carefully arranged”—give way to speculation masquerading as statement of fact (“addressed to himself”). The rhetorical questions that follow then coax us to read or hear the “singular” style of the painting as “soliloquy.” The second question says more about what is actually on the canvas—thick impasto, shoes emerging from shadow, angular patterns, curved laces—than Schapiro says anywhere else. But these stylistic features collectively signify oddity of conception, which in turn signifies soliloquy, the artist expressing his own “deviant and . . . deformed” uniqueness through the picture.40 Curiously, however, this painted sign of the artist’s idiosyncratic self also

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signifies—for Schapiro—something universal: van Gogh’s conception of the shoes “as a symbol of his lifelong practice of walking, and an ideal of life as a pilgrimage, a perpetual change of experience.” 50 To compare Schapiro’s commentary on A Pair of Shoes with Heidegger’s account of it is to see the difference between a philosopher and an art historian. Schapiro can challenge Heidegger’s reading of the picture because he evidently knows much more of the life and influences that stand behind it, as well as of other pictures by van Gogh that may help to explain its style and meaning. But by themselves, facts gathered by an art historian neither constitute an interpretation nor guarantee its plausibility. When Schapiro claims that the painted shoes are van Gogh’s soliloquy, that through them the artist tells us the story of his wandering and troubled life, Schapiro may be right, but the gap between the known facts and these autobiographical inferences can only be bridged by a leap of faith—something like the faith required to read van Gogh’s Starry Night as an evocation of the apocalypse.51 In the name of art historical clarification, Schapiro strives to overturn Heidegger’s story of the painting’s existential truth with his own story of its autobiographical truth. Once again a male beholder makes the painting tell a story dominated by men. Rather than depicting the shoes of a woman or signifying the story of her life, it must—we are told— depict the shoes of the artist and thus signify the story of his life as recalled by such fellow (male) artists as Gaugin. Schapiro’s reading of the picture admits neither indeterminacy nor the life of a woman. In speaking for the painting, he makes it tell the story of a man in a voice exclusively male.

Leo Steinberg and the Taciturnity of Abstract Art To this point we have examined the language of four critics writing about a kind of art that could be simply classified as representational. For all their differences, the paintings of Narcissus, of the deposition of Christ, of the young girl weeping over the dead bird, and of the pair of shoes, all refer to people or material objects that exist, once existed, or could conceivably exist in the world outside the painting. Schapiro’s whole argument about A Pair of Shoes springs from his conviction that it represents an actual piece of the artist’s own property, and thus tells something about his life. The notion that a painting represents something tangible outside itself, even if that something can be visited only by the imagination, helps to explain why paintings so often generate narrative. Given

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the painting of a figure or an object—a young man gazing into a pool, a young girl weeping over a dead bird, or simply a pair of shoes—the critic can tell a story about what the painting shows, or put into words the story signified by its images. But the story of art criticism itself, which is what I have very selectively sketched, can hardly be told without some reference to modernism and specifically to abstract art, which begins about 1900. What can the art critic say about abstract art? What sort of story can be told about an art that seems to turn its back on representation, on reference to any object or figure that we might recognize from our experience of the world outside the painting, and that might thus give us something to talk about? Modern art has been charged with declaring war on language itself. For Rosalind E. Krauss, its taciturnity is exemplified by its most persistent emblem: the grid (fig. 13.1). “Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting,” she writes, “and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” 52 This sentence encapsulates the paradox of abstract art. In the very act of proclaiming its silence and its will to silence us, Krauss not only displays the full power of her own rhetoric with a resounding triad of parallel phrases (“to literature, to narrative, to discourse”); she also affirms the eloquence of the would-be taciturn grid, naming just some of the things that it “announces.” 53 If modern art ever aimed to silence the viewer, it has conspicuously failed. Its very renunciation of what we commonly take to be subject-matter intensifies our need to talk about it. What Harold Rosenberg says of minimalism applies to all abstract art: “The less there is to see, the more there is to say.” 54 Viewers of abstract art thus recall in a way the condition of Diderot’s subscribers, who could see the Salon paintings only through the screen—or grid—of his words. Though reproductions and frequent exhibitions give us ready access to specimens of abstract art, most of us need words in order to see what these works are, what they do, what they “announce,” what in any sense they represent. So far from silencing the critic, then, abstract art provokes and demands at least as much commentary as any of its precursors. Not surprisingly, much of this speech has been devoted to placing abstraction in the history of art, and thus to revealing once more how storytelling informs our response to painting. If critics cannot tell a story about the objects or figures represented in a work of art, they can at least tell the story of how modernism won its independence from the story of the past. For Greenberg, modern art is the story of its quest for pictorial

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purity, its retreat from the illusory depth of the Old Masters to the twodimensional picture plane, its resolute insistence on “the ineluctable flatness of the support (i.e. the stretched canvas or panel).” 55 For Alfred H. Barr, whose Cubism and Abstract Art (first published 1936) has been called the “Bible of modern art,” modern art is above all the story of its liberation from the task of representing figures.56 As Mitchell suggests, the well-known diagram that Barr drew to show the evolution of modern art from the age of impressionism to 1936 may be read as “a quest romance in which heroic artists search for the holy grail of pure abstraction, smashing the false, illusionistic images of mere ‘nature’ to find a spiritual essence” (PT 232–34). Similarly, Krauss defines the original phase of abstract art as a Hegelian journey to pure Spirit, wherein Being is purified to Nothing.57 This story of the evolution of modern art becomes a little less startling when we recall that for Heidegger, van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes is a picture about their being, “of what the equipment, the pair of peasant’s shoes, is in truth.” If Heidegger can elevate the painting of shoes to a representation of their being, abstract art can make Nothing signify Being itself, and thus demonstrate that it has not discarded subjectmatter at all but rather discovered a new subject, perhaps the ultimate Subject. The abstract painter’s “greatest fear,” says Krauss, “is that he may be making mere abstraction, abstraction uninformed by a subject, contentless abstraction, for which the term—wholly pejorative for everyone from Kandinsky and Mondrian to Pollock and Newman—is decoration” (237). Steinberg likewise argues that “modern art has not, after all, abandoned the imitation of nature, and . . . in its most powerful expressions, representation is still an essential condition, not an expendable freight” (Other Criteria 237). What then is the Being or nature or Nature that abstract art represents? Sliding from signifier to signifier, we come to what Pollock calls “energy and motion made visible,” which Krauss elaborates as the dynamic melding of binaries: line and color, contour and field, matter and the incorporeal. “The subject that then emerges is the provisional unity of the identity of opposites: as line becomes color, content becomes field, and matter becomes light” (239). Abstract art thus becomes a language of abstraction ranging from Being down to line and color—which may help to guide our vision but still leaves us well above the particularities of experience. How then does an articulate critic respond to a particular work of abstract art—specifically to a specimen of Pollock’s abstract expressionism?

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Consider briefly what a young Leo Steinberg wrote about Jackson Pollock in 1955, when Steinberg was studying to become an art historian. Steinberg’s review of Pollock’s first retrospective crosses the line between art history and art criticism and implicitly shows it to be what Krauss later called “a false distinction” (221). For it was precisely Steinberg’s already supple command of art history and the history of Pollock’s own work that enabled him to gauge its power, its affront to art history, and its challenge to art historians who did not then know how to assimilate it. In 1955 Pollock’s work still embodied the shock of the new, testing the viewer. Steinberg’s review meets this challenge in three ways. It first recalls the conversation provoked by the paintings, in this case the controversy over whether or not they constitute art. Like Diderot, Steinberg knows full well that the study of new art must begin with the social experience of it, with talking and listening as well as looking, with hints from what various viewers—artists in particular—may have to say about it. This is the beginning of the process by which art enters the academic conversation of art history, wherein quarrelling witnesses to the birth of new art give way to the printed commentaries and learned debates of scholarship, the protocol of quoting, citation, and footnotes. Second, Steinberg uses his knowledge of the past not to build a wall against the would-be artlessness of Pollock’s work but to weave a thread that may guide him through and to its art. Looking, for instance, at the huge “drip” paintings of the late 1940s, he is reminded of the labyrinthine decorations in the medieval Books of Kells and Lindisfarne, but only to register the force with which Pollock forsakes deliberate artifice for chance, renounces the worksmanship and artifice exemplified by the Celtic manuscripts—as well as by his own earlier work—to express “something of the barbarism of an ancient epic” (Other Criteria 265). Third, Steinberg freely reveals his subjective experience of Pollock’s art and his urge to proclaim as well as explain its value. Eschewing the tone of pure objectivity that typically marks the presentation of art historical “facts,” his warmblooded language recalls the passion of Diderot even as it displays the analytical rigor of the professional art historian.58 He does not hesitate to report the facts of his own experience in “effect” or “ego” words, to say why he finds Pollock’s works “utterly overwhelming.” They manifest to him “a mortal struggle between the man and his art,” for “from first to last the artist tramples on his own facility and spurns the elegance that creeps into a style which he has practised to the point of knowing how” (Other Criteria 265).

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2.4 Jackson Pollock, Echo: Number 25, 1951. © 2006 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Well enough. But can Steinberg say anything more than that Pollock trades artistic virtuosity for epic barbarism? Consider his comment on what he calls “the most hypnotic picture” in the Pollock show (fig. 2.4). A huge ninety-two inch world of whirling threads of black on white, each tendril seeming to drag with it a film of ground that bends inward and out and shapes itself mysteriously into a moulded space. There is a real process here; something is actually happening. Therefore the picture can afford to be as careless of critique as the bad weather is of the objections of a hopeful picknicker. With all my thought-sicklied misgivings about Pollock, this satisfies the surest test I know for a great work of art. (Other Criteria 267)

At once descriptive and celebratory, Steinberg’s comment leads us into the world of the picture without giving us anything like a complete tour of it—such as art history might judiciously provide after the spadework of

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first appraisal has been done. The urge to praise, which so often motivates art criticism, is here intensified by the need to overcome the resistance which Pollock’s work had provoked, and which could be shaken only by a language that might enable us to see—actually to see—what he had achieved in this painting. How to capture its “careless” audacity in words? Not by measuring—yet—the variety of thicknesses in Pollock’s swirling lines, or their precise relation to the dots and blots that accompany them. To show that “something is actually happening” on this canvas, Steinberg simply sketches—in words—an outline of how its “whirling threads” destabilize and “mysteriously” recreate the binary opposition between figure and ground. What then happens when Steinberg moves beyond a brief sketch into detailed analysis? Consider what he writes about one of the paintings with which Jasper Johns launched postmodernism in the late fifties (fig. 2.5).

2.5 Jasper Johns, Shade (1959). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: Rudolph Burckhardt.

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I keep looking at his black-and-white painting called Shade. But for a narrow margin all around, its entire surface is taken up by an actual window shade—the cheap kind; Johns had to fortify it to keep it flat. It’s been pulled down as if for the night, and obviously for the last time. Over all the visible surface, shade and ground canvas together, spreads the paint itself, paint unusually atmospheric and permissive of depth. It makes a nocturnal space with bursts of white lights that radiate from suspended points, like bursting and falling fireworks misted over. An abstracted nightscape? You stare at and into a field whose darkness is Absolute, whose whites brighten nothing, but make darkness visible, as Milton said of infernal shade. Or a scene of nightfall: far lights flaring and fading move into focus and out, like rainy nights passed on a road. Are we out inside the night or indoors? A window, with its cheap shade pulled down, is within reach, shutting me out, keeping me in? Look again. On a canvas shade lowered against the outside we are given to see outdoor darkness: like the hollow shade our closed eyes project upon lowered lids. Alberti compared the perspective diaphanes of the Renaissance to open windows. Johns’ Shade compares the adiaphane of his canvas to a window whose shade is down. (Other Criteria 309)

As Johns’s postmodernism returns us to the world of tangible objects that modernism had renounced—to objects such as flags, targets, and shades—Steinberg returns us to the world of literature that modernism had supposedly silenced. Steinberg uses both Milton and Joyce to help him say what he sees in this painted shade. “Darkness visible” describes hell in the first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost (line 63), and in the opening paragraph of chapter 3 of Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus uses adiaphane to mean opacity, “the limit of the diaphane.” 59 Steinberg also reactivates most of the rhetorical strategies that have permeated art criticism from Philostratus onward. This passage is driven by a series of narratives. The Homeric story of how Johns made the painting—by fortifying and flattening the shade on the canvas, then painting over both shade and margin—grounds two other stories about what is represented or signified here. The quotidian tale of a day ending (the shade “has been pulled down as if for the night”) becomes the quasi-apocalyptic story of darkness immutable (“and obviously for the last time”) and then the art-historical narrative of what Johns does with Alberti’s master trope: the open window of Renaissance art, with its sunlit threedimensional vistas, becomes the impenetrably occluded window of modern or postmodern art, with its resolutely flattened opacity.

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But Steinberg’s commentary deconstructs this opacity even while seeming to affirm it. With a series of rhetorical questions, he prompts us first to see the painted shade-on-canvas as an abstracted nightscape, then as the representation of nightfall with its own depth (“far lights flaring and fading”) or of a window that cannot help signifying the two worlds it constitutes by separation—inside and outside. Baxandall, we recall, says that any attempt to identify the objects represented by a painting entails comparison words. In telling us that “Johns’ Shade compares the adiaphane of his canvas to a window whose shade is down,” Steinberg imputes the work of comparison to the painting itself and thus affirms its power to imitate nature, which—as already seen—he considers “essential” to all art. Like Philostratus and Diderot, Steinberg uses rhetorical questions to make us share his experience of painting, his insistently interrogative mood, his acts of repeated looking. But unlike his precursors, Steinberg aims his questions at the reader rather than the painting, and from the painting he elicits not a single answer but a variety of them. The painting may represent a nightscape, a nightfall, a window, or a screen on which we project outdoor darkness just as we may project shade on our lowered eyelids. Thus the story about lowering a shade becomes a story of closing one’s eyes—just as Dedalus tests the limits of the diaphane when he says to himself, “Shut your eyes and see.” 60




The painted shade can no more be wholly opaque than the art critic can be wholly transparent, the crystalline window through which the painting glows or the hollow conduit through which it speaks. Whatever it aspires to be, art criticism is inescapably a kind of writing, and as such, it borrows rhetorical strategies from both literary narrative and persuasive discourse. To court our assent, it typically presents the critic’s interpretation as the painting’s soliloquy or confession, so that the painting’s “truth” is a story constructed by the critic and ventriloquistically voiced by the silent work of art. Even Steinberg, who draws a rich polyphony of “truths” from Johns’s Shade, ends by declaring what the painting says, what it compares itself to. The persistence of narrative and other rhetorical strategies in art criticism ranging from ancient times to our own prompts us to question several assumptions. One is the notion that art criticism has been fundamentally and successively changed by the critic’s access to the lives of artists and then by the advent of reproductions. To compare Philostratus’

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third-century C.E. account of the possibly imaginary Narcissus with Vasari’s sixteenth-century commentary on Raphael’s Deposition is to see that the lives of artists come to play a crucial role in what paintings are said to signify, more precisely in the stories that they are said to tell. Yet Vasari, like Philostratus, claims to know what the silent painting tells us, whether it be the feelings of a painted figure, the feelings of the artist, or both. Likewise, to compare Vasari with Schapiro is to see how modern technology can enhance the story of an artist’s life, can help the critic explain—with the aid of reproductions—what a group of related pictures may tell us about that life. Yet if Schapiro describes pictures as often as Vasari does and almost as often as Diderot, we can hardly say that reproductions obviate the need for description. On the contrary, to describe or identify anything in a picture is to initiate or advance the task of interpreting it, and as we have seen in the work of Schapiro, the very word describe can be used to mean “interpret.” If the line between description and interpretation wavers, how strong is the border between art criticism and art history? Except in the work of Philostratus, who says nothing of artists or their lives, art criticism draws on the facts supplied by art history, and the story of art cannot be told without critical reference to meaning and value in particular works of art. Efforts to banish “literary” art criticism from the domain of art history—to strip away the clothing of “rhetoric” from the body of art historical fact—inevitably founder on the question of just what the facts are. The moment we try to “describe” a work of art or make a statement of “fact” about its meaning, such as “they are the shoes of the artist,” we are interpreting the picture, construing its signs and articulating what they signify. Unless it opts for the mere recitation of names and dates, art history can never escape art criticism, and the art critic cannot escape the rhetorical urge to speak for pictures, to make these silent objects tell the story he or she scripts for them. Finally, in spite of its radical departure from what preceded it, abstract art has neither killed this urge nor fundamentally changed the language used to express it. The very absence of depth or recognizable objects in a work of abstract art sharpens the need to talk about its seemingly inscrutable surface, to try (or try to say) what it signifies, to tell stories about its genesis and effect on the viewer, and then—in postmodern art— to recognize the return of depth and of familiar forms as objects of representation. In the work of practitioners such as Steinberg, the language of art criticism has grown more supple, more responsive to multiple

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meanings, more sensitive to the role that any painting—especially a new one—can play in the unending story of art. But the difference is quantitative rather than qualitative. The task of speaking for pictures—of turning their silent images into stories of how they were made, how they affect us, what they say to us—remains essentially and enduringly rhetorical.

Chapter 3

Alberti on Apelles Word and Image in De Pictura In the history of word-image relations, as well as in the history of Renaissance art, Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting has long been recognized as a seminal text. Besides explaining the Euclidean geometry of one-point perspective and the Ciceronian rhetoric of painting—the means by which painted figures may be made to express their feelings and thus to move the soul of the beholder—Alberti describes a number of ancient paintings. In so doing, he verbally revives graphic works that have survived only in words, in the ancient texts from which he draws the material for descriptions couched in the quattrocento humanist Latin of his De Pictura (1435) and the Italian of his Della Pittura (1436).1 Alberti thus invites the painters of his own time to reconvert these verbal versions of ancient paintings into something like the originals. “It is indeed,” says David Rosand, “a grand invitation: to join Alberti in the project of creating nothing less than the full Renaissance of painting.” 2 Though not immediately accepted, as Rosand promptly adds, the invitation was decisively taken up in the last decade of the fifteenth century, when Mantegna made a drawing and Botticelli a painting that each manifestly correspond to Alberti’s description of Apelles’s Calumny.3 Thus Alberti’s account of this lost painting would seem by itself to have played a crucial role in regenerating art. After describing the painting— more precisely after telling the historia or narrative that it represents with figures—Alberti asks, “if this ‘historia’ siezes the imagination when described in words, how much beauty and pleasure do you think it presented in the actual painting of that excellent artist?” (Grayson 97). To imagine the impact that Apelles’s painting might once have had on 69

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ancient eyes is also to anticipate the impact that a renewed version of it might now have on modern ones: to suggest the distinctive power of depiction, of a story told with the silent rhetoric of images rather than in the audible language of words. Closely scrutinized, however, Alberti’s description of Apelles’s painting reveals a conception of graphic art that is inescapably bound to words. By this I do not mean simply that the narrative theme or historia of ancient paintings is revived by Alberti’s text. I mean that the painting he asks the reader to imagine takes most of its meaning from language. It cannot move, please, nor enlighten the beholder without the intervention of words. I stress this point because it flatly contradicts what Alberti repeatedly asserts throughout the first two books of his treatise: painting is an art of visible signs that speak for themselves. At the very beginning of book 1, he declares: Quae vero intuitum non recipiunt, ea nemo ad pictorem nihil pertinere negabit. Nam ea solum imitari studet pictor quae sub luce videantur. (par. 2, Grayson 36) But no one will deny that those things which do not receive a gaze pertain not at all to the painter. For the painter strives to imitate only those things which may be seen in the light.

Alberti’s language is rigorously and emphatically exclusive. Using four negative terms (non, nemo, nihil, negabit) in a single short sentence, he absolutely bans from the universe of painting all that is invisible, and then underscores his point by stating its positive corollary: painting represents only the visible. This inflexible rule of visibility presents no theoretical problems for Alberti in book 1, which explains the mechanical or more precisely geometrical rules of perspective—the rules for reproducing on a flat surface the appearance of three-dimensional objects seen from one fixed point of view. But in book 2, which explains how to represent the human body so as to signify the feelings and thoughts of the soul, Alberti knows full well that he is skirting the limits of the visible. He begins skirting them even while explaining how to depict the physical structure of a living creature. After urging painters first to sketch the bones, then to add sinews and muscles, and finally to clothe both bones and muscles with flesh and skin, he catches himself in a possible inconsistency:

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Sed (video) hoc in loco fortassis aderunt obiicientes quod supra dixerim nihil ad pictorem earum rerum spectare quae non videantur. Recte illi quidem, sed veluti in vestiendo prius nudum subsignare oportet quem postea vestibus obambiendo involuamus, sic in nudo pingendo prius ossa et musculi disponendi sunt, quos moderatis carnibus et cute ita operias, ut quo sint loco musculi non difficile intelligatur. (par. 36, Grayson 74) But (I see) at this point perhaps some may come in objecting that above I said that nothing of those things which cannot be seen concerns a painter. These [who object] are quite right, but just as in clothing [i.e., painting a clothed figure] it is first necessary to signify beneath [the clothing] the nude figure which afterwards we wrap up in clothes, so in painting the nude: first to be set in order are the bones and muscles, which you cover with well-molded flesh and skin in such a way that where the muscles are may be understood without difficulty.

Alberti here refines the principle so baldly stated at the beginning of his treatise. Reminding himself (as well as the reader) that a painter has nothing to do with invisible things, he nonetheless argues that a painter can “subsignare”—can signify what is beneath or behind a visible surface.4 A painter can depict skin in such a way as to let us infer the location of the bones and muscles it covers. This newly refined principle of depiction opens painting to a world behind the immediately visible—not just to the physical substructure of the body but to the feelings and thoughts of the animus, the soul. Of the soul’s relation to historia—the chief narrative point of a painting—he writes: Animos . . . spectantium movebit historia, cum qui aderunt picti homines suum animi motum maxime prae se ferent. . . . Hi motus animi ex motibus corporis cognoscuntur. (par. 41, Grayson 80) The historia will move the souls of the beholders when each of the men who are depicted there shows forth as vividly as possible the motion of his soul. . . . These motions of the soul are known from the motions of the body.

Alberti offers some fairly straightforward examples from both real and painted life. In real life sluggish limbs reveal melancholy; a drooping body signifies mournfulness; a red, swollen face denotes anger. In painting, Giotto’s Navicella (destroyed in the seventeenth century) shows the amazement of the disciples seeing Christ walk on water, with each disciple, says Alberti,

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suum turbati animi inditium vultu et toto corpore preferentem, ut in singulis singuli affectionum motus appareant. (par. 42, Grayson 82) displaying the sign of an agitated soul in his face and entire body, so that in everyone the individual motions of the passions appear.

For Alberti, this now lost mosaic by Giotto—the only modern (i.e., not ancient) painting he cites in his treatise—exemplifies the silent rhetoric of painting, the Ciceronian eloquence of the body itself speaking with visible, paintable gesture and stance.5 But with his comments on Timanthes’s painting of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Alberti brings painting to the threshhold of the invisible. He cites Timanthes’s work not just to exemplify graphic eloquence but also graphic coherence—all parts of the painting working together to explain the historia, the narrative theme. To explain this coherence, Alberti borrows the term compositio from the vocabulary of rhetorical analysis, where it had been used to signify the construction of a periodic sentence built with increasingly complex parts: words joined to make a phrase, phrases joined to make a clause, clauses joined to make a sentence. Likewise, as Michael Baxandall observes,6 Alberti defines compositio as a method of composing—fitting together—the parts of a painting: Historiae partes corpora, corporis pars membrum est, membri pars est superficies. Primae igitur operis partes superficies, quod ex his membra, ex membris corpora, ex illis historia, ultimum illud quidem et absolutum pictoris opus perficitur. (par. 35, Grayson 72) The parts of the historia are bodies, the part of the body is the member, the part of the member is the plane. Therefore the first parts of a work are planes, because from these [come] members, from members bodies, [and] from these the historia, indeed the final and absolute thing [by which] the work of the painter is brought to completion.

In Timanthes’s painting the historia is Agamemnon’s overpowering grief at the sacrifice of his daughter. According to Alberti, whose description of the painting comes almost verbatim from Quintilian (De Inst. Orat. 2.13.13), Agamemnon’s grief is expressed not directly by the face and figure of Agamemnon himself but indirectly, by the expressions of the other figures depicted with him.7 Collectively, they play the role of a pictorial admonisher, which Alberti liked to see: some figure in the picture who points out to us what is remarkable, or keeps us at bay with a forbidding glance, or invites us by his gestures to laugh or weep (par. 42, Grayson

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80). Timanthes used more than one such admonisher. He reportedly painted a group of figures to guide the viewer’s response, and thus exemplified for Alberti the compositional principle that whatever the painted figures do among themselves or with the spectators, all things in the picture must work together to realize and explain the historia (par. 42, Grayson 80–82). Timanthes, says Alberti, surpassed his rival Colotes by representing faces of gradually heightened anguish that lead us to imagine the unseen face of Agamemnon: Cum in Iphigeniae immolatione tristem Calchantem, tristiorem fecisset Ulixem, inque Menelao maerore affecto omnem artem et ingenium exposuisset, consumptis affectibus, non reperiens quo digno modo tristissimi patris vultus referret, pannis involuit eius caput, ut cuique plus relinqueret quod de illius dolore animo meditaretur, quam quod posset visu discernere. (par. 42, Grayson 82) When he had made Calchas sad at the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Ulysses sadder, and on the grief-stricken Menelaos had lavished all of his art and genius, his passions [i.e., power to represent passions] spent, not finding any suitable way to represent the face of [Iphigenia’s] overwrought father, he covered his head with rags, so that everyone might in his soul consider more what the painter left behind [i.e., unrepresented] of that man’s sorrow than what could be discerned with the eye.

Set beside Alberti’s original contention that painting has absolutely nothing to do with what is not visible, this tribute to the graphic representation of the invisible is remarkable enough. It is still more remarkable in its rhetorical conversion of expressive incapacity to expressive power: because Timanthes could go no further in visibly representing grief, he left the viewer to think about what Agamemnon felt, and thus expressed more of Agamemnon’s suffering soul than the eye could see. Alberti here moves decisively beyond Quintilian. Quintilian uses Timanthes’s painting to show by analogy that in oratory, some things ought to be hidden because they should not be revealed or cannot be adequately expressed.8 Alberti cites Timanthes’s work to show how various figures in a painting—its most important parts—can work together to present a historia that is essentially invisible. For all he owes to Quintilian’s description of Timanthes’s painting, Alberti’s point about the ultimately superior expressiveness of Agamemnon’s hidden head is his own. In the passage on Timanthes, then, Alberti stretches to the breaking point his initial claim that painting is exclusively an art of the visible. Yet in book 2 as a whole, even in the Timanthes passage, Alberti strives to

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show what the visible forms of painting can express, what they can signify to the interpretive mind. He not only expects painters to be learned in the liberal arts, and to consort with poets, orators, and other literate men, as he says in book 3 (par. 52–54, Grayson 94–96); he also presupposes a thoughtful audience for painting, viewers capable of making inferences from what they see. “Fuit et qui Ulixem pingeret,” he writes, “ut in eo non veram sed fictam et simulatam insaniam agnoscas” (“And there was someone who painted Ulysses so you would know the insanity in him was not true but feigned and counterfeited”; par. 37, Grayson 74). Significantly, Alberti says nothing about how the painter leads us to this inference. If he refers to the painting by Euphranor that Pliny describes in Natural History (35.129), he could have mentioned that it showed Ulysses yoking an ox to a horse—a spectacle that would remind learned viewers of the story that Ulysses feigned madness to avoid being drafted for the Trojan war. But in suppressing any reference to the anomalous yoking, Alberti implies that the painted face and figure of Ulysses somehow managed by themselves to signify a feigned madness. Once again, the claim Alberti makes for the expressive power of a painting he has never seen necessitates revision of the ancient description on which the claim is based. We are asked to imagine a painting in which figures and facial expressions alone—unaided by words—tell the story or historia of a character’s hidden thoughts. In describing Apelles’s Calumny, however, Alberti asks us to imagine a painting which could not possibly speak for itself in the silent language of expression and gesture, which could not be understood without the aid of words to identify its figures and thus explain its meaning. To compare Alberti’s description of the painting with its textual source—Guarino da Verona’s Latin translation (1408) of Lucian’s ancient Greek essay on calumny—is to see that Alberti has systematically suppressed all reference to the process by which the viewer of the picture construes its meaning, identifies its figures with specific abstractions. In Alberti’s account, the regulatory power of language over visual art—its power to make the meaning of what the viewer sees—is repeatedly evident but nowhere plainly acknowledged. Yet it is plainly embedded in Alberti’s concept of inventio, a rhetorical term that anciently signified the discovery (excogitatio) of arguments to be used in a speech.9 In Alberti’s vocabulary, inventio seems to denote the “selection of material” to be used in a painting, but this material can be represented in words.10 For Alberti, Rosand writes, “inventio . . . exists effectively on the level of idea, beyond the contingency of pictorial exe-

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cution. It involves the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’ of representation . . .” (155). This is why Alberti urges painters to befriend orators and literary men, for they are the source of invention, and invention is such, he says, that it can delight even by itself without pictorial realization (ut etiam sola inventio sine pictura delectet [par. 53, Grayson 94]). Sola inventio, of course, means invention cast in words alone, which is how Alberti presents Apelles’s Calumny. Alberti describes this painting precisely because it epitomizes the power of invention, which survives through a process of purely verbal transmission. The painting moves, so to speak, from Lucian’s Greek description of it in his essay on calumny through Guarino’s Latin translation of the essay and thence to Alberti’s treatise. But Alberti makes the verbalized painting serve a purpose quite different from Lucian’s original one. Lucian described Apelles’s painting in order to illustrate the rashness of believing too quickly in slander—something that nearly precipitated the death of the painter himself. According to Lucian, Apelles was slandered by a jealous rival at a time when he was honored and rewarded above all other painters at the court of King Ptolemy.11 Falsely accused of conspiring against Ptolemy and precipitately judged by the king to be guilty of doing so, he was cast into prison and condemned to be executed. Ironically, then, his story undermines the advice Alberti gives to artists just before describing his painting. Though Alberti tells painters that probity and amiability will earn them good will and financial security (par. 52, Grayson 94), Apelles’s good character could not withstand the impact of slanderous speech. He was saved not by his probity or painting but only by the words of a fellow-prisoner testifying on his behalf. After he was released and recompensed for his suffering (with money and the gift of the slanderer himself as his slave), he painted the picture to requite the slanderer—and expose the viciousness of slander itself. Alberti’s suppression of any reference to what prompted Apelles’s painting is remarkable enough in itself, but still more so in light of Alberti’s own history. Like Apelles, he knew from his own experiencet the pain that political intrigue could inflict. He wrote his treatise just after returning to Florence from what he calls in his prologue to Della Pittura a “long exile” (Spencer 39). His grandfather Benedetto had been exiled from Florence by the Albizzi faction in 1387, and his father Lorenzo banished in 1401 (Spencer 13). Only in 1434 did Leon Battista return to his ancestral city, and in dedicating De Pictura the following year to Giovanni Francesco Gonzaga, Prince of Mantua, he is quite

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overtly seeking patronage. He asks the prince to place him among his most dedicated servants and to value him not of the least (Grayson 34)— in effect, to restore the Alberti family to the respect and acclaim it deserved, just as Apelles was restored to his position in the court of Ptolemy. Alberti gives no hint of this connection in his comments on Apelles’s painting. His sole aim is to illustrate the power of invention, which is here embodied in the words describing a group of painted figures. Also, besides suppressing any reference to what prompted the painting in Apelles’s own life, Alberti makes no mention of what Guarino repeatedly notes: the viewer’s act of interpretation in linking the figures to particular abstractions.12 Setting aside the point first broached in book 1 and insistently developed in book 2, Alberti makes no effort to show how the painting he describes makes its meaning visible without the aid or intervention of words. The painting Alberti describes is explicitly allegorical. Except for the donkey-eared man to whom the slander is reported, every figure in the painting is identified as a particular abstraction: Erat enim vir unus, cuius aures ingentes extabant, quem circa duae adstabant mulieres, Inscitia et Suspitio, parte alia ipsa Calumnia adventans, cui forma mulierculae speciosae sed quae ipso vultu nimis callere astu videbatur, manu sinistra facem accensam tenens, altera vero manu per capillos trahens adolescentem qui manus ad coelum tendit. Duxque huius est vir quidam pallore obsitus, deformis, truci aspectu, quem merito compares his quos in acie longus labor confecerit. Hunc esse Livorem merito dixere. Sunt et aliae duae Calumniae comites mulieres, ornamenta dominae componentes, Insidiae et Fraus. Post has pulla et sordidissima veste operta et sese dilanians adest Poenitentia, proxime sequente pudica et verecunda Veritate. (par. 53, Grayson 96) For there was one man, whose huge ears were standing out, [and] on whom two women were attending, Ignorance and Suspicion; in another part [of the picture appeared] Calumny herself approaching, whose form was that of a beautiful woman but who seemed in her very face to be too well-versed in cunning; holding a burning torch in her left hand, but with the other dragging by the hair a young man who stretches his hands to the sky. And her guide is indeed a man sown with pallor and misformed, with penetrating gaze, whom you would rightly compare to those whom long labor in the field has exhausted. Rightly they called him Envy.

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And there are two other female companions of Calumny—Treachery and Fraud—arranging their lady’s ornaments. After these, covered in a dark and extremely filthy garment and tearing her hair comes Penitence, with modest and shamefaced Truth following closely.

Erwin Panofsky long ago remarked that the final sentence of this passage includes a notable revision of Guarino: while Guarino (following Lucian) makes Penitence the shamefaced figure turning back to look at approaching Truth (“haec retrovertitur, ut proprius accedentem veritatem pudibunda suspiciat”), Alberti makes Truth shamefaced.13 Other differences between Guarino and Alberti—as well as between Alberti and Lucian—have been noted by scholars ranging from Förster to Massing.14 But so far as I know, no one has considered these differences in light of Alberti’s determination to make Apelles’s painting seem selfexplanatory. To compare Alberti with Guarino is to see that Alberti elides almost every reference to the viewer’s inferences about what the figures signify. While Guarino’s translation preserves Lucian’s references to what the viewer thinks and how the viewer learns what the figures mean, Alberti simply gives the figures their allegorical names. Compare for instance what Guarino and Alberti say about the two women shown attending on the seated man: Guarino: quem circum duae mulieres adstant, ignorantia, ut opinor [Lucian: dokei moi], atque suspicio. (qtd. Baxandall, Giotto 154; emphasis mine) whom two women attend upon, ignorance, as I think, and suspicion. Alberti: quem circa duae adstabant mulieres, Inscitia et Suspitio. on whom two women were attending, Ignorance and Suspicion.

In Guarino’s faithful translation of Lucian, inference or conjecture generates the allegorical names of the figures. By implication their expressions, gestures, or postures prompt the viewer to identify them with specific states of mind. But Alberti simply posits the identities of the two figures. Unsolicited by anything we are asked to imagine of their appearance in the picture, his words descend ab extra to regulate their meaning. Alberti’s departures from Guarino grow bolder as he proceeds. Compare the following passages:

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Guarino: Dux huius est vir quidam palore obsitus et informis, acriter intuens, quem eis iure comparavero, quos macie diuturnior confecit aegritudo. Hunc ipsum merito esse livorem quis coniectaverit. (qtd. Baxandall, Giotto 154; emphasis mine) Her leader is a man sown with pallor and malformed, gazing sharply, whom I will have justly compared to those whom long protracted sickness has consumed with emaciation. One will have conjectured that this one is deservedly [called] envy. Alberti: Duxque huius est vir quidam pallore obsitus, deformis, truci aspectu, quem merito compares his quos longus labor in acie confecerit. Hunc esse Livorem merito dixere. (par. 53, Grayson 96; emphasis mine) Her guide is indeed a man sown with pallor and deformed, with a savage look, whom you would rightly compare to those whom long service on the [battle]field has consumed. Rightly they called him Envy.

This time—for the only time—Alberti preserves one of Guarino’s references to the viewer’s interpretation of the picture. Like Guarino, he describes what the pale deformed man resembles—what his figure suggests to the mind of the viewer. But besides mistaking macie (with emaciation) for in acie (in the [battle]field), as Massing notes (57), and thus missing a crucial feature of the painted figure’s appearance, Alberti once again deletes the reference to conjecture and inference. Instead of deducing or conjecturing that a pale, sharp-eyed, emaciated figure might signify envy, we are asked to take as the personification of envy a figure whose appearance suggests something else: the exhaustion of an overworked soldier. Alberti’s final revision of Guarino is the most startling of all. Compare him with Guarino on the two female attendants of Calumny: Guarino: Aliae quoque duae comites sunt mulieres calumniae praeduces, quae illius ornamenta componunt. Harum altera erat insidia, fraus altera, sicut mihi quidam eius tabellae demonstrator explicuit. (qtd. Baxandall, Giotto 154) There are also two other companions of calumny, women leading her forward, who are arranging her ornaments. Of these one was treachery and the other fraud, as a pointer out [interpreter] of this picture explained to me.

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Alberti: Sunt et aliae duae Calumniae comites mulieres, ornamenta dominae componentes, Insidiae et Fraus. (par. 53, Grayson 96) And there are two other female companions of Calumny, arranging their lady’s trappings, Treachery and Fraud.

Once again Guarino follows Lucian in explaining how the viewer learned the identities of the two figures—this time by explicitly mentioning an interpreter. But Alberti says nothing of the interpreter. He simply assigns names. To be altogether fair to Alberti, we might explain his suppression of the interpreter—like his suppression of virtually all references to interpretation—as something necessitated by the context in which he uses Lucian’s description of Apelles’s painting. Unlike Guarino, he is not translating an entire essay by Lucian, but using the description alone to illustrate the power of inventio, which is fundamentally conceptual, “beyond the contingency of pictorial execution. It involves the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’ of execution” (Rosand 155). As such, it is also beyond the ‘how’ of reception. It negates what Louis Marin calls “the deixis of an utterance,” which “is constituted by the orientational traits of language, traits related to the time and situation where the utterance takes place.” 15 Drawing on Emile Benveniste’s distinction between discourse and narrative in verbal texts, Marin argues that historical painting—which is to say painting that tells a story, painting that narrates—erases the deictic circumstances of discourse. It excludes references to the speaker and listener, or in pictorial terms to the painter and beholder.16 This definition hardly covers all history paintings, any more than Benveniste’s definition covers all textual narratives, but it nicely complements Rosand’s definition of inventio as a conceptual object, the isolated “what” or subject matter of painting as Alberti presents it. The painting Alberti describes is not deictic. It does not present itself as a coded message sent by the aggrieved Apelles to a gullible ruler, or to anyone else in a position of power, or to a thoughtful viewer that is invited to decode it. The painting Alberti describes is impersonal, like the description itself, which is nearly all written in the third person. The sole reference to the reader— “you would rightly compare” the pale miscreant to an exhausted soldier—involves a response that occurs on the level of what Panofsky calls “primary” or “natural” meaning (Studies 5), the meaning that ordinary experience teaches us to recognize in—or construct from—depicted

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forms.17 Nevertheless, recognizing the pale miscreant as Envy (Livor) requires the sort of iconographic instruction that an unspecified thirdperson “they” (subject of dixere, “they said”) is said to have furnished. Here for the first and only time Alberti openly admits the intervention of a word not somehow “given”—not expressively signified—by the depicted forms themselves. This small chink in the armor of what presents itself as pure, objective description, as simple enumeration of what is “in” the picture, makes no room for an interpreter’s ego, the “I” of a beholder’s eye. Elsewhere Alberti expunges all of Guarino’s references to the views of a first-person beholder, such as opinor, “I think.” Yet if Alberti felt awkward about using the first person to express thoughts not his own, he could have simply quoted Lucian (in Guarino’s translation), just as he earlier quotes the words of (Hermes) Trismegistus (par. 27, Grayson 62). As much as for any other reason, I believe, he avoids quoting a first-person interpretation of Apelles’s painting because he does not want to jettison openly his earlier claim that painted figures can speak for themselves. Yet the chink in the armor of his would-be objective description— the brief reference to what “they say” the pale miscreant signifies—discloses Alberti’s awareness that painted figures cannot speak allegorical meanings to an uninstructed observer. Pictorial allegory needs more than the silent rhetoric of painted gesture and expression; it needs the intervention of words. Whether written or spoken, whether actually embedded as labels in the painting itself or somehow communicated to the observer, words must be attached to motifs—to naturally recognizable painted forms—in order for them to become “images” of specific abstractions (Panofsky, Studies 6). Alberti could have said something about this sort of construct, especially since Giotto—whose work he cites—had produced an allegorical painting: a fresco for the Great Hall of the Podesta depicting Good and Bad Government, complete with the virtues of Strength, Prudence, Justice, and Temperance (Cast 52–53). But allegory hardly fits the naturally expressive model of painting that Alberti has painstakingly developed in the first two books of his treatise. Hence he not only avoids mentioning it as such, he suppresses the crucial roles that interpretation and special instruction play in making the meaning he attributes to Apelles’s Calumny. The result is a description that says more about the power of words than of painted figures, more about the wholly verbalizable inventio of the painting, its conceptual substance, than about what Alberti asks us to imagine at the end of his description: the gratia and amoenitas of its picto-

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3.1 Sandro Botticelli, Calumny of Apelles (c. 1494–1495). Uffizi, Florence. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

rially realized historia.18 Alberti’s words are at once descriptive and prescriptive. They determine and regulate the meaning of the ancient picture they describe just as they determine and regulate the meaning of any modern picture that might be generated from the description of the ancient one—such as Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles, probably painted in the mid-1490s, about sixty years after Alberti wrote De Pictura (fig. 3.1). Such a painting could not speak for itself. As Cast says, it was designed for learned viewers such as Antonio Segni, to whom the painter gave it, and his son Fabio, a poet, who could explain it to their friends.19 Other pictures of calumny came with words of their own. In the earliest known Renaissance drawing of the subject, an illustration titled APELLIS PICTURA DE CALUMNIA and made to decorate the translation of Lucian’s essay on calumny that Bartolommeo della Fonte presented to the Duke of Ferrara in 1472, the chief figures are each labeled with an abstract term (Cast 41–42). They are likewise labeled in the drawing of calumny that Mantegna made around 1490 and in the engraving made after this drawing by Girolamo Mocetto (fig. 3.2). Without such labels in a picture of calumny, it needed either an already instructed viewer or an accompanying text. In 1517 Bernhard Adelmann, a canon of Augsburg, sent to Willibald Pirckheimer two translations of Lucian’s essay on

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3.2 Girolamo Mocetto, Calumny of Apelles after Mantegna (c. 1506). Copperplate engraving. Used by permission of the British Museum.

calumny, asking him which of the two he thought superior. “For I would like,” he wrote, “to give a copy of that piece, together with a picture of Calumny, to my prince” (Cast 27–28).20 The implication is clear. Whichever translation Pirckheimer might choose, Adelmann knew very well that the picture of Calumny would be unreadable by itself. Its meaning could be construed only in light of the words that would accompany it.




Alberti’s treatise on painting is subtly but unmistakably riven by a fundamental contradiction. Though he aims to show that painting can move the beholder just as powerfully as speech can, that its silent rhetoric of gesture and expression can signify a whole inner world of thoughts and feelings, he cannot sustain the would-be natural link between painted visible sign and invisible signified. Straining as the argument proceeds, the link breaks altogether when Alberti tries to illustrate the power of invention in art with a pointedly edited version of Lucian’s description of an allegorical painting. Here the expressive power of painting—whether ancient or modern, whether merely recorded in an ancient text or actually revived on canvas—gives way to the regulative, determining power of words. In spite of himself, Alberti at last makes the rhetoric of painting depend on the rhetoric of speech.

Chapter 4

Text and Design Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience If contradiction permeates De Pictura, Alberti himself is contradicted by William Blake. Working in England some 350 years after Alberti’s treatise first appeared, Blake makes words and images cooperate in ways that radically challenge its definition of painting. While Alberti seeks to show that painting can signify almost anything without the intervention of language, Blake—as poet and painter—strives to integrate the two. In the composite art of his illuminated poems, pictures surround and interpenetrate the words of his texts, and we cannot fully comprehend any of those texts without the graphic context in which he quite literally designed them to be read. Nevertheless, critics can and often have torn asunder what Blake has joined together. Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947), a classic study of Blake, makes almost no reference to his pictures, and a number of other critics have contrived to say little or nothing at all about those pictures even while writing illuminating words about his texts.1 Consider four noteworthy commentaries on Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Robert Gleckner’s The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake (1959), Hazard Adams’s chapters on the Songs in his William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems (1963), E. D. Hirsch’s Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake (1964), and Heather Glen’s Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1983). Of these four commentaries, only Hirsch’s poem-by-poem explication treats Blake’s designs for the Songs along with the texts, and even Hirsch separates his comments on the two, dealing first with the text of each poem at length and then with the design in a brief afterword. Blake’s designs are ignored or slighted at least as often 83

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as they are read and elucidated. If Blake’s composite art is so indissoluble that “no part [of it] can be neglected,” as Jean Hagstrum says, then much of Blake criticism is vitiated by negligence.2 But is it really? Is E. P. Thompson negligent when he writes an explication of “London” that makes no reference to the design but includes five pages (6–10) on the political implications of the word “charter’d” in the first line of the poem? 3 Even the most fervent admirer of Blake’s composite art would have to recognize what Thompson contributes to our understanding of “London,” just as we might recognize the value of a good commentary on the composite art of any one poem in the Songs, or perhaps of several, even though such a commentary “neglected” to discuss the others. All good criticism is selective. If it focused equally on everything, it could never tell us anything in particular. Given the richness and intricacy of Blake’s texts, there is nothing inherently illegitimate about a commentary focussed exclusively on them, especially since Blake’s two languages—verbal and pictorial—have been recognized even by champions of his composite art as “two vigorously independent modes of expression.” 4 So I shall not argue in this essay that each of Blake’s Songs must be read as an indissoluble composite of image and text, that no explication of the text alone can tell us anything worth knowing. I would rather begin by frankly acknowledging the difficulty of reading Blake’s texts in their illuminated contexts, and I mean this quite literally. In the Blake Trust edition of the Songs, which includes the best facsimiles of them now generally available, the lettering on the plates is sometimes so faint and tiny as to be indecipherable, and the reader is driven from the plates to the letterpress texts printed beside them.5 When we return to the plates with the words in mind, the design often seems not so much to illustrate the text as to demand further explanation. On the first plate of “The Little Girl Lost” in Songs of Experience (SIE plate 34), the verbal account of a lost and wandering seven-year-old girl is accompanied by the picture of a young woman embracing a nude young man.6 Unless Blake is here depicting the loving couple he describes in “A Little Girl Lost” (SIE plate 51), as David Erdman suggests, we must find some way to link the little girl of the text with the eroticized young woman of the design.7 Given the difficulty of doing so and the demonstrable value of criticism focused solely on Blake’s texts, we may reasonably ask what can be learned from the analysis of his composite art, or—to put the question another way—what text and design in Blake’s work contribute to each other. Rather than assuming that these two elements are inseparable, I

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grant they are separable, but I will try to show how they interact in the Songs and what we can learn from the study of this interaction. The best introduction to the composite art of the Songs is, I believe, Blake’s own “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence: Piping down the valleys wild Piping songs of pleasant glee On a cloud I saw a child. And he laughing said to me. Pipe a song about a Lamb: So I piped with merry chear, Piper pipe that song again So I piped, he wept to hear. Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe Sing thy songs of happy chear, So I sung the same again While he wept with joy to hear. Piper sit thee down and write In a book that all may read So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed. And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs, Every child may joy to hear. (SIE plate 4)8

It is startling to realize that the first three stanzas of this “Introduction” to a book of illuminated poems chiefly concern neither pictures nor words but rather music, and thus remind us of an element in Blake’s composite art that is commonly slighted even by those who insist on the importance of his designs. The visual impact of the plates in the Songs makes the whole collection seem better designated by the title of Blake’s first volume, Poetical Sketches (1783). But that book has no designs, and its title—which may not have been chosen by Blake himself—simply reflects a fashionable metaphor for poetic descriptions in the later eighteenth century. What Blake’s “Introduction” suggests is not that the Songs translate pictures into words—into the poetical sketches of the waning sister arts tradition—but that they transform songs into illuminated texts.9

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Ronald Paulson interprets this transformation as a fall from innocence to experience: from the spontaneity and immediacy of piping, where “the lyric was the breath of the lyricist,” to the deliberateness of writing, which cuts the piper off from his lyrics.10 But the introduction doesn’t represent writing as a fall. Writing is rather the culmination of a process—the gradual assimilation of one art form into another. In the first stanza, the piped song is wordless, a pre-verbal melody expressing simply a mood of “pleasant glee.” In the second stanza the melody becomes programmatic, or at least thematic; it is “about a lamb.” But since it still emanates from a pipe, it remains wordless. Only in the third stanza do the piper’s wordless melodies become the singer’s verbal songs—one of which is this very song of introduction. Once the song has been verbalized, its words can be transcribed with a “rural pen” made from a hollow reed. Such a pen recalls the piper’s pipe and yet can also serve as an artist’s “pencil” or paintbrush when its tip has “stain’d the water clear” for watercolor painting. If “stain’d” suggests a violation of purity and thus a fall from innocence, it also signifies the genesis of an art at once verbal, visual, and auditory, for as the very last line of the poem tells us, the songs which the piper transcribes and illuminates may be heard as well as read and seen. Thus the end of the “Introduction” completes a cycle, recalling the musical joy of the opening and paradoxically affirming the power of Blake’s illuminated book to perpetuate this sound in the visible language of text and design. A thoroughgoing explication of Blake’s composite art, therefore, would require us to scrutinize not just his text and design but also his music—insofar as his prosody conveys it—and to explain how all three of these elements cooperate. But we can learn a good deal about Blake’s Songs by focusing on just two of these elements and seeing what happens to the harmonious integration of them which the “Introduction” seems to proclaim. If text and design are in fact “vigorously independent,” as Mitchell contends (Blake’s Composite Art 3), we might inscribe them in the system of contraries which permeate the Songs as a whole. The simplest way of doing so is to read the designs as pictures of innocence and the texts as articulations of experience. At the bottom of “The Chimney Sweeper” in Songs of Innocence (SIE plate 12), beneath a text that records in the very first stanza the experience of abandonment, misery, and filth, Blake depicts Tom Dacre’s innocent dream of salvation: children released from their chimneylike coffins of black and nakedly dancing on a heavenly green. If we read this poem with the eyes of innocence, we look through the misery repre-

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sented by the text to the joy radiated by the picture, which finally overcomes the words of experience. In Songs of Experience this process is reversed—but with no essential change in the relative values of text and design. In the design for “A Little Girl Lost” (SIE plate 51) Blake depicts a barren tree entwined by a leafy, fruitful vine and surrounded by birds—an innocent vision of regenerative vitality. But the text tells the story of how a pair of lovers met fearlessly “in garden bright” until the girl’s father found her out and terrified her with a look “like the holy book.” The father personifies the repression to which the text leads. Only from the text, as David Erdman says, do we learn that all the libidinal energy signified by the vine “can be negated . . . by the parent tree” (93). Yet however antithetical Blake’s pictures and texts may sometimes be, we cannot define their relation simply in terms of the contrast between innocence and experience, or energy and repression, or joy and sorrow. The text of a poem such as “Spring” expresses an innocent gaiety quite as much as the accompanying illustrations do, and in “The Chimney Sweeper” of Songs of Experience (SIE plate 37), the picture of the barefoot boy lugging a sack of soot through snowy streets reveals the misery of experience quite as much as do the opening words of the text: “A little black thing among the snow: / Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!” The relation between text and design becomes still more complicated in the set of poems called “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found” (SIE plates 34–36). Here the picture of the embracing couple on the first plate signifies a joyous sexual experience that the text and the illustration between the two poems represent as the fearful, woebegone parents of Lyca see it: as the desolation of a little girl “lost in desart wild” and exposed to predatory beasts. But the final illustration for “The Little Girl Lost” works together with the final stanzas of the text to transform this vision of desolation into one of redemption. The predatory lion becomes “a spirit arm’d in gold” who dispels the parents’ care, and the beasts become gentle protectors of the sexually initiated Lyca as well as of the children playing among them.11 Since the relation between text and design in the Songs ranges from radically antithetical to mutually corroborative, it is hardly easier to generalize about this relation than to fix a consistent value for either one of its components. But we can understand the relation best, I believe, by comparing Blake’s management of it in Songs of Innocence with his management of it in Songs of Experience. In the process, we can also learn what Blake’s composite art contributes to his portrayal of “the two contrary states of the human soul.” 12

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The title pages of the two sets of Songs reveal the contrariety of innocence and experience as vividly as any two pages could. On the title page of Songs of Innocence (fig. 4.1), the words of the title fully participate in the pictorial design of the plate as a whole. The letters of the word “SONGS” sprout leafy, undulating growths that follow the wavy line of the apple tree branch below them, and tiny figures appear within several of the letters. Erdman sees the winged scribe leaning on the slant of the N as a picture of the author (Blake 44), who is also represented as a widehatted piper significantly nestling in the I of “INNOCENCE.” From the

4.1 William Blake, Title page for Songs of Innocence (1789).

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viewpoint of “The Author and Printer W. Blake,” then, the design of the title page synthesizes the activities of piping, writing, and depicting. Furthermore, from the viewpoint of the children depicted at lower left, the design also synthesizes the activities of reading words, viewing pictures, and directly experiencing a pastoral world. If the book shown to the children by the mother or nursemaid seated at left may be regarded as Songs of Innocence itself, the children enter a pastoral world through the pages of a book at once verbal and pictorial. They do not stop looking at natural objects in order to start reading, nor do they forsake pictures in

4.2 William Blake, Title page for Songs of Experience (1794).

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order to study words. In the perfect harmony of innocence, all these activities become one. The title page of Experience (fig. 4.2) resembles the title page of Innocence in two ways. At the top of the former, the words “SONGS” and “of ” sprout leaves, flowers, and a curling tendril; below, a boy and girl bend over to the left, repeating the postures of the boy and girl leaning over the book on the title page of Innocence. But these resemblances between the two pages only sharpen our sense of what differentiates them. While the cursive letters of “INNOCENCE” follow the flowing lines of the tree growing up around the word and of the curling vine at lower right, the rigidly upright letters of “EXPERIENCE” seem to form an iron fence against hope, as Erdman says (Blake 71), and they run from one side of the plate to the other, allowing nothing to flow around or grow through them. The word “EXPERIENCE” also presses down on the bending children like a weight and reinforces the horizontals beneath it: the straight top of the paneled wall, the stiffly supine bodies of the dead or dying parents, the bed or bier on which they lie, and the platform under it. On the title page of Innocence, text and design work together to signify ascent. Though the children look down at the book, the curving outline of the girl’s body matches the rising spiral of the vine and points up past the head of the seated woman to the piper nestled in the I of “INNOCENCE,” a letter which in turn points upward to “SONGS.” On the title page of Experience, text and design work together to frustrate ascent. The dancing girl and boy on either side of the “of” recall the birdlike gaiety of the figures perched in the letters of “SONGS” and “INNOCENCE,” but the word “EXPERIENCE” bars the way back to that soaring joy and keeps the mourning children down. These two title pages, then, reveal in different ways how closely text and design can collaborate in the Songs. Though each has a life of its own, each extends the meaning of the other. “Blake’s words are visual,” Jean Hagstrum writes, “his paintings literary and conceptual” (William Blake 10). While Blake’s words assume a graphic function without ceasing to be words, without losing their linguistic signification, his designs speak a language of their own. To put a winged scribe within the N of the word “SONGS” is not to illustrate the act of singing but to reveal the synoptic vision of innocence: a vision in which writing and singing become one. If the vision of innocence integrates not only writing and singing but painting as well, it is tempting to infer that all of these arts diverge in the Songs of Experience, that they can no longer cohere once the world of

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innocence has been left behind. In fact the arts—or more precisely text and design—collaborate throughout the Songs, but they collaborate for different ends. While they work together in Innocence to reveal a world of radical integration, they work together in Experience to signify radical disintegration. As we move from Innocence to Experience, what changes is not the fact of collaboration between text and design but the nature of it. Consider, for instance, the contrast between “Infant Joy” in Innocence (plate 3) and “Infant Sorrow” in Experience (plate 4). Pictorially, the essential difference between the two is that the first is visionary or otherworldly and the second naturalistic, or—one might say—novelistic. In “Infant Joy,” the fantastic picture of an infant resting on its mother’s lap and attended by an angel within the petals of a gigantic flower evokes the magical births of medieval romance as well as the Annunciation and the birth of Christ. In “Infant Sorrow,” the picture of an infant flailing its limbs on a bed and attended by a nursemaid or mother within a heavily curtained room looks forward to the recognizably realistic world of Victorian fiction, where children appear in furnished interiors—not within flowers. Yet the striking thing about these two pictures is that by themselves, they do not unequivocally portray a contrast between joy and sorrow. “Infant Joy” does indeed offer us a picture of contentment, but the outstretched arms of the child on the bed in “Infant Sorrow” could signify a joyous exuberance, and the outstretched arms of the woman, whose bending form repeats the curving outline of the petals in “Infant Sorrow,” could signify the wish to comfort and caress rather than the urge to repress. Only when we read the pictures in light of the texts do they yield up definite meanings. At the same time, we must of course read the texts in light of their illuminated—and illuminating—contexts. The design of “Infant Joy” actually compels us to experience the text of the poem as a graphic phenomenon first. Before we can read the minutely etched words as such, we see the entire text enclosed by the curving stems of the flowers, just as the infant above the text is enclosed by the mother, the angel, and the protective embrace of the petals. Thus the text itself embodies the fragility of an infant. It demands to be protectively embraced rather than dismissed on grounds of implausibility—as Coleridge did when he complained that two day infants cannot smile.13 For that is the least of its implausibilities, as we can see from the whole text: I have no name I am but two days old.—

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What shall I call thee? I happy am Joy is my name,— Sweet joy befall thee! Pretty joy! Sweet joy but two days old. Sweet joy I call thee: Thou dost smile. I sing the while Sweet joy befall thee.

The text makes its appearance in a visionary but also radically humanized world. One of the many things that a printed version of this poem cannot show is the graphic rhyme at the end of the first stanza between the sinuous, elongated tail of the “y” in “joy” and the slender, undulant form of the leaf immediately to the right of it. In the world of innocence, language does not separate humankind from other forms of life, or distinguish man from those he dominates by the very act of naming them, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost, where the speaking of the serpent—another undulant form—can only portend the fatal subversion of man’s authority. In Songs of Innocence, all living things possess the power to express themselves. If “the green woods laugh with the voice of joy” in “Laughing Song” (SIE plate 15), the shape of a leaf can duplicate the shape of a letter in “Infant Joy,” and thus help to articulate the essential word of the poem. Blake here integrates text and design in order to represent the humanization of vegetative life. Pictures become instruments of linguistic expression because all of the living things which they represent have the characteristically human capacity to speak. The graphic context of the poem thus prepares us to suspend our disbelief in the articulatory powers of the infant, who is not only capable of smiling and formulating complete (albeit simple) utterances at two days old, but who also precociously preempts the traditional prerogative of its parent. Instead of receiving its name from the parent, the child names itself, identifying itself as the embodiment of an innate joy. In the conventional world, a two day infant can neither speak nor smile because it must learn both of those actions over a period of time through imitation of the parent. But in the visionary world of Innocence, the child speaks first, expressing a joy that radiates from within, and the mother simply reacts to this initiatory act of the child: “Sweet joy I call thee.” Only in the last line of each stanza does the mother introduce a note of adult anx-

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iety about the future. While the child lives in a present tense of unequivocally joyous self-affirmation (“I happy am”), the mother’s words foreshadow a fall into the misery of experience even as they express the wish for a future of happiness: “Sweet joy befall thee!” With the longest and strongest of its stresses falling literally on the syllable “fall,” this makes us feel the vulnerability of the child and tempts us to read the entire poem as the ironic celebration of a joy doomed to be crushed by the weight of experience. But to read the poem as simply ironic is to miss the power that text and design alike attribute to the infant. The text reveals that the infant is born with the power to smile, speak, name itself, and radiate joy; the design reveals the irrepressible vitality of the flower from which the infant is born, and the flamelike upward curving of the vivid red petals anticipates a notable passage in Blake’s The French Revolution, written in 1791, just two years after Songs of Innocence first appeared. In this passage the revolutionary Commons “convene in the Hall of the Nations; like spirits of fire in the beautiful / Porches of the Sun, to plant beauty in the desert craving abyss, they gleam / On the anxious city; all children new-born first behold them.” 14 So in the design of “Infant Joy” as in the text of his explicitly revolutionary prophecy, Blake uses fire, flowers, and infants to express the innate power of a visionary innocence. What happens to that power in the world of experience, however, is all too painfully shown in “Infant Sorrow,” where text and design collaborate to reveal a fundamental disintegration. To compare the pair of figures in “Infant Sorrow” with the mother and child in “Infant Joy” is first of all to see a picture of alienation. Instead of resting contentedly on his mother’s lap, the infant of “Infant Sorrow” sits upright on a bed, spreading his notably muscular arms and legs as if striving to rise. Whether or not the woman bending over the infant with outstretched arms intends to comfort or simply to seize him, he is resisting her. The text of “Infant Sorrow,” which is placed above the pictorial design rather than (as in “Infant Joy”) enclosed within it, confirms the alienation signified by the picture but does not furnish a verbal equivalent of it. What it offers instead is the strikingly compressed and accelerated story of a birth into experience: My mother groand! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud: Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

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Struggling in my fathers hands: Striving against my swadling bands: Bound and weary I thought best To sulk upon my mothers breast.

If Blake had followed Lessing’s theory of illustration, he would have depicted with this text the “most suggestive” moment in the story it unfolds: the moment “from which the preceding and succeeding actions are most easily comprehensible” (78). Presumably this would be the moment at which the infant grudgingly surrenders to his parents, or— like Laocoon with the encoiling snakes—struggles in vain against the hands and bands of parental constraint. Instead, by comparing text and design we discover that Blake is actually depicting a moment of innocence, of revolutionary energy freely manifesting its infant power just before it has been tamed. Thus, while the correspondence between text and design in “Infant Joy” signifies the joyous unanimity of all living things, the antagonism between text and design in “Infant Sorrow,” especially between the verbal account of the bound infant and the picture of the momentarily free one, graphically accentuates the suffering and isolation of the infant trapped in experience. The text further sharpens this sense of entrapment by turning the externalized dialogue of “Infant Joy” into an interior monologue. Instead of conversing with his mother, the infant talks only to himself. His parents no longer speak to him at all; they groan and weep. Even the language in which he describes himself cruelly parodies the “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence. The happy music of the piper becomes a cry of pain (“piping loud”), and the laughing child who inspires the piper and who evokes the Christ of the Apocalypse by riding on a cloud now becomes a cloud-hidden fiend recalling the deranged, solipsistic, radically alienated singer of the “Mad Song” in Blake’s Poetical Sketches: a singer who specifically compares himself to “a fiend in a cloud.” 15 Yet if we read the text in light of the design, we are compelled to see the primordial energy of innocence erupting beneath the language of helpless submission. If the text turns the cloud-riding child of Innocence into a cloud-hidden fiend, the outstretched arms and legs of the naked infant on the white oval bed in the design for “Infant Sorrow” clearly recall the outstretched limbs of the naked child on the white oval cloud in the frontispiece to Innocence (fig. 4.3). By thus evoking a picture of primordially innocent energy and apocalyptic renewal, Blake’s design helps us to understand the meaning of “dangerous” in his text. The world is dangerous not because it threatens the helpless nakedness of the child

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4.3 William Blake, Frontispiece to Songs of Innocence (1789).

with violent assault, as the wolves and tigers of “Night” in Innocence (SIE plates 20–21) menace the lambs. Paradoxically, the world is dangerous because it threatens the child with overprotection: with the relentless grip of parental hands, with the stifling bondage of swaddling clothes. The swaddling clothes appear in the design as heavy folds of drapery looming over the child, but essentially it is the text that signifies the work of suppression. Because the mere act of being born—of leaping into the world—challenges an order solidified by custom and conformity, the child who pictorially appears to us as an apocalyptic Christ appears to the parents in the text as a fiend: a figure diabolically assaulting the status quo, or more precisely the passivity that is conventionally identified with goodness, as Blake says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.16 Thus Blake

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fully exploits the opposition between text and design to show how the world of experience distorts the images of innocence, suppresses its vitality, and breaks up the innocent communion of all living things. From this extended scrutiny of just two poems I draw a simple conclusion about Blake’s composite art: that the best way to understand it is to read both text and design continuously in light of each other. Doing so means not just scrutinizing the interaction of text and design in a single poem, but using one picture to explain another just as we commonly use one text to gloss another. To show further where this method of reading can lead, I will apply it briefly to the two quintessential poems of innocence and experience: “The Lamb” (fig. 4.4) and “The Tyger” (fig. 4.5).

4.4 William Blake, “The Lamb,” Songs of Innocence (1789).

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Like the text of “Infant Joy,” the text of “The Lamb” is a dialogue initiated by an innocent speaker—in this case a child rather than an infant. The child asks the lamb about its creation (“Little Lamb who made thee[?]”) in the first stanza, and then, though the lamb has “a tender voice,” the child answers his own question in the second. The two stanzas thus constitute the two halves of a catechism lesson, but the answer does not come from any adult authority. It flows rather from an intuition made possible by Christ, who perfectly mediates between the child and the lamb because he became both, so that all three names are interchangeable: “I a child & thou a lamb / We are called by his name.” To pipe a song about a lamb, then, as the cloud-riding child asks the piper to

4.5 William Blake, “The Tyger,” Songs of Experience (1794).

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do in the “Introduction” to Innocence, is to celebrate the perfect communion of lamb, child, and Christ. This spirit of communion is plainly underscored by the design (fig. 4.4). With only a single, slender branch to mark the break between them, the two stanzas hang between two sinuous trees embracing at the top, and beneath them is the picture of a child holding his hands out to the mouth of a lamb, presumably feeding it. Since the lamb pictured is one of a flock that is resting and grazing immediately behind it, the community of two (or three) represented in the text becomes in the design a community of many. Commentators on the composite art of “The Tyger” frequently complain about the discrepancy between the ferocity of the beast apostrophized in the text and the apparent harmlessness of the creature depicted beneath it, especially in some copies of the poem, where—says Geoffrey Keynes— the creature “appears to smile as if it were a tame cat.” 17 But if the tiger’s expression may be read as a smile on any plate, it must surely be linked to the smile of the creator in stanza five of the poem: a smile of admiration for his own terrifying handiwork—or even of sadistic delight in it. In any case, whatever we make of the tiger’s expression, the outline of its body clearly reveals the latent power of the short, straight, thick forelegs and the agility of the outstretched hindlegs. Even if this picture falls short of the terrible sublimity expressed by Blake’s words, as Edmund Burke could have predicted, we can reasonably ask whether the design of “The Tyger” contributes anything valuable to the impact of the plate as a whole.18 My own answer is yes. I find the design essential because it helps to resolve the radical asymmetry that confronts us when we compare “The Tyger” to “The Lamb.” While the text of “The Lamb” is catechetical, with the second stanza reassuringly answering the first, the text of “The Tyger” is relentlessly interrogative, a series of unanswered questions. In “The Lamb,” everything about the design works to promote a sense of communion. The text is symmetrically framed by the vines, and the picture below shows the child and the lamb together in front of the flock. On the plate of “The Tyger,” the text is off-center and asymmetrically framed between a thin strand on the left side and a thick, leafless tree on the right, and the picture below shows a solitary tiger without human or animal companionship of any kind. In a sense, the only way to “complete” the picture of the tiger is to set it beside the plate of “The Lamb,” so that the tiger is represented in the very act of stalking his innocent prey: lamb and lamblike child. But Blake isolates the tiger both pictorially and verbally. Though he reminds us of “The Lamb” at one point in the poem (“Did he who made

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the Lamb make thee?”), he expresses no sympathy for the tiger’s prey, only admiration for the tiger itself and for its creator, whose mysterious identity lurks quite as much in the design as in the text. Textually, the poem is framed by its opening and closing stanzas, which are alike except for the change of a single word. The poem begins: Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

With the single change of “Could” to “Dare” in the final line, the last stanza perfectly matches this opening one. The poem is therefore textually framed by questions about framing—questions that inevitably draw our attention to the ways in which the text and the design are framed on the plate. In the text, iambic tetrameter couplets frame the speaker’s explosive questions; in the design, double lines frame the plate as a whole, and the outline of the tiger’s form frames and defines its latent power.19 In addition, unlike the text above it, the tiger’s form is perfectly but not statically centered at the bottom of the plate. With its raised head thrust forward and its left hind leg stretched backwards, the tiger’s form embodies a line of energy running parallel to the diagonal of its left thigh: a line that runs from lower right up through the tiger’s head and to the crucial word “Dare.” Thus the painted tiger graphically reveals the audacity of the one whose immortal hand and eye dared to frame its fearful symmetry in so many different ways: Blake himself. To study the discrepancy between text and design in “The Tyger,” then, is finally to learn how Blake reintegrates these heterogeneous elements in the radically divisive world of experience. I began this essay by admitting that critics who ignore Blake’s designs may nonetheless say illuminating things about his texts. Having just now presumed to analyze “The Tyger” without a single reference to any of its middle stanzas, I must end by admitting that not even the most scrupulous commentary on the patterns of Blake’s composite art will necessarily do justice to the richness of his texts. So I do not claim to have the best method of reading the Songs. What I have tried to show is simply that a continuing concentration on the interplay between text and design in the Songs reveals aspects of their meaning—and of the contrariety between innocence and experience—that we can learn in no other way.

Chapter 5

Marginal Language Word and Image in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion Oothoon, the heroine of William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, is probably the most remarkable woman Blake ever conceived. She is also one of the most complicated, disturbing, and least readily assimilable figures to appear in his poetry—a figure who frustrates all attempts to categorize her. Though she is generally taken as the voice of prophetic liberation, her message is—as Thomas Vogler has noted—anything but unambiguously liberating.1 As “the soft soul of America” (1.3), she allegorically signifies a country whose political virginity has been tainted by slavery, for as Bromion tells her: “Thy soft American plains are mine and mine thy north & south: / Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun” (1.20–21).2 But she herself says nothing explicitly abolitionist, nothing that would specifically align her with those demanding an end to British slave trading in 1793, when the poem was issued.3 More problematically, though she denounces the exploitation of women—such as the chain and rod of enforced marriages (5.22)— she does not speak for any version of feminism generally recognized in her time or ours. She is far too passionate and sensual to embody the ideal of rational womankind espoused by Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and she seems far too self-denying to qualify as a liberated woman in the modern sense.4 After Bromion rapes her, she tries to appease her jealous lover Theotormon by offering her “defiled bosom” to his predatory eagles (2.13–15), and she apparently balks at nothing in her eagerness to gratify his lust. While denouncing the “hypocrite modesty” 101

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of the girl who “with nets found under [her] night pillow . . . catch[es] virgin joy / And brand[s] it with the name of whore; & sell[s] it in the night” (6.16, 11–12), she herself offers to spread “silken nets and traps of adamant” in order to catch girls for Theotormon and “view their wanton play / In lovely copulation bliss on bliss” with him (7.25–26). Statements such as this have led several critics—not just Vogler—to see Oothoon as fundamentally compromised. Leopold Damrosch, Jr. finds her mired in “sadomasochism and voyeurism,” and Michael Cooke says that when she proposes to catch girls for Theotormon, she simply makes “prostitutes replace the rapist Bromion at the third corner of the triangle, and Theotormon becomes the advantaged male where she herself had been the victimized female.” 5 Oothoon’s incapacity to shake her victimized status is precisely what troubles even her defenders. Susan Fox calls Oothoon “the strongest and most independent” of Blake’s women, yet also finds her “helplessly victimized by powers completely outside her control,” a figure at once unable and unwilling to free herself from male authority. Since this includes the authority of Blake’s own system, which treats the Female Will as essentially hostile to the harmonious unity of the individual, Oothoon—says Fox—is “trapped in a reality which recognizes no female power but evil female power.” 6 Vogler takes this argument one step further. For him, Oothoon is psychically as well as physically bound—at once the “ventriloquating mirror” of male desire and the transgressive “other” that is paradoxically engendered and regulated by the very authority it purports to defy.7 But as I hope to show in the following pages, Oothoon’s language is far too complex and ironic to serve as the mirror of male desire. Furthermore, the Foucauldian categorization of Oothoon as transgressor fixes her in polar opposition to limit, even though Vogler himself says that she threatens “the loss of all aspects of identity that are figuratively (in discourse) and socially (in reality) built on the propriety of things being in their proper places” (304). It is precisely her resistance to being polarized—not just her defiance of Urizenic authority and oppression— that makes Oothoon so difficult to classify. Wailing to a Theotormon who sits “Upon the margined ocean” (8.12), Oothoon is herself marginal. She embodies the paradox embedded in contemporary feminist criticism, which has powerfully exposed the nature of female powerlessness and which has struggled to formulate a language that would somehow operate outside what Jacques Lacan calls “the law of the father”: the law that governs the symbolic order of language.8 Escaping the sentence of this law—a sentence at once linguistic and judgmental—does not necessarily mean gaining a victory. Paula Treichler

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observes that in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written some hundred years after Blake’s poem, the female narrator gradually devises an “impertinent” language that defies the diagnostic “sentence” of her doctor husband, liberates the woman symbolically trapped within the pattern in the wallpaper, and “articulate[s] the nature of women’s condition.” Yet in spite of these achievements, Treichler says, the narrator “remains physically bound by a rope and locked in a room. . . . Thus women’s control of language is left metaphorical and evocative: the story only hints at possibilities for change” (75). Oothoon likewise remains physically bound at the end of Blake’s Visions, and precisely because she seeks a genuine alternative to the language of male authority and assertion, she risks losing control of her own words. In fact her speeches seem to exemplify a recent description of “female language” as “open, nonlinear, unfinished, fluid, exploded, fragmented, polysemic, attempting to speak the body i.e., the unconscious, involving silence, incorporating the simultaneity of life as opposed to or clearly different from the pre-conceived, oriented, masterly or ‘didactic’ languages.” 9 Nina Baym aptly observes that such a description of female language can all too easily confirm “the idea of the hopelessly irrational, disorganized ‘weaker sex’ desired by the masculine Other.” 10 But Oothoon’s language is not irrational or disorganized; it is rigorously controlled by her imagination, which is at once intellectual and emotional, critically acute and “open to joy and to delight” (6.22). What makes her marginal is precisely her resistance to classification, her refusal to be polarized. Straddling the line between defiant assertion and helpless submission, Oothoon challenges all binary oppositions. She reenacts what Blake does in the radically antinomian Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which he completed at about the same time as he wrote Visions and which ends with an echo of Oothoon’s very last words: “every thing that lives is Holy” (Marriage, plate 27).11 If Marriage subverts the values traditionally attached to such elementary opposites as good and evil, Oothoon questions the oppositions traditionally used to define gender: oppositions such as “terror & meekness,” which recall the contrast that Edmund Burke drew between the sublimity of patriarchal domination and the beauty of female submission.12 The text of Visions tells us that after Bromion rapes Oothoon, the two are bound together: “Bound back to back in Bromion’s caves terror & meekness dwell” (2.5). But in the frontispiece illustrating this line (plate 5), Bromion’s expression—wide-eyed, slack jawed, hair standing on end—is terrified rather than terrifying, and in one copy of the poem, the frontispiece becomes a tailpiece immediately following the

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5.1 William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), plate 3.

picture of an apocalyptically soaring Oothoon, so that Bromion is literally made to see the power of defiance that Oothoon’s language conveys.13 Thus, just as Oothoon’s language crosses the border between female meekness and masculine terror, Blake’s composite art crosses the line between the sublimity that Burke found in words and the beauty he found in pictures.14 Blake’s pictures do not simply serve his text or give us a beautifully clear idea of its meaning. Representing Oothoon as both bound and liberated, both meek and terrifying, they visually express the marginality of her language. What I wish to do, therefore, is to consider this marginal language within the context of the poem as a whole, which itself is marginal in form, straddling the border between word and image. The cooperation of word and image in Blake’s poem complements the dialogue between mind and body in Oothoon’s speeches. We are drawn to this internal dialogue of “sense” and the senses—on which I shall say more below—because there is virtually no external dialogue in

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the poem: no communication between Oothoon and the men. The only external dialogue we get is the loving exchange between Oothoon and the nymph at the beginning of the poem, when the nymph graciously overcomes Oothoon’s reluctance to pluck her flower by assuring her that “another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight / Can never pass away” (1.9–10). In the illustration for this dialogue (fig. 5.1), Oothoon and the nymph are not only facing but delicately kissing each other, which is remarkable chiefly because nothing like this happens again in the poem. Though Oothoon says in plucking the flower that she “turn[s] her face to where [her] whole soul seeks” (1.13), she never actually faces her lover, much less gets to kiss him. Instead, while impetuously running over the waves—the oceanic “reign” of a Theotormon who cannot rein her “impetuous course” (1.15)—she is intercepted by Bromion. In the title page illustration (fig. 5.2) she is already looking back at this menacing pursuer and thus away from Theotormon, and after the rape,

5.2 William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), Title page.

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Bromion has nothing to say to her; he merely fulminates to Theotormon about “this harlot” (1.18). What happens to communication among these three characters is vividly expressed by the frontispiece (plate 5), where all of them are shown facing away from each other. Oothoon utterly fails to reach either of the other two with her speeches. She is heard by Theotormon’s eagles, who descend to punish her, and by the Daughters of Albion, who repeatedly “eccho back her sighs” (2.20, 5.2, 8.13). But Bromion scarcely heeds her lamentations even if (as Oothoon suggests) he hears them (3.1), and Theotormon “hears [her] not” (2.37). As she wails, he sits in a self-enclosed fetal ball “conversing with shadows dire” (8.11–12). One reason why neither Bromion nor Theotormon can truly hear or understand Oothoon is that she speaks a language of radical indeterminacy. Her very first words to the “bright Marygold of Leutha’s vale” reveal an imagination that makes no distinction between the literal and figurative meanings of words. “Art thou a flower! art thou a nymph!” she says. “I see thee now a flower, / Now a nymph” (1.6–7).15 As often noted, Oothoon here echoes what the unborn heroine of The Book of Thel says when she sees the lowly worm. (“Art thou a Worm? image of weakness, art thou but a Worm? / I see thee like an infant wrapped in the Lillys leaf” [Thel 4.2–3].) But Thel’s vision is gloomily monocular. She sees the worm only as an “image of weakness” that is “like an infant”: a “helpless & naked” infant crying vainly for maternal comfort (4.5–6) and thus prompting Thel herself to weep for the misery of a life she cannot bear to begin living (5.11). By contrast, Oothoon opens her eyes to multiple delights. She sees the nymph and the flower almost simultaneously (“now a flower; / Now a nymph!”), and neither one preempts the other. The Marygold may be a flower that is figuratively called (or imaginatively seen) as a nymph; but it could just as easily be a nymph that is figuratively called a flower.16 Blake accentuates this indeterminacy by his spelling of “Marygold,” which combines a woman’s name with the color of the flower, and his design (fig. 5.1) shows the “Golden nymph” (1.8) emerging from the flower and extending its sinuous line with the curve of her body.17 The design also shows that the “gold” of “Marygold” refers at once to the color of the flower and to the rays of the sun shown rising behind it—or even emanating from it, since the blossoms of this “golden shrine” (1.10) are themselves shaped like radiant suns. When Oothoon plucks the flower, therefore, and places it “to glow between [her] breasts” (1.12), she marks the sunrise or blossoming of her desire for Theotormon. Having “trembled in her virgin fears” and “hid in Leutha’s vale,” as the

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Argument says, she now “[rises] up from the vale” like a sun or a flower to meet him. Oothoon’s openness to experience, which underlies her capacity to envision and articulate the radical interaction of all living things, not only survives the rape but reveals itself vividly in her long last speech, when she describes herself as “Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears. / If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix’d / In happy copulation” (6.22–24). This startling formulation anticipates what contemporary French feminists have said about jouissance—a distinctively female kind of pleasure that is sensual, fluid, and almost endlessly diffused. “Woman,” says Luce Irigaray, “has sex organs just about everywhere. She experiences pleasure almost everywhere.” 18 Clearly, Oothoon experiences something like a sexual pleasure through the eyes, which unite her “in happy copulation” with whatever she sees that is beautiful. Just under the lines she speaks, Theotormon is shown flagellating himself with a three-tailed whip whose knots—as David Erdman has noted—closely resemble the heads of the marigolds depicted in fig. 5.1.19 What for Oothoon is a sign and source of pleasure thus becomes for Theotormon an instrument of punishment and pain. But while Theotormon sees only misery in the world because he is “overflowed with woe” (3.22), Oothoon delights in all beautiful sights. She copulates with them visually. This point is crucial to the meaning of the notorious passage in which Oothoon seems to define herself as a procuress for Theotormon and a voyeur as well: But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon spread And catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold; I’ll lie beside thee on a bank & view their wanton play In lovely copulation bliss on bliss with Theotormon: Red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first born beam, Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e’er with jealous cloud Come in the haven of generous love; nor selfish blightings bring. (7.23–29)

Outrageous as this sounds—and it is meant to sound outrageous, I believe—this impassioned statement can be read as the expression of an extraordinarily liberated sensuality. It defies both jealousy and the possessiveness of fixed referentiality, in which words are bound to single meanings.20 If we recall that Theotormon is king of the ocean (his “reign,” as we are told earlier [1.14–15]), the “girls” of gold and silver that Oothoon

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plans to catch in her nets could be fish, and the “lovely copulation” that Oothoon plans to view could be their undulating movement through the water.21 Alternatively, or in addition, “copulation” can simply refer to Oothoon’s own pleasure in looking at this movement and thus sharing— coupling herself with—the pleasure of it. None of these meanings precludes the sexual reference, which is undeniably present, but once again, we cannot be sure whether the “copulation” is literally or figuratively sexual. Oothoon’s language destabilizes sexual and semantic possession at the same time. While Oothoon’s language is copulative, open, and richly inclusive, embracing multiple meanings and multiple pleasures, Bromion’s language is rigidly univocal, exclusive, and divisive—like his actions. The very first word applied to Bromion is a verb denoting his characteristically divisive way of copulating with Oothoon: he “rent her with his thunders” (1.16). For Bromion, Oothoon thus becomes a “harlot” irrevocably sundered from her virginity. Her pregnancy—if indeed she is pregnant, as Bromion claims (2.1–2)—springs not from love but from Bromion’s hypocritical “rage” at her impetuous desire for Theotormon, and the “child / Of Bromion’s rage” (2.1–2) has merely monetary value in a market where slaves are “stampt” like coins with his signet (1.21).22 Oothoon’s initial response to the rape is perhaps the most complicated but also the most revealing moment in the entire poem. Calling Theotormon’s predatory eagles “to prey upon her flesh,” she seems to accept his punitive morality and at the same time to adopt the language of ruthless division. First “Bromion rent her with his thunders”; “then storms rent Theotormon’s limbs” (2.3); now Oothoon tells the eagles: “Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect / The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast” (2.15–16). But the context plainly indicates that these words are bitterly ironic. Before Oothoon speaks them, she steels herself against repentance by steadfastly refusing to weep. She “weeps not: she cannot weep! her tears are locked up” (2.11). Instead she “[howls] incessant” while “writhing her soft snowy limbs” as if she were sexually aroused. Her body thus responds to the fact that rape and the punishment for being raped are physically indistinguishable; both entail a rending of the body. And if Bromion can turn sexual intercourse into an act of violent aggression, she can turn a brutal punishment into a kind of sexual intercourse. When she speaks of her “defiled bosom,” therefore, she refers to the way Theotormon sees it, and when she says that she wants to reflect his image on her breast, she subtly mocks him—as we realize later when she denounces Urizen for mistak-

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5.3 William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), plate 6.

enly assuming that he can “form men to [his] image” (5–4), can reproduce himself rather than creating individuals.23 To reflect or confirm the way Theotormon sees her, she would have to be defiled as the text suggests: rent and bleeding while “Theotormon severely smiles” and while “her soul reflects the smile” (2.18)—his sadistically vengeful satisfaction.24 But Blake’s illustration of the eagles’ descent (fig. 5.3) shows Oothoon’s body perfectly undefiled. Instead of being rent and bloodied, it is merely kissed by the swan-like bill of the giant eagle hovering over her. Thus the illustration reveals both the purity and the defiance that underlie Oothoon’s seeming admission of guilt. In the speech that follows the descent of the eagles, she reinforces this defiance by reenvisioning them as harbingers of renewal. Echoing the Song of Songs, she calls on Theotormon to “arise” because “the lark does rustle in the ripe corn, and the Eagle returns / From nightly prey, and lifts his golden beak to the pure east” (2.25–26). Elsewhere Blake writes, “When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up they head!” (Marriage 9.54). For Oothoon, who now sees with her own eyes rather than reflecting (or pretending to reflect) Theotormon’s debased vision of her, the once-predatory eagle becomes an agent of regeneration, “shaking the dust from his immortal pinions to awake, / The sun that sleeps too long” (2.27–28). She can see the eagle in this way because her “infinite brain” is no longer circumscribed by the five senses of empiricism, no longer enclosed by the cavern in which the frontispiece shows

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her physically bound.25 For the rest of the poem, therefore, she wages unrelenting war on the claim that all knowledge derives from the senses. “With what sense is it,” she asks, that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk? With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse? With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse & frog Eyes and ears and sense and touch? Yet are their habitations And their pursuits, as different as their forms and as their joys. (3.2–6)

Precisely because of her passionate sensuality, Oothoon will not tolerate the limits that empiricism places upon the senses, and she particularly rejects the Urizenic dogma that all creatures experience the same sensations. Bromion preaches this dogma. Unable to imagine anything on earth that would “gratify senses unknown,” he cannot conceive of sorrows that do not spring from poverty, of joys that do not spring from riches and ease, or of any law that would not equally bind the lion and the ox.26 By contrast, Oothoon opens up sensation to diversity. Stressing the variety of feelings that different creatures can have, she ranges freely from body to mind, and she fully exploits the pluri-signification of the word “sense”: Does he who contemns poverty, and he who turns with abhorrence From usury: feel the same passion or are they moved alike? How can the giver of gifts experience the delights of the merchant? How the industrious citizen the pains of the husbandman, How different far the fat fed hireling with hollow drum: Who buys whole corn fields into wastes, and sings upon the heath: How different their eye and ear! how different the world to them! With what sense does the parson claim the labour of the farmer? (5.10–17)

If joy depends on wealth or on the gaining of wealth, as Bromion has implied, the giver of gifts can never experience any delight at all, much less the delights of the merchant. But Oothoon’s question about giving implies its converse: how can the merchant experience the delights of the giver? Obsessed with profit, the merchant cannot know the pleasures

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of giving, cannot know that—pace Bromion—there are many joys “beside the joys of riches and ease.” Different men have different sensations. The recruiting officer—the fat fed hireling who takes peasants from tilling to fighting—cannot see a cornfield with the eyes of a husbandman: “How different their eye and ear!” Furthermore, when Oothoon asks “with what sense” the parson collects a tithe from the farmer, she cunningly shows how the meaning of “sense” can shift from body to mind, from the “five senses” to such immaterial concepts as “reason,” “intelligence,” and “justification.” In this case, “sense” is the rationalization of oppression. “Cold floods of abstraction” (5.19) turn the farmer’s labor into the castles and high spires where kings and priests make laws that crush the bodily senses “till she who burns with youth and knows no fixed lot is bound / In spells of law to one she loaths: and must she drag the chain / Of life, in weary lust?” (5.21–23). Throughout her impassioned speeches, Oothoon struggles to overthrow the would-be sense of her oppressors with her own kind of sense, which is insistently sensual. Cast out by Theotormon because of the jealousy he has learned from Urizen, she calls herself “a solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity” (7.15). Yet from this margin she asserts the vitality of sensual desire—“the moment of desire!” (7.3)—and shows what the repression of desire begets: erotic images, “the self enjoyings of self denial,” and mere “reflections of desire” impressed on darkness (7.6–11). As Oothoon describes them, in fact, the pining virgin and the frustrated youth are the truly marginal characters, living in the shadowy borderland between chastity and gratified desire. Oothoon yearns to liberate desire from darkness and bring it out into the light. In proposing to watch Theotormon copulating with the girls she would catch for him, she says: “Red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first born beam, / Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e’er with jealous cloud / Come in the haven of generous love; nor selfish blightings bring” (7.27–29). Oothoon is at once selfless, spiritual, and carnal; as Alicia Ostriker has observed, she “is intellectual and spiritual precisely because she is erotic.”27 While self-denial leads to covert “self-enjoyings” and jealousy is a “self-love that envies all” (7.21), Oothoon would happily view “his dear delight.” Theotormon’s pleasure would be as dear to her as it would be to him, for as she says in her concluding line, “every thing that lives is holy” (8.10).28 The extraordinary mixture of spirituality, sensuality, eroticism, and selfless delight in the joy of another is what keeps Oothoon not just permanently beyond the pale of conventional morality but permanently on

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5.4 William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), plate 7.

the margins of our comprehension. “White and pure” in her dedication to light and in her hatred of the shadows that envelop Theotormon, she nonetheless seems to advocate wholesale promiscuity. Abject in her submission to punishment, she nonetheless defies her lover, her assailant, and the “Demon of heaven” who created them both. Bound in Bromion’s caves, she nonetheless speaks a language of triumphant independence. Through the veil of powerlessness she radiates power. When she is held down by a chain and at the same time caught up by a giant wave (fig. 5.4), this could be the picture of a chained slave drowning in despair. But as Mitchell notes, the unnaturally sinuous shape of the wave links it to the “flame-flowers” used to convey passion and vitality in the Songs of Innocence.29 Furthermore, though she clasps her hands in seeming supplication to her lover, the wave raises her over him so that she can speak from on high, like the apocalyptic figure on the cloud depicted at the end of the poem. Oothoon remains a fascinating outsider because her attitude will not fit the structures of power and submission with which societies customarily organize themselves, and her language will not fit the categories of possession and opposition that we customarily use to define ourselves and our relation to others. She neither wins nor loses. She challenges the assumption that love means exclusive possession, and as the words and images of the Visions cooperate to show, she breaks down the oppositions

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between fidelity and promiscuity, holiness and sensuality, the intellect and the senses, punishment and self-gratification, submission and transgression, defeat and victory. But she neither converts the men who oppress her nor liberates herself from them. In the end, she is celebratory and plaintive at once, joyously proclaiming the holiness of everything that lives in a voice that “wails” to the Daughters of Albion, who “hear her woes” (8.11–13). Her voice expresses not so much anguish on her own behalf as sorrow for the human condition: for the daughters’ incapacity to hear anything but her “woes,” for our own incapacity to share her unclassifiable, untranslatable way of seeing love, freedom, sexuality, and holiness.

Chapter 6

Painting against Poetry Reynolds’s Discourses and the Discourse of Turner’s Art In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault defines the various sciences as so many kinds of discourse resulting from what he calls “discursive formation.” Every branch of scientific knowledge, he argues, is the product of a historically definable process, beginning with “the moment at which a single system for the formation of statements is put into operation” and culminating in formalization, when a particular scientific discourse can define the axioms it needs, the elements it uses, and the propositional structures it recognizes as legitimate.1 It is not at all clear how well this model will explain the literature, the literary criticism, or literary theory of any one historical period, and it is still less clear that this model will accommodate the unwieldy collection of things that have been written about works of art. There is no such thing as a coherent discourse about art. In its place we find a bewildering variety of discursive practices that diverge and proliferate: art history, art criticism, art theory, interart theory, interart criticism, iconography, iconology, and ekphrasis. Of all these, only art history approaches what Foucault calls the threshold of formalization as a discourse; those who write the kinds of things that might be classified by one of the other terms have not yet even agreed on just how to categorize their writings, and perhaps never will. Nevertheless, in a brief passage that comes near the end of his book, Foucault suggests that an archaeological analysis might be applied to painting itself. This analysis, he argues, would aim to show not that painting is a way of speaking or meaning without using words, but rather 115

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that it embodies discursive practice in techniques and effects, that “it is shot through . . . with the positivity of knowledge” (193–94). In support of Foucault, a history of the process by which Alberti and the artists of the Renaissance developed and refined the techniques of perspective could undoubtedly be used to show that perspective is a discursive formation, an episteme or way of knowing comparable to the ways of knowing generated by the sciences that began to emerge in the same period. But this is not my project. Instead, I wish to apply Foucault’s theory of discursive formation to the condition of painting—and more precisely to the condition of discourse about art—at the turn of the eighteenth century in England. Consider first the Discourses on Art that were regularly delivered from 1769 to 1790 by Joshua Reynolds in his capacity as founder and first president of the Royal Academy. In these discourses, Reynolds sought to establish the terms in which painting in England would henceforth be conceived: not as a mechanical trade, but as a liberal art whose intellectual dignity made it worthy to rank with poetry. As Reynolds defined it, however, the “intellectual dignity” of painting depended on a vertical system that ranked paintings according to their subject matter, and assigned the highest place to paintings that represented “history” in the sense of canonical narrative, whether scriptural, literary, or factual. Reynolds valued most the kind of painting that took its subject matter from “the Poet or Historian” rather than from the mind of the artist himself.2 As their full title indicates, Reynolds’s Discourses constitute not a discourse of art but a discourse on art, a would-be systematic structure of statements about painting. If painting speaks for itself anywhere in the Discourses, it is only in discourse 14, where the “powerful impression of nature” made by the landscapes of Gainsborough (249) threatens to undermine all that Reynolds has said about the supremacy of history painting, and where the striking sense of resemblance uncannily generated by the “unfinished manner” of Gainsborough’s portraits threatens to overturn the “indispensable rule” Reynolds has formulated earlier: the rule that painting must precisely express the painter’s “knowledge of the exact form which every part of nature ought to have” (164, 52). The discursive system formulated and codified by the Discourses, in fact, cannot accommodate a powerfully impressive painter of “unfinished” landscapes and portraits. Even after placing Gainsborough “among the very first” of the rising English School that will take its place in the history of art (248), Reynolds ends discourse 14 by warning his students that there is no excuse for Gainsborough’s defects—“want of precision and finish-

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ing”—in the painting of history, “in that style which this academy teaches, and which ought to be the object of your pursuit” (261). The fractures and fissures discernible in the discursive formation that Reynolds left behind him strongly suggest that a new discourse—a discourse truly of art—was struggling to be born. It emerged with J. M. W. Turner, who began his studies at the Royal Academy in the very last year of Reynolds’s presidency. Though he admired Reynolds, Turner decisively rejected the central premise of the Discourses, which is that painting of the highest kind must take its subject matter from poetry and history, or in other words, that poetic and historical discourse should largely set the terms in which painting is judged. Turner attacked this premise in two ways. First, in his own lectures as professor of perspective at the Royal Academy, he repeatedly insisted that landscape painting could be “equal in power” to history painting, and that elements of landscape—such as trees—could even overpower historical figures in works that combined the two.3 Secondly, he set out to liberate painting from anything like a filial dependence on poetry. In the notes he made about 1809 while preparing his lectures, he carefully explained the problems generated by any attempt to produce the graphic equivalent of a poetic passage, and then concluded that the painter “should be allowed or considered equal [to the poet] in his merits and having conceived his differences of method should be allowed to have produced what is exclusively his own.” 4 Why then, we may ask, were so many of Turner’s pictures exhibited with lines of poetry quoted beneath their titles in exhibition catalogues? In the spring of 1798, when painters exhibiting at the Royal Academy were first allowed to put into the catalogue “descriptions” of their works, the twenty-three-year old Turner was among the very few who quoted poetry under his titles, and the only landscape painter to do so.5 Five of the ten oils and watercolors he exhibited in 1798 were listed with passages from Milton and Thomson, and eight more passages of poetry— including two by Turner himself—appeared beneath the titles of works he exhibited during the next two years. He kept this practice up for the rest of his life. In the course of his long career, which lasted virtually to his death in 1851, Turner linked the titles of about one-fourth of his exhibited oils to poetry of some kind, to verses either quoted from others or composed by himself.6 Turner thus asks us to read a substantial body of his work in light of the poetry that he placed against it. But “against” has a double meaning here. The spirit in which Turner juxtaposed so many of his paintings with lines of poetry is essentially the

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same as the spirit in which he stipulated that two of his paintings would permanently hang in the National Gallery “by the side of” and at the “same height from the ground” as two works by Claude (B&J, text 96). Turner sets painting beside poetry to make the two compete before our eyes. When he quotes the poetry of others with the titles of his pictures, he typically prompts us to see how his pictures reconstruct the poetry and thus gen-erate new meanings of their own. When he quotes his own verse, he displaces the literature from which painting was traditionally expected to take its subject and creates a rival text that independently authorizes the painting. The rivalry between painting and poetry in Turner’s art springs from a relentlessly contentious temperament.7 His legendary performances on varnishing days at the Royal Academy, when he would labor from dawn to dark on his paintings in full view of other artists, were calculated to show that he could “outwork and kill” every one of them.8 When the young David Wilkie won acclaim with a painting called The Village Politicians in 1806, the first year he exhibited at the Royal Academy, Turner painted for the next year’s exhibition a genre piece of his own—A Country Blacksmith Disputing upon the Price of Iron—and hung it beside Wilkie’s Blind Fiddler. Together with Sun Rising Through Vapour, which he also exhibited in 1807, the “overpowering brightness” of A Country Blacksmith is said to have eclipsed Wilkie’s Fiddler, and Turner’s two paintings together reportedly “‘killed’ every picture within range of their effects” (B&J, text 52). Turner thrived on emulation. Writing to a printpublisher in 1822, he proposed that a set of engravings be made from his own works to compete with the set that William Woollett had some years earlier made from four of Richard Wilson’s historical landscapes. Eager to show that he could “contend with such powerful antagonists as Wilson and Woollett,” he declares: “to succeed would perhaps form another epoch in the English school; and, if we fall, we fall by contending with giant strength.” 9 The giant strength with which Turner spent most of his professional life contending, however, belonged not to Wilson but to Claude. After seeing Claude’s Sacrifice to Apollo for the first time in 1799, when he was 23, Turner reportedly said that “he was both pleased and unhappy while he viewed it, it seemed to be beyond the power of imitation.” 10 Yet for the rest of his long life Turner repeatedly aimed to show that he could match Claude’s achievement. The seventy engravings that he commissioned and published in periodical sets from 1807 to 1819 under the title of Liber Studiorum were meant to exhibit a variety of “Landscape

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Compositions” equal in power to the sketches of Claude’s Liber Studiorum—a graphic record of all Claude’s works that had been engraved by Richard Earlom two years after Turner’s birth and that appeared, like Turner’s Liber, right up to 1819.11 Furthermore, as I have already noted, Turner’s will ensured that two of his paintings would permanently hang right by two of Claude’s works in the National Gallery (B&J, text 96). So Turner could hardly be more explicit about his determination to make us see that he could stand—and indefinitely withstand—comparison with one of the greatest of his European precursors. To see how Turner’s lifelong insistence on measuring himself against Claude intersects with his equally persistent habit of setting painting against poetry, consider Apullia in Search of Appulus vide Ovid (ex. 1814, B&J, text 128), which virtually repeats the composition of Claude’s Jacob with Laban and his Daughters (repr. B&J, plate 567). Though nearly forty and well established when he painted this picture in 1814, Turner entered it—with typical idiosyncrasy—in a competition designed by the British Institution for artists just launching their careers (B&J, text 92). Whether or not the rules of the competition required a painting “proper in Point of Subject and Manner to be a Companion” to a work by Poussin or Claude, as Finberg says (208–9), Turner deliberately mimics Claude in a picture about mimicry: the tree marked “Appulus” is the wild olive into which, in the Metamorphoses, an Apulian shepherd was turned when he mockingly imitated the dancing of nymphs (Met. 14.519–28). Kathleen Nicholson argues that this picture of mimicry and mockery chastised was probably Turner’s way of mocking the British Institution, which expected young artists to mimic the old masters.12 But also embedded in Turner’s picture and accentuated by its title is mockery of the old poetic master it ostensibly salutes. If we “see Ovid,” as the title directs, we find in his story of the Apulian shepherd no mention of “Apullia.” Turner has invented her—or plucked her from the 1709 London edition of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia and then graphically composed the story of her doomed quest for the dendrified Appullus.13 Ostensibly illustrating Ovid’s verbal text, Turner creates a visual text of his own. Thus, even as he mocks the expectation that modern painters should dutifully follow the example set by the old masters, he likewise subverts the traditional doctrine that painters should take their subject matter from “the Poet or Historian,” in Reynolds’s words (Turner 57) rather than inventing it themselves. Turner’s challenge to the authority of poetry actually begins with the very first of his poetic quotations. Because all of the poetry he quoted

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6.1 J. M. W. Turner, Buttermere Lake (ex. 1798). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

with the pictures he exhibited in 1798–1799 stresses atmospheric effects, Jerrold Ziff says that what he quoted in those years was “the verbal equivalent” of what he painted (“Turner’s First Poetic Quotations,” 8). But consider the relation between Buttermere Lake (fig. 6.1) and the verses he linked to it in the exhibition of 1798. For Buttermere he quoted the phrases I have italicized in this passage from Thomson’s Seasons: Thus all day long the full-distended clouds Indulge their genial stores, and well-showered earth Is deep enriched with vegetable life; Till in the western sky the downward sun Looks out effulgent from amid the flush Of broken clouds, gay-shifting to his beam. The rapid radiance instantaneous strikes The illumined mountains, through the forest streams, Shakes on the floods, and in a yellow mist, Far smoking o’er the interminable plain, In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems. . . .

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Meantime, refracted from yon eastern cloud, Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds, In fair proportion running from the red To where the violet fades into the sky. Here awful Newton, the dissolving clouds Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism; And to the sage-instructed eye unfold The various twine of light, by thee disclosed From the white mingling maze.14

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Like Thomson’s passage, Turner’s painting represents radiance, mist, an illuminated mountain, and a rainbow. But Turner’s rainbow differs radically from Thomson’s, which—as we learn from the full passage—is explicitly Newtonian. As a true product of the Enlightenment, it no longer signifies the covenant in which God promised never again to flood the earth (Gen. 9:12-17). Though this typological meaning is pointedly recalled in Paradise Lost, one of Thomson’s sources, 15 Thomson treats the rainbow as a purely scientific phenomenon. It has become the property of Newton—“thy showery prism,” in Thomson’s apostrophe to him—because Newton explained in his Opticks (1704) how the white light of the sun is broken up or refracted into various colors as it passes through moisture. To the “sage-instructed eye,” the rainbow is no longer an object of wonder, a “white mingling maze.” Unfolding “every hue,” it is neatly divided into the seven colors of the spectrum from red to violet. In William Kent’s illustration for the 1730 edition of Spring, the rainbow appears as a broad ribbon subdivided into narrow, well-defined bands of light and dark. Working in black and white, the engraver shows what Thomson does to the rainbow: he makes it a sign of Newton’s analytic power. Turner’s rainbow is altogether different. Though he quotes Thomson’s phrase “every hue unfolds,” he depicts only the upper end of the spectrum, where delicate strands of yellow are interwoven with various degrees of white. While Thomson’s rainbow runs in “fair proportion . . . from the red / To where the violet fades into the sky,” this early picture already begins to reveal what Norman Bryson finds in Turner’s later work: an “absence of the gamut” in the rendering of light and color, with enhanced discrimination of the midrange.16 Turner’s bow is an arc of light set between wedges of shadow that are nearly black. Primordial in its structure as well as in the simplicity of its coloring, the arc of the bow is extended by its reflection in the water, so that the two figures in the

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6.2 J. M. W. Turner, Norham Castle on the Tweed, Summer’s Morn (ex. 1798). Watercolor. The Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, England.

fishing boat seem to be caught in an uncompleted circle of light. Turner thus subtly revives the biblical typology that Thomson suppresses. The fishing boat prefigures the ark that will later play such a conspicuous part in Light and Colour . . . The Morning after the Deluge (plate 6) and the arc of light itself prefigures the full circle that encloses the later work. In the words Turner quoted from Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination at the end of his first lecture at the Royal Academy in 1811, Buttermere shows how the artist draws from “matter’s mouldering structures, the pure forms / Of Triangle, or Circle, Cube, or Cone.” 17 To see further how the pictures Turner exhibited in 1798 resist appropriation by the poetry he linked to them, compare the watercolor called Norham Castle on the Tweed, Summer’s Morn (fig. 6.2) with the lines Turner quoted from this passage of Thomson’s “Summer”: But yonder comes the powerful King of Day, Rejoicing in the East: the lessening cloud, The kindling azure, and the mountain’s brow Illumed with fluid gold, his near approach Betoken glad. Lo! now, apparent all, Aslant the dew-bright earth and coloured air, He looks in boundless majesty abroad,

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And sheds the shining day, that burnished plays On rocks, and hills, and towers, and wandering streams High-gleaming from afar. (81–90)

For Norham Castle Turner quoted just the lines I have italicized, and in the fourth line he squeezed “Illumed with fluid gold” down to the one word “Illumin’d.” What struck him most in the passage was clearly Thomson’s evocation of light spreading everywhere and transforming everything it touched. Yet in the watercolor, light contends with considerable shadow. In the castled cliff that dominates the background and partially occludes the sun rising behind it, Turner establishes a powerful blocking agent that casts its heavy shadow on the river. Some things emerge from this shadow, such as the house and the rock on the left, but except for them and the watery circle of reflected light in the center, the lower half of the picture is wrapped in darkness. Turner must have known that what he produced was hardly the equivalent of Thomson’s passage. While Thomson enumerates a variety of objects touched by light, Turner concentrates on the light of the sky and its reflection in the water. Some years later, in a lecture that he first delivered at the Royal Academy in 1812, he specifically cited Thomson’s passage as an example of poetry that could not be made to form a pictorial whole. “The lessening cloud,” he said, “displays the most elevated power of delineation; and the kindling azure resembles Shakespeare’s beautiful ballad that fancy, when established, dies.” (He’s thinking of “Tell me where is fancy bred,” which tells us that fancy is “engendered in the eyes, / With gazing fed, and fancy dies / In the cradle where it lies.” [Merchant of Venice 3.2, 71–73].) “The difficulty,” Turner continues, “is the poetic truth: the towers and hills and streams high gleaming from afar admit the means of producing a picture; [but only] by evading the superior elegance and truth of the foregoing lines and [sic] create a picture of Morning.” 18 Turner greatly admires Thomson’s poetry, and he expresses his admiration with a literary sensitivity that is too often overlooked. But what fascinates him most is Thomson’s representation of visible objects as both revealed and consumed by light: the lessening cloud and the kindling azure. Significantly, Turner ignores Thomson’s regal metaphor for the sun—“the powerful King of Day” as well as the anthropomorphism of the whole passage. What he finds in Thomson’s lines, or interpretively

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6.3 J. M. W. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise (late 1840s). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

distills from them, is “the utmost purity of glowing colour” (Gage 201): a purity that would be evaded or compromised by a picture materially furnished with rocks, hills, towers, and wandering streams. In linking Thomson’s lines to the 1798 Norham Castle, Turner must have felt the disparity between Thomson’s purity and the solidity of his own shadowed forms. Yet he was beginning to find his own way of representing the power of light. By setting a dark, mounded castle against a rising sun whose rays filter through the castle windows, he establishes the permeable materiality that light must overcome. Over the next fifty years, Turner produced more than fifteen versions of Norham Castle in various media, culminating in the oil known as Norham Castle, Sunrise, now dated to the late 1840s (fig. 6.3).19 By this time Turner had radically purified his conception of his subject. In the 1798 watercolor, he gives us not only the castle but a number of other details: a line of hills in the distance, a wooded hill at left with a white cottage on the shore, a rowboat by the cottage, a sailboat drifting under the castle, a group of three cows drinking in the center foreground, and at right a rocky bank with more cows on it. In the late oil version, most of these details have disappeared. We no longer see with any certainty the

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hills in the background, the cottage, the sailboat, the rowboat, the rocky banks, or even the castle itself, which has become virtually indistinguishable from the blocky blue mass on which it rests in the middle distance. The cows at right have also disappeared, and the three in the center have dwindled to one. What remains are chiefly light and color, which efface or transform everything they touch. The deep shadows of the earlier version have given way to reflections—most especially the reflection of the sun, whose yellow light shining from above and behind the castle is repeated in the yellow rays that reach to the bottom of the picture. Unlike Thomson’s “shining day, that burnished plays / On rocks, and hills, and towers,” the light is no longer scattered, no longer distributed to a variety of separate objects picked out of the shadows, but is rather diffused and pervasive. The only distinguishable object left in the foreground is a single cow whose attenuated form is designed to signify not so much the cow itself as—in Hazlitt’s words—“the medium through which [it] is seen.” 20 Because the late Norham Castle was never exhibited, let alone exhibited with lines from Thomson, we cannot be sure just how much Turner meant it to compete with Thomson’s sunrise, or whether—in the last years of his life—he was any longer thinking of Thomson at all. But if we turn from the late 1840s back to the late 1790s, we find him repeatedly testing the power of painting against the poetry he quotes, and then—in 1800—starting to use verses of his own. Turner’s verses have generally provoked reactions ranging from condescension to contempt. “Not particularly brilliant,” which is what Ruskin called one piece of Turner’s verse (qtd. B&J, text 100), is about the most generous assessment that any piece of Turner’s verse has ever received. So far from being great poetry, Turner’s verses are not even—in any obvious way—distinctively ekphrastic. He could powerfully describe the work of other painters, as when he salutes the “veil of matchless colour” that Rembrandt displays in The Mill (fig. 7.1): “that lucid interval of Morning dawn and dewy light on which the Eye dwells so completely enthrall’d” that it dares not “pierce the mystic shell of colour in search of form” (Ziff, “Backgrounds” 145). But Turner never wrote this way about his own art. The verses he linked to Slavers throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, for instance, are not nearly so vivid and evocative as Ruskin’s prose account of “its thin masts written upon the sky, in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror” (qtd. B&J, text 236). Yet Ruskin’s declamatory prose threatens to displace the

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painting itself, which may partly explain why he sold it after owning it for 28 years.21 With language as fiery and tumid as Ruskin’s, who needs pigment? By contrast, Turner’s verses must be read beside the paintings to which he linked them. They serve us only insofar as they help us to understand the discourse of his art. When Turner first linked an exhibited picture to verses of his own in 1800, he identified a political meaning that had been latent in his work up to then. As Jerrold Ziff has noted, all of the passages he quoted with the pictures he exhibited in 1798–1799 stress atmospheric moments (“Turner’s First Poetic Quotations,” 8). For pictures such as Norham Castle of 1798 and Caernarvon Castle of 1799, the verses Turner quotes make no mention of the castle, which plays—or at first sight seems to play—a purely formal role in blocking or framing the light. For Caernarvon Castle, for instance, Turner quotes David Mallet’s description of the setting sun hovering “o’er this nether firmament, / Whose broad cerulean mirror, calmly bright, / Gave back his beamy visage to the sky / With splendor undiminish’d.” 22 Turner’s watercolor seems to illustrate these lines perfectly, representing the reflection of the orange sunset with a brilliance that “evokes,” as Wilton notes, “the heroic sunset harbors of Claude Lorrain” (JMWT 57). But in this picture as in the 1798 Norham Castle, the sun and its reflection are confronted by the castle and its shadow, and the latent political meaning of this confrontation becomes manifest in the verses he wrote in 1800 for Doldabern Castle, now in London’s Royal Academy of Arts: How awful is the silence of the waste, Where nature lifts her mountains to the sky. Majestic solitude, behold the tower Where hopeless Owen, long imprison’d pin’d, And wrung his hands for liberty, in vain.23

Here the verses clearly elicit the political meaning of the picture, which represents the mountains as a vast shadowy enclosure dwarfing the figures in the foreground. Sublime in its darkness and isolation, forbiddingly steep and thus blocking any attempt to see beyond it, to liberate the eye, the massive enclosure is a like a dungeon sited beneath the tower where Owen was imprisoned. When Turner links his exhibited pictures to verses of his own, then, he is no longer seeking simply to show that he can rival in his own art a specimen of poetry, that his images can hold their own against someone

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else’s words. Emulation now becomes appropriation. Siezing the role of poet, appropriating the art from which the painter was traditionally urged to take his subject matter, Turner makes words serve images by exposing their latent meaning and thus revealing their power. Viewed in light of the verses that Turner wrote for it, Doldabern decisively refutes Burke’s contention that painting cannot match the sublimity of poetry because description will always be more obscure—hence more evocative—than depiction (Burke 60–63). Challenging the exclusionary claims made for the sublimity of words, Turner’s verses let us see the sublimity of his picture. Turner’s challenge to the supremacy of poetic discourse becomes still more explicit in The Garreteer’s Petition, ex. 1809 (now in the Tate Gallery), which he linked with these verses of his own: Aid me, ye Powers! O bid my thoughts to roll In quick succession, animate my soul; Descend, my Muse, and every thought refine, And finish well my long, my long-sought line. (qtd. B&J, text 71)

Instead of taking his subject or seeking his inspiration from a poem, Turner writes words for the poet in his picture, a poet who needs inspiration and who ends his request with a phrase that could apply just as well to a graphic composition as to a verbal one: “finish well my long, my longsought line.” In articulating the garreteer’s petition, in saying just what he is asking for, Turner also prompts us to see that this picture represents painting and poetry as equally entangled in derivation. The picture itself has several sources. Its subject comes from Hogarth’s engraving, The Distressed Poet (1736/37), which shows a man struggling to write in a cluttered, crowded room; scratching his head and clutching his pen in midair, he illustrates the hopeless quest for inspiration described in the lines of Alexander Pope that served as a caption for the engraving: “Studious he sate, with all his books around, / Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! / Plung’d for his sense, but found no bottom there; / Then writ, and flounder’d on, in mere despair.” 24 Butlin and Joll say that Turner’s picture “somewhat enno-bles” its Hogarthian source (B&J, text 72), and it does indeed remove some of Hogarth’s clutter as well as reducing the figures to just one man engaged in solemn invocation. But the would-be poet sits in a glow of light surrounded by the Rembrandtian gloom of a humble interior derived—at least in part—

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from the genre paintings of Wilkie, whom Turner had already begun to emulate in A Country Blacksmith. These obviously derivative graphic features of the Petition reinforce the garreteer’s dependence on a variety of literary sources: he holds a pamphlet in an outstretched hand, rests an elbow on a pile of books, and sits beside a tub of further publications that he will use to make up his poem: the “Translations &c.,” “Hints for an Epic Poem,” and “Coll. of Odds and Ends”—as Turner calls them in a note on a sketch for the picture (qtd. B&J, text 71). Altogether, then, the poet of this picture is no more original than the amateur artist of the picture that Turner apparently conceived to accompany it, though he made only a sketch of a figure working with what he calls in an inscription “stolen hints from celebrated Pictures.” 25 In The Garreteer’s Petition, a further challenge to the cultural supremacy of poetry is that Turner may be wryly representing himself as a poet-in-hiding, asking for the inspiration with which to write the poem that he would shortly begin to quote in exhibition catalogues: The Fallacies of Hope.26 Yet the verbal ambiguity of the garreteer’s appeal, with its exhortation to finish a line that may be graphic or literary, anticipates the visual ambiguity of another writing figure who appears many years later in one of Turner’s most celebrated works: Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—The Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (plate 6). W. J. T. Mitchell views this picture as both “a history painting that reflects on the writing of history, and an abstract study in visual phenomena that reflects on the science of vision.” 27 As its full title indicates, the painting has three subjects: light and color, a biblical event, and the verbal representation of that event. Since our ultimate source for the story of the deluge is the book of Genesis, Turner makes the author of that book an integral part of the event itself. Yet in spite of this apparent homage to writing—to the poetry of Scripture—Turner checks the flow of authority from author to painter, from word to image. The very name “Moses” calls verbal authority into question, for as Lawrence Gowing notes, it evokes not only the author of Genesis but also an eighteenthcentury color theorist named Moses Harris, who devised a color circle that Turner drastically revised while developing his own color theory.28 In this picture, therefore, the figure holding what could be a pen or paintbrush and placed just above a doubly turned serpent can signify the author of Genesis or Turner himself, the prophet who rewrites Scripture in color and light. And also in his own words. Instead of quoting

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Scripture as his source in the exhibition catalogue, he quoted from his own The Fallacies of Hope: The ark stood firm on Ararat; th’ returning Sun Exhaled earth’s humid bubbles, and emulous of light, Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise Hope’s harbinger, ephemeral as the summer fly Which rises, flits, expands, and dies. (qtd. B&J, text 253)

Verbally as well as graphically, Turner writes a language of light, color, and emulation. “Emulous” of the sun’s primordial light, earth’s humid bubbles reflect her lost forms even as Turner—a painter emulous of Scripture’s poetic light—reflects them on the prismatic vortex of his canvas. Each bubble-head thrown up by the receding waters at lower right is ephemeral, caught up in the swirl of the vortex, but the ark stands firm, and like it the painter holds firm, fixing his Mosaic surrogate just above the center of the canvas—the still point of the turning wheel. If Turner could reconstruct Scripture in his paintings, implicitly representing himself as a prophet writing in pigment, he was equally revisionary in his treatment of the other main source on which “history painting” traditionally drew: classical epic. His most remarkable response to classical epic is his lifelong rewriting of Virgil’s Aeneid: a project that begins with the unexhibited Aeneas and the Sibyl of about 1798 and continues right up to 1850, when the very last group of works he exhibited at the Royal Academy included no less than four paintings of Aeneas’s sojourn with Dido. Turner rewrote Virgil not just figuratively in paint but literally in words. Whenever he exhibited pictures of Aeneas or Dido with verse, the verse was his own, and one of his last four pictures of the pair represents an event that Turner simply imagined: Aeneas and Dido visit the tomb of her late husband while “the sun went down in wrath at such deceit.” 29 As his source for this line that he linked to the picture, Turner cited The Fallacies of Hope, a manuscript poem of his own that he first cited in 1812 with the verses he linked to Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army.30 Two things about The Fallacies are notable. One is that from the very beginning, Turner cited it in place of the classical, canonized texts we would expect him to cite—such as Livy for the Hannibal picture, or Virgil for any picture of Dido and Aeneas. The other notable thing is that Turner’s poem exists only in the passages he “quoted” from it. While some of these

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passages look genuinely fragmentary—they occasionally begin with words such as “or”—we have no access to the whole. Turner’s Fallacies was in fact a mental construct, an imaginary source created to displace and supersede the canonical ones. This is nowhere more evident than in the verses he linked to the second of the two great Carthaginian pictures with which he aimed to rival Claude: Dido Building Carthage (fig. 6.4) and The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (fig. 6.5). Originally willed to be hung on either side of Claude’s Seaport, these two pictures also ask to be set beside Virgil’s epic. The full title of the first, in fact, is Dido Building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire—1st Book of Virgil’s Aeneid. To set this picture beside the Aeneid is to see the picture as a profoundly ironic commentary on the empire building that Virgil’s whole poem is calculated to glorify and justify. As Karl Kroeber has noted, Dido Building Carthage reenacts the creation of Carthage in terms of a literary work written long after the city was destroyed and in celebration of an Imperial Rome that was itself destroyed long before Turner painted his picture.31 The Decline completes this ironic commentary on Virgil’s poem. Though Virgil adumbrates the fall of Carthage when the abandoned Dido calls for endless war between her race and that of Aeneas (4.610–30), he can hardly suggest what the

6.4 J. M. W. Turner, Dido Building Carthage (ex. 1815). Used by permission of the National Gallery Picture Library, London.

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fall of Carthage might itself come to adumbrate. By contrast, the title of Turner’s picture—The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire—is at once echoic and prophetic. Echoing Gibbon’s title, it makes the decline and fall of Carthage prefigure the decline and fall of Rome, and beyond that the ultimate decline of all empires—including the one that Britain herself was building at the very time this picture was first exhibited. To see just how Turner creates his own vision of Carthage in this picture, we need its elaborately full subtitle as well as the verses he wrote to accompany it. The subtitle defines the historical context of the moment depicted: Rome being determined on the overthrow of her hated rival, demanded from her such terms as might either force her into war or ruin her by compliance: the enervated Carthaginians, in their anxiety for peace, consented to give up even their arms and their children. Using these historical circumstances, Turner’s verses define the moral meaning of the sunset in the picture: At Hope’s delusive smile, The chieftain’s safety and the mother’s pride,

6.5 J. M. W. Turner, Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (ex. 1817). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

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Were to the insidious conqu’ror’s grasp resigned;While o’er the western wave th’ensanguin’d sun, In gathering haze a stormy signal spread, And set portentous. (B&J, text 100)

Though title and verses together seem to overdetermine the meaning of the picture, it can hardly be said to illustrate the words that accompany it, for it does not show us the Carthaginians giving up their arms and children to the Romans. What we do see can best be understood by comparing this picture with Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (fig. 6.6). David’s picture, which Turner may well have known,32 commemorates an oath of allegiance to Rome taken by the Horatii brothers before going into battle against their cousins, the Curiatii. But the firmly triangulated stance of the men, the brandishing of phallic swords and the rigidly extended arms all signify an aggressive male bonding that could serve as a model for any nation threatened by Rome itself—especially since one of the precursors of David’s Oath is a painting Turner certainly

6.6 Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii (1784). Paris, Musée du Louvre. © Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

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knew: Benjamin West’s Hannibal Taking the Oath (1771, now in St. James’s Palace, London), which shows the young Carthaginian at the altar of Jupiter swearing eternal hatred of Rome at the behest of his father Hamilcar. Though no swords are raised in this picture, the outstretched arms of David’s Horatii are anticipated by the paralleled upraised forearms of father and son and the pointing arm of the figure at lower right. Strengthening the link between these two pictures and Turner’s Decline is the fact that Turner’s picture explicitly recalls the oath of Hannibal: the architrave of the farther portico on the left is inscribed AMILCAR, and at the top of the altar on the right are the letters HANN. Thus Turner evokes a moment of Carthaginian defiance even as he shows how luxury and decadence have nearly obliterated the record of that moment. Read against the paintings of West and David, Turner’s picture clearly reveals a people ready to surrender everything to Rome. The anchor, the oar, and the flowered staff strewn across the marble steps in the foreground prefigure the casting down of swords—the antithesis of the sword brandishing in the Horatii. Further, the sunken, languid, flaccid poses of all the figures in Turner’s picture strikingly recall the postures of the women in David’s Oath: the women whose collapsing figures are so clearly subordinated to and overpowered by the militaristically erect men. The acquiescence signified by the flaccidity of Turner’s figures becomes still more evident when we consider the relation between the figures and the architecture that surrounds them. While Dido Building Carthage depicts a city in the making, this picture represents the city complete—but only too complete, overly finished, overripe for a fall. And in place of the strong and simple Doric columns that frame the gesture of David’s militant males and reinforce their powerfully erect stances, we find elaborate cornices, ornate Corinthean capitols, and a multitude of fluted columns that seem more decorative than structural.33 This overwrought architecture fittingly encloses a people exhausted and enervated by their own decadence, unable to stand—in any sense— against the Romans. Reinforcing these graphic signs of imminent surrender and impending disaster, Turner’s verses gloss the “ensanguin’d sun” as a stormy signal, and its setting a portent of doom. This is an overstatement. Though Turner clearly does use the setting sun to signify the decline of empire— something that had become a literary cliché by Turner’s time—the delicate flush of his sunset resists any simple iconographic equation with blood and destruction.35 Instead of the fire and blood that will later rage and burn in the sunset of The Slavers (1840), the setting sun of Decline

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6.7 J. M. W. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (ex. 1812). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

exudes a delicately pink and yellow light that gilds the waves and turns white marble to rose. What we see in the light of this picture is not a menacing portent but the graphic irony of “Hope’s delusive smile.” Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, then, is not only a pendant to Dido Building Carthage but a sequel to Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (fig. 6.7), with which Turner linked these verses from The Fallacies of Hope: Craft, treachery, and fraud—Salassian force, Hung on the fainting rear! then Plunder siezed the The victor and the captive,—Saguntum’s spoil, Alike, became their prey; still the chief advanc’d, Look’d on the sun with hope:—low, broad, and wan; While the fierce archer of the downward year Stains Italy’s blanch’d barrier with storms. In vain each pass, ensanguin’d deep with dead, Or rocky fragments, wide destruction roll’d. Still on Campania’s fertile plains—he thought, But the loud breeze sob’d, “Capua’s joys beware!” (B&J, text 89)

Turner draws on Thomson’s description of a winter sun turned “weak, wan, and broad” when—in the sequence of zodiacal signs—Sagittarius

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(the Centaur-Archer) yields to Capricorn “and fierce Aquarius stains the inverted year” (“Winter” 41–49). But Turner has his own way of expressing Hannibal’s determination. In spite of the “fierce archer of the downward year” and all the other impediments to his progress, Hannibal advanced and “look’d on the sun with hope.” Representing that hope, this picture tempts us to see the beautiful beyond the sublime: to see the sunlit plains of Campania beckoning Hannibal as he struggles to make his way around the jagged rocks hurled down upon his army, past hostile mountaineers, and through the great black Brobdignagian jaws of the snowstorm. These destructive forces work “in vain” against Hannibal’s advance. But as the last words reveal, the advance itself is vain, for the sunlit plains in the distance lead only to the luxuries of Capua, where Hannibal’s soldiers dissipated their energies in idleness and pleasure and thus anticipated the fatal decadence shown in the setting sun of the Decline.35 It is the Decline, in fact, that finally reveals just how cruelly fallacious was Hannibal’s hope. Having recreated the epic story and history of Carthage in just three paintings of its rise and fall, Turner went on to demonstrate that he could rewrite a classical story in a single painting, The Vision of Medea (fig. 6.8). In verses for the painting that are once again said to be drawn from The

6.8 J. M. W. Turner, Vision of Medea (ex. 1828). Tate Gallery, London.

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Fallacies of Hope, Turner tersely recapitulates Ovid’s version of the Medea story—with one striking innovation: Or Medea, who in the full tide of witchery Had lured the dragon, gained her Jason’s love, Had filled the spell-bound bowl with Aeson’s life, Yet dashed it to the ground, and raised the poisonous snake High in the jaundiced sky to wreathe its murderous coil, Infuriate in the wreck of hope, withdrew And in the fired palace her twin offspring threw. (B&J, text 172)

Verbally and graphically, Turner depicts Medea at the height of her rage. Like Dido, she is a woman abandoned by her lover. But unlike Dido, she turns murderous rather than suicidal, killing her own children to punish their father Jason, who has led her to sacrifice everything for him and who is now marrying another woman. Around her are graphic signs of her story. At lower right is the cave of the dragon drugged by Medea’s magic so that Jason could obtain the golden fleece. At lower left is the “spell-bound bowl” in which she rejuvenated Aeson, Jason’s father, by boiling him in medicinal herbs. But also at lower left (as well as upper left) is the most conspicuous sign that Ovid’s story of Medea undergoes a radical metamorphosis in this picture. In Ovid’s version, which was almost certainly Turner’s source, Medea flees to Athens after killing her children, marries Aegeus, and brews a cup of poison for Aegeus’s son Theseus, who is saved from death only when Aegeus dashes the cup from his lips.36 In Turner’s hands, the cup of poison becomes a cup of rejuvenation that Medea herself dashes to the ground so that she—a Medea turned Medusa—can raise “the poisonous snake / High in the jaundiced sky to wreathe its murderous coil.” Wielding what treacherously resembles the serpent rod of Aesculapius, god of medicine, she brandishes it over scenes of destruction. At her feet below the oversized bubbles in the center of the picture is the caldron in which she drowned Pelias after promising his daughters that she would rejuvenate him with a boiling potion. Above, to the right of the bubbles, is the dragon-drawn chariot in which she leaves with her children, and against the cloud at upper left she stretches out her arms to fling her children down. The points about the chariot and the tiny figure have been made by Cecilia Powell, who also reads the three women on the ground in the

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center of the picture as the fates, with the one at right paying out the thread, the one in the middle measuring it, and the one at left cutting it.37 But these three women signify something more specific than fate. The many signs of Medea’s past and present elsewhere in the picture authorize us to read all three women as figures in a narrative about Medea, especially since the two fair-haired women in white look like the standing figure—minus her saffron skirt. The woman lying on the ground and facing upwards, I believe, is Medea herself, telling stories of how her magic conquered the dragon on her left and rejuvenated the father of Jason. According to Ovid, Medea told these stories to the daughters of Pelias in order to make them believe that she could rejuvenate their father by boiling him in herbs. The black haired woman in the middle, therefore, is a daughter of Pelias listening to Medea’s treacherous words, and to her right is Medea again, this time necromantically directing the same blackhaired daughter as she boils the would-be rejuvenating potion. The murderous coil of the snake brandished by the infuriated Medea, then, is a coil of narrative encircling the lives of all she has met. Like the dragons of Medea’s chariot, who are (says Ovid) “sleek and shining / In bright new skins” when they return with her from an herb-gathering journey (Metamorphoses 7.235),38 the snake held aloft by Medea signifies a story of promised renewal and ultimate destruction. She masters the fates that she herself has impersonated, literally taking in her own hands the serpentine thread of life and death. Emulous in all things, Turner takes into his hands the serpentine thread of narrative—the very thing that traditionally distinguishes literature from the visual arts. His picture actually exemplifies what Paul Ricoeur has written of plot: it “draws a configuration out of a simple succession,” organizing events into an intelligible totality and furnishing a point of view from which the story can be perceived as forming a whole.39 Admittedly, Turner’s painting cannot tell its story unaided; we cannot read it without some reference to classical texts as well as Turner’s own text. But if narrative must be absolutely self-sufficient, then any story that alludes to any other story would have to forfeit its claim to be narrative. The distinctiveness of Turner’s discourse comes not from its absolute independence of verbal narrative, but from the originality with which it reconstructs its literary sources—first verbally, then graphically. One more example underscores this point. In 1837, six years after exhibiting The Vision of Medea, Turner showed yet another painting of a classical subject accompanied by verses of his own: The Parting of Hero

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6.9 J. M. W. Turner, Parting of Hero and Leander—From the Greek of Musaeus (ex. 1837). Used by permission of the National Gallery Picture Library, London.

and Leander—from the Greek of Musaeus (fig. 6.9). Remarkably enough, the verses tell the story of the lovers precisely by describing—ekphrastically—what the painting depicts: The morning came too soon, with crimsoned blush Chiding the tardy night and Cynthia’s warning beam; But love yet lingers on the terraced steep, Upheld young Hymen’s torch and failing lamp, The token of departure never to return. Wild dashed the Hellespont its straited surge, And on the raised spray appeared Leander’s fall. (B&J, text 221)

Butlin and Joll suggest that Turner probably got the story of Hero and Leander from Francis Fawkes’s translation of Musaeus’s ancient poem on the ill-fated pair (B&J, text 221). What Turner does with the story in the verses and his painting is something exclusively his own—and emphatically graphic. In the center of the sky the rising sun strives for mastery with the setting moon. Since the sun and the moon cannot appear together in the same part of the sky, their conjunction here is astronomically impossible, but at the same time vividly significant. The lingering

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moon, which should be behind us as the sun rises before us, remains with the tardy night to signify the lovers’ desire to stop time, to prolong night indefinitely, and to keep alive and glowing the torch of Hymen—a third source of light—which hovers over them as they linger on the terraced steep: on the steps leading down to the moonlit water just below the center of the picture. But even as he represents the lovers’ resistance to time, Turner reveals the inexorability of its passage. This is shown not just by the rising sun but by what appears in the “raised spray” of the “straited surge” dashed up against the rocks at lower right, where “Leander’s fall” is prefigured in phantasmagoric multiple exposure. Ironically mimicking the celebratory gesture of the torch-bearing figure at center left, the upraised arms of the multiple exposure at right signify the desperation of a drowning man. Thus Turner tells the whole story of Hero and Leander in a single picture. Refusing to be unitemporal, refusing to illustrate just one moment from a story written by someone else, Turner rewrites the story himself in words and pigment, generating a narrative of his own. Like the Carthaginian series, like the The Vision of Medea, and like so many of Turner’s other paintings of “history,” Hero and Leander reveals Turner’s deep indebtedness to poetic and historical narrative. At the same time, the verses he wrote to accompany his pictures in exhibition catalogues show him radically swerving from the literary and historical discourse of canonical texts. In displacing those texts with texts of his own, in moving from the quotation of known and established works to passages gleaned from a poem that existed solely in his mind, he creates a series of verbal pretexts for the graphic texts of his own art. The result is a kind of painting that takes its stand against poetry in a sense both juxtapositional and oppositional, formulating a new discourse of art.

Chapter 7

Wordsworth, Constable, and the Poetics of Chiaroscuro

In 1833, nearing the end of a long, arduous, and often frustrating struggle to gain adequate recognition for his achievements in landscape painting, Constable expressed the hope that “I may yet make some impression with my ‘light’—my ‘dews’—my ‘breezes’—my bloom and freshness—no one of which qualities has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.” 1 Constable’s faith in what he might do even “yet” at the age of fifty-six calls to mind the ending of The Prelude, where Wordsworth looks forward to writing with Coleridge the prophetic poem of mankind’s redemption, “surely yet to come.” 2 Both statements of expectation resonate with poignancy. The Prelude itself struck Coleridge as “prophetic” enough to place its author “in the choir / Of ever-enduring men,” 3 but Wordsworth died without ever keeping the promise made at the end of his poem. A comparable fate befell Constable’s yearning to “make some impression” with his light, bloom, and freshness. At the Paris Salon of 1824 his paintings anticipated French impressionism itself, and many of those who saw them there—including Delacroix—clearly believed that Constable himself had already perfected the art of representing light and dew. But by 1833, when he spoke of what he “yet” might do with his light, his canvases had noticeably darkened. In the prevailing gloom of works such as Hadleigh Castle (1828–1829) and Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds (1831–1834), critics commonly see evidence of melancholy and pessimism: of sorrow springing from the death of Constable’s wife in November 1828, from the humiliating way in which 141

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he was finally admitted to full membership in the Royal Academy a few months later, and from his reactionary alarm at what discontented labourers, the Reform Bill of 1832, and diabolical “agitators” were doing to the harmony and order of the rural England he cherished.4 Yet if we can hardly do justice to the last forty-five years of Wordsworth’s life by speaking of them as his “decline,” still less can we explain the last phase of Constable’s career by treating it simply as a period of gloom, or—in the words of Michael Rosenthal—as a period of “depression which is varied only in its degree of darkness.” 5 Instead we can penetrate this darkness by means of what Constable at the end of his life called “the soul and medium of art”: chiaroscuro.6

I It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the importance that chiaroscuro finally assumed in Constable’s own conception of what he aimed to achieve, or more precisely what he had already achieved by 1829, when he hired David Lucas to recreate a representative selection of his paintings in mezzotint so that he could quite literally publish them and thereby gain the recognition that he had so far failed to obtain in his own country. Made under Constable’s exacting and often agonized supervision, the mezzotints of English Landscape—as the collection is usually known—constitute at once a retrospective exhibition organized by the artist himself and a graphic commentary on his own work. But since Constable knew only too well that “many can read print & cannot read mezzotint” (JCC 3:108), he wrote verbal commentaries on several of the plates as well as a general introduction to them all. And throughout these commentaries—verbal explanations of what is already a series of graphic explanations of his paintings—Constable chiefly seeks to elucidate the operation and effect of chiaroscuro, which he considers a natural as well as pictorial phenomenon. In 1833 the elaborately full title he gave to the second edition of the mezzotints was Various Subjects of Landscape, characteristic of English scenery, principally intended to mark the Phenomena of the Chiar’Oscuro of Nature. Chiar’Oscuro of Nature is a suggestively problematic phrase. Strictly speaking, chiaroscuro is purely pictorial: “a principle of composition by means of the alternation of light and shade, and particularly the exaggerated effects of darkness shot through with brilliant light that we associate with the works of Correggio and Rembrandt.” 7 Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro struck Constable deeply. In one of the lectures on landscape painting

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7.1 Rembrandt, The Mill (c. 1650). Image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

that he gave not long after the mezzotints appeared, he spoke of Rembrandt’s The Mill (fig. 7.1), as “a picture wholly made by chiaroscuro; the last ray of light just gleams on the upper sail of the mill, and all other details are lost in large and simple masses of shade” (JCD 62). This comment deserves scrutiny. Provocatively enough, it shows that Constable admires Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro even though it exemplifies the very opposite of what he himself had originally aimed to produce. In late May 1802, writing from London to his good friend John Dunthorne, he said that he would return to his native East Bergholt for the summer in order to paint rural scenery “in a pure and unaffected manner,” and he made the oft misquoted statement, “there is room enough for a natural painture.” 8 Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro is not natural. In Constable’s own words it is “somewhat exaggerated” and “decidedly . . . artificial”—the “peculiar language” with which Rembrandt expressed his sentiment. Yet for Constable this peculiar style is “so impressive” that it overwhelms all objections (JCD 62–63).

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The key word here is “impressive,” which—it is worth noting—was also a key word in the vocabulary of Wordsworth.9 Knowing the kind of impression that could be made with chiaroscuro, Constable believed that his paintings could be represented in mezzotint even though it inevitably reduced all colors to varying degrees of light and shade. His friend John Fisher disagreed. When Constable first told him of the plan to engrave his pictures, Fisher wrote, “There is, in your pictures, too much evanescent effect, and general tone, to be expressed in black and white. Your charm is colour, and the cool tint of English daylight. The burr of mezzotint will never touch that” (Leslie 134–35). Yet Constable believed that it could, and that it could represent not only the essence of his pictures but also what he now regarded as the essence of visible nature: its chiaroscuro, the ceaseless interplay of its light and shade. In publishing a set of mezzotints that represents his own paintings— and in turn the natural scenes they represent—as studies in chiaroscuro, Constable seems to define himself as ultimately a formalist, a detached and technically adroit manipulator of abstract elements on the picture plane. This is not the Wordsworthian Constable we know and love, or think we know and love. It is not the Constable who set out to represent natural scenery “in a pure and unaffected manner.” It is not the Constable who told Fisher in 1821 that painting was “but another word for feeling” (JCC 6:78). It is not the Constable who declared—as late as 1836—that “the ideal” when embodied in painting “must bear the stamp of the most absolute reality.” 10 It is not even the Constable who says—in his introduction to the mezzotints themselves—that he is publishing them to promote the study and appreciation of rural scenery in England (JCD 9). For rural scenery is a subject, and chiaroscuro is a technique of graphic arrangement that need not signify any subject at all. As Coleridge wrote in response to Italian painting in 1806, “what Tone to colors chiar-Oscuro [is] to Light & Shade; viz. such a management of them that they form a beautiful whole, independent of the particular Images colored, lit up, or shaded.” 11 May we conclude, then, that Constable abandoned subject matter for abstract pattern in the mezzotints? To answer this question fairly, we should consider his own statements about what his chiaroscuro meant. In the introduction to the mezzotints he says that he has used chiaroscuro to signify “the day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade” (JCD 9). This temporal signification is one of Constable’s trademarks, evident not only in such well-known paintings as The Hay Wain, which he originally titled Landscape: Noon, but also in the mezzotints. Commenting, for instance,

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on the picture of his East Bergholt birthplace that he used as a frontispiece, Constable observes that the “broad still lights” and the “farextended shadows” indicate a summer evening (JCD 12). But not all of the mezzotints unequivocally signify the time of day. For one of them Constable considered the alternative titles “Tempestuous Evening” and “Tempestuous Afternoon” before finally settling on the purely geographical designation Weymouth Bay, Dorsetshire (ELS 36). Still more problematic is Constable’s claim that chiaroscuro—or his chiaroscuro—expresses feeling as well as signifying time. In his commentary on the picture of his birthplace, Constable says that he used chiaroscuro to show that it could invest any subject—no matter how unattractive in itself, no matter how “simple or barren”—with “pathos and effect.” Yet unattractive, simple, and barren are not very apt adjectives for the handsome Georgian house of Golding Constable, Esquire—especially since it was one of several houses that gave East Bergholt “an appearance far superior to that of most villages,” according to an author that Constable immediately proceeds to cite (JCD 12). Does the picture of Constable’s birthplace serve to demonstrate the power of chiaroscuro, to evoke the artist’s childhood (as the opening books of The Prelude evoke Wordsworth’s), or to certify the artist’s gentility? Whatever the answer to that question, Constable hardly demonstrates that chiaroscuro never fails to generate pathos. On the contrary, one of Constable’s own pictures shows how chiaroscuro can be used to suppress it. Consider the 1828 version of Dedham Vale (plate 1). As I have already noted in chapter 1, the chiaroscuro in this picture draws the eye over the shadowy foreground to the sunlit river and village beyond, and to the billowing white clouds above them. Only if we look carefully into the shadows of the foreground can we see what is just barely discernible there: a vagrant mother with her infant (plate 2), cooking on an open fire beside a crude tent that mimics in its shape the roof lines of the far more comfortable and substantial dwellings shown in the middle distance. So far as I know, this faint hint of rural destitution is as close as Constable ever comes to the kind of pathos Wordsworth conveys in a poem such as “The Ruined Cottage.” But shadow makes it all too easy for us to overlook the impoverished mother and child, who become little more than bits of red and white texture. In the “beautiful whole” created by the formal patterns of chiaroscuro, their shadowy lair becomes largely a foil to the glowing vista that we alone—not they—can see.12 Essentially, this picture confirms what Constable said about Wordsworth’s Excursion when he first heard “a good deal” of it read aloud by George Beaumont in 1823.

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Obviously alluding to the story of Margaret in book 1 (a revised version of “The Ruined Cottage”), Constable said of the poem: “It is beautiful but has some sad melancholy stories, and as I think only serve to harrow you up without a purpose—it is bad taste—but some of the descriptions of Landscape are beautifull” (JCC 2:292). Shortly after thus dismissing one of the most poignant stories Wordsworth ever wrote, Constable affirmed, “The language of the heart is the only one that is universal” (JCC 6:157). But the language of Wordsworth’s heart was clearly not universal enough for Constable, who—anticipating the strategy of Dedham Vale—casts the pain of human suffering into the shadow of “bad taste” and focuses instead on the “beautifull” landscapes of Wordsworth’s poem. I have said enough to suggest some of the directions in which Constable’s assiduous cultivation of chiaroscuro take him: away from subject matter, away from reference to anything in particular, away from genuine pathos, and toward a purely formal, abstract kind of beauty.13 Such beauty might have served Constable as a refuge from depression, just as the formal structures of the picturesque served Wordsworth when the failure of the French Revolution had driven him to despair, and thence to the temporarily distracting pastime of judging natural scenery by “rules of mimic art” (1805 Prelude 11.154). Yet in spite of his formalist tendencies, there is considerably more than formal beauty in the chiaroscuro of Constable’s late work, and especially in the chiaroscuro of his mezzotints. In Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows Karl Kroeber finds a “chiaroscuro of meaning,” by which Kroeber means an impenetrable obscurity or ambiguity of reference.14 Reversing Kroeber’s phrase, I seek instead to explain the meaning of Constable’s chiaroscuro, and to find that meaning with the aid of Wordsworth’s poetry. Constable leads us to Wordsworth by quoting him in the introduction to the mezzotints. He not only uses for one of his epigraphs a passage from Wordsworth’s fervently patriotic “Thanksgiving” ode of 1816 (JCD 8); he also quotes Wordsworth in the text of his introduction, when he says that he has tried in some of the mezzotints “to arrest the more abrupt and transient appearances of the CHIAR’OSCURO IN NATURE; to shew its effect in the most striking manner, to give ‘to one brief moment caught from fleeting time’ a lasting and sober existence, and to render permanent many of those splendid but evanescent Exhibitions, which are ever occurring in the changes of external Nature” (JCD 9–10). The quoted line in this passage comes from a sonnet Wordsworth wrote in 1811, “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture, Painted by Sir G. H. Beaumont”:

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Praised be the Art whose subtle power could stay Yon cloud, and fix it in that glorious shape; Nor would permit the thin smoke to escape, Nor those bright sunbeams to forsake the day; Which stopped that band of travellers on their way, Ere they were lost within the shady wood; And showed the Bark upon the glassy flood For ever anchored in her sheltering bay. Soul-soothing Art! whom Morning, Noon-tide, Even, Do serve with all their changeful pageantry; Thou, with ambition modest yet sublime, Here, for the sight of mortal man, hast given To one brief moment caught from fleeting time The appropriate calm of blest Eternity. (PW 3:6)

Since Constable used a line from this sonnet to help him explain his own graphic chiaroscuro, the verbal chiaroscuro of the sonnet itself deserves close scrutiny. The verbal chiaroscuro here—notably the contrast between the bright sunbeams and the shady wood—demands special attention because, so far as we know, Beaumont’s picture offered very little graphic chiaroscuro. The only things Wordsworth took from it were the smoke and the travelers.15 The other details he added to create an imagined picture of light and dark “caught” in perpetual equipoise, in the symmetrical beauty of a “calm” that encompasses both radiance and gloom. The “bright sunbeams” seem to predominate, but the “thin smoke” slightly darkens the scene, and still more ominous is the “shady wood” in which the band of travellers is about to be “lost”—especially since Wordsworth’s lines unmistakably echo the opening terza rima of Dante’s Commedia.16 The lines were uncannily prescient, for in the journey of his own life Wordsworth would shortly enter the selva oscura of grief for two of his children, Thomas and Catherine. They were themselves “lost”—as Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick—not long after he wrote the poem, and after their deaths, sorrow led his mind back to the poem and to the solace intimated by its concluding line (PW 3:420). Significantly, that line drops out of Constable’s quotation. What he seeks to give to the one brief moment caught from fleeting time is not the transcendental calm of eternity but a “lasting and sober existence” on earth: the permanence of graphic art, which translates the evanescent flickering of light and shade into the subtle, intricate, and—for Constable—sobering structures of chiaroscuro. Yet poet and painter

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equally recognize the disruptive impact of darkness on light, the shadowy premonition of pain or loss that threatens to disturb a beautiful and radiant “calm.” In this sense Wordsworth’s sonnet vividly recalls another poem that he wrote five years earlier, that was also prompted by a Beaumont painting, and that Constable also quoted in connection with the mezzotints. I refer to “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm.” 17 Strangely enough, this earlier poem radically undermines the golden tranquillity of the later one. In the later poem Wordsworth describes a picture that is partly of his own imagining, and among the things he imagines or adds to Beaumont’s picture is “the bark upon the glassy flood / For ever anchored in her sheltering bay.” The picture of unruffled peace that is thus created in words is remarkably similar to the one created in the opening stanza of “Peele Castle,” where the poet recalls the sight of the castle itself “sleeping on a glassy sea”: So pure the sky, so quiet was the air! So like, so very like, was day to day! Whene’er I looked, shy Image still was there; It trembled, but it never passed away. How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep; No mood, which season takes away, or brings: I could have fancied that the mighty Deep Was even the gentlest of all gentle Things. (lines 4–12)

Beaumont’s Peele Castle (plate 8) reminds Wordsworth of an altogether different picture that he saw one summer while living within sight of the castle itself, which stands on a coastal promontory in North Lancashire. Yet his description of what he remembers seeing employs just the kind of terms he later uses to describe Beaumont’s other picture. The glowing serenity of that work—as recreated in the sonnet—is enhanced by a “glassy flood.” Here a “glassy sea” tremblingly but persistently reflects the image of the castle “sleeping” upon it and thus creates a natural picture of radiant tranquillity, of perfect and seemingly imperturbable “calm.” The memory of this serene natural picture then prompts Wordsworth to imagine the kind of picture he would have created from it if he could: Ah! THEN, if mine had been the Painter’s hand, To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,

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The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the Poet’s dream; I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile Amid a world how different from this! Beside a sea that could not cease to smile; On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. (lines 13–20)

Had Wordsworth been a painter, he would have taken the serene reflection of the castle as a model of graphic representation, and would therefore have produced a picture something like Richard Wilson’s Carnarvon Castle (1762).18 Just as reflections “sleeping” on water intensify the brightness of what they reflect and at the same time radiate calm, Wordsworth would have reflected the castle in a picture altogether different from “this” stormy one of Beaumont’s: a picture of eternal sunbeams, “Elysian quiet,” and “steadfast peace that might not be betrayed” (lines 23, 26, 32). In this poem, however, the beauty of the imaginary picture yields to the sublimity of the real one. The picture of radiant and steadfast peace that Wordsworth once would have painted gives way to the picture that Beaumont has actually painted and that now stands undeniably before him. Beaumont’s dark, stormy picture moves him to dismiss the bright, peaceful one as a “fond illusion” (29) because he is now within the dark wood of grief; his brother John had died in a shipwreck several months before he wrote the poem. As a result, he commends the passion with which Beaumont depicts a scene of dark and fearful upheaval: “this sea in anger, and that dismal shore” (44), with a distant ship laboring ominously in the “deadly swell” (47). At the same time, he implicitly identifies himself with the “sublime” castle which anthropomorphically “braves, / Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, / The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves” (50–52). Beaumont’s Peele Castle may well have been known to Constable, who (as we shall see in a moment) recalls its composition in one of his own most famous works. But what he explicitly links to the mezzotints is Wordsworth’s poem. Sometime in or about November 1830, Mrs. C. R. Leslie saw at Constable’s house a proof of a print called Weymouth Bay and asked him if she might have it. When her husband protested because he thought it was something “of value to Constable” (Leslie 222), the artist sent her the proof the very next day with the following note:

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I have no idea that husbands should control their wives any more than that wives should control their husbands at least in trifles. I therefore make no scruple to send you a thing that is good for nothing. It is I hope a sufficient excuse for me, that you expressed a wish for it & feeling at the same time assured that its being useless was the reason of your doing so, thus—“much (ado) about nothing.” I shall now to give value to the fragment I send you, apply to it the lines of Wordsworth—. . . “That sea in anger [/] and that dismal shoar.” I think of “Wordsworth” for on that spot, perished his brother in the wreck of the Abergavenny. (JCC 3:28–29)

I quote this passage in full because it sheds more than a glimmer of light on Constable’s state of mind at the time he was preparing the mezzotints, on his attitude toward Wordsworth, and on his response to Wordsworth’s poem. Constable’s note is at least as remarkable for what it does not say as for what it does. It does not say, for instance, that the painting which stands behind the mezzotint of Weymouth Bay is itself based on an oil sketch Constable made in October 1816, when he was on honeymoon with the woman he had waited five years to marry.19 If “Peele Castle” reflects Wordsworth’s grief for the loss of his brother, the mezzotint of Weymouth Bay surely reflects Constable’s grief for the loss of his wife. For Wordsworth in 1806, Beaumont’s picture of Peele Castle simultaneously recalls an enchanted summer and represents the ruin of enchantment, the murderous savagery of the sea. For Constable in 1830, the painting of Weymouth Bay (ex. 1819) that he was now recreating in mezzotint must have simultaneously recalled the enchanted beginning of his long-delayed marriage to Maria and its painful dissolution. All these thoughts find veiled expression in Constable’s tender solicitude for the wishes of Mrs. Leslie, who in some sense represents Maria; in his reference to the death of Wordsworth’s brother, which displaces any reference to the death of his own wife; and in the mezzotint itself, which turns a canvas of greys, pale greens, and ochre into a work of striking contrast between black shade and vivid white bursts of light. Equally revealing is the extravagance of Constable’s self-deprecation. He gives the mezzotint to Mrs. Leslie because, he says, it is “good for nothing,” and to make this worthless “fragment” valuable, he applies to it a single line of Wordsworth (which for some reason he quotes as if it were two). The line, of course, is itself a fragment of Wordsworth’s poem, and the mezzotint is a totality, a fully organized work of chiaroscuro. But Constable reverses the values of the picture and the verbal fragment, and

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in doing so shows us something of the desperation which repeatedly tortured him throughout the process of preparing the mezzotints. On March 12, 1831 he wrote to Lucas: “I have thought much on my book, and all my reflections on the subject go to oppress me—its duration, its expense, its hopelessness of remuneration, all are unfavourable” (JCC 4:344). The prospect of financial disaster—of losing all or most of his considerable investment in the project—made him feel at times like Milton’s Adam right after the fall. On March 24 he wrote to Lucas, “The work worries me greatly. It was indeed thought of ‘in evil hour’ ” (JCC 4:347)—a phrase quoted from the opening line of Adam’s first guilt-stricken speech to Eve in Paradise Lost (9.1067). Two years later, with the project virtually complete, he sounded the same note of explicitly spiritual desperation. “I do consider the book a heavy visitation,” he wrote, “a real curse, upon me for my sins—and that it was the devil himself who first led me step by step to do it—thus to waste the sacred property of my children.” 20 The darkness evident in Constable’s late work undoubtedly springs, at least in part, from the oppressive sense of loss and guilt revealed by comments such as these, especially since he regularly described his own sufferings in terms of darkness. In 1825, well before the death of Maria and the ordeal of the mezzotints, he wrote to Fisher about the “cruel” indifference of the public, and then added: “I have related no imaginary ills to you—to one so deeply involved in active life as I am they are realities, and so you would find them. I live by shadows, to me shadows are realities” (JCC 6:210–11). Time made shadows multiply in Constable’s world. In June of 1833, when C. R. Leslie was planning to leave for America, Constable wrote: “The loss of you is a cloud casting its shade over my life, now in its autumn” (JCC 3:103). By the end of the following year Leslie was back, but his return brought no change in Constable’s personal iconography. To Leslie he wrote: “Every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms?” 21 The sense of his own later life as an autumnal vale of shadows and storms helps to explain why he should have been particularly struck by Wordsworth’s poem on Beaumont’s Peele Castle, since poem and painting each bear witness to the melancholy darkness of what Wordsworth calls the “rueful sky” (48). But the other element that must have caught his attention in both works is the hulk laboring in the “deadly swell”: the endangered hulk which he—like Wordsworth—surely connected to the shipwreck he mentions in his letter to Mrs Leslie. The juxtaposition of ruin and imminent shipwreck in both works can also be linked to still

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more elements of Constable’s personal iconography. In December 1832, dismayed by what Lucas was doing with the mezzotint of Glebe Farm, he repeatedly called it “a wreck” (JCC 4:361), and he had already decided to do another version of the picture with a ruin in it because, he told Lucas, “not to have a symbol in the book of myself, and of the ‘Work’ which I have projected, would be missing the opportunity.” 22 Since I have already noted that Constable’s emphasis on chiaroscuro in the mezzotints seems to reinforce the formalist tendencies in his later work, the painter’s identification of himself and his work with ruin and wreck is worth noting for two reasons. One is that ruins heighten the effect of darkness that emanates from some of his most remarkable late works, notably Hadleigh Castle. The other and more important reason is that Constable’s definition of the ruin in personal and psychological terms clearly aligns him with Wordsworth and against the purely formal, aesthetic tradition of the picturesque. In the picturesque tradition, the ruin has no moral significance. Its chief value lies in the pictorially interesting irregularity of its form and the roughness of its texture.23 But for Wordsworth, the ruin of Peele Castle in Beaumont’s painting is a “sublime” symbol of stoic resolution and heroic resistance to “the lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves” (52). For Constable likewise, a ruin is far more than a picturesque curiosity. It starkly signifies his conviction that the mezzotints—his grand project of retrospective self-presentation—had become instead a catastrophic exercise in self-destruction.

II To identify something contrary to picturesque formalism in Constable’s conception of the ruin is not, of course, to overturn the notion that I called into question earlier: the notion that Constable’s late work manifests simply his decline into depression. For the question raised by the evidence I have just cited is whether we can find anything but depression in the darkness and ruin that seem to predominate in both the paintings and the mezzotints of Constable’s final decade. I believe that we can. Constable’s late works fight depression in ways that move beyond even what Wordsworth offers in “Peele Castle.” In “Peele Castle” the antidote to depression is stoic perseverence: “fortitude, and patient cheer, / And frequent sights of what is to be borne!” (57–58). But the chiaroscuro of Constable’s late work embodies something more than stoicism. What it gives us instead is the graphic psychomachia of a mind at war with its own despair.

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To grasp the psychological complexity of Constable’s chiaroscuro, we must first realize that for him, darkness signified sublimity quite as much as—if not more than—melancholy. In his well-known treatise on the sublime and beautiful, which Constable evidently knew by 1814 (JCC 2:131), Edmund Burke had explained why “darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light” (80). Whether or not Burke’s treatise actually influenced Constable, he plainly acknowledged the sublime effect of darkness, its capacity to suggest infinitude and grandeur. Just after explaining to Leslie in 1834 that the darkening of his own life had led him to “paint continual storms,” he added significantly, “Still the darkness is majestic” (JCC 3:122). This was not a late discovery. Twenty years earlier, when he was visiting Hadleigh Castle and making the sketch that later became the basis for his paintings of it, he wrote to Maria Bicknell, “I was always delighted with the melancholy grandeur of the sea shore” (3 July 1814; JCC 2:127). This remark helps us to see that the looming darkness of paintings such as the Tate Gallery version of Hadleigh Castle cannot simply be read as a manifestation of Constable’s grief for the loss of Maria. It is also an evocation of something he had pleasurably experienced long before her death, and had described to Maria herself. If Constable found a majestic sublimity in darkness, he also recognized its capacity to intensify light and color by contrast, and it was in fact the dynamic cooperation of light and darkness in landscape that he sought to express in the chiaroscuro of the mezzotints. Commenting on the mezzotint of Spring, Constable writes that he seeks to show in the plate the animating, exhilarating effect of spring: “when at noon large garish clouds . . . sweep with their broad cool shadows the fields, woods, and hills; and by the contrast of their depths and bloom enhance the value of the vivid greens and yellows, so peculiar to this season; heightening also their brightness, and by their motion causing that playful change, always so much desired by the painter.” 24 To see that Constable used chiaroscuro to represent the vitality of spring is to begin discovering that for all their accent on darkness and ruin, the mezzotints also testify to renewal and regeneration. “For the most part,” Constable wrote, the mezzotints represent scenes “with which I have the strongest associations—those of my earliest years, when in the cheerful morn of life, I looked to nature with increasing joy” (Hill 31). If the ruin that Constable added to Glebe Farm symbolizes his despondency, the frontispiece showing his birthplace signifies a Wordsworthian longing to reawaken his original impulses, and so does the mezzotint of Spring that immediately follows the frontispiece in Constable’s final ordering of the

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plates (Hill 98–99). When Constable said that Leslie’s plan to emigrate in 1833 “was like a cloud casting its shade over my life, now in its autumn,” he went on to say, “I never did admire the autumnal tints, even in nature, so little of a painter am I in the eye of commonplace connoisseurship. I love the exhilarating freshness of spring” (JCC 3:103). Comments such as this one show that Constable did not simply surrender to the darkness of despondency in his final years. If at times he linked his feelings with the most despairing moods of Milton’s fallen Adam, he could also cite the words of Milton’s just-created Adam to help him articulate his vision of landscape. In a note evidently intended for use in his lectures on landscape painting, which he gave from 1833 to 1836, he quotes at length from Adam’s description of his first awakening to the light of paradise (PL 8.250–71) and comments: “We are no doubt placed in a paradise here if we choose to make it such. All of us must have felt ourselves in the same place and situation as that of our first parent, when on opening his eyes the beauty and magnificence of external nature and the material world broke on his astonished sight intensely. . . .” 25 To the end of his life Constable struggled to keep alive in himself this primordially Adamic capacity for wonder. I began this essay by quoting what he said in 1833 about “my ‘light’—my ‘dews’—my ‘breezes’—my bloom and my freshness” (JCC 2:96). As late as 1835, when he was working on The Valley Farm, he declared, “I have kept my brightness without my spottiness, and I have preserved God Almighty’s daylight, which is enjoyed by all mankind, excepting only the lovers of old dirty canvas” (JCC 5:20). He could hardly prove this point by The Valley Farm itself, which—as critics have noted—projects a stagnant gloom. But in the mezzotints and in the best of his late works, he uses chiaroscuro to dramatize the enduringly assertive power of his light. Consider the Tate Gallery version of Hadleigh Castle (plate 9). Based on a sketch of 1814, this full-scale oil sketch may owe something to the composition of Beaumont’s Peele Castle, which—like Constable’s picture—shows a large ruin in the left foreground and the sea at right under a clouded sky. But whether or not Constable’s painting owes anything to Beaumont’s, comparison of the two reveals as many differences as similarities. Beaumont uses yellows and browns to achieve the mellow autumnal tone of an old master canvas—the “old Cremona fiddle” coloring that he once ineffectually urged upon Constable (Leslie 114). By contrast, Constable’s picture is chromatically dominated by the cool

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greens, blues, and swirls of white that fill up his sky. Also, while Beaumont shows the darkness of a storm closing in from all sides on a contracted circle of light, Constable shows light both advancing and rising from behind a foreground of darkness. The full subject of Constable’s picture, as the full titles of the exhibited version and the mezzotint clearly indicate, is Hadleigh Castle on the morning after a stormy night.26 The titles alone suggest that Hadleigh Castle radiates something more than melancholy, and further words of Constable help us to see that it signifies a sense of renewal, the regenerative power of light invading darkness. Beneath the title of the exhibited version in the Royal Academy catalogue of 1829 he quoted a passage from the long Miltonic tribute to light that appears in James Thomson’s “Summer” (lines 81–198).27 In Constable’s quotation the passage (lines 165–70) runs: The desert joys Wildly, through all his melancholy bounds Rude ruins glitter; and the briny deep, Seen from some pointed promontory’s top, Far to the dim horizon’s utmost verge Restless reflects a floating gleam. (LP, text 199)

Constable alters the punctuation of the first two lines here, which in the original form one complete sentence: “The desert joys / Wildly through all his melancholy bounds” (“Summer” 165–66; CPW 59). By removing the full stop after “melancholy bounds,” he makes the dark ending of the line give way to light glittering through the bounds. In Constable’s version, this all-permeating light emanates from the “rude ruins,” and thus reinforces what Thomson himself says about the sun just before the lines Constable quotes: “The very dead creation, from thy touch / Assumes a mimic life” (160–61; CPW 59). This line is the key to Constable’s treatment of Hadleigh Castle. In his various versions of it, Constable struggled to show that the creative power of light could reanimate even a shadowy ruin, which thereby serves to signify both his shattering sense of loss and his faith in the possibility of renewal. The battle between the two, which Constable represents as a contest between light and shadow, takes different forms in the three different versions of the picture. In the Tate Gallery painting, the ruined towers stand in a pool of almost unrelieved blackness, with the lines of the

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7.2 John Constable, Hadleigh Castle (ex. 1829). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

shadow cast by the taller one just barely marked against the faint streaks of light on either side. In the exhibited version (fig. 7.2), light almost envelops the taller tower, making it glitter, and the previously invisible niches on its right side—together with the long shadows cast by the cows, the shepherd, and the dog—become sharply visible. Under Constable’s exacting guidance, Lucas recast this exhibited version in the chiaroscuro of the mezzotint (fig. 7.3), where light and shadow dramatically strive for mastery. On either side of the deep shadows under the taller tower, light strikes the cows and the figures at lower left, and also defines the jagged edge of the break in the tower against the blackness of its interior. On the horizon at right, the pale slant of light in the exhibited picture becomes a vivid shaft of white cut through swirls of grey, and the “floating gleam” of the distant sea—though visible in the paintings— is accentuated here by the contrasting shadows in the clouds lying just above it. Finally, more than either of the paintings, the mezzotint elicits the whiteness of the gulls flying through the shadows of the right fore-

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7.3 David Lucas after John Constable, Hadleigh Castle (c. 1832). Mezzotint with etching, engraver’s proof. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

ground from the light of the distant sea. Against the white cloud in the centre the gulls are black; against the dark cloud and the shadows at right they are white. The gulls thus illustrate the principle of conversion that enables Constable to penetrate shadow, and to challenge the sublimity of darkness with the sublimity of a regenerative light. Constable once defined artists as “creatures of feeling, visionaries” (JCC 6:209). To study his later paintings and the mezzotints is to see that he could finally express his own divided vision of hope and despair only through the dramatic antagonism of light and shadow, the graphic psychomachia of chiaroscuro. In the broken light of such a vision referentiality fades; in Hadleigh Castle, it has been said, the objects are “glimpsed through a maelstrom of paint.” 28 Yet if Constable’s chiaroscuro obscures physical facts, it also reveals psychological truths. At once gloomy and radiant, it literalizes the chiaroscuro that Wordsworth metaphorically deploys to represent the “Visionary power” that he found “Embodied in the mystery of words”:

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There darkness makes abode, and all the host Of shadowy things do work their changes there As in a mansion like their proper home: Even forms and substances are circumfus’d By that transparent veil with light divine; And through the turnings intricate of Verse Present themselves as objects recognis’d In flashes, and with a glory scarce their own. (1805, Prelude 5.595–605)

Chapter 8

Self-Representation in Byron’s Poetry and Turner’s Art

If painting is an art of signs rather than an illusionistic replica of the world we inhabit, one good way of testing this hypothesis is to see how painters represent themselves. We might of course look simply at selfportraiture. Just as Richard Wendorf has compared biography and portrait-painting in Stuart and Georgian England, we might—let us say—compare any number of youthful self-portraits from the early twentieth century with an autobiography such as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929) or an autobiographical novel such as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).1 In the Romantic period, the work of Turner complicates this task, for he painted himself just three times—and never again after his Self-Portrait as a young man, made about 1798. Yet in linking passages from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to several of his paintings during the years 1818 to 1844, Turner prompts us to search his work for signs of something like the self-representation in Byron’s celebrated quest romance, and in a larger sense to ask what kinds of self-representation are possible in literature and painting. To consider each of them as an art of signification is to see that autobiography and self-portraiture are merely the most obvious of the many ways in which writers and painters can signify themselves.

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I The works Turner explicitly linked to Childe Harold serve not as an end in themselves but as a goad to further investigation because they leave so many questions unanswered. In catalogues for annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy, Turner quoted lines from Byron’s poem under the titles of five pictures: The Field of Waterloo (1818), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage— Italy (1832), The Bright Stone of Honor and the Tomb of Marceau (1835), Modern Rome—Campo Vaccino (1839), and Approach to Venice (1844). He also made a total of 26 drawings that were engraved for the two editions of Byron’s Works published in 1825 and 1832–1834.2 All this evidence of Turner’s interest in Byron, the only major romantic poet in whom he showed any interest at all, raises questions about influence, or at the very least about affinities. Did Turner become in any sense Byronic? Did the poet and the painter share a vision? John Ruskin thought that they did, that each of them regarded the world with an idiosyncratically pessimistic eye. “In his extreme sadness,” wrote Ruskin, “and in the morbid tones of mind out of which it arose, [Turner] is one with Byron and Goethe.” 3 Ruskin is surely right about the strain of pessimism that permeates the work of Byron and Turner as well as that of Goethe. But when we attempt to move beyond that large abstraction into specific correspondences between Byron and Turner, Turner’s nominally Byronic pictures actually furnish very little help. Take The Field of Waterloo and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—Italy, both at the Tate Gallery. While each depicts the subject of the stanza quoted—the brutality of war and the beauty of an Italian landscape graced with classical ruins—neither of them represents either of the two major figures in Childe Harold: the narrator and Harold himself. For The Field of Waterloo Turner quotes the stanza in which Byron’s narrator imagines the gaiety of a ball giving way to the carnage of battle: “Rider and horse,—friend, foe,—in one red burial blent!” 4 The picture itself shows the night of the battle day, when rockets were fired to frighten away scavengers and desperately anxious women came to seek what remained of their men.5 But Turner neither quotes nor represents the lines on Harold’s paradoxically smiling despair (CHP 3.16), nor does he show how the imagination of Byron’s narrator exhumes the story of the recent battle from the dust of the Empire that lies beneath his feet (3.17–28). Likewise, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—Italy (fig. 8.1) represents the stanza that salutes the indestructible beauty of an Italian landscape paradoxically graced by ruins and weeds (4.26), but offers no glimpse of the figure who calls himself “a ruin amidst ruins” (4.25) in the stanza just before.6 In

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8.1 J. M. W. Turner, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—Italy (1832). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

place of Byron’s brooding, solitary narrator, Turner gives us a happy huddle of picnickers and a pair of figures dancing gaily in an idealized landscape that owes much less to Byron or his pessimism than it does to Claude Lorrain, the single most important influence on Turner’s interpretation of Italy.7 Thus the literary title of this picture seems not so much to identify its subject as to enhance its cultural value.8 I say this much to indicate the difficulties confronting anyone who seeks to align Turner and Byron or, more precisely, who hopes to find in Byron’s poetry some clue to the art of self-representation in the paintings of Turner. Byron pours so much of himself into the character of Harold that critics must labor to distinguish the two—to separate Harold from the narrator, who is usually identified with Byron.9 But it is much harder to find the face of Turner in his paintings than to find the personality of Byron in his poems. If Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—Italy raises questions by suppressing all reference to Harold or the ever-present narrator, Turner’s work as a whole raises questions by making virtually no explicit reference to the painter himself. In what we commonly regard is an age of passionate self-expression, Turner produced just three self-portraits, as I have already noted, and none at all after his early twenties. In light of this apparent self-effacement it is startling to recall that Rembrandt, whose

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coloring Turner idolized, painted more than one hundred self-portraits, and that Joshua Reynolds, whom he greatly respected, produced eight of them at various stages of his career.10 To juxtapose Byron and Turner, then, as Turner himself invites us to do, is to confront a fundamental difference. Byron advertised himself, transparently dramatizing his guilt in Manfred, explicitly linking the melancholy, alienated temperament of his narrating self with the personality of the title figure in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, publicly dragging the pageant of a bleeding heart halfway across Europe in the poems on his separation from Augusta Leigh. By contrast, Turner hid himself. He never posed for a formal portrait in oils by anyone else; he resented any expression of curiosity about his private life; he conceived the imagination of the artist as a sanctum sanctorum, “enthroned in [its] own recess, incomprehensible as the cause [of] darkness.” 11 Turner’s work thus seems to embody the antithesis of romantic self-expression and to thwart the interpretive strategy that Byron’s poetry repeatedly invites: the quest for overt or covert autobiography. At this point we may ask if such a quest could succeed with painting of any kind, if even a self-portrait can be anything more than a dead metaphor for autobiography. Lessing’s Laocoon furnishes the terms for a negative answer: while autobiography narrates the successive stages of a life lived in time, the self-portrait spatializes its subject, isolating from the flow of time just one stage or moment of the subject’s life. But this formulation oversimplifies the difference between literature and the visual arts. Painting can plainly reveal the effects of time, as shown in such works as the Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat which Barthelemy Menn painted about 1872, when he was nearly sixty, and which he himself called his autobiography.12 Painting can also represent the successive stages of a painter’s life, as Rembrandt does in a series of self-portraits produced over a period of forty years. Even a single self-portrait can give us considerably more than the painter’s response to what he or she sees in the mirror at the time of the painting. In Le passé et le présent (1890), Henri Rousseau represents himself both as the young man he had been and as the older man he had become at the time of the painting (Manuel Gasser 191). Such pictures reveal that neither retrospection nor self-reconstruction is the exclusive property of the autobiographer. In fact it is striking to note that in 1804, shortly before Wordsworth completed the first version of his autobiographical Prelude, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted the first version of his Self-Portrait of the Artist at the Age of Twenty-four. Then sometime between 1840 and 1850, when Wordsworth was revising

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for the last time the story of his growth to early manhood, Ingres extensively retouched his youthful self-portrait (Manuel Gasser 136–39). At the very least, correspondences such as these should prompt more comparative study of the ways in which writers and painters represent themselves: of what has been done in self-portraiture and autobiography, and of the many other forms that self-representation can take in both of the arts. Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is not autobiography but autobiographical: a minimally fictionalized account of the poet’s travels through Europe and the Mediterranean region, a poem in which he projects himself at once as the first-person narrator and as the third-person pilgrim whose travels, thoughts, and feelings he ostensibly recounts. Byron’s poem, then, exemplifies one of the many forms that self-representation can take when it moves beyond the borders of autobiography. And the overt self-projection that Byron offers us may be compared with what we find in the works of Turner: covert self-signification. The difference between these two kinds of self-representation does not spring from any inherent difference between literature and the visual arts. Painters and writers are equally capable of overt self-projection and covert self-signification. On the one hand, painters can openly represent themselves in self-portraits or can project their likenesses into figures they impersonate, as Rembrandt does when he depicts himself as an oriental grandee in Self-Portrait with an Oriental Costume (1631). On the other hand, writers can covertly signify themselves as writers, can put within a text any number of figurative or symbolic references to the act of writing which they are performing. Lily Briscoe’s patient, protracted struggle to compose a painting of Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, for instance, represents in part Virginia Woolf’s own struggle to compose her novel, and one critic has recently argued that the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe can be read as a “secret autobiography”—the encrypted story of Poe’s own life as a writer.13 If the self-portrait is the pictorial counterpart of autobiography, Turner shows us that painting also furnishes a counterpart to this covert self-signification in literature. Studied together, then, the works of Byron and Turner help to reveal the variety of ways in which both poets and painters can represent themselves.

II We can now begin to see how Byron represents himself by looking at a single stanza of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. For all the dangers inherent in taking stanzas out of context, the basic unit of self-representation in

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Byron’s poem is the stanza, more precisely the Spenserian stanza: compact enough to be absorbed as a unit, yet long enough to define a mood, or even the shift from one mood to another, as in the opening stanza of canto 3: Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child! Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart? When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled, And then we parted,—not as now we part, But with a hope.— Awaking with a start, The waters heave around me; and on high The winds heave up their voices: I depart, Whither I know not; but the hour’s gone by, When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve, or glad mine eye. (CHP 3:1)

We have here almost a concrete poem, a typographical picture of separation. The stanza breaks precisely in the middle, graphically signifying two kinds of rupture: the wrenching separation of the speaker from his daughter, which assumes a painful finality when compared with a previous parting, and the sudden experience of waking up, which decisively breaks the mood of reverie established in the first half of the stanza.14 Yet even as it registers and represents rupture, the stanza demands to be seen and read as a whole. It begins and ends in a present tense that consumes nostalgia, that denies the emotional impact of the fissure between past and present, that defiantly asserts the speaker’s indifference to the very act of parting: “I depart, / Whither I know not; but the hour’s gone by, / When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.” The speaker’s determination to deny the very split which this stanza so graphically reveals is reinforced by the mode of narration here. As Jerome McGann has said about the whole poem, the stanza makes “no distinction between the narrator’s virtual present and a past series of events about which he writes.” 15 In this stanza McGann finds “narrative illusionism pushed to its extreme limit,” because, he says, the speaker’s reverie in the first four and a half lines occurs at the same time as his narration of it (34). But if we read Byron’s stanza innocently, as if for the first time, we cannot know that its first four and a half lines express a mood of reverie until we learn that the speaker has been jolted awake. Only then are we asked to believe that the lines we have just read have not been uttered by an already awakened speaker at the moment when he actually leaves his daughter (“as now we part”), but rather have been spoken or

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written in a dream, an act even less likely than that anyone should start speaking or writing at the instant of awakening or should scribble out Spenserian stanzas on the deck of a pitching ship. Byron thus exposes the illusion as such in the very act of generating it. Even as he tries to close the gap between the writing self and the experiencing self, between the poet deliberately shaping a stanza and the voyager spontaneously narrating (or recording) his sensations and feelings, he is forced to disclose it. What is implicit in this first stanza of the canto becomes explicit in the third, where the poet emerges from the guise of voyaging narrator to speak briefly for himself: In my youth’s summer I did sing of One, The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind; Again I seize the theme then but begun, And bear it with me, as the rushing wind Bears the cloud onwards: in that Tale I find The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind, O’er which all heavily the journeying years Plod the last sands of life,—where not a flower appears. (CHP 3.3)

The I of this third stanza clearly differs from the I of the first two. In the first two stanzas the voyaging narrator uses the present tense to tell the story of an actual embarkation, and of his reckless surrender to the elements: “I am as a weed, / Flung from the rock, on Ocean’s foam, to sail / Where’er the surge may sweep, or tempest’s breath prevail” (3.2). By contrast, the I of stanza 3 first uses the past tense to say what he has written. Then the literal language with which the narrator records his physical embarkation gives way to a figurative language signifying the renewed act of composition. The man driven by wind and waves—the passive object of elemental forces—becomes himself a tempestuous force driving his cloudlike theme along. Finally, the poet represents himself as a reader also, looking back on a text that becomes a sterile tract of sand, a parody of the voyager’s wake, even as he sets out to write again. Before Harold reappears in the poem, therefore, Byron represents himself as an I with two selves: the speaking self of the narrating traveler, who is literally in motion and who immediately translates his experience into words, and the writing self of the dramatized poet, who can read what he has written and comment on his own act of writing. Both selves persevere to the end of the poem. While the traveler journeys from

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England to Rome and to the culminating view of the ocean from the Alban Hills, the dramatized poet reads and writes, comparing his account of Roman ruins with Servius Sulpicius’s account of Greek ruins (CHP 4.44–46), leaving “in this page” a record of the curse called down upon his enemies (4.134), hoping to be remembered for his written words (4.9), and ending the poem with a final comment on them: “What is writ, is writ,— / Would it were worthier!” (4.185). Nevertheless, the dramatized poet never assumes the importance of the traveling narrator. Instead, he periodically dissolves into the traveler, as in this stanza from the latter part of canto 3: But let me quit man’s works, again to read His Maker’s, spread around me, and suspend This page, which from my reveries I feed Until it seems prolonging without end. The clouds above me to the white Alps tend, And I must pierce them, and survey whate’er May be permitted, as my steps I bend To their most great and growing region, where The earth to her embrace compels the powers of air. (CHP 3.109)

The I in this stanza first signifies the dramatized poet who has been reading “man’s works” (the books of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Gibbon) as well as writing his own poem, endlessly feeding “this page.” But in quitting the page, the dramatized poet once more becomes the narrating traveler. Speaking rather than writing, reading the book of nature instead of man-made texts, bending his steps to the Alps, he is literally on the move again. Both the dramatized poet and the narrating traveler, of course, emanate from the undramatized poet, the invisible author who keeps the stanza going even after the dramatized poet has put down his pen. Within the poem, however, the traveling self springs from the creative mind of the dramatized poet: ’Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now, What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou, Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,

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Invisible but gazing, as I glow Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth, And feeling still with thee in my crush’d feelings’ dearth. (CHP 3.6)

Here the dramatized poet describes the process of poetic creation. The life he images or projects now is usually taken to be that of Harold, his alter ego or “object self” (McGann 76). But since Harold does not appear until stanza 8, the figure being created by the dramatized poet can only be the one already introduced to us: the traveling narrator. This figure at once consumes and magnifies the I of the dramatized poet, transforming its nothingness into a personality that paradoxically constitutes not the embodiment of the poet’s thought but the soul of it, a kind of epipsyche wrought with words, a traveler who can speak or write even in dreams because the poet who invisibly travels with him can at all times “glow” or speak through him, making the pronoun I signify the poet, the traveler, or the cooperative union of both. Visibly claiming to be invisible, the dramatized poet identifies himself only in order to show how his identity mixes and blends with the identity of the traveler it projects. Thus the dramatized poet creates a traveler whose strenuous venturing figuratively signifies the effort to write poetry, as CHP 3.3 suggests, but who nonetheless absorbs the identity of his creator. Just as the dramatized poet projects the traveling narrator, the narrator in turn projects the figure of Harold, who is summoned back to life in canto 3, written four years after he first appeared in cantos 1 and 2 (published 1812): “Long absent HAROLD reappears at last” (CHP 3.8). As a pilgrim, Harold nominally objectifies the wandering side of the I, the energy that drives the I from writing to traveling, from the page to the path. Byron himself, in dedicating Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to John Cam Hobhouse, treats both the poem and the pilgrim as his traveling companions. He refers to the poem as an “old . . . friend” who makes him think of one “still older and better,” namely Hobhouse, who actually traveled with him even as “the poem also, or the pilgrim, or both, have accompanied me from first to last.” 16 Precisely because he represents himself chiefly as a traveler rather than as a poet, Byron himself thought he had failed to distinguish “between the author and the pilgrim” (O 146), by which he presumably meant the pilgrim and the I within the poem. Yet, Byron does keep the two distinct. For even though pilgrim Harold nominally embodies the wandering temperament of the I, he actually objectifies—as McGann has

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shown—the tendencies toward hopelessness, introversion, and stagnation that the I must overcome in order to make himself a true pilgrim, a heroically indefatigable quester (McGann 76–87). By the end of the poem, pilgrim Harold has won his shrine (CHP 4.175). Having long ago left the “monastic dome” of his English ancestors (1.7), he has reached Rome and Saint Peter’s, “Christ’s mighty shrine” (4.153), the traditional destination of Christian pilgrims. But in the very act of reaching it, he terminates his role in the poem. Unmentioned in canto 4 up to the passage on Saint Peter’s, he reappears just afterwards, only to disappear, “his wanderings done, his visions ebbing fast, / And he himself as nothing” (4.164)—the counterpart of the dramatized poet called “nothing” who reconceived him at the beginning of canto 3. With Harold thus ending his pilgrimage, the narrator moves on to the ocean, which itself rolls on forever; indestructible and glorious, “boundless, endless, and sublime” (4.183). First and last, then, Byron represents himself as a quester: a figure who absorbs both the dramatized poet who projects him and the nominal pilgrim he in turn projects. With the dramatized poet and the nominal pilgrim reduced to “nothing,” what remains is the quintessentially Byronic pilgrim, a man with neither a determinate self nor a determinate destination, a personality in the act of perpetually becoming.

III While Byron offers us a trio of overt self-projections in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the paintings of Turner seem at first to say almost nothing at all autobiographical. I have already noted that Turner painted just three self-portraits. The first two, a watercolor (c. 1791) and an oil (c. 1793), were done in his teens. The last and best of them, an oil dating from his early twenties (fig. 8.2), shows an intense, self-confident, ambitious young man at the start of his career. But there are no self-portraits from Turner’s long years of achievement and fame, and nothing at all like the Self-Portrait as Doctor of Civil Law (now at the Royal Academy) that Joshua Reynolds painted for the Royal Academy about 1773, when he was its president. Reynolds’s picture plainly recalls Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653). In place of Homer, Reynolds puts the bust of Michelangelo, whose sculptures and frescoes rivaled in grandeur, he thought, “the most sublime passages of Homer.” 17 And in place of Aristotle, Reynolds confidently puts himself, for he had already

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8.2 J. M. W. Turner, Self-Portrait (c. 1798). Tate Gallery, London.

begun to deliver the series of discourses that would collectively constitute a poetics of painting. Perhaps one reason Turner never produced this kind of self-portrait is that in both substance and style his own lectures at the Royal Academy drastically departed from the example set by Reynolds’s elegant Discourses. While Reynolds wrought a gracious and cultured persona for public consumption, Turner guarded his privacy. In place of Reynolds’s lucid eloquence and precisely formulated rules, Turner offered mystification. The notion that painting ultimately springs not from rules or even from nature but from the “imagination of the artist enthroned in his own recess, incomprehensible as the cause [of] darkness,” is the opinion of a recluse, an artist habitually secretive about himself and his methods.18 For all of his fame, Turner refused to publicize his methods—to make them systematically available to others—or to depict for the public his own figure, which was variously described by his contemporaries as pig-faced, slovenly, shabby, short, stout, bandy-legged, vulgar, pimply, and coarse: a figure inviting caricature rather than portraiture (Thornbury 224;

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Walker 26). Turner was never formally depicted in oils by anyone. Though his career lasted more than fifty years, the most flattering portrait we have of him is a pencil sketch that Cornelius Varley made about 1815 in a graphic telescope (reproduced in Walker 25). Whatever the merits of Varley’s sketch, the question remains: how does Turner’s own art signify the artist himself? One way to answer it would be to find in Turner’s work a covert self-portrait, such as the face of Michelangelo discovered long ago in the Last Judgement or the face of Leonardo discovered more recently, and no less remarkably, in the Mona Lisa.19 But covert self-portraits raise questions of their own. Why did Michelangelo paint his own face into the flayed skin held up by Saint Bartholomew? 20 Why did Leonardo cryptically inscribe his own features in the inscrutably serene face of a beautiful young woman? Even if the face of Turner were discovered in one of his paintings, its presence there would prompt questions like these, would demand not simply recognition and assent, but further decoding and interpretation. To rephrase my initial question, then, we might ask whether Turner ever signifies himself by means of figures or configurations that bear no resemblance to him at all. The logical place to begin looking for this self-signification is in Turner’s pictures of other artists, especially artists at work.21 Turner’s bestknown pictures of this kind begin with Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaelle. . . Preparing His Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia (ex. 1820) and include such later works as Watteau Study by Fresnoy’s Rules (ex. 1831) and Van Goyen, Looking out for a Subject (ex. 1833).22 But so far as I know, Turner’s earliest depiction of an artist is the Rembrandtesque watercolor sketch now variously called The Artist’s Studio or The Amateur Artist (c. 1808). On the back of this sketch, wherein a wide-eyed, roundshouldered painter sits before a picture on an easel, Turner has written, “Please[d] with his Work he views it o’er & o’er / And finds fresh Beauties never seen before” (qtd. in JMWT 140). Turner evidently made this sketch as the basis for an oil painting that was to accompany The Garreteer’s Petition (ex. 1809), which shows an aspiring young bard seated at his lamplit desk in a gloomy room holding pen aloft and gazing earnestly into space as he prays, in Turner words, “Aid me, ye Powers! O bid my thoughts to roll / In quick succession, animate my soul; / Descend my Muse, and every thought refine, / And finish well my long, my longsought line” (B&J, text 71). Since these are the very first verses that Turner himself wrote for one of his oils in an exhibition catalogue, they may constitute a wry commentary on Turner’s own status as a poet in hiding, a poet who worked with a pen as well as a brush and would shortly begin to quote fragments from the poem he never published in full, The

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Fallacies of Hope. Furthermore, the two pictures of poet and painter at work each reveal Turner’s consciousness of the inescapable debts that he owed to his predecessors. The poet in The Garreteer’s Petition, which is itself modeled on Hogarth’s Distressed Poet, holds a pamphlet in an outstretched hand, rests an elbow on a pile of books, and sits beside a tub of other publications: the “Translations, &c,” “Hints for an Epic Poem,” and “Coll. of Odds and Ends” (as Turner calls them in a note on a sketch for the picture) from which the poet will make up his poem. Likewise, in Turner’s unmistakably Rembrandtesque sketch of the painter, the inscription allows us to identify old masters stacked on the floor, and “stolen hints, from celebrated pictures” (Gage 136). Obviously, Turner is satirizing the fatuously narcissistic painter; yet he is also disclosing his own obligations to old masters such as Rembrandt and to the celebrated pictures from which he takes the hints that allow him to generate his own “fresh Beauties never seen before.” A particularly witty illustration of the way he does so is Bridge of Sighs . . . Venice: Canaletti [sic] Painting (fig. 8.3). Placing Canaletto and his easel at the lower left, Turner invites us to compare this picture with those of the eighteenth-century Italian painter famed for his pictures of Venice. But while Canaletto’s paintings of Venice minimize the light of

8.3 J. M. W. Turner, Bridge of Sighs: Ducal Palace and Custom House, Venice: Canaletti [sic] Painting (ex. 1833). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

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reflections in water and make buildings form a solid, precisely delineated barrier between the water and the sky, Turner demolishes this barrier. He paints watery reflections with so much intensity that in some of his Venetian pictures we can hardly tell where reality ends and reflection begins, or rather, where the representation of reality ends and the representation of reflection begins. These pictures confront us in toto as watery reflections of Venice, literalizations of the metaphor that art reflects nature. Consequently, the Canaletto represented in Bridge of Sighs is painting a Venice that has already become a painting by Turner. Turner thus turns his celebrated predecessor into a covert sign of himself. Long before painting Bridge of Sighs, however, Turner began to show how he could turn hints from celebrated pictures into pictures of his own and signs of himself. Take for a start his first major historical painting, The Fifth Plague of Egypt (fig. 8.4), which actually represents the seventh plague as described in the passage Turner quotes from Exodus (9:23): “And Moses stretched forth his hands, toward heaven, and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along the ground.” Critics commonly see in this picture the influence of Poussin and Richard Wilson, crediting Poussin with the parallel arrangement of the hills and the architecture in

8.4 J. M. W. Turner, The Fifth Plague of Egypt (ex. 1800). Indianapolis Museum of Art, Gift in Memory of Evan F. Lilly.

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the middle distance, and Wilson, in particular his Niobe (1760), with the turbulent sky, tiny figures, and shattered trees. However, even if Turner’s sky were not considerably more turbulent than Wilson’s, and even if his remarkable synthesis of Poussin’s architecture and Wilson’s atmosphere did not take him well beyond his predecessors, we should still have to account for the way Moses is represented here at the lower right: a figure so diminutive and dark that we can scarcely find him. His outstretched arms are modeled on those of the central figure in Raphael’s celebrated cartoon Paul Preaching at Athens (1515–1516).23 But Turner’s Moses is far less conspicuous than Raphael’s Paul, much less noticeable even than the infant Moses in Poussin’s Exposing of Moses (1654), a work Turner copied shortly before painting The Fifth Plague.24 In Poussin’s picture the infant is the well-lit terminus of a strong diagonal running from upper left to lower right, a diagonal reinforced by the infant’s outstretched right arm. But into the corresponding part of his own picture Turner puts a Moses who is scarcely detectable. If we ask why, the answer begins to emerge when we recall that the lower-right portion of a picture is the traditional locus of self-signification, the place where the artist represents himself or herself in a diminutive or subordinate position. In the lower right corner of his Coronation of the Virgin (1447), for instance, Fra Lippo Lippi signs himself both graphically and verbally, inscribing the words is perfecit opus (“This man made the work”) beside the picture of his kneeling figure. Likewise, Raphael puts himself among the spectators in the lower right corner of his School of Athens, in the Vatican. Graphic signatures such as this largely disappeared after the Renaissance, but verbal signatures have continued, and they customarily appear in the lower righthand corner, which is where Turner signed many of the watercolors he produced up to 1800 and at least seven of the oil paintings he produced thereafter.25 In The Fifth Plague Turner miniaturizes Moses, nominally the hero of his painting, and places him in the very spot where his signature would normally go. He thus covertly signifies himself as the prophet speaking in pigment, the ambitious young artist who stretches out his arms to recreate on canvas the fiery turbulence of thunder and hail, subverting the Poussinian stability of the central pyramid by surrounding it with an inverted triangle that points to carnage in the foreground and opens out in the distance to the swirling of clouds, to the first hint of the elemental vortex that would become Turner’s graphic signature, a sign of his eponymous power to turn—and overturn. In Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus—Homer’s Odyssey (ex. 1829; plate 7), which Turner painted almost thirty years later, a diminutive figure with

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upraised arms once again confronts a huge and menacing display of physical force: Polyphemus represented as a smoking volcano. Ulysses stands not at the lower right but at the center left on the bridge of his ship, and unlike the Moses of the earlier picture, he raises his arms in defiance rather than in command. This gesture takes on a special significance because this time it has no authorization from Turner’s text, which was Pope’s translation of the Odyssey.26 Essentially, the upraised, outspread arms of Ulysses align his gesture of defiance with the masts rising up on either side of him, which effectively extend his reach almost to the height of Polyphemus’s head. The masts thus serve as instruments of selfexpression, literally raising up before the blinded eye of Polyphemus the name Odysseus (the Greek original of Ulysses), which is written on the flag at the top of the mainsail to signify visually what Ulysses is shouting. If the masts serve as instruments of self-expression for Ulysses, they also remind us of the instruments with which Turner produces his art. Consider Parrott’s depiction of Turner at work on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy in 1846 (fig. 8.5). In this picture the three paintbrushes

8.5 S. W. Parrott, Turner on Varnishing Day (c. 1846). Collection of the Guild of St. George, Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust.

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on the left fan out from Turner’s hand in exactly the way that the masts rise up from the ship in Ulysses.27 We may reasonably infer, then, that when Turner worked on a canvas, his brushes looked like masts. And just as masts form the fixed framework within which sails and flags are billowingly unfurled, the very shape of Turner’s brushes signifies the linear structure that subtly underlies even the most chromatic and fluid of his works. From eyewitness accounts (Gage 130) we know that Turner used ruled lines to guide him in representing the rays of the sun, which in this picture repeat and indefinitely extend the fanlike spreading of the masts. In the figure of Ulysses, therefore, we can see at work the artist who radiates line even as he unfurls color, whose brushes extend the reach of his arms and at the same time exemplify the linear structure with which he triumphantly organizes his recreation of light. Some dozen years after painting Ulysses, Turner took on a far greater challenge to his powers of organization: the task of representing a snowstorm at sea from the deck of a ship caught up in the storm itself. To prepare himself to paint Snow Storm—Steam-Boat Off a Harbour’s Mouth (ex. 1842; fig. 8.6), Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a pitching vessel

8.6 J. M. W. Turner, Snow-Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth (ex. 1842). Clore Collection, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

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8.7 Horace Vernet, Joseph Vernet Attached to the Mast Studying the Effects of the Storm (1822). Museé Calvet, Avignon.

for four hours. In doing so, he not only impersonated Ulysses, as critics have often noted, but also reenacted the celebrated feat of Claude-Joseph Vernet, the eighteenth-century French seascape painter whose work Turner knew very well and whose feat was depicted in 1822 by his grandson, Horace Vernet, in a painting entitled Joseph Vernet Attached to the Mast Studying the Effects of the Storm (fig. 8.7).28 Whether or not Turner knew this picture firsthand, we can profitably study it as a precursor to Snow Storm, precisely because Turner’s picture is so different. In Horace Vernet’s painting of his grandfather on a stormy sea, neither the variously tilted masts, nor the dramatically steep diagonal of the hull, nor the slant of lightning at the upper right, nor the leaning ship in the distance at the left disturbs the artist, who stands boldly upright at the intersection of the one nearly vertical mast and the perfectly level horizon behind him. The stability of the artist in the picture corresponds to the stability of the artist who painted it. He carefully preserves his own vantage point from the upheaval that he tries to represent. In Turner’s picture, all traditional bases of visual stability slide away. The horizon itself tilts, and instead of a vertical line in the center we find a bowed and slanted mast. The bent mast signifies Turner’s struggle to generate a form to represent what he saw from a pitching vessel in the midst of a storm. Around the anti-sun of the dark paddle wheel in the center everything else revolves, but not, significantly, in concentric cir-

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cles. Instead a series of nearly straight lines radiates from the center, including the continuous line made by the mast and the right side of the triangular shadow in the foreground. By making the bent mast participate in a line that is essentially straight, Turner demonstrates his capacity to define and delineate elemental turbulence even while representing its radically destabilizing effect. He thus achieves something very much like what Byron delivers in the first stanza of Childe Harold, canto 3: a form that represents the physical instability of the poet at sea and yet also reveals his capacity to shape what he sees and feels. Seen in this way, Turner’s Snow Storm becomes an autobiographical statement about the process of generating a seascape—almost a way of writing about artistic self-consciousness. The full title of the picture actually refers to Turner as the author of it (The Author Was in This Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich), and, given Turner’s poetry, his fascination with literature, and his addiction to puns, it is not surprising that his manner of painting actually looked like writing. “He used short brushes,” wrote one observer, “some of them like the writers [sic] used by house decorators, working with thin colour over the white ground, and using the brush end on, dappling and writing with it those wonderfully fretted cloud forms and the rippling and filmy surface curves upon his near water” (Gowing 42). Turner wrote with paint, and when he returned to the figure of Moses in one of the great works of his final decade, it was to represent him in the act of writing. Writing is essential to the title that Turner literally wrote for the picture: Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—The Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (ex. 1843; plate 6). To quote Mitchell on it again, it is “a history painting that reflects on the writing of history, and an abstract study in visual phenomena that reflects on the science of vision” (“Metamorphoses” 146). On the one hand, Turner challenges Goethe’s theory of color. Though Goethe defines red, yellow, and green as “plus” colors, indicating lively aspiration, Turner uses them to express what seems at first a vision of despair. In the verses he wrote about this picture, the human-faced bubbles thrown up by the receding waters at the lower right are called “ephemeral as the summer fly / Which rises, flits, expands, and dies.” 29 On the other hand, over these ephemeral bubbles Moses writes a text that has endured long enough to be rewritten in color thousands of years later. The very name Moses, as Lawrence Gowing notes, points not only to the author of Genesis but also to an eighteenth-century color theorist named Moses Harris, who devised a color circle that Turner drastically revised while

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developing his own color theory (23). At the same time, the figure of Moses with pen in hand recalls the figure of the poet holding his pen in The Garreteer’s Petition—the partly autobiographical figure who covertly reveals Turner’s own life as a poet in hiding. In Light and Colour, therefore, Moses signifies Turner, the prophet who rewrites Scripture with color, and whose paintings, especially his late works, typically manifest the emergence of a shaping vision from what looks at first like primordial chaos. The picture of Moses writing the book of Genesis signifies Turner at work, regenerating the myth of the Deluge in such a way as to make us see how fully the myth depends on the writer who first created it and the painter who now recreates it. Turner even insinuates himself into the double turn or overturning of the serpent, which signifies not just the Fall of Man that has led to the Flood but also the Redemption to come, when Christ would be raised on the cross like the brazen serpent that Moses once raised in the wilderness to overcome a plague of serpents.30 In The Fifth Plague of Egypt, Turner had signified himself with a Moses who summons plagues; in Light and Colour he signifies himself with a Moses who sees beyond plagues, looking out from the center of what is at once a sun, a gigantic bubble, and an all seeing eye. It would be tempting to end by saying that Turner learned the art of self-signification from Byron. But that is not where the evidence leads. Turner was practicing this art before Byron had published a line, and though Byron’s poetry clearly impressed him, Turner represented himself in ways quite different from those on display in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The primary self that Byron projects is neither a poet nor a third-person character but rather a first-person personality, a figure simultaneously leading his life and reporting on it, using Harold to objectify tendencies that he—the first-person pilgrim—ultimately leaves behind. Turner’s method is precisely the opposite. Hiding his personality in its own recess, he uses characters such as Moses and Ulysses to represent his artistic self, to signify the epic and prophetic scope of artistic ambitions barely disclosed by his early and only self-portraits. Taken together, the poetry of Byron and the paintings of Turner do not furnish evidence for one more argument about the influence of a poet on a painter. In light of the principle that painting, like literature, is an art of interpretable signs, they show instead that self-representation can be just as various, complex, and powerful in visual art as in the art of the written word.

Chapter 9

Looking at the Monster Frankenstein and Film Movies speak mainly to the eyes. Though they started talking in words almost eighty years ago, what they say to our ears seldom overpowers or even matches the impact of what they show us. This does not mean that film is a medium “essentially” visual, anymore than theater is. Many of the films made in the twenty-five years following the 1928 advent of the talkie crackle with dialogue worthy of the stage, which is where they often originated. Even in the visually captivating Citizen Kane, the single word “Rosebud” resonates just as memorably as any of its shots, and one notable film from the mid-twentieth century—Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1951)—has been plausibly read as an allegory of how the word contests the power of the cinematic image.1 But whether or not this film ultimately “confirms the triumph of the female image,” as W. J. T. Mitchell suggests (“Going” 9), or demonstrates the ironizing power of the word, it cannot help but remind us of what film and film theory alike repeatedly privilege: the structure and sequence of images, which Andre Bazin calls “the language of cinema.” 2 The fact that Bazin welcomed the literal language of the human voice to movies because it enhanced their realism only heightens the significance of his steady concentration on the figurative language of what movies show, what they say to our eyes.3 For Bazin, the great divide in the history of film was not a split between silents and talkies but a crack that began within the silent era, when “expressionist” directors like Griffith and Eisenstein used devices such as montage and special lighting to create meaning from images while realist directors like Flaherty and

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Stroheim used prolonged shots to record actions and settings that putatively speak for themselves. For Bazin, therefore, the advent of recorded sound in movies simply reinforced the realism of films bent on recording the visible world in visual—or more precisely spatial—terms, preserving the unity of space in prolonged, deep-focus shots (149–56). One may object, of course, that recorded sounds lead no more surely to realism than recorded sights, for both are equally liable to manipulation.4 But the crucial point is that while Bazin welcomed sound to the world of film, it did nothing at all to change his concept of “the language of cinema,” which remained purely visual. Since Bazin, film theory has become more explicitly linguistic but no less committed to the principle that the language of cinema is fundamentally visual. When Christian Metz explains the semiotics of film, he treats its “syntagmatic” and “paradigmatic” axes as chains and stacks of images, not of words.5 When Kaja Silverman applies to film the linguistic concept of “suture,” she redefines it in terms of interlocking shots.6 To realize that both of these formulations could apply just as well to silent as to talking films is to see how tenaciously the image dominates film theory and criticism. Eight decades of sound have not really loosened its grip. This stubborn visuality of cinema—or more precisely our habit of considering it predominantly visual—may help to explain why film versions of Frankenstein have drawn so little attention from academic critics of the novel. Not long after its publication, Percy Shelley asserted that language “is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, . . . than colour, form, and motion.” 7 Film versions of Frankenstein seem to confirm this axiom by showing us far less of the monster’s inner life than his long autobiographical narratives in the novel do.8 In the first talking film version, James Whale’s so-called “classic” Frankenstein of 1931, the monster is totally silenced and thus forced—like the monster of Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption (1823), the first of many plays based on the novel—to make gesture and expression tell a fraction of his story, which is mutilated as well as severely abridged.9 Mary Shelley’s monster leaves us with a poignant apologia pro vita sua delivered to Walton over the body of Victor; Whale’s creature dies in a burning windmill while Elizabeth and Victor (unaccountably named Henry) both survive to beget what Victor’s father (who also survives, in perfect health) expects will be a son. Kenneth Branagh’s film version is much closer to the book, but nonetheless adds its own twists. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), the creature rips out Elizabeth’s heart, and in so doing reenacts what filmmakers regularly do to Mary

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Shelley’s text. They rip out its heart by making the creature speechless, as Whale’s version did, or at the very least cutting out his narrative, as even Branagh’s version does. What then can film versions of Frankenstein offer to academic critics of the novel? Can they be anything more than vulgarizations or travesties of the original? To answer these questions in anything but the negative we must consider what film can tell us—or more precisely show us— about the role of the visual in the life of the monster represented by the text. If film versions of the novel ignore or elide the inner life of the monster, they nonetheless foreground for the viewer precisely what the novel largely hides from the reader. By forcing us to face the monster’s physical repulsiveness, which he can never deny or escape and which aborts his every hope of gaining sympathy, film versions of Frankenstein prompt us to rethink his monstrosity in terms of visualization: how do we see the monster, what does he see, and how does he want to be seen? In quest of answers I will chiefly consider three of the nearly two hundred films that Frankenstein has spawned: Whale’s version, Branagh’s version, and Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974).10

I To learn why academic critics may need film to help answer the questions I have posed, consider two recent essays that both set out to explain the monster in terms of his body. Bette London gives a new twist to feminist readings of the novel by arguing that it makes a spectacle of masculinity—more precisely of the broken, enervated, or disfigured male body— and thus challenges “the singular authority of masculinity and . . . the fixity of sexual positions.” 11 Peter Brooks likewise highlights Mary Shelley’s representation of the male body, but his argument turns on the contrast between the ugliness of the creature’s body and the eloquence of his speech. Caught in the contradiction between the visual and the verbal, between—in Lacanian terms—the imaginary order of the mirror stage and the symbolic, acculturating order of language, the Monster (as Brooks calls him) is that which “exceeds the very basis of classification, language itself.” 12 Each of these two readings aims to define the verbalized body which the text exhibits to the eye of the reader’s mind. Yet London turns the body of the not-yet-animated creature into a universalized sign of masculine vulnerability, disfigurement, and pathetic lifelessness. She thus averts her critical gaze from the sight of the creature’s animated body,

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which is anything but powerless and which appears uniquely repulsive at the very instant it is given life.13 In Brooks’s argument, the body of the creature is largely consumed by what Victor calls the “godlike science” of language (F 108)—more precisely by the Lacanian vocabulary of desire, which subordinates the body to the word. “Love,” writes Brooks, “ . . . is in essence the demand to be heard by the other.” 14 “Hear my tale” says the creature to Victor as he covers Victor’s eyes to relieve them from “the sight of [his] detested form” (F 98). The creature’s very turning to language as a means of “escape from the condition of ‘to-belooked-at-ness’ ” (Brooks 218) is precisely the turn reenacted by critics like Brooks, who define him in essentially linguistic terms. Yet the creature’s longing to communicate in words—his desire to be heard—is no more urgent than his longing to be looked at with desire, with something other than fear and loathing. Just before planting in the dress of the sleeping Justine the portrait that will lead to her execution, he fleetingly imagines himself her lover: I bent over her, and whispered, “Awake, fairest, thy lover is near—he who would give his life but to obtain one look of affection from thine eyes: my beloved, awake!” (F 139)

This remarkable passage, which first appeared in the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, echoes at once the Song of Solomon (2:10-12), the words spoken by Milton’s Satan to a sleeping Eve (PL 5:38–47), and—most poignantly of all, perhaps—the words spoken by Keats’s Porphyro to the sleeping Madeline in Eve of St Agnes.15 Feminist criticism has sensitized us to the visual subjugation of women by the gaze of the male, and as Brooks notes—in his sole reference to film—the condition of “to-belooked-at-ness” is the phrase Laura Mulvey uses for the “traditional exhibitionistic role” given to women in film.16 Yet if the creature’s aversion to being seen signifies a feminine or feminist rejection of that role, as Brooks suggests (218–19), his longing to be seen longingly—to be looked at with affection—reminds us that the capacity to attract and hold such a look is just as often a gender-neutral source of power as a gendered target of male exploitation. The doctrine that film subjugates women to the gaze of the male should also be rethought, as Kaja Silverman suggests, with the aid of Lacan’s distinction between the “gaze” and the “look.” While the gaze is impersonal, ubiquitous (issuing “from all sides”), and detached, the look is the desiring act of an eye seeing from just one viewpoint.17 Such an act

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cannot be simply identified with male power. As Silverman notes, a film such as Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1970) “not only extends desire and the look which expresses it to the female subject, but makes the male desiring look synonymous with loss of control” (131).18 What Silverman says of Fassbinder’s film might well describe the acute ambivalence with which Mary Shelley’s creature looks at the sleeping Justine. Longing “to obtain one look of affection from [her] eyes,” he is terrified by the thought that if she awakened to see him, she would curse and denounce him as a murderer (F 139). Though no film known to me conveys the creature’s ambivalence in this scene (Branagh’s brief shot of him looming over Justine shows just his desire), Branagh’s film includes a moment of the creature’s tormented looking in another scene: a close-up of his bloodshot eyes peering through a chink in the wall of the De Laceys’ cottage. In the text, where the creature tells Victor that his “eye could just penetrate [the chink]” (F 104), the phallic intrusiveness implied by his language is belied by his vulnerability, for the sight of old De Lacey and the lovely young Agatha fills him with such “a mixture of pain and pleasure” that he shortly feels compelled to turn away (F 104). In Branagh’s film, the close-up of his peering face combines the spectacle of his mutilated features—a sight his own story in the novel never explicitly gives us—with the complex expression of his desire to see and his fear of being seen. Since the whole episode of the monster’s spying on the De Laceys is narrated in the novel by the monster himself, the text never describes the sight of his peering face. So we might construe this shot as an example of the way film reveals what the novel hides or suppresses. Yet to identify anything as hidden or suppressed in a novel is to acknowledge or assert its presence there as something implied, more precisely something we are authorized to imagine. Elaine Scarry has argued that verbal arts can achieve the “vivacity” of the material world by telling us how to imagine or construct an object of perception, how to imitate the act of perceiving it.19 We can be led to imagine a three dimensional object, she says, by the description of something transparent—like film or water— passing over something solid (9). If Scarry is right, Mary Shelley prompts us to visualize a body when Victor describes what he saw just after animating the monster: “Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (F 56). But even without such precise instruction, any description of an act of looking can lead us to imagine both the seen and the seer.20 What else could explain Branagh’s conviction that the novel actually does describe the monster’s spying

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face? “There’s a very strong image in Shelley’s book,” he writes, “of the Creature peering . . . and spying on the family. We reproduced that exactly, this image of the eyes as windows of his soul” (MSF 23). For all the feebleness of his cliché, Branagh unwittingly testifies to the force of the sight implied by Mary Shelley’s text. Beyond exposing such sights to the viewer’s eye, film versions of Frankenstein implicitly remind us that filmmaking itself is a Frankensteinian exercise in artificial reproduction.21 Mary Shelley’s Victor is “a modern Prometheus,” in the words of her subtitle: a figure created from the fire-stealer she found in the opening lines of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and the man-making master craftsman that she found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.78–88). As Anne Mellor has shown, Frankenstein conflates the fire-stealer and the man-maker of classical antiquity in the figure of a 1790s scientist exploiting the newly discovered powers of electricity, the fire of life, the “spark of being” with which—by the guttering light of a “nearly burnt out candle”—he animates the creature (F 56).22 Is it mere coincidence that the earliest known Frankenstein movie, made in 1910, came from the film company of Thomas Edison, who had thirty years earlier invented the first commercially practical incandescent lamp and who had installed in New York City the world’s first central electric-light power plant? Ever since Edison, filmmakers have been reenacting what Victor calls his “animation” of “lifeless matter” (F 53). Mythically, as William Nestrick notes, the concept of “animation” in Frankenstein looks both backward and forward: backward to Genesis and the creation of man and woman, “which two great sexes animate the world” (PL 8.151), and forward—chronologically at least—to the mechanical reproduction of animal movement on a screen and to the illusion of metamorphosis.23 For if Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus originates in part from her reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of her own most telling passages anticipates what George Méliès discovered by accident in 1898, when his camera briefly jammed while he was filming traffic outside the Paris Opera and he then continued cranking. When he projected the film, which had captured two discontinuous sequences of images before and after the interruption, he saw “a bus changed into a hearse, and men changed into women” (qtd. Nestrick 291). By the end of the nineteenth century, then, film could actualize the vividly metamorphic dream that comes to Victor right after he animates the creature.24 At the moment of animation, Victor’s admiration for the beauty of the creature’s inert form dissolves: “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (F 56). The ensuing

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dream reenacts this change by essentially reversing what Victor has done—bestowed animation on a composite of lifeless body parts—and precisely reversing what he had hoped to do: “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (F 53). In his dream, Victor is surprised to see Elizabeth walking down a street in Ingolstadt, but as soon as he embraces and kisses her, she turns into the worm-ridden corpse of his mother (F 57). This sudden dissolving of one image into another is “supremely cinematic,” as Kenneth Branagh has said of Frankenstein as a whole (MSF 177). At the same time, the passage encapsulates the greatest of all ironies in the novel: the fact that Victor’s ambition to create and renew life leads only to death. We will shortly see how Branagh’s film intensifies this irony by pursuing some of the implications of the dream—even while eliding the dream itself.

II First, however, Branagh’s comment on Frankenstein must be qualified. Mary Shelley’s novel is by turns supremely cinematic and stubbornly uncinematic. Much of it—such as the creature’s account of what he learned from reading Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe (F 124–27)—would be numbingly static on the screen. And filmmaking itself evokes Victor’s project only in a broadly figurative sense. While film is a wholly artificial product, the creature consists entirely of natural body parts, so that he is closer to an actual human being with one or more transplanted organs than he is to the mechanical men constructed by futurist designers in the 1920s or to the cyborg of present-day science fiction.25 Nevertheless, the visual medium of film highlights something at once crucial to the novel and virtually invisible to the reader: the repulsiveness of the creature’s appearance. In the novel, the words of the creature—especially as we read his autobiographical story—cover our eyes, and our blindness to his appearance is precisely what enables us to see his invisible nobility. Though Victor abhors the creature’s looks, the novel seldom asks us even to imagine them.26 Instead it repeatedly makes us imagine what the creature sees and hears. A faithful recreation of the novel’s central narrative, in fact, would never show the monster at all—would give us only the sound of his voice over shots of what he sees and hears, such as the roaring crowd of torch-bearing villagers charging up a mountain after him in Whale’s 1931 version. Yet no director known to me has ever filmed the novel in this way.27 Essentially, filmmakers do to the creature’s narrative what

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“Phiz” the illustrator does to the hero’s autobiography in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–1850).28 In film versions of Frankenstein as in Phiz’s illustrations, the first-person narrator telling us all that he sees, hears, feels, and dreams becomes just one more visible object.29 Yet if filmmakers seem thus compelled to objectify the creature, they also compel us to face—more frankly and forthrightly than critics of the novel usually do—the problem of the creature’s appearance. In the novel, Victor says that the creature was “gigantic . . . about eight feet in height, and proportionably large” (F 52), that his skin was “yellow,” that his hair was “lustrous black, and flowing,” that his teeth were “of pearly whiteness,” that the color of his “watery eyes” almost matched that of their “dun-white sockets,” that his complexion was “shrivelled,” and that his lips were “straight [and] black” (F 56). It is hard to know just what to make of this description. The creature’s size is monstrous, but except for his yellow skin, the other details suggest a face seductively sinister rather than truly repulsive, something closer to Bela Lugosi’s Count in Tod Browning’s Dracula than to the mouth-distending barbed-wire-stitchery of Robert De Niro’s creature in Branagh’s Frankenstein.30 Yet Branagh and his collaborators ask the right question about the creature’s effect on Victor: “Why, after all this time, having seen what he was putting together, should he be so repelled and then be so frightened by it?” (MSF 19). The question becomes even more pointed when we realize that Victor made the creature from features “selected . . . as beautiful” (F 56, emphasis mine). What makes Victor’s composition of such beautiful features monstrous? In part, the answer made by Branagh’s film is much like the nowfamiliar answer formulated by critics such as Ellen Moers: Victor’s sudden loathing for the newly animated creature he has long labored to construct evokes the sense of “revulsion against newborn life” that may be felt by any new mother, as Mary Shelley knew from her own experience.31 In Branagh’s film, the creature lunges from a great copper sarcophagus— a vessel meant for a corpse—that has been filled with water to make it a kind of womb. After he lands sprawling in the spill tank under it, Victor lifts him up, vainly tries to show him how to walk, then ties him standing to a set of chains. But when the struggling creature is struck by a falling piece of wood and shortly goes limp, Victor concludes that he himself has killed this luckless heir to “massive birth defects,” and that “this evil must be destroyed . . . forever” (MSF 81). Since Branagh’s Victor tries to help the creature at first and seems dismayed to think that he has killed

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him, he is decidedly more paternal—or maternal—than the Victor of the text. But when (in the next scene) Branagh’s Victor awakens in his bedroom to find the naked stitched-up creature looming over him, he cries out “No!” and flees. Like the Victor of the text, who finds the ugliness of the creature inconceivably magnified by its acquisition of the capacity to move (F 57), Branagh’s Victor is horrified by life itself—by the living sight of what he has made. Branagh’s answer to his own question, then, is at once visual and psychological. His Victor rejects the creature in part because any newborn being may disgust its begetter and in part because this one—in the film— has apparently risen twice from the dead, more “hideous” than “a mummy again endued with animation,” in the punning words of a text that has just described Victor’s dream of embracing his dead mother (F 57). But Branagh’s Victor is also horrified by the sheer ugliness of the creature, by the barbed-wire stitches that harrow his body and distend his face. The stitching of the creature—nowhere explicitly mentioned in Mary Shelley’s text—originates in film with Jack Pierce’s make-up for Boris Karloff in the Whale Frankenstein of 1931, where the creature’s face and body appear discreetly sutured. But the body of De Niro’s creature in Branagh’s film is vividly, cruelly stitched, and thus reminds us that Mary Shelley’s creature was precisely not a reanimated corpse—something Victor had so far found “impossible” to produce (F 53)—but a patchwork quilt of flesh cut from dead bodies, a paradoxically ugly composite of features “selected . . . as beautiful” (F 56). With singular irony, Victor’s phrase evokes a leading principle of neo-classical aesthetics. Encapsulated in the story of Zeuxis, the ancient Greek artist who painted Helen of Troy by selecting and combining the loveliest parts of the most beautiful virgins of Crotona, this was the principle of what Joshua Reynolds called “Ideal Beauty” in visual art: a generalized shape abstracted from the comparative study of particular human figures, a “central form . . . from which every deviation is deformity.” 32 Victor deviates from central form, of course, by making his creature eight feet tall. But otherwise his project turns neo-classic aesthetics on its head. By applying to corpses a formula calculated to produce ideal beauty in painting and sculpture, Victor generates only deformity: the deformity of a creature artificially assembled.33 It is this myth of miscreation, of artistic ambition run monstrously awry, that scores of filmmakers have sought to illuminate in their own art, which may yet lead us to a deeper understanding of Mary Shelley’s.

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III Let us return, then, to the question posed by Peter Brooks’s essay: “What is a Monster?” Unlike Brooks’s linguistic response, the answer one might expect from film is that a monster is someone visibly deformed, hideous to behold. Yet Boris Karloff’s creature in the Whale Frankenstein of 1931 is not unequivocally ugly. Without saying a single word, without the eloquence that allows the creature in the text to make us forget his ugliness, Karloff’s creature excites our sympathy. He radiates longing when he raises his arms to the light pouring through the partly open roof of the dark watchtower where he has been made, and he radiates joy when he smilingly kneels to join the little girl named Maria in picking and throwing daisies into a lake. Even his throwing of Maria into the lake—censored out of the prints originally released but now restored (Dixon 171)—was scripted as an innocent gesture prompted by his assumption that she would float like a flower, and in spite of Whale’s wishes, Karloff played it this way.34 What do such moments tell us about monstrosity? Do they confirm what Mary Poovey has written of Mary Shelley’s creature— that while “it recognizes and longs to overcome its definitive monstrosity,” it “is unable to disguise its essential being . . .”? 35 To rephrase my earlier question, just what is the essential being of a monster? The difficulty of answering this question—or rather the problem with assuming too quickly that we know the answer—may be illustrated by turning again to Dickens, this time to Great Expectations. In chapter 40, shortly after Magwitch reveals himself as the source of Pip’s wealth and gentlemanly status, which he has come back from New South Wales to admire, Pip explicitly compares the two to Victor and his creature. “The imaginary student,” writes Pip, “pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me.” 36 Pip is of course not just another Victor. As a gentleman “made” by the wealth of a criminal, he is himself a creature, and perhaps a monster of snobbery and affectation as well. But his aversion to Magwitch, who now wants Pip to care for him, clearly recalls Victor’s loathing of his new creature, whose infantile appeal to his maker—with “inarticulate sounds” and “a grin wrinkl[ing] his cheeks—prompts Victor to see only a “miserable monster” (F 57). One other thing Pip says about Magwitch also anticipates what Mary Poovey writes of the creature. After dressing up Magwitch to pass him off in public as a prosperous farmer, Pip despairs of the effort: “To my

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thinking,” he says, “there was something in him that made it hopeless to attempt to disguise him. . . . The more I dressed him and the better I dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching figure on the marshes. . . . From head to foot there was Convict in the very grain of the man” (GE 352). In Pip’s eyes, the undisguisably “essential being” of his coarse-grained creator/creature is criminal. Implicitly, Pip reads Magwitch in the light of physiognomy, the ancient art of construing external features—especially facial ones—as signs of “supposed inner essences.” 37 Revived in the later eighteenth century by the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801)—one of whose disciples examined the infant Mary Shelley herself at her father’s request38—physiognomy strongly influenced the description of characters in Dickens’s earlier novels as well as the drawings of them made by Hablot K. Browne, whose very nickname (“Phiz”) revealed his belief in the idea that beauty expresses virtue and ugliness vice, or more precisely that facial features disclose—to an astute reader of them—one’s moral character (Hollington 125). Dickens’s later work shows some resistance to this idea. In Great Expectations itself (1860– 1861), significantly unadorned by the handiwork of “Phiz” or any other illustrator, Pip’s physiognomic reading of Magwitch exposes his blindness to the man’s inner worth, which he eventually recognizes. But for all its blindness, Pip’s reading anticipates yet another revival of physiognomy less than three decades after Great Expectations first appeared. In 1887 an Italian physician named Cesare Lombroso published the first of a series of books that established the science (or pseudo-science) of criminal anthropology, which claims that the “born criminal” can be known from his anatomy, and especially from the configuration of his skull. According to Lombroso, criminals are evolutionary throwbacks, visibly atavistic reincarnations of the prehistoric savage or the ape.39 As Nietzsche paraphrased the theory in Twilight of the Idols (1889), it “tell[s] us the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo [monster in face, monster in soul].” 40 What does all this have to do with Frankenstein? Just this: though criminal anthropology comes far too late to have influenced Mary Shelley’s text, it has subtly influenced our ways of both construing and representing the creature’s monstrosity. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) ultimately derives from Frankenstein’s literary sibling—John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (first published 1819), the only other child of Byron’s proposal that he and Polidori and the Shelleys should “each write a ghost story” in the summer of 1816 (Mary Shelley, F 7). Whether or

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not Lombroso’s theories ever directly affected the portrayal of Mary Shelley’s creature on stage or screen, they certainly influenced Stoker, for as Leonard Wolf has shown, Jonathan Harker’s first description of Count Dracula closely follows Lombroso’s description of the criminal face.41 Likewise, most of the faces that Universal artists originally drew for the creature in the Whale Frankenstein of 1931 (repr. Skal 133) were decidedly atavistic, just the sort of face Lombroso thought innately criminal. While none of these faces resembles the one that Jack Pierce made for Boris Karloff, Karloff’s creature—in one of the many notable departures from Mary Shelley’s text—gets a brain explicitly labeled “abnormal.” In Waldman’s words, it is “the abnormal brain of the typical criminal,” marked by “distinct degeneration of the frontal lobes.” The film thus tries to ensure that the inner self or “essential being” of the monstrous-looking creature will likewise be monstrous, will validate the simplest notion of what a monster is: one whose malformed body proclaims the viciousness of his or her soul. In its basic form, this notion is much older than Lombroso or Lavater. Thersites, the ugliest of all the Greeks in the Iliad (2.216), is also—according to Odysseus—the worst of them (2.249). In the Book of Revelation, Satan appears as “a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns” (Rev. 12:3). Shakespeare’s hump-backed Richard III is a “lump of foul deformity” (1.2.57), at once bodily disfigured and morally corrupt. In Paradise Lost, the ur-text of Frankenstein, Sin is a woman whose lower body “ended foul in many a scaly fold” and is surrounded by hell-hounds uglier than Scylla and Hecate (2.650–62). Few ideas are more enduring or more seductively plausible than the assumption that deformity signifies depravity. Yet literature and life itself offer us many monsters in disguise: figures whose physical attractiveness belies the evil within. Milton’s Sin is beautiful down to the waist (2:650), and Dante’s Fraud (“froda”)—one of the many Dantean “thing[s]” to which Victor compares the creature (F 57)—likewise combines the trunk of a serpent with “the face of a just man, so benign was its outward aspect” (Inferno 17.10–11). In realistic fiction and drama the handsome seducer is a stock figure, as in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, where the handsome Alec d’Urberville not only takes the heroine’s virginity but diabolically drives her to murder. Victor Frankenstein himself, who is at least attractive enough to win the love of Elizabeth, seems unwittingly to reveal the depravity of his own soul in the very act of expressing his wish to kill “the monstrous Image which I had endued with the mockery of a soul still more mon-

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strous” (F 177). And if we turn to life itself, how would Doctors Lavater or Lombroso read the handsome face of the late, unlamented Jeffrey Dahmer, whose actual behavior makes the fictional crimes of Mary Shelley’s creature look like the misdemeanors of an Eagle Scout? 42 If ever a monstrum in animo was speciosus in fronte, Dahmer was it. Beside malformed criminals and handsome knaves, however, there is a third kind of monster much closer to the original meaning of monstrum—“divine portent or warning” (OED)—than either of the other two is.43 Nietzsche’s phrases in fact refer to Socrates, a monstrum in fronte renowned for his admonitions, a notoriously ugly philosopher. Nietzsche argues that Socrates’s dogged promotion of “rationality at any cost” made him also a monstrum in animo, leader of a sickeningly repressive war against instinct (34). But earlier in the nineteenth century, it is far more likely that Mary Shelley viewed Socrates as Alcibiades does in the Symposium, a dialogue Percy translated in 1818.44 For Alcibiades, Socrates is a monstrum in fronte, deus in animo: a god of wisdom with the face of a monster. Alcibiades compares him to Marsyas, the ugly satyr whose pipe makes music that is enchantingly divine, for the ugly Socrates makes Marsyan music with his philosophic words.45 Are echoes of this music audible in the philosophic eloquence of Mary Shelley’s ugly creature? Though enchanted by the sounds of old De Lacey’s guitar (F 104, 113), the creature does not know the Symposium as he knows Paradise Lost. But Mary Shelley probably knew something of Plato’s dialogue by the time she wrote Frankenstein (see above, n. 44), and what the creature says to Victor reflects—in part by a kind of desperate inversion—something of what Socrates says he has learned from Diotima about love. When the creature tells Victor that he must have a female “of the same species and . . . the same defects” as himself (F 139), he inverts Diotima’s definition of love as the yearning not for one’s other half (Aristophanes’s theory) but for the good (Plato, Symposium #205–6). Love, says Diotima (in Percy Shelley’s translation), “embraces those bodies which are beautiful rather than those which are deformed” (Symposium #209, Percy Shelley, “Banquet” 204). Ironically, the creature’s instincts confirm this axiom. Gazing on the miniature portrait of the “most lovely woman” that was once Victor’s mother, he is filled with delight (F 138). But knowing that he can excite in beautiful creatures only fear and loathing, he bitterly cultivates a “burning passion” for “one as deformed and horrible” as he is, someone who “would not deny herself to me” (F 139).

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Apparently, then, the creature cannot reach even the first step of the ladder that would lead from particular to “supreme beauty” in Diotima’s discourse (Symposium #210–11, “Banquet” 207). Yet he startlingly resembles the figure of Love that Diotima describes. Like Love, a “great Daemon” holding “an intermediate place between what is divine and what is mortal” (Plato #202, “Banquet,” 197), Victor’s creature is a “daemon” (F 161) of superhuman strength and endurance. Like Love, too, the creature is “for ever poor, . . . squalid and . . . homeless; . . . ever the companion of Want” (Plato #203, “Banquet” 198). In the Symposium, Love’s poverty and squalor help to show what the seeker for love must learn: that the mind’s beauty transcends the “mere beauty of the outward form” (Symposium #210, “Banquet” 206). In Frankenstein, we are nowhere told that the creature seeks a beauty of mind. But if he wants Victor to “make [him] happy” (F 97), could he be satisfied by a woman who offered no more than the “same defects” as his? Would he not also desire someone with comparable virtues, someone whose soul radiates “love and humanity,” as his own once did (F 97)? Whatever the answer to these questions, the creature’s “burning passion” is much closer to Socrates’s conception of love than to Victor’s egotism. While Victor spurns companionship in his quest for scientific glory, the creature’s whole story—right up to its final words—aims to show that life is unbearable without love. This complex evocation of Socrates in the creature’s narrative helps to explain and justify a bit of dialog invented by the scriptwriters for the ice cave scene in the Branagh film, a drastically condensed version of the creature’s narrative. The scene reminds us that even as the language of fiction can sometimes be visual, the verbal language of film can sometimes rival the impact of its images. Just before Robert De Niro’s creature asks for a mate, he reveals that he knows how to play the recorder, and he claims not to have learned but to have “remembered” this Marsyan skill by means of what Branagh’s Victor goes on to suggest might be “trace memories in the brain, perhaps.” I will not claim that the scriptwriters were thinking of Socrates, but for anyone who can hear echoes of his voice in the novel, the film dialog between Victor and the creature about memory and the recorder calls to mind the ugly philosopher whose theory of knowledge is based on recollection, on the silent recorder known as memory. Victor struggles to forget the creature as soon as he comes to life, but the creature compels him to remember both what he has created and what he has repressed in the very act of solitary creation: the desire that erupts in the dream which immediately follows that act.

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IV Let us now revisit this dream and the desire it signifies with the aid of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), a film scripted by Gene Wilder, who also plays Friedrich Frankenstein, the eponymous hero. At the end of the film, Madeline Kahn’s Elizabeth not only survives but also falls in love with the creature when he abducts her. Lulled by her own mood music (she sings “Ah, sweet mystery of life”) and enchanted by his charm as he suavely lights two cigarettes and gives her one (like Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager), she ends up marrying him and playing tigress to his tame executive, lustily leaping into a bed where the creature sits up reading the Wall Street Journal. (Friedrich has selflessly traded his brain for the creature’s, which is what makes the creature “normal” at the end.) So what do these sophomoric pranks have to do with Mary Shelley’s novel? They have, I think, quite a lot to do with one of the myths lurking just beneath the surface of its plot: the myth of Beauty and the Beast. It is powerfully implied not only by the creature’s response to the sleeping Justine but also by what he says about the miniature portrait of Caroline Beaufort that he takes from William and plants on Justine: It was a portrait of a most lovely woman. In spite of my malignity, it softened and attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight on her dark eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips; but presently my rage returned: I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow; and that she whose resemblance I contemplated would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and affright. (F 138)

Steeped as he is in Paradise Lost, the creature implicitly recalls what the beauty of Eve does in book 9 to Satan, who is so enraptured by it that he momentarily forgets his vengeful plot against her and all of humankind (9.455–66). But unlike Satan, who can present to Eve a “pleasing” and “lovely” shape even when he inhabits the body of a serpent (9.503–5), the creature knows—or at any rate presumes—that the woman whose portrait he lovingly contemplates would be horrified by the sight of him. Irresistibly seductive, Satan damns himself to the Dostoyevskian hell of those who cannot love. Grotesquely repulsive, the creature is damned to the hell of those who cannot be loved. He stirs desire in no woman, beautiful or otherwise, and one woman faints at his appearance (F 102). But he is nowhere actively rejected by a woman, not even by the young girl he saves from drowning and takes (admittedly “senseless”) in

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his arms (F 136). In the myth of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty’s love for the Beast turns him into a prince. In a children’s book version of the story that Mary Shelley may well have known, the Beast is by his own admission “hideous” and “ugly,” but the kindness of this “Monster” makes Beauty overlook his “outward form” and eventually turns her fear of him into desire.46 The children’s story may be read as an allegory of Mary Shelley’s fascination with what she called her “hideous” idea in the introduction to the 1831 edition (F 31). Lovingly portraying a creature loved by no one else, she gives him an eloquence that makes us overlook his outward form, as I have already noted, and she lets him show by his own words and deeds how “benevolent and good” he was before misery “made [him] a fiend” (F 97). Nothing about the creature she presents to us is more moving than his longing to be loved. In Young Frankenstein, Elizabeth gratifies this desire. Acting out—campily, to be sure—the creature’s deepest fantasy, she plays a loving Beauty to his Beast. Wacky as it is, the creature’s marriage to Elizabeth in Young Frankenstein also points directly to the sexual energies that Mary Shelley’s Victor so perversely thwarts in himself and the creature alike. When Victor tears apart the creature’s mate and thus breaks his promise to furnish one, the creature grimly tells Victor, “I shall be with you on your weddingnight” (F 163). As he later tells Walton, it was precisely Victor’s determination to take a bride for himself while denying one to the creature that led the creature to kill Elizabeth (F 212). But the killing of Elizabeth is not just an act of vengeance. It is also a vicarious expression of Victor’s misogyny and, contradictorily, a tortured expression of the creature’s desire for the woman he kills. First of all, as the psychic son or “symbolic projection” of Victor’s imagination, in Mary Poovey’s words (337), the creature vengefully reenacts Victor’s misogynistic dismemberment of the creaturess: an act prompted largely—as Anne Mellor has argued—by Victor’s fear of what an unregulated female might do (Mary Shelley 119–20). Having set out to pre-empt the generative powers of women, Victor is horrified by the spectre of rampant heterosexual reproduction, by “a race of devils [who] would be propagated upon the earth” (F 160). This overt fear of what a pair of monsters might beget suggests a deeper fear of what any woman could beget, and more specifically of what his own bride might generate. For this reason, the creature’s killing of Elizabeth gratifies one of Victor’s deepest wishes.47 In refusing to consummate his marriage on his wedding night, in leaving Elizabeth alone in their room while he stalks the inn

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corridors in search of the creature, Victor unconsciously invites the creature to take her. The taking, I submit, is sexual as well as murderous—a tortured expression of the creature’s hitherto frustrated desire. Just after Victor destroys the mate-to-be before the eyes of the creature and swears never to create one, the creature says, “You are my creator, but I am your master—obey!” (F 162). Victor’s refusal to do so goads the creature to exercise in his own murderous way the traditional right of a feudal master: the droit de seigneur, the lord’s right to take his vassal’s bride on her wedding night. Whether or not this brutal custom was ever mentioned in the history course that the creature overheard Felix giving to Safie (F 115–16), it is central to the plot of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro (1786), which Mary Shelley knew about well before she finished writing Frankenstein (Letters 1:33, 395–96). The echo of the droit de seigneur in the creature’s weddingnight assault on Elizabeth amplifies all of the other signals pointing to rape: the creature’s own fierce desire for a mate and the appearance of Elizabeth herself when, drawn by a scream from her room, Victor finds her dead body thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair. Every where I turn I see the same figure—her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal bier. (F 189)

In this vivid picture of a “relaxed” body thrown or flung across the “bridal bier” of her bed, Victor portrays the victim of a murderous rape: a complex expression of his own misogyny, of the creature’s lust for revenge, and of his frustrated longing for a mate. Victor’s response to this spectacle of murderous consummation—the closest he gets to consummation of any kind—is singularly revealing. After fainting and then reviving, he says, he rushed back to the body of Elizabeth “and embraced her with ardour” (F 189). This passionate embrace of her dead body marks the very first time he is said to touch her at all, but it vividly recalls the dream in which he embraces an Elizabeth who turns into his mother’s corpse. Just as the creature’s murder of Elizabeth reenacts Victor’s dismemberment of the creaturess, Victor’s embrace of his dead bride reenacts the dream, which itself reveals Victor’s Oedipal obsession with his dead mother, his inability to transfer his desires to any other woman.

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Branagh’s film situates this necrophilia within a triangle of desire binding both Victor and the creature to Elizabeth. Branagh’s Victor, first of all, is a passionate lover as well as an obsessed scientist. Besides radiating a robust vitality that scarcely recalls the wasted, emaciated figure we meet in the novel, he loves his Elizabeth far more intensely than Mary Shelley’s Victor loves his; he kisses her hungrily when he leaves for the university, and though he writes her no letters for months, he joyously seizes her when he rises one day from his sickbed to find her—improbably enough—playing the piano at the far end of the garret in which he has recently manufactured the creature. But if Branagh’s film makes Victor far more passionate than Mary Shelley does, it also reveals something merely implied by her text: the link between Victor’s project and his mother’s death. In the novel, Victor’s ambition to create life is ignited by Waldman’s lecture on the “new and unlimited powers” of modern science (F 47). The idea of reviving the dead is just a secondary possibility (F 53), and the dead mother comes to his mind only in the dream he has just after animating the creature. In the film, however, it is precisely her death that makes him resolve “to fight death itself,” and even though his project goes catastrophically awry, the creature’s murder of Elizabeth reanimates this urge. As in the novel, the creature kills Elizabeth on her wedding night while Victor is out seeking him with a gun. When he returns to find the creature ripping out her heart, he shoots in vain at her fleeing assailant and then takes her corpse in his arms. But unlike the Victor of the text, who simply collapses with exhaustion at this point, Branagh’s Victor desperately strives to revive Elizabeth by sewing her now shaven head to the torso of Justine, who (as in the novel) has been hanged for the murder of little William. After electrically animating this composite body in the sarcophagus/womb, clothing her in a wedding dress, and thrusting a wedding ring onto her finger, he begs her to recognize him, coaxes her to stand, and then waltzes her around the room, spinning and laughing with her until he sees the creature standing by the sarcophagus. For the creature, the sight of Elizabeth’s shaven head and sutured body is a Lacanian stade du miroir. Seeing at last a woman whose mutilated form mirrors and thus affirms the humanity of his own, he says, “She’s beautiful,” and claims her as his long-promised mate.48 But when Victor’s counterclaim leads them to fight over her, she recoils at once from the men and from the alien body stitched to her head, and immolates herself with a kerosene lamp.

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Students of Mary Shelley’s text may find all this merely grotesque or recklessly sensational. Yet even as it wrenches the plot of the novel, this sequence exfoliates some of its major themes: Victor’s necrophiliac obsession with his dead mother, the contradictions embedded in what Noel Carroll calls the “overreacher” plot of his ambition to create life from dead bodies,49 the creature’s desire for a mate, and Victor’s unwitting substitution of Elizabeth for the mate he destroyed. Above all, Branagh’s film evokes the Oedipal conflict between Victor and his creature. In fighting over the reanimated body of Elizabeth, they remind us that Mary Shelley’s Elizabeth was chosen by Victor’s dying mother to be not only his mate but her successor as mother to the Frankenstein family (F 42). In the “beautiful” body of the sutured Elizabeth, De Niro’s creature briefly finds his own mother and mate. It is hardly news, of course, that Frankenstein tells the story of an Oedipal conflict. But Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein helps to show how tightly the novel knits the Oedipus story to the myths of Prometheus and of Milton’s Satan. Ultimately, Victor’s struggle with the creature for possession of Elizabeth—their would-be mate and mother-surrogate— springs from an ambition at once Promethean and Satanic: the ambition to rival the creative power of God.50 In Paradise Lost, Satan defies God by claiming to be “self-begot, self-raised / By our own quick’ning power” (5.860–61), and he begets Sin all by himself, in the very act of conceiving his rebellion (2.748–61). When Satan’s monstrous daughter—literally a monstrum, a “sign / Portentous” (2.760–61)—excites his incestuous lust, he begets upon her the still more hideous monster of Death, who rapes her and thus impregnates her with the hellhounds that ceaselessly torment her (2.761–802). The story of this unholy trinity is reconfigured in Frankenstein, where Sin splits into Elizabeth and a creature who plays the role of Death. But unlike Sin, Elizabeth is not conceived by the Satanic Victor. On the contrary, she is a rival creator, more precisely an instrument in the scheme of creation conceived by God. That is why Victor exposes her not only to rape, which Sin undergoes, but death.51 The Branagh film reveals the implications of this point by moving one step beyond it. If Mary Shelley’s Victor can embrace a woman only after she has turned into a corpse, Branagh’s Victor finally seeks a woman he has created from corpses, a woman who signifies not the divine scheme of creation and reproduction but his own egomaniacal alternative to it. What he repeatedly begs of the reanimated Elizabeth is a tribute to himself: “say my name.” In contesting Victor’s claim on the woman that he believes had been promised to himself, De Niro’s creature

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reasserts his right to be treated as God treated Adam. He reasserts, in other words, the primacy of the divine scheme, which makes mating essential to reproduction.

V If radical departures from the plot of the novel may sometimes sharpen our understanding of it, they may also help to illuminate our cultural relation to the nameless creature who has captivated the popular imagination for the better part of two centuries. Probably the most outrageous and certainly one of the most original cinematic departures from Mary Shelley’s novel is the scene from Young Frankenstein in which Gene Wilder’s Friedrich Frankenstein presents Peter Boyle’s creature to a theater audience. Dressed in white tie and tails, Friedrich and his creature tap dance and sing “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” with Friedrich singing most of the words and the creature periodically grunting out the nearly consonantless refrain, “ootin’ on ah itz.” What can be learned from this bizarre spectacle of the creature as would-be Fred Astaire? On the one hand, Astaire’s combination of sexual charm and urbane sophistication is about as far from Mary Shelley’s repulsive giant as anything can be. On the other hand, the episode exemplifies what the creature has become in popular culture: a source of immensely popular entertainment. When Noel Carroll writes that we enjoy horror fiction because we are fascinated “with the categorically transgressive beings that star in the genre,” 52 he reveals precisely what makes transgression pleasurable. We are captivated not by transgression as such, but by the starring performance of it. In the tap dance of Young Frankenstein, the creature acts out transgression for an audience, theatrically breaching the wall between savagery and sophistication. Like so much else in Young Frankenstein, the scene parodies not the novel itself but earlier film versions of it, especially the Whale Frankenstein of 1931, which begins with a shot of Edward Van Sloan stepping out from behind a curtain to announce a film that “will thrill” and “may . . . horrify you!” Yet Van Sloan also plays Waldman, who in the novel makes comparable claims for modern chemistry. Galvanizing Victor by explaining what chemists can now do, Waldman says they “have indeed performed miracles. . . . They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows” (F 47). Waldman’s language recalls the machinery of theater

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even as it adumbrates the spectacles of film. In the first part of the eighteenth century, thunder effects devised by the playwright John Dennis were, he testily charged, promptly stolen for a production of Macbeth.53 At the end of the twentieth century, filmmakers not only mimic thunder and earthquakes but can recreate a raging Arctic sea on a studio stage, as production designers did for Branagh’s Frankenstein (MSF 166). The tapdance of Young Frankenstein exemplifies the theatricality of science as well as of transgression. Conceived by Victor in response to a lecture that defines chemistry as miraculous mimicry, Mary Shelley’s creature was made to be exhibited as the supreme specimen of mimesis, the living simulacrum of life itself. In Young Frankenstein, this spectacle disarms a theater audience, by turns amusing and terrifying them. Presented by the Baron (Victor’s grandson) as a scientific wonder, the creature fascinates the crowd by walking on command, then dancing and singing; but when his oafish diction (“ootin’ on ah itz”) makes the people laugh, he turns to rage and they flee in terror. In so doing, they reenact the flight of Mary Shelley’s Victor, who rushes from his lab in “breathless horror and disgust” at the first sign of animation in a creature whose “beautiful” features were chosen for display, but not meant for motion beyond the control of his maker—who would of course also be his exhibitor.




Film versions of Frankenstein violate the tacit compact made between novel and reader precisely by showing us what the novel decorously hides. According to Friedrich Schelling, approvingly quoted by Freud, the uncanny, or unheimlich, “is the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . hidden and secret and has become visible.” 54 The monster displayed by film versions of Frankenstein perfectly fits this definition, and thus compels us to reenact—in turning from text to screen— what Victor undergoes at the moment he animates the creature. The uncanny springs from the return of the repressed. “Nothing new or foreign,” Freud writes, “but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (CP 4.394). At the moment of animation, the monster is profoundly familiar to Victor, who has been laboring for months to construct him. But because Victor has up to now seen only “the beauty of the dream” (F 56), the glorious prospect of singlehandedly creating life, he has blinded himself to actual ugliness quite as much as to actual beauty. His own animation of the monster opens his eyes to an ugliness he has hitherto refused to see, and the heimlichkeit of this ugliness—the fact that it erupts in his own secret workroom—is exactly what makes it so unheimlich.

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Ironically, of course, this ugliness of face and form blinds Victor to the beauty of the monster’s soul, which is revealed in words that Victor cannot or will not understand because they come from one who seems to him nothing but a repulsive killer. Yet while the novel thus exposes Victor’s double blindness, it also shields the reader from—or blinds the reader to— the shock of what Victor sees. With one brief exception, all we are asked to visualize in our reading are reactions to the sight of the monster—not the sight itself. We might imagine a film that showed us nothing more than such reactions. But aside from breaking the promise implicitly made by all reaction shots—the promise that we will be shown what provoked them— such a film would fail to show the monster’s tortured longing to be sympathetically seen, to be the object of a desiring gaze. The monster of the Frankenstein films, more precisely the Karloff monster of the Whale films, has in one sense realized this desire beyond his wildest dreams. Captivating millions, his image has been reproduced and disseminated as widely and as often as the Mona Lisa. But there is a vast difference between the riveting impact of a cinematic image viewed by an audience and the repulsiveness of an actual figure seen by those around him. Pictures, we are told, are typically feminine objects consumed by the male gaze. Yet if a monster seems the very antithesis of a beautiful woman—whether Da Vinci’s Giocanda or Victor Frankenstein’s doomed bride—he can nonetheless signify the feminine because he, like women, deviates from the normative male form.55 The picture of a monster epitomizes this contradiction. Even as it displaces the picture of beauty, its radical deformity reinscribes both the feminine and the abject, which— in the words of Julia Kristeva—“disturbs identity, system, order,” and yet also “beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire.” 56 The moving picture of a talking monster is doubly monstrous, for it rends not only the lineaments of beauty but also the silence traditionally expected of women and pictures alike. In the end, what is most startling about the Frankenstein films is not that they make the monster visible, but that in most cases they also make him audible. Subject and object, viewer and viewed, he speaks at once to our eyes and our ears.

Chapter 10

Love, Death, and Grotesquerie Beardsley’s Illustrations of Wilde and Pope

“If I am not grotesque I am nothing.” —Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley came of age some seventy years after English publishers had started producing illustrated books. According to Martin Meisel, they originated largely in the 1820s, when technological innovation made it possible to print a book with pictures that illustrated the text.1 Meisel usefully distinguishes the nineteenth-century meanings of “illustration” and “realization.” While a realization faithfully recreated a verbal description or a painting on the stage—“a translation into a more real, that is more vivid, visual, physically present medium” in three dimensions—illustration meant “enrichment and embellishment” on the page, with the artist’s imagination freely at work in two dimensions (30). Stirred by this freedom of the artist, the distinguishing feature of the nineteenthcentury illustrated novel is collaboration: artist and writer working together to tell a story. While Dickens early on established the primacy of the text as both conceptually and chronologically prior to illustrations, artists did not simply offer arrested moments of stopped time to punctuate the moving line of a narrative. They found ways to tell what Meisel calls “a moment’s story,” and conversely, novelists drew word-pictures of their own to complement the movement of their narratives (17, 56). The illustrated novel thus presented itself as something to be experienced both visually and sequentially as a series of actions and scenes.

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In the illustrated books of the 1890s, however, the artist took full command of the pictures. Instead of producing a book by means of continuing collaboration, the illustrator—writes Lorraine Kooistra—“typically . . . received the completed manuscript of poetry, drama, or fiction direct from the publisher and produced the illustrations with little or no connection to the writer, who was sometimes surprised by the final product.” 2 In a sense, therefore, the artist stood outside the text as its “first public reader,” its first interpreter and critic (Kooistra 3–4). Aubrey Beardsley exemplifies this kind of independence. In his illustrations for Wilde’s Salomé and Pope’s Rape of the Lock, as we shall see, he reads not only the text but the life of its author: something unprecedented, so far as I know, in illustrated books before the nineties. Beardsley’s illustrations for the first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, which appeared in 1894, also radically revised the conventions of “realization.” Salomé was a play, something written to be realized on a stage. But in February 1893, some three years before it was first staged, the play was published in French, and its publication instantly prompted the 21-year-old Beardsley to produce a sensational picture depicting a moment in the play that would be visually “realized” on stage for only a moonlit instant before Salomé is killed—in punishment of her depravity. In spite of or perhaps because of its grotesquerie, the picture led Wilde to commission Beardsley to illustrate the English edition of Salomé—with pictures that Wilde found hardly suitable for his play.3 Beardsley’s illustrations to Wilde’s play, then, are clearly not the work of a collaborator but of a precociously gifted artist with a style uniquely his own: a style that seems not so much to serve the text as to appropriate it for its own idiosyncratic ends. Yet Beardsley’s illustrations to Salomé are considerably more than an exercise in graphic self-indulgence; they constitute a provocative reading of the play. When studied along with Beardsley’s illustrations for Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock, which appeared two years after Salomé, they allow us to see the threads of grotesquerie that permeate both of these works. Beardsley draws the Rape from an unmistakably fin-de-siècle perspective, making Pope’s figures play out their parts in an Art Nouveau world of riotous ornamentation. But this kind of ornamentation ultimately reaches the very core of Pope’s poem. Pope’s poem seems at first no kin to Salomé. What can the pampered, delicate, decorous Belinda share with the savagely sensual dancer who not only takes the head of a prophet but also kisses the very lips that have denounced her? What could link the sparkling, sprightly wit of Pope’s Augustan mock-epic to the ghastly decadence of Wilde’s late

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10.1 Aubrey Beardsley, Salomé with St. John’s Head. From The Studio 1.1, April 1893. Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

nineteenth-century play? Beardsley’s art points the way to an answer. The simple fact that he illustrated both the play and the poem may lead us to see what common ground underlies their obvious differences. If Salomé’s frustrated lust for John leads her to demand his head so that she may fetishize it, the Baron’s lust for Belinda drives him to cut a lock of her hair so that he may fetishize that. If Salomé’s necrophilia is grotesque, so is the Cave of Spleen to which a distraught Belinda flies when she

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loses her lock. If Belinda’s hair entrances the Baron, John’s hair entrances Salomé, and various kinds of extravagant coiffeurs occupy Beardsley’s illustrations for both works. To view them side by side through Beardsley’s eyes is to see not only what specific features they share but also how each of them represents the ambivalence of its heroine and the kinds of destruction generated by desire.

I To understand fully what Beardsley contributed to the first English edition of Wilde’s play, we must begin with Beardsley’s sensational debut. In April 1893, the inaugural issue of a London magazine called The Studio featured his work and formally introduced him in an article by Joseph Pennell, “A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley.” 4 The nine drawings Beardsley furnished for this issue included one which, according to Kenneth Clark, “aroused more horror and indignation than any graphic work hitherto produced in England.” 5 This was Beardsley’s illustration of the moment just after Salomé kisses the severed and bleeding head of John the Baptist at the end of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (fig. 10.1). In slightly altered form, the picture would reappear one year later in the first English edition of Wilde’s play (fig. 10.2).6 But since the play had just been published and would not be staged for another three years, as noted above, Beardsley’s Salomé with St. John’s Head set before the eyes of the public for the very first time what Wilde had simply suggested by the words that he wrote for his necrophiliac heroine—the very last words she speaks in the play: J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan, j’ai baisé ta bouche (“I have kissed your mouth, Jokannan, I have kissed your mouth”; Salomé 1067–68).7 The stage directions tell us that Salomé speaks these words on a set first darkened by the passing of a great cloud across the moon and then suddenly lit by a shaft of moonlight that exposes her to Herod, who promptly orders her killed (lines 1063–65, 1069–70). It is this moment of ghastly revelation that Beardsley depicts. At upper left, a thick cluster of white rimmed disks in various sizes suggest moons—or possibly suns—in eclipse. At upper right, Salomé gazes entranced at the face of the severed and dripping head of John the Baptist, which she holds in both her hands immediately before her face. With the edge of a quarter-segment of moon behind them cutting directly under their chins like the blade of a rounded axe, she kneels humpbacked as if in adoration of the man whose head she has demanded on a platter. Their two heads nearly meet and in some ways match. While her open eyes and grinning lips confront John’s

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10.2 Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax. From Oscar Wilde, Salomé (London: Elkin Matthews & John Lane, 1894). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

closed lids and downturned mouth, both display Medusan hair. Her thick black locks writhe up and down like snakes; his snaky locks fall whitely over her hands, and beneath his neck a slender, broken stream of white widens to the shape of a cobra at the bottom of the picture, where a white lily stands in black water. At left are blocked the words J’AI BAISÉ TA BOUCHE IOKANNEN J’AI BAISÉ TA BOUCHE. Because these words appear just above a snakelike white tendril rising sinuously from a narrow, white-rimmed, vaginal oval of black, they seem almost to be spoken by a snake. The serpentine form of the tendril as well of John’s hair and blood reflect Beardsley’s careful reading of Wilde’s play, which fascinated him.8

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Having tried in vain the fortress of his virtue, having sought in vain to kiss him when alive, Wilde’s Salomé imputes to John the serpentine nature traditionally used to signify the treacherous charm of women, beginning with Eve.9 Shortly after the fall in Milton’s Paradise Lost, for instance, Adam explicitly denounces Eve as a serpent. Calling her just as “false” as Satan, he says she needs only his serpentine shape and color to “show / [Her] inward fraud” and thus to warn all other creatures away from her (10.867–71). Salomé herself is traditionally snakelike; Ewa Kuryluk notes that on the eleventh-century bronze door of Verona’s San Zeno the sinuous line of the dancing princess is distinctly serpentine.10 But Wilde’s Salomé sees herself quite differently. Knowing full well that John thought her a harlot like her mother Herodias (1022), she nonetheless charges him with taking her virginity (1046–47) and casts him as a serpentine tempter. He captivates her first with his body, which she ambivalently calls both lily white and repulsively leprous (304–17), and then with his hair, which she finds both lustrously black and horrible, “like a crown of thorns” and “like a knot of serpents coiled around thy neck” (334–35), evoking both Christ and Medusa. Finally she longs for his superlatively red mouth, which for her is “like a pomegranate cut in twain with a knife of ivory” (336–37) and which she finally determines not only to kiss but to bite “as one bites ripe fruit” (1010–11). Thus John’s very lips become for her the apple of temptation. His lips excite her precisely because they are forbidden fruit. By the mere act of speaking to the living John, she defies the command of Herod, who forbade anyone to speak with him (181–83), and in kissing the lips of the dead John, she does what the living John would “never” allow (353–54). In life, as Kuryluk observes (220), the lips of Wilde’s John the Baptist echo the curses of John the Revelationist, for just as the Revelationist denounces the whore of Babylon and predicts the apocalyptic destruction of the world (Rev. 6:12-13), Wilde’s John denounces Salomé as a daughter of Sodom and Babylon (291, 621) and predicts—in the very words of the Revelationist—that the sun shall become black like sackcloth of hair, and the moon shall become like blood, and the stars of the heaven shall fall upon the earth like unripe figs that fall from the fig-tree, and the kings of the earth shall be afraid. (652–55)

Salomé’s murderous passion for John is mirrored, as Kuryluk suggests, by the ruthlessness of the curses he hurls at her (220). John foretells the

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destruction of a corrupt world, and he most especially seeks the annihilation of Salomé. To exemplify his banishment of “all wickedness from the earth,” he prays that she be stoned, pierced, and crushed: “Let the people take stones and stone her. . . . Let the captains of the hosts pierce her with their swords, let them crush her beneath their shields” (623–26). The last part of John’s wish is precisely fulfilled at the end of the play by Herod’s soldiers, who “rush forward and crush [Salomé] beneath their shields.” Commanding them in the very last words of the play to “Kill that woman!” (1069), Herod unwittingly does the murderous bidding of John just as he had reluctantly done to John the murderous bidding of Salomé. What enrages Herod is precisely what Beardsley’s inaugural drawing depicts: the spectacle of Salomé infatuated with a bleeding head. To grasp the full impact of this picture, we should consider the precedents for it in literature and visual art as well as its immediate source in Wilde’s play. The scriptural versions of the Salomé story say nothing of her passion for John and identify her only as the daughter of Herodias, who tells her to ask for John’s head after her dancing has moved Herod to offer her anything she wants (Matt. 14:3-12, Mark 6:17-28). Later versions of the story eroticize the motives of Herodias. While Mark clearly indicates that she sought to punish John for criticizing the unlawfulness of her marriage to her husband’s brother (Mark 6:18-19), nineteenthcentury versions of the story—before Wilde—made her John’s rejected lover. In Heinrich Heine’s satirical poem Atta Troll (1847), a phantom Herodias riding a horse in a pageant of the dead on the night of St. John’s Day holds the prophet’s head and fervently kisses it (Kuryluk 200). Whether or not Wilde knew Heine’s poem directly, he certainly knew another work which took this striking episode one step further. In 1888, four years before writing his play about Salomé, Wilde reviewed J. C. Heywood’s Salomé, a dramatic poem in which a live Herodias kisses the prophet’s head (Ellmann 340). According to Richard Ellmann, Wilde saw this striking detail—which apparently originated with Heine and Heywood—as the potential climax of his own work (340). But so far as I know, Wilde was the first to make Salomé rather than Herodias the lover of John. This is what distinguishes his play not only from the work of Heine and Heywood but also from the treatment of Salomé in Joris Huysman’s A Rebours (1884), which Ellman calls the “principal engenderer” of Wilde’s play (340). In Huysman’s description of a painting by Gustave Moreau we might indeed see the genesis of Wilde’s Salomé: “the symbolic incarnation of undying lust, . . . the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like the

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Helen of ancient myth, everything that she touches” (qtd. Ellmann 340). But Huysman’s words describe Moreau’s painting of Salomé dancing for Herod. In Moreau’s painting of Salomé presented with the Baptist’s head, she manifests not lust but horror (Ellmann 340)—the antithesis of what Wilde’s Salomé displays. For Salomé’s infatuation with the head of John, therefore, we might consider two other precedents in nineteenth-century literature and art. One is Keats’s Isabella, a poem whose “passionate humanity” Wilde had come to admire by the age of twenty.11 Near the end of this Gothic romance in verse, the heroine unearths the head of her lover, who has been murdered by her brothers, and kisses it. Putting it into a garden pot and covering it with soil, she then plants basil over it. Isabella’s lugubrious tending of her basil plant, “ever fed . . . with [her] thin tears” (line 425), is depicted by William Holman Hunt in Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1867), a painting that both Wilde and Beardsley could have known.12 This is a study in genteel necrophilia. Dressed in a thin white chemise with a geometrically patterned blue shawl falling about her waist, Isabella stands leaning over a large painted majolica pot that sprouts a thick clump of basil and rests on a richly embroidered cloth adorning a prie-dieu inlaid with ivory and precious stones. With her left leg bent and her left foot perched on the ledge of the prie-dieu, she seems half kneeling at the shrine of the pot, which she holds in both her hands while gazing intently upon it and letting her long black hair flow over it—as if it were the hair of Lorenzo himself. The only sign of the head within the pot is the little bald skull on the handle nearly touched by the ends of Isabella’s tresses. From the Isabella of Keats and Hunt to the Salomé of Wilde and Beardsley is not so wild a leap as may at first appear. For all its domestic decor and decorum, the mingling of the sacred and the erotic in Hunt’s painting as well as its accent on plant life and long wavy hair—a traditional sign of promiscuity—all subtly anticipate, however unwittingly, the climactic scene that Wilde dramatizes and Beardsley draws.13 In Hunt’s painting, a young, half-kneeling woman dressed in white and crowned with long black wavy hair gazes on and holds in both her hands a pot containing the buried head of her lover, and a leafy plant springs from the soil around his buried head just as flowers rise “like incarnations of the stars” from the buried corpse of Keats himself in Shelley’s Adonais (line 174). In Beardsley’s drawing, a kneeling, white-robed young woman crowned with long black wavy hair gazes on and holds in both her hands a head from which blood drips into a pool that begets a lily—the talisman of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Wilde’s iconic signature

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(Ellmann 45, 87, 115, 117, 206). Wilde and Beardsley thus expose the grotesque eroticism latent in Hunt’s sentimental tableau. The other precedent for the climactic scene of Wilde’s play appears in a book that Wilde read on his honeymoon in Paris in June of 1884: Stendhal’s Red and Black (Ellmann 250). Like Wilde’s play, Stendhal’s novel ends with a woman kissing the severed head of the man whom she has loved but who has finally rejected her.14 Mathilde-Marguerite de la Mole, Stendhal’s antiheroine, has long adored the audacity of her sixteenth-century namesake, Queen Marguerite of Navarre, who buried with her own hands the head of her executed lover, Boniface de la Mole.15 Theatrically passionate as well as proudly aristocratic, Mathilde scorns conventional squeamishness. “What woman alive today,” she asks, “would not be too horrified to touch the head of her decapitated lover?” (Stendhal 246). On the very last page of the novel Mathilde dramatically answers this rhetorical question. Finding the severed head and body of the newly executed Julien Sorel on the floor of the room occupied by his friend Fouquet, who has managed to buy Julien’s corpse, she picks up the head, sets it on a little marble table, and kisses its forehead. Then she carries it to the cave where Julien asks to be buried and puts it in the ground with her own hands (408). To these precedents for the dramatization and depiction of a Salomé infatuated with the bleeding head of John may be added a small cluster of etchings that date from an earlier fin de siècle—the 1790s. In 1793 a French artist named Villeneuve published two etchings of heads severed by the guillotine and dripping blood from the neck: Louis XVI and the Comte de Custine, a general of the revolutionary Army who had been executed for conspiring with the British against the new Republic.16 Each held aloft by the hand of an unseen executioner, these severed heads are meant to show the triumph of liberty over tyranny and treachery (“sang impure,” the impure blood). But they also signify acts of desecration, for as Ronald Paulson notes, the severing of powerful heads—above all that of the king himself—subjected living persons to “the iconoclastic treatment dealt out to religious images in churches” (“Severed Head” 58). Salomé’s desecration of John’s severed head thus revives the iconoclastic implications of beheading. It likewise recalls the way Thomas Rowlandson represents French Liberty in an etching entitled “The Contrast” (1792), where a Medusa-headed woman brandishes the head of a man on a the central prong of a trident and thus usurps—as Neil Hertz notes—the pose of Cellini’s Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa.17 Beardsley not only shows a Medusa-headed woman holding the severed head of a man; he

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also puts serpentine locks on the man, as we have seen, thus implying that Salomé has the power to turn John’s head into the image and likeness of her own.18 If anything, her set lips and lantern jaw make her face more masculine than that of John, whose drooping mouth and delicate chin suggest effeminacy. Latent or overt in all of these images is the assault of the secular and erotic upon the sacred. When we read the final lines of Wilde’s play and view Beardsley’s illustration of them in light of what earlier writers and artists had done with severed heads, we can see that desecration and fetishism paradoxically go hand in hand. As Ewa Kuryluk shows, Beardsley consummates a tradition of the grotesque that began with the Renaissance discovery of monstrous frescoes in ancient Roman “grottoes” and became a subculture bent on subverting “official Christian culture with inappropriate forms and shocking iconography.” 19 The shocking iconography of Beardsley’s illustrations for the English edition of Salomé, which first appeared in 1894, begins with its title page. In the original (and later bowdlerized) version, a horned, garlanded, armless, nude, and flagrantly hermaphroditic Pan gazes grinningly down on a winged nude boy kneeling with his half-raised phallus on display.20 The figures suggest a parody of the crucifixion, with Christ supplanted by a demonically grinning Pan set between would-be sacred candles and the mourner at the foot of the cross replaced by a pseudo-angel who looks not worshipfully up at the god but leeringly out at us.21 Beardsley’s design not only mocks Christian iconography. In featuring a monumental hermaphrodite, it also flaunts what Snodgrass calls a sign of self-enclosed sterility, an “emblem of solipsistic, unfulfilled desire—particularly homosexuality, onanism, and that vice supreme cerebral lechery, all of which characterized to Victorians decadent disillusionment and withdrawal from practical life” (60). The title page thus begins to show how far Beardsley’s illustrations for Salomé swerve from Wilde. While Beardsley’s hermaphrodite may be tenuously linked to Salomé’s unfulfilled desire for John, the double-sexed figure points less to Wilde’s play than to the bisexual life of its author. Several of Beardsley’s other illustrations allude to that life, for Wilde’s own features appear in the feminized moon watched by the Young Syrian and the Page of Herodias (“The Woman in the Moon”), in the face of Herod (“Eyes of Herod”), and also in the face of the owl-capped jester presenting the queen in “Enter Herodias.” Whatever he thought of these particular caricatures, Wilde found Beardsley’s illustrations for Salomé generally unpalatable. Though “Salomé with St. John’s Head” had instantly won his admiration, he reportedly complained that the “Japanese” style of

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Beardsley’s illustrations did not fit his “Byzantine” play and that they resembled the “naughty scribbles” of a “precocious schoolboy.” 22 This verdict has by turns been confirmed and contested. Up to the 1970s, critics generally agreed that Beardsley had simply made his own way, ignoring Wilde’s text and spawning irrelevant images.23 On the other hand, recent critics give both collaborators high marks. Elliott Gilbert calls the 1894 Salomé “one of the most successful collaborations of poet and illustrator in history”; Linda Zatlin finds playwright and artist each revealing the triumph of male authority over the rebelliousness of female power; and Ian Fletcher rightly notes that “the principal images of the play certainly appear in the drawings” 24 But no one theme binds text and image in this so-called collaboration. As Robert Schweik has recently shown, the illustrations and the play both conjoin “strikingly incongruous elements.” 25 Wilde’s Salomé, for instance, is first virginal and withdrawn, then suddenly filled with lust for John; Beardsley’s Salomé is aggressively Medusan in The Climax and erotically feminine in The Tail-Piece (fig. 10.3), which shows a masked Pierrot and satyr gently

10.3 Aubrey Beardsley, The Tail-Piece. From Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1894). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

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lowering her slender nude body into a box designed to hold the large powder puff poised beside it.26 When it appeared with Wilde’s Salomé, Beardsley’s drawing of Salomé kissing John’s severed head (fig. 10.2) could be called The Climax (rather than Salomé with St. John’s Head) because the text of the play itself made further words unnecessary. Beardsley also cut the words that had appeared in The Studio (J’AI BAISE TA BOUCHE . . .) and several other elements: the spidery, filigreed figures just above Salomé’s ankle and behind her head; the long black lock hanging down below Salomé’s arms; the slender pair of wings just above the lily; the black bar running just under the two heads at upper right; and the fringes adorning the edges of John’s locks, Salomé’s locks and her feet. The result is a simpler, starker, more concentrated depiction of Salomé’s necrophilia. At the same time, Salomé herself is made more feminine. Her nose, chin, and feet are all smaller, and her hair is ornamented with stippled swirls. For all its Medusan menace, then, The Climax subtly prefigures the powder puff eroticism of The Tail Piece, where Salomé’s tightly curled hair in turn recalls the eclipsed moons of The Climax. The salience of a powder puff in the very last illustration for Salomé not only exemplifies Beardsley’s way of recreating the incongruity of Wilde’s play. It also links Salomé—or more precisely Beardsley’s illustrations for Salomé—to his illustrations for The Rape of the Lock, which first appeared with them in 1896. As Beardsley helps us to see, both works incongruously mingle the social and domestic rituals of civilized life— applying make-up, formal dining, dancing, card-playing, tea-drinking, gossiping, flirting—with acts of brutal barbarity: rape and decapitation. While the “rape” of Pope’s poem is ostensibly just a metaphor for the cutting of a lock of hair, the act of cutting hair is an assault on the head—a form of decapitation—and a pair of scissors may be used as a weapon of assault, a kind of sword. Well before he started work on his designs for The Rape, Beardsley subtly drew this connection in his revised version of The Toilette of Salomé (fig. 10.4). Both versions of this picture, which depict an episode that cannot be found in the play, show Salomé seated in her dressing room and attended by a masked Pierrot; both versions also include one or more domestic objects that will reappear in the illustrations for The Rape: books, vases, teacups, and a powder puff conspicuously waved by the Pierrot.27 But while the second version removes three of the figures and many of the props (such as the double bass and the vase of flowers to be found in the first), it adds two pairs of scissors—one tucked into the pocket of Pierrot’s

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10.4 Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilette of Salomé. From Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1894). Photo courtesy of Darmouth College Library.

apron and the other on the top tier of the etagère at right. The context makes the scissors ominous. With her previously semi-nude figure now anachronistically sheathed in a sleek and sweeping costume of the 1890s, Salomé wears a great oval black Ascot concourse hat that covers her head nowhere else in these illustrations and that serves a purely symbolic purpose in this one. Though wholly impractical (it can only impede the dressing of her hair), the black hat prefigures the great oval platter on which John’s head will be served to her in The Dancer’s Reward as well as the black moons (or black suns) that fill the background to Salomé’s necrophilic kiss in The Climax. But if the hat prefigures the platter on which Salomé gets the head she has demanded, the masked clown’s

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scissors may well convey—as Milly Heyd says—“a hinted threat to the heroine’s head, insinuating that revenge is soon to follow” (133). Superficially innocent and domestic but also potentially sinister and even deadly, scissors play a major part in Pope’s Rape of the Lock. On the front cover of the edition he illustrated, Beardsley presents them as the central icon of the poem (fig. 10.5).28 Holding in all twenty unlit candles, two rococo candelabra support between them an oval frame enclosing a pair of richly ornamented open scissors whose points in turn enclose a floating lock of hair. The oval frame prefigures the mirror described in the passage on Belinda at her dressing table—a mirror shown as oval in Beardsley’s The Toilet (fig. 10.6), where a pair of plain black scissors appears on the dressing table. Furthermore, the candles depicted on the binding cover stand on what looks like an altar, which is what Belinda’s

10.5 Aubrey Beardsley, front cover from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (London: L. Smithers, 1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

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dressing table is called in Pope’s poem (1.127). Outlined in white against a black background, the thin vertical lines of the candles as well as the other white verticals suggest what Pope calls “Slight Lines of Hair” (2.26). But in any case, the framing of the scissors and the lock reveals the ambiguity of both. Consider first the scissors. As an instrument of beautification, they may look light, beautiful, richly ornamented, and even adorable, which is

10.6 Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilet, from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

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how they appear in Beardsley’s cover; on the other hand, they may look plain, black, and functional, which is the way they appear in Beardsley’s Toilet, where they rest unobtrusively on the altar of her dressing table between the ornamented candlestand and the fancy bow tied at the corner. Though scissors are surely crucial to the art of hairdressing, they are not mentioned among the beauty aids that Pope identifies on Belinda’s dressing table in the poem (gems, combs, pins, puffs, powders, and patches), and in Beardsley’s illustration as in Pope’s poem, Belinda is too busy adoring (or admiring) her own heavenly reflection to notice anything so trivial as a pair of scissors. In the poem, furthermore, the sylphs responsible for her hair seem to be charged with everything but cutting it: setting and separating (“divid[ing]”) its strands (1.146), curling them (2.97), and tending Belinda’s favorite lock (2.115). Yet in telling us that some of the busy sylphs attending Belinda “divide the Hair” (1.146), Pope may ambiguously refer to either separating or cutting it. In any case, Beardsley’s hieratic elevation of the scissors and the lock on his cover makes strikingly visible what may well rise up before the mind’s eye of the Baron in canto 2. Hours before dawn and Belinda’s awakening, he builds an Altar of “vast French Romances” to love, lights the Pyre with Billetdoux, “and begs with ardent Eyes / Soon to obtain, and long possess the Prize” (2.43–44).29 While Belinda ignores the scissors on her dressing table, the Baron could be adoring the means to his prize as well as the lock itself. Beardsley’s cover likewise exploits the erotic ambiguities of the lock and its taking. If the sinuous shape hovering between the scissors’ ends on Beardsley’s cover hovers between signifying a lock of hair and a spermatozoon, as Robert Halsband suggests, it furnishes something like an objective correlative for the ambiguity of Pope’s titular trope.30 In Pope’s title, a word that literally means the forcible abduction or sexual invasion of a woman is figuratively used to mean the cutting and taking of a woman’s hair—a trivial prank. Yet throughout the poem, literal and figurative meanings change places with disarming frequency, and in so doing, they radically destabilize the opposition between the trivial and the grave. Mighty contests rise from trivial things in this poem because trivial things can turn momentous, just as harmlessly figurative meanings can turn dangerously literal. The gossip at Hampton Court is said to be killing—figuratively, of course: “At ev’ry Word a Reputation dies” (3.15). But half a dozen lines later, hungry judges sign a sentence of real death, “And Wretches hang that Jury-men may dine” (3.21). In the mock-battle of the final canto, mock death fells beau and witling alike: “One dy’d in Metaphor, and one in Song” (5.59). But

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when the Baron—menaced by the “fierce Belinda—seeks “no more than on his Foe to die” (78), we are slyly reminded that from at least the time of Donne in the early seventeenth century, “die” could mean “ejaculate.” Ridiculous as this battle may be, it is driven by real passion and real desire. If Belinda can demand her lock more loudly than Othello roared for his handkerchief (5.103–6), the line between comedy and tragedy seems hardly thicker than a hair, which is what “Beauty draws us with” (2.27). The spermatozoic lock of Beardsley’s cover thus originates—or leaps up, one might say—from the passion that animates Pope’s poem and from the sexual innuendoes of his language. The sexual innuendoes of The Rape, I suspect, did just as much as its would-be triviality to sink the poem in the estimate of later Victorian critics. According to one anthologist, it was “pretty” but also “trivial” (like Belinda herself, one might say), and Matthew Arnold found it lacking in “high seriousness.” 31 But Edmund Gosse called it a “little masterpiece in Dresden china,” and ironically enough, he urged Beardsley to illustrate it precisely because he thought this precocious young artist had been “doing so much illustrating work of a trivial kind” (qtd. Halsband 87n). Fortunately, however, Gosse also urged Beardsley to treat this masterpiece “in his own spirit,” which is fully alive to the rich combination of playfulness, artificiality, irony, and deep seriousness (as distinct from high seriousness) that drives the poem. In its own way, the poem seriously dramatizes the sexual magnetism of hair even as it derides the idolatry that hair excites. To see more clearly why Victorian critics found the poem trivial, we must realize that it mockheroically trivialized precisely what Victorian culture had glorified. In canto 4, Thalestris fans the rage of the luckless—and now lockless— Belinda by imagining what the Baron will make of her precious ringlet: And shall this Prize, th’inestimable Prize, Expos’d thro’ Crystal to the gazing Eyes, And heighten’d by the Diamond’s circling Rays, On that Rapacious Hand forever blaze? (4.113–16)

Victorian readers might well find this passage sacrilegious, for in the midnineteenth century, jewelry made from plaited hair became an obsession. “Hair was powerful,” writes Elizabeth Gitter,

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and the ubiquitous Victorian lock of hair, encased in a locket or ring or framed on the wall, became, through a Midas touch of imagination, something treasured, a totem, a token of attachment, intrinsically valuable, as precious as gold.32

Or as virginity. To read, for instance, Elizabeth Barrett’s response to Robert Browning’s request for a lock of her hair is—as Gitter notes—to see that she considers such a request second only to asking for her sexual surrender: I never gave away what you ask me to give you, to a human being, except my nearest relatives & once or twice or thrice to female friends, . . . never, though reproached for it,—and it is just three weeks since I said last to an asker that I was “too great a prude for such a thing”! . . .—and prude or not, I could not—I never could—something would not let me.33

Belinda would readily understand. For her too a lock of hair is an intimate possession as well as a mark of beauty and a sign of sexual magnetism. From its title onwards, the poem repeatedly identifies the taking of the hair with sexual conquest even as it pretends to separate the two. Ostensibly it mocks the practice of confusing appearance with reality, social gaffes with moral lapses. To be equally frightened, as Ariel is, that a nymph may “stain her Honour, or her new Brocade” (1.107) is to show oneself fundamentally—and ridiculously—lacking in a sense of moral proportion. But just what does “Honour” mean in this poem? Foreseeing that the Baron might publicly display Belinda’s lock in a diamond ring, Thalestris cries, “Honour forbid! at whose unrival’d Shrine / Ease, Pleasure, Virtue, All, our Sex resign” (4.105–6). If honor demands the sacrifice of virtue as well as of pleasure and ease, can honor be anything more than reputation, which is of course based on the appearance of virtue, so that figuratively staining one’s honor is morally indistinguishable from literally staining one’s brocade? 34 Falstaff famously calls honor nothing but “Air” (I Henry IV 5.1.1), but this poem makes it inhere in precisely what is visible, above all in whatever hair is visible. Hence the supreme irony of Belinda’s cry after the Baron takes her lock: “O hadst thou, Cruel! been content to sieze / Hairs less in sight, or any Hairs but these! (4.175–76). To save the hairs of her head, the hairs that publicly signify her honor, she would presumably have been willing to sacrifice the hairs of her maiden-head. Thus would virtue have knelt at honor’s shrine.35

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10.7 Aubrey Beardsley, The Baron’s Prayer, from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1896). Photo courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library.

To be sure, it is the Baron who genuflects to the Goddess of Love as he prays for her blessing on his quest (2.35–46). But in his illustrations of Belinda at her toilet (fig. 10.6) and the Baron at his altar (fig. 10.7), Beardsley shows each in profile and wearing a dressing gown, with the kneeling form and praying hands of the Baron figuratively mirroring the seated form and slightly extended right hand of Belinda as she literally gazes into her own mirror. Placed in elegantly furnished boudoirs, both figures appear against a trompe l’oeil backdrop of nature at its most artificial. What seems at first a set of windows overlooking foliage behind

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Belinda proves instead to be a three-paneled screen stippled with the orderly trees and round temple of a formal garden, and in the Baron’s room, the would-be window is a large tapestry stippled with twin clumps of trees flanking a distant house. Stippled on the wall beneath the Baron’s tapestry are bouquets linked by hanging garlands, just as garlands hang over the tops of the panels of Belinda’s screen and decorate her elaborate coif. Finally, both rooms are conspicuously occupied by what Pope’s account of them never mentions: candles. Two slim candles rise above Belinda’s head from the sculpted candlesticks on either side of her table; a three-branched candelabra stands on a table just behind the Baron; and before him, standing up over the curving flames of the Billetdoux he has just lighted atop his pyre of books, a burning candle rising from a filigreed floor-based candlestick looms well above his head. If the Baron’s burning candle may be taken to signify his priapic excitement, as Zatlin suggests, the unlit candles on Belinda’s dressing table may likewise suggest her latent desire to be ravished, which is revealed both by the language of Pope’s first canto and the puff-skirted courtier peering through the garlanded curtains of Belinda’s bed in The Dream, Beardsley’s frontispiece to the poem.36 Beardsley’s courtier has all the ambiguity of Pope’s. With his long black curls, his skirt garlanded in flowers, and his delicate profile almost identical to that of Belinda in The Toilet (fig. 10.6), this androgynous figure personifies what Pope’s Belinda conjures in her dream: “A Youth more glittering than a Birth-night Beau” (1.23). But his long, thin, star-topped baton prefigures the burning candle of the Baron’s boudoir and likewise implies a priapic excitement that is explicitly represented by another drawing Beardsley made a few months after The Dream. Drawn to illustrate a passage in Juvenal’s sixth satire, The Impatient Adulterer shows a man bending forward to peer through a set of bedcurtains just like the courtier—except that he is naked from the waist down and fiddling with the foreskin of his halferect penis (repr. Halsband, fig. #46). To see how closely his long black curls and his leaning, peering stance resemble those of the well-padded courtier, to see the link between the adulterer’s hand on his naked phallus and the courtier’s pointing forefinger, is to see how well Beardsley captures the fundamental ambiguity of the youth’s moral posture in Pope’s poem. This sylph, who calls himself Ariel and who claims to be Belinda’s protector actually behaves very much like Milton’s Satan. Satan first tempts Eve with a dream whispered to her ear as she sleeps (Paradise Lost 5.35–37), and he begins by telling her that all Nature is ravished by her

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beauty (1.43–46). Summoned by Belinda’s unnamed guardian sylph, Ariel likewise whispers to the ear of the sleeping Belinda, calls her “Fairest of mortals,” and urges her to know her “own Importance” (1.27, 35). Ariel is just as seductive as the men he is supposedly guarding Belinda’s purity against. Even while warning her against “the whisper in the dark,” he is whispering to her in the early morning light.37 Even while later commanding his troops to guard Belinda closely from male advances, he also reminds them of their duty to keep her as lovely and fragrant as possible (2.91–100)—in other words, to keep her supremely desirable. And even while urging Belinda herself to beware of man, he tells her that any woman who rejects mankind is “em-brac’d” by a sylph, by one of those who easily “Assume what Sexes and what Shapes they please” (1.68–70). Pope thus writes the recipe for Beardsley’s androgynous courtier, an exquisitely equivocal amalgam of delicacy, would-be solicitude, and lust. In Beardsley’s illustrations as in Pope’s poem, Belinda subtly reveals a lust of her own. Beardsley’s The Billet Doux shows her sitting up in bed propped against a huge pillow, backed by a rococo headboard and flowered wallpaper. Wearing a bonnet tied around her chin and an elaborately frilled bedjacket, she seems at first glance fully protected. But the angle at which she holds the Baron’s note makes it lead the viewer’s eye directly to her exposed left breast. Beardsley thus depicts the sudden impact of the Baron’s fervent words upon a newly awakened Belinda. Though Ariel in her dream has just been warning her to beware of “some dread Event” and above all to “beware of Man!” (1.109, 113), the billet doux makes her instantly forget these warnings: “Wounds, Charms, and Ardors, were no sooner read / But all the Vision vanish’d from thy Head” (1.119–20). Combining as it does the pampered innocence of a children’s book heroine with the sensuality of a courtesan, Beardsley’s drawing aptly expresses the sexual ambiguity of Pope’s Belinda.38 When “awful Beauty puts on all its Arms” in the dressing table scene, Belinda is not arming herself against sexual overtures but doing everything possible to attract them. The “purer Blush” she paints on her cheeks with rouge (1.143) is cosmetically more delicate than the natural reddening of embarrassment would be. But while the latter suggests virginal spontaneity, the cosmetically purer blush is morally tainted, the work of artifice, the sign of the courtesan. A comparable ambiguity marks the scissors, the “little Engine” of Belinda’s downfall (3.132). By showing a pair of scissors on Belinda’s

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dressing table, Beardsley reminds us—as I have noted—that scissors are often used to trim and beautify a woman’s hair. In the drawing called The Rape of the Lock (fig. 10.8), Beardsley’s picture of the moment just before the lock is cut, the sumptuously frilled and bountifully bewigged figure holding a pair of open scissors by the frozen cascade of Belinda’s coiffeur (which is all we see of her head) could be a hairdresser giving her a final trim. But the wink of the dwarf in the foreground tells us that the Baron

10.8 Aubrey Beardsley, The Rape of the Lock, from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

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is bent on amorous theft even as the dwarf himself—who typically signifies lust in Beardsley’s iconography—slyly pilfers a cup of coffee.39 As a sardonic observer of the action rather than a would-be guardian angel of the heroine, the dwarf is Beardsley’s antithetical answer to Pope’s sylphs, whom he does not depict at all.40 The dwarf’s full skirted coat and highheeled shoes make him a miniature parody of the Baron, and the sheer intricacy of pattern in the men’s embroidered coats, the women’s figured dresses, and the extravagantly curled wigs may well suggest the “mystick Mazes” (1.92) into which Belinda’s conflicting desires lead her. In the poem, her response to the Baron’s advances is anything but straightforward. At the very moment when Ariel tries to warn her of the scissors, he is balked by her own passion for the Baron: As on the Nosegay in her Breast reclin’d He watch’d th’ Ideas rising in her Mind; Sudden he view’d, in spite of all her Art An Earthly Lover lurking at her Heart. Amaz’d, confus’d, he found his Pow’r expir’d, Resign’d to Fate, and with a Sigh retir’d. (3.141–46)

In the text these lines are immediately followed by the passage on the cutting of the lock, where the blades of the scissors cut “the sacred Hair . . . / From the fair Head, for ever and for ever!” (3.153–54). Subliminally implying the severance of the head itself, Pope constructs a mock-heroic version of decapitation. Milly Heyd even suggests that the dwarf’s knowing wink at the scissors in Beardsley’s illustration intimates the artist’s own “passionate desire to cut off a woman’s head” (82). In Beardsley’s second version of The Toilette for Salomé, as we have seen, the princess’s would-be hairdresser is a masked Pierrot—a demonic clown— who encircles her head with his right arm and waves a powder puff before her eyes while pointing with his sharp left elbow to a pair of black scissors stuck in the pocket of his white apron. If scissors can signify the revenge finally taken on the heroine’s head in Salomé, they may help to explain Belinda’s alarm at the assault on her hair. The cutting of the lock in The Rape, however, is followed not by any literal decapitation but by Umbriel’s descent to the Cave of Spleen in a passage that led Beardsley to the most intricate, grotesque, and claustral of his illustrations for the poem. To this point, Beardsley has given us ornately furnished interiors. His picture of Belinda on the barge in The

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Barge includes not even a glimpse of Pope’s “Silver Thames” (2.4), and the glorious sun of Pope’s passage appears only on the lavishly decorated side of the boat—as a set of little round sunbursting faces with “phallic and testicular forms” hanging from their mouths (qtd. Halsband 100). The outdoor world appears just once, in the background of the picture of the Baron wielding his scissors (fig. 10.8), where a large window frames a double row of trees so nicely that this “natural” scene could be yet another picture—like the tapestry on the wall of the Baron’s boudoir. In The Cave of Spleen (fig. 10.9), Beardsley takes this interiority to its claustral extreme. Illustrating the line that “Men prove with Child, as

10.9 Aubrey Beardsley, The Cave of Spleen, from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

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pow’rful Fancy works” (4.53), stippled embryos nestle in the swollen belly of a man at lower left and the thigh of the man beside him. Images of enclosure and entrapment abound. At lower right one woman sits in a closed jar, and just above the peacock-winged female nude appears the bust of a man in a cage of diagonal crosses. Directly above him a tiny bare-breasted woman with the round face of a mop-haired child peers out at us through a veil. Since she perches over the reclining figure of Spleen, she may be Affectation, one of Spleen’s two handmaids, for the frowning old frump just above clutching a set of books and scrolls to her chest is clearly Pope’s “Ill-nature like an ancient Maid” (4.27). But just as Beardsley puts spectacles on this ancient maid, he adds a veil to the face of Affectation. In what Halsband aptly calls this “grotto of hair” (103), virtually all the figures are caught up in hair or hair-like forms, in a swirling profusion of curls, netting, plumes, peacock feathers, and wigs. In the midst of this bizarre world sits the half-profiled figure of Pope himself in a pose borrowed from Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of him (Halsband 106). With sunken cheek and narrowed eyes under his turban-like morning cap, he gazes out at us warily, holding on his lap what seems an embryo made of curled hair—an emblem of the poem he has begotten. Beardsley likewise works his own variations on Pope’s theme of metamorphosis, of “Bodies chang’d to various forms by Spleen” (4.48). Taking his cue from Pope’s lines on anthropomorphic teapots and impregnated men (4.49–53), Beardsley presents not only a bird-woman and several teapot-shaped men but also—looming large on the left—a conspicuously feminized Umbriel, who is male in Pope’s text but here displays the hourglass figure of a tightly corseted woman, with a stupendously plumed turban, richly ornamented sleeves, and thighs draped in what appear to be stippled pearls. Subtly recalling the hermaphroditic nude on the suppressed title page for Salomé, Beardsley’s Umbriel epitomizes the gendercrossing that permeates Pope’s poem from the first canto, where the glittering youth displays an effeminacy that is plainly caught—as we have already noted—in Beardsley’s illustration of Belinda’s dream. At the same time, this effeminate figure assumes the boldly erect stance and assertive manner of a man about to fight. Holding up sceptre and spleenwort with his left hand as he points with his right, he seems precisely the kind of warrior that Belinda aimed to be when she set out to challenge and conquer at Ombre “two adventurous Knights” (3.26). For if men can look and act like women in this poem, women can behave like men.

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10.10 Aubrey Beardsley, Battle of the Beaux and Belles, from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1896). Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

Belinda does so plainly in the last of Beardsley’s full-scale illustrations for the poem, Battle of the Beaux and Belles (fig. 10.10). Superficially, this picture replaces dark confusion with the appearance of decorum and light. Misshapen hybrids give way to well-dressed men and women gathered in a drawing room; the windowless wall of the cave is supplanted by a pair of windows; and in place of Umbriel’s tight black bodysuit, Belinda wears a billowing, delicately stippled dress that forms a triangle of light with the decolletage of the white-plumed woman just behind her (presumably Thalestris). But the overturned chair and the kneeling Baron and the cast-down walking stick signal confusion, and for all its light, the

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picture is framed and freighted by darkness: by the dark curtains at the top, by the broad strip of nearly black carpet below, and by thick dark wigs quite as large as any of those to be found in the cave—especially on the head of Belinda herself. Just as importantly, her frowning face and the forward thrust of her upper body repeat the bellicose stance of Umbriel, and the single curly lock resting on her right shoulder repeats the lock dangling from the headdress of the Goddess of Spleen. Belinda thus combines the grace of a lavishly dressed young woman with the aggressiveness of a warrior. To compare this picture with the earliest illustration of the battle scene, however, is to see that Beardsley stops well short of turning Belinda into the “fierce Virago” that Thalestris becomes when she issues the call to arms (5.37). In a 1714 engraving of canto 5 of The Rape, Louis Du Guernier shows a simply clothed Belinda leaning over the almost supine figure of the Baron and thrusting the point of a bodkin into his chest while he tries with his right hand to push her forearm away (repr. Halsband 15). The foreground of this illustration may have led Beardsley to put an overturned chair in his picture of the battle, as Halsband notes (106).41 But Beardsley treats the confrontation between Belinda and the Baron somewhat more coolly than Du Guernier does. Resplendent in towering wig and elaborately ruffled dress, Belinda faces down the Baron without touching him, sternly clutching her fan at her side rather than striking him with it.42 Equally self-possessed, the Baron kneels erectly before her in thickly curled wig, finely stippled ruff, and richly embroidered coat. With his hand on his chest and his head held firmly up, he strikes a pose somewhere between abashment and defiance. He could well be signifying, in fact, what he says when Sir Plume demands the return of the lock in canto 4: . . . by this Lock, this sacred Lock I swear, ... That while my Nostrils draw the vital Air, This Hand, which won it, shall for ever wear. (4.133, 137–38)

Besides composing a balance of antithetical elements—abjection and self-assertion, grace and fury, confusion and decorum, light and dark—Beardsley puts in the very center of this picture a figure who has by now come to serve as a detached, amused observer: the page-boy dwarf. Milly Heyd identifies this figure with Beardsley himself. Through him, she says, Beardsley expresses “the little man’s fear of the large

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woman” even as he plays the clever fool, sharing with us his amusement at the antics of the others (80–81). But if the dwarf signifies Beardsley himself, he also signifies Beardsley’s alliance with Pope, for his position in the center of “Battle” corresponds precisely to that of the poet in the center of The Cave (fig. 10.9). Their expressions and posture are different, of course; while Pope sits pensively staring out at us, the dwarf stands between the two chief antagonists—Belinda and the Baron—with a look of complacence if not amusement. But the dwarf’s turban resembles Pope’s soft round hat, and the dwarf’s head is cocked to the right just as Pope’s is cocked to the left. Beardsley’s implicit linking of the two reminds us that Pope was only four and a half feet tall and sometimes called himself a dwarf, as Halsband notes.43 All three figures are at once outside the action and yet central to the creation of its meaning for the observer—whether reader, viewer, or both. Beardsley’s tailpiece for The Rape (The New Star) includes neither a dwarf nor anything like the satyr and Pierrot figures interring the princess in the tailpiece for Salomé. After the flagrant grotesquerie of The Cave of Spleen and the embroidered confusion of the battle in the drawing room, the tailpiece offers a compact vision of sweetness and light. Plumed, wigged, and sashed, a man in the carnival costume of the court of Louis XIV holds delicately in his thumb and forefinger the “sudden Star” that Belinda’s stolen lock becomes as it finally shoots into the sky and thereby prompts the star-gazing John Partridge to predict the fall of Louis (5.127–28, 139–40). Yet the tidy symmetry of the star is offset by the Baroque extravagance of the courtier’s plume and wig, which evokes all the riotous profusion of hair and plumage that we have seen throughout these illustrations, especially in The Cave of Spleen. Grotesquerie is an eruption of buried energies. True to its etymological roots in the grotta (cave), the grotesque evinces—in the words of Snodgrass—“not only something playful and carelessly fantastic but also something ominous and sinister, the discovery of a totally different ‘underground’ world in which the realms of the animate and the inanimate are no longer separate and the ‘normal’ laws of symmetry and proportion are no longer valid.” 44 Yet in his illustrations for both Salomé and The Rape of the Lock, Beardsley’s elegantly grotesque art does more than expose the ominous powers of an underground world typically buried by the rituals of the civilized life. It also continually shows the interplay between these two worlds. If the openly lustful and bloodthirsty Salomé can don a modish dress and hat, accept the ministrations of a hairdresser, and offer her

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cheek to a powder puff, the delicate and virginal Belinda can just as readily feel the stirrings of desire, the lust to conquer, and the deforming effects of rage. Beardsley’s fin-de-siècle illustrations for the 1894 edition of Wilde’s play and the 1896 edition of Pope’s poem enable us to see that we can never escape the grotesque. “Not merely the human personality,” writes Snodgrass, “but the very nature of the world is grotesque, in the sense that we can at any point and without provocation be the targets of malicious forces, the most familiar elements of everyday life suddenly becoming strange and evil.” 45




In the monograph from which I quoted at the beginning of this study, Lorraine Kooistra argues that illustrated books are always “books of conversations” (247). Through pictures, she contends, the artist enters by various means into dialogue with the writer.46 For the most part, however, the author answers the artist and his reading of the text only insofar as the text itself talks back, confirming or contesting what the artist graphically says of it. Beardsley’s illustrations of Wilde and Pope generate a series of conversations. Responding at first to the text of Salomé with a drawing that prompted Wilde to commission a suite of illustrations for it, Beardsley then draws a set of pictures that relentlessly explore and expose what the play dramatizes: the conversation between the grotesque and the beautiful. When these graphic “readings” of Wilde’s play are themselves read in conjunction with his illustrations of Pope’s poem, they generate a further conversation between the play and the poem, between the savagery of the one and the delicacy of the other. The pictures reveal the grotesquerie of both.

Chapter 11

Hockney Remakes Hogarth A Gay Rake Progresses to America At first glance, David Hockney seems to share with William Hogarth little more than his English nationality, his profession as an artist, and the first two letters of his surname. London born and London bred, Hogarth limns the rabidly political and feverishly heterosexual life of London in the early eighteenth century. Hockney does something else. Though also trained in London—at the Royal College of Art—he depicts a late twentieth-century life that is typically apolitical, langorously homosexual, and often exotic, played out in sites ranging from Cairo to Los Angeles, where he has lived for most of the past thirty years. And Hockney’s style is just as un-Hogarthian as his subject matter. What can Hogarth’s overfurnished, densely populated, dark-walled interiors have to do with the cool, typically open spaces of Hockney’s paintings and prints: with the swimming pools of Southern California, with single figures or single objects poised in minimally delineated space? And what links Hogarth’s three-dimensional perspective—with its strong separation of foreground and background, its closets and alcoves and back rooms—to the resolute flatness of Hockney’s cubism, which puts everything before the viewer on the picture plane? We can begin to answer these questions with a simple statement of fact. Hockney forged his own link to Hogarth when he conceived and produced in the early 1960s a set of sixteen etchings called A Rake’s Progress. Based on his first trip to America, chiefly New York, in 1961, the sequence was begun that year and finished in 1963, when Editions Alecto published fifth sets. “My original intention,” Hockney wrote some years later, “was to do eight etchings, to take Hogarth’s titles and 231

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somehow play with them and set it in New York in modern times. What I liked was telling a story visually. Hogarth’s original story has no words, it’s a graphic tale. You have to interpret it all. So I thought, this is what I will do. . . .” 1 The eight etchings originally planned became sixteen because the head of the Royal College, where Hockney was studying when he first conceived the project, wanted a number sufficient for a book.2 But Hockney’s doubling of Hogarth’s original eight may be the least of the changes he brings to the work of his precursor, which he describes both inaccurately and incoherently. To speak of “Hogarth’s titles” is to imply that he titled each of the plates instead of simply issuing them all under one title, A Rake’s Progress, and using numbers alone for the plates, which is what Hogarth actually did. The titles sometimes given to the plates— such as “Receiving the Inheritance” for Hogarth’s plate 1 (fig. 11.1)—are

11.1 William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, Plate 1, Third State (1735). Line Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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not Hogarth’s.3 But even without the titles, one can hardly say that Hogarth’s graphic story of the rake “has no words.” On the contrary, Hogarth’s plates serve us a feast of them. Beneath each picture run the octosyllabic couplets of Dr. John Hoadley, and words within the pictures range from the memorandum of the late Mr. Rakewell cast on the floor of plate 1 to the geographical terms scratched on the wall of Bedlam in Hogarth’s plate 8 (fig. 11.2). So Hockney garbles some of the facts about Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress. But he is nonetheless right on one essential point. Hogarth’s series is a graphic tale, and none of its many words can relieve the viewer from the task of interpreting it. Hoadley’s verses on plate 1, for instance, speak solely to the dead father shown weighing his gold coins in the picture over the mantelpiece (fig. 11.1). Chastising him for his miserliness and his insensitivity to his son, the verses say nothing of other things

11.2 William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, Plate 8, Third State (1735). Line Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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revealed by the picture, such as the quite literal underhandedness of the steward, the spinelessness of a young man who tries to buy off the pregnant young woman he has seduced with promises of marriage, and the aggressive venality of her mother. The picture thus shows more than Hoadley’s verses say. Yet the picture itself is stamped with verbal signs. Between the hand of coins that Tom extends and the lower hand of the weeping Sarah Young, a batch of letters reveals Tom’s written promise to marry her. The words “Dearest Life . . . & Marry you” cooperate with the graphic sign of his promise—the ring Sarah holds between her finger and thumb—to denote what Tom now forswears. Besides interweaving images and words, Hogarth also stitches in puns that straddle the line between the two. At upper right, the mechanical vices displayed with the word “BEWARE” on the two escutcheons over the door recall, as Paulson suggests, the miser’s rigid grip on his money.4 They also prefigure the moral vices that will come to grip the rake as he loosens his hold on the old man’s coins—precisely what he begins to do here. At lower left, the hole in the cover of the book marked “HOLY BIBLE” (which first appears in the third state of the plate) makes a pun of “HOLY,” and the overturned shoe lying next to it shows that the miser has used this Bible to save his sole instead of his soul. But the finest pun of all is made with depiction alone. In taking the measure of young Tom’s leg, the kneeling tailor shows exactly what the artist is doing to both of the Rakewells, dead father and high-living son. While the tailor checks his tape and the steward makes a list of all the goods and treasure left behind, Hogarth takes the moral measure of the Rakewells and also makes a graphic inventory of the old man’s character. From the mutilated Bible and the half-starved cat to the coins dropping out of the cornice, almost every object in the picture helps to tell the story of a miserly life. At the same time, the picture tells and foretells the life of his son. If the father’s life can be plotted on a trajectory that runs diagonally upward from the Bible past the cold black fireplace to the falling coins and the escutcheoned vices, the son’s life can be plotted on a trajectory that runs diagonally downward from the picture of his father weighing coins to the swollen belly of Sarah, where the son’s own heir now lies. Unlike the father, who is boxed within a picture frame, Sarah breaks the frame of the door, as Paulson notes,5 and the imminent birth of her child is prefigured by the eruption of love letters from the mother’s apron and of plates, coins, moneybags, and a cornucopia of implements spilling out of closets and chests. The father’s will can in no sense contain the treasures he has hoarded. On the contrary, while the

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11.3 David Hockney, Receiving the Inheritance, A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963), Plate 1A. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney.

father carefully measures his money in the painting, his actual coins flow uncontrollably away. From the coins in the painting a straight line runs down to the outstretched hand of the son giving coins instead of his hand in marriage, and then to the would-be wedding ring held by Sarah: a ring that now signifies a broken bond. Tom’s gesture is mimicked by the outstretched hand of Sarah’s mother, who instead of reaching out for the coins (as we would expect her to do) points to Sarah’s womb. Sarah’s womb tells as much about the Rakewells as anything else in the picture. Since plate 2 of the Rake’s Progress includes a painting of the Judgement of Paris, Paulson reads the first three plates as an updated version of the Judgement of Hercules, which Shaftesbury had defined as a choice between Virtue and Pleasure (HAL 22). Here the place of virtue—or of an exemplary depiction of virtue—is usurped by a painting of miserliness, which the young rake instantly spurns in favor of lust and profligacy. The rake’s choice goes hand in hand with the theme of generation as degeneration. If the thieving hand of the steward incidentally cheats the son, the would-be generous hand of the son far more brutally defrauds his own heir. The father has left the son no more than money;

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the son’s heir gets only a handful of coins. Reversing, as Paulson notes, the spiritual growth of Bunyan’s famous pilgrim (HAL 21), the “progress” of the Rakewell line will take it steadily downward: the standing rake of plate 1 will become the sitting drunkard of plate 3, the desperately kneeling gambler of plate 6, and at last the deliriously prostrate madman of plate 8 (fig. 11.2). In rewriting Hogarth’s graphic story for the late twentieth century, one of the boldest moves that David Hockney makes is to cast himself as the rake. The sixteen etchings of Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress tell the story of his first trip to America—specifically New York and Washington—in the summer of 1961: viewing monuments, hearing Mahalia Jackson sing, watching marathon runners, drinking in gay bars, and running out of money. Individually titled by Hockney himself, some of his etchings clearly or at least nominally recall the life of Hogarth’s rake. Receiving the Inheritance (fig. 11.3) evokes Hogarth’s plate 1 (fig. 11.1);6 The Gospel Singing echoes the operatic harpsichording of Hogarth’s plate 2; Marries an Old Maid (fig. 11.4) recalls the marriage scene in Hogarth’s plate 5;

11.4 David Hockney, Marries an Old Maid, A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963), Plate 4A. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney.

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Viewing a Prison Scene recalls the debtor’s prison of Hogarth’s plate 7; The Drinking Scene (fig. 11.5) recalls the drunken revelry of Hogarth’s plate 3; and Bedlam (fig. 11.6), the last of Hockney’s series, recalls the final plate of Hogarth’s (fig. 11.2).7 Hogarth’s work even furnishes a slight precedent for Hockney’s telling of his own life in his etchings. In Hogarth’s plate 7, the bearded man at left with a “new scheme” for paying the national debt probably signifies an episode in the life of Hogarth’s father, and the rake’s vain attempt to clear his own debts by writing a play (it “will not doe,” says the letter on the table beside him) reminds us that Hogarth himself conceived his pictures as silent theater.8 But Hogarth’s dissolute young man has nothing to do with the life of Hogarth himself as a mature, hardworking, and highly successful artist. In casting himself as both the rake and the artist, Hockney tells a fundamentally new tale. This is not just a matter of adding new episodes with no precedent in Hogarth—such as landing in a city of skyscrapers, watching marathon runners, or hearing election speeches. Hockney treats all past artists, including those he admires, with irrepressible irreverence. In the spring

11.5 David Hockney, The Drinking Scene, A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963), Plate 4. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney.

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11.6 David Hockney, Bedlam, A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963), Plate 8. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney.

of 1961, when he was completing his second year at the Royal College of Art, students were required to transcribe a work of art. Hockney chose Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England (1852–1855), which shows the painter himself and his wife Emma forced into exile by poverty, leaning wistfully over the rail of the emigrant-jammed Eldorado as it steams out of Dover harbor.9 Hockney’s version, The Last of England?, dutifully reproduces the rondo format, but Brown is replaced by Hockney himself, identified by the number 4.8, a coded reference to his initials (DH) as letters 4 and 8 of the alphabet. At right the figure of Emma is replaced by a character marked (in barely readable letters) DB for Doll Boy, Hockney’s nickname for Cliff Richards, who had recently recorded a hit song titled “Living Doll” and who had thereby become Hockney’s fantasy lover. One of the many things Hockney’s art shares with Hogarth’s is its thoroughgoing hospitality to the language of popular culture. Hockney’s parody of Brown’s painting shows not only what he typically does with the art of the past but also what he was doing with his

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own art in the early 1960s. Stylistically, the smudged faces reflect the abstract expressionism that dominated the study and practice of art in the early sixties, but they also reveal Hockney’s determination to create—along with artists such as Francis Bacon—a new figural art in an age of abstraction, and at the same time to keep alive the Hogarthian tradition of graphic storytelling.10 The story told here is of a young homosexual artist exiled from the public sphere, free to disclose his sexual orientation only in code, hiding in the blurry half-light of a legally forbidden desire, living culturally underwater, or half underwater: Brown’s rondo here becomes something like a wave-dashed porthole. At the same time, the pathos of the artist’s situation is leavened by the wit of his selfrepresentation. Chucking Brown’s sentimentality overboard, Hockney’s picture playfully asks if homosexuality—more precisely his own homosexuality—means the end of England. Thematically, then, this picture marks a stage in the progress of Hockney’s “coming-out” as a gay man bent on making a place for gay experience in the world of art. At first cryptically and then with growing boldness, Hockney’s paintings and etchings of the early sixties repeatedly aimed to legitimize homosexual activity at a time when it was still illegal in Britain and wholly unrepresented in contemporary art.11 His work in this period—the period of his own Rake’s Progress—ranges from a Yellow Abstract of early 1960 inscribed with the barely legible word Queer to the explicitly homoerotic as well as self-referential Love Paintings of 1960–1961 and the playfully pornographic Teeth Cleaning, W11 (1962), a picture of mutual fellation in which paste-spouting tubes of Colgate stand in for ejaculating phalluses. To realize that Hockney reconceived the Hogarthian rake as a means of further expressing his own gay vision is to see another crucial difference between the two series. It is not just the difference between heterosexual and homosexual; it is the difference between stifling, disguising, or deforming desire and finding a way to reveal it. From the moment a tailor remakes him, Tom Rakewell suffocates himself. Disowning both his love of Sarah Young and their child, he plays out a succession of roles that bury his spirit alive: patron of the arts, lecherous drunk, would-be courtier heading for the palace of St. James, wealthy widow’s bridegroom, reckless gambler, failed playwright, and bankrupt prisoner.12 Stripped of all but madness in the final plate (fig. 11.2), where the other figures’ masquerading clearly shows their insanity, Tom still fails to acknowledge the weeping Sarah Young—the only trace and sign of his original desire. By contrast, Hockney’s rake is openly transsexual, homosocial, and

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11.7 David Hockney, The Start of the Spending Spree and the Door Opening for a Blonde, A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963), Plate 3. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney.

homosexual, an unabashed admirer of male-to-male affection and of the male body. Except for Mahalia Jackson, a female corpse, and an “Old Maid” (fig. 11.4) whose sexual identity is questionable, as I will show, all the figures in Hockney’s series are male, and Hockney uses all of them to tell his story. Dyeing his hair blonde (fig. 11.7), admiring male athletes, seeing one man’s arm around the neck of another at a bar (fig. 11.5), and smiling slightly as he approaches a man himself, Hockney’s rake reveals the artist as a man determined to make a place for himself and his gay identity in the world of art. To make such a place, Hockney had to define his relation to the art and culture of the past. Taking its cue from the title usually assigned to Hogarth’s first plate, Receiving the Inheritance, Hockney’s work of the early sixties—including the Rake—reflects an inheritance that is verbal and literary as much as it is visual, and like Hogarth, Hockney irreverently mingles this high cultural heritage with the low cultural language of his own time. The Third Love Painting (1960), for instance, juxtaposes lines from Walt Whitman’s homoerotic poem, “When I Heard at the Close of

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Day” with graffiti from the walls of the men’s room in the Earl’s Court Underground station—including a line in which Hockney is pressed to confess himself gay: “come on David admit it.” 13 Whitman reappears the following year (1961) in Hockney’s first etching, Myself and My Heroes, which uses the tryptych structure of the traditional altarpiece to show the half-length figures of Whitman and Mahatma Ghandi. Prophets, respectively, of homoeroticism and pacifism (Hockney was himself a conscientious objector to military service), they gaze at each other from adjacent panels while Hockney looks on respectfully from the panel at right. Hockney’s self-portrait here combines self-effacement with self-assertion. While Whitman and Ghandi radiate large halos and display uplifting words (Whitman’s “for the dear love of comrades,” Ghandi’s pacifistic “love” and “vegetarian as well”), Hockney’s nonradiant head wears only a little cap, and his torso (labeled “David”) bears the impeccably modest legend: “I am 23 years old and wear glasses.” Nevertheless, unlike the donor figures who traditionally appear as miniaturized and kneeling in sacred art, Hockney’s figure stands up to the height of his heroes as if he belonged with them, and in the title of the picture he puts himself first: Myself and My Heroes. Since Hockney’s self-portrait in A Rake’s Progress also combines selfeffacement and self-assertion, it is only fitting that the Heroes etching should be depicted as lying on the table in plate 1A of Hockney’s Rake (fig. 11.3). In calling this plate Receiving the Inheritance, Hockney recalls the would-be subject of the untitled first plate of Hogarth’s Rake (fig. 11.1), and the man offering Hockney less than his asking price for his etching recalls the steward filching coins from Hogarth’s young heir behind his back. But to note that point of correspondence is also to begin to see the disparity between the two rakes—Hogarth’s and Hockney himself—as well as the impossibility of determining by any one title just what either plate means. In Hogarth’s plate, the only one literally being handed an inheritance is Sarah Young, target of the handful of coins which the young man extends to the mother and grandmother of his unborn heir. In other respects the picture could be called “Cheating the Heirs” (Tom and his unborn child), “Exposing the Miser,” or—in the words of the title Hockney uses for his own plate 3 (fig. 11.7)—The Start of the Spending Spree. But none of these titles can be simply superimposed on Hockney’s plate 1A (fig. 11.3). Even if Hogarth’s plate 1 (fig. 11.1) could be summed up by the phrase “Receiving the Inheritance,” the meaning of the phrase itself would undergo a drastic change when applied to

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Hockney’s situation in the early 1960s. At 23, when he first came to New York, Hockney was not an idle young man suddenly handed a fortune. He was an exceptionally productive young artist whose work was already starting to make its mark and earn him a living. In 1961, the year he started etching the Rake, he won prizes for etching and painting that largely financed his trip to the United States.14 By 1963, when he finished the Rake, he had won the gold medal for his year (1962) at the Royal College of Art; he had been featured in a one-man show at the Bond Street Gallery of John Kasmin; he was beginning to earn from his work about fifteen hundred pounds a year; and he had already sold pictures to London’s Tate Gallery and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, whose curator—William Lieberman—bought two etchings from Hockney himself in 1961. It is this transaction that Hockney represents—or misrepresents—in plate 1A, where Lieberman is shown beating down the asking price from twenty to eighteen dollars.15 Here we begin to see that Hockney’s Rake’s Progress is really a selfportrait of the artist as a young man, or a chapter in the graphic story of his progress toward fame. Receiving his cultural inheritance from figures such as Whitman, Ghandi, and a succession of visual artists ranging from Hogarth to Picasso, Hockney had already started to rework their words and images into an art of his own. Reworking means nothing if not work. During his 1961 stay in New York, he sketched frequently, and in 1962, when the Rake was in progress, he lived and worked in a flat where the bed faced a chest of drawers on which he had carefully lettered the words, “Get up and work immediately” (DHDH 92). Hockney’s Rake’s Progress is industry masquerading as idleness. With its irrepressible street life, its nonstop television, and its gay bars open at all hours, New York intoxicated Hockney, but he still managed to produce there what he calls “quite a lot of drawings” and to generate from them—with no help in the arduous technical labor of etching—more than twice as many plates as he eventually used for the series.16 The paradoxical conjunction of work and play that begets the new Rake’s Progress also begets the various paradoxes of its central figure: he is nobody and somebody, onlooker and protagonist, gazer and object of our gaze, wastrel and ambitious young journeyman steadily progressing to mastery of his art. If his idleness recalls Tom Rakewell, the keenness of his observation and the productive energy signified by the etching shown in plate 1A recall Hogarth himself, whose plates reveal not only indolence and dissipation but also the exacting labor of the engraver’s art.

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As artist and rake, Hockney sometimes mocks his own ambition. In plate 1A (fig. 11.3), the three tiny zeroes under the $20 mark on the price sheet tell us what he thinks his etching is worth: twenty thousand dollars. This fantasy of self-aggrandizement is punctured not only by the cut-price offer shot from Lieberman’s elegantly bearded lips but also by the stoic impassivity with which the artist receives it and the diminutive size of his head and torso. Here cubism shrinks the artist himself. Traditional, Albertian laws of perspective, suggested by the slanted line of the table at right, would have made him seem larger than Lieberman, since he sits nearer the foreground. In flattening the perspective, Hockney makes himself smaller as well as lower than Lieberman, who looms up over him. As a shrunken, passive, nearly armless torso cut off at the waist, the artist here seems utterly unmanned. Later, the separation of his nose from his face and his neck from his torso signifies his sense of alcholic “Disintigration” (sic) as he contemplates a whiskey ad, and in plate 7A his truncated figure is handed over like a scrap of food—or a chess pawn—to the saw-toothed jaws of a dragon that may well signify the mouth of hell. In any case, it resembles the “hell-mouth” dragon head on a showcloth hung in Hogarth’s Southwark Fair (1733/34).17 Yet to grasp the full import of this limbless icon and its “disintigration,” we must consider something of what traditional art has done with the bust. On the one hand, classical busts are often shorn of their noses— like the rake of Hockney’s plate 7—and may be glorified junk. Fake Roman busts lie heaped together on the floor in the foreground of The Marriage Contract (c. 1732), the oil sketch that Hogarth evidently made as a trial run for what would eventually become plate 5 of The Rake’s Progress. Ancient busts are mutilated in the orgy scene of Hogarth’s plate 3: all but one of the bust-like portraits of Roman emperors on the wall are literally defaced, and the portrait of Nero—fifth from right, the only one left intact—presents him as something like a patron saint of the dissipation he is made to witness. On the other hand, painted busts can also signify genius. Probably the most famous example is Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653) in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, but equally notable for our purposes are the busts of Michelangelo and Raphael in John Constable’s The Cenotaph (1836, National Gallery, London), where the great Italian masters flank a rural monument to Joshua Reynolds inscribed with verses by Wordsworth. If we compare plate 1A of

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11.8 David Hockney, Meeting the Good People (Washington), A Rake’s Progress (1961–1963), Plate 2. Etching, Acquatint. © David Hockney.

11.9 David Hockney, The Student: Homage to Picasso (1973). Etching. © David Hockney.

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Hockney’s Rake (fig. 11.3) to Hockney’s plate 2, Meeting the Good People (Washington) (fig. 11.8), we can see that the disarmed torso becomes precisely the kind of bust used to represent Michelangelo in Constable’s painting—minus of course the pedestal. As the profile bust of Michelangelo flanks a monument to the founding father of British art, the profile bust of Hockney flanks monuments to the founding fathers of America— Lincoln (the refounder), Jefferson, and Washington. Using the iconography of canonized genius to reconstruct the conventional snapshot of the tourist standing by the monument (as evidence that he or she has been there), Hockney brashly poses as the new genius of contemporary art. Later, in plate 7, his alcoholically disintegrating head radiates the same lines of light that emanate from the monuments to America’s founding fathers. Hockney’s art thus converts the bust—and the alcoholically busted head—into a sign of audacious self-assertion. The same sign turns up ten years later in a Hockney etching called The Student: Homage to Picasso (1973) (fig. 11.9), where the little god of twentieth-century art is made to look remarkably like the young David Hockney. In Artist and Model (fig. 11.10), the naked figure of Hockney in profile sits across the table from the fully clothed figure of the old bald

11.10 David Hockney, Artist and Model (1973–1974). Etching. © David Hockney.

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Picasso in striped jersey holding a sheet of paper. Here the familiar pairing of the artist with his nude model is both radically and playfully reconstituted. Sitting and studying Picasso rather than posing for him, Hockney seems to be suggesting that he takes Picasso (or his work) as the model for his own art. But in using the traditional rules of perspective to represent their two figures, Hockney strips himself—at least for now—of Picasso’s influence. Possibly as a way of further articulating a style of his own, Hockney had long since started dyeing his dark hair blonde. Hair dyeing was Hockney’s way of throwing paint—or tint—at gender stereotypes. Having first recolored his hair shortly after arriving in New York, he made hair-dyeing the subject of plate 3, The Start of the Spending Spree and the Door Opening for a Blonde (fig. 11.7). Though nothing quite like this happens to Hogarth’s rake, we might recall that the door opens for Sarah Young and her mother in Hogarth’s plate 1 (fig. 11.1) and also that the rake’s headdress changes from one plate to another: the dark natural curls of plate 1 are tucked under a nightcap in plate 2, then under a succession of wigs in plates 3–7, and finally give way to the bald pate of the Bedlam scene (fig. 11.6)—first revealed in Hogarth’s plate 6, where the wig has been doffed in a moment of rage. Hockney’s dye job says something equally significant about him and his rake. Hearing on American TV the ad slogan for Lady Clairol, “Blondes have more fun, doors open for a blonde,” Hockney bought a bottle of it (starting to spend) and applied it to his hair. He thus used the art of painting or tinting—in the most basic sense—to signify his crossing or blurring of the gender line.18 Since the word “blonde” denotes a female and since Lady Clairol is explicitly for women, we may need a moment to realize that the rake himself is now the blonde for whom the door is opening on a fantasy scene of Floridian palm trees waving over a beach at sunrise. What does such fantasy have to do with Hogarth’s realism? Hockney adopts and adapts Hogarth’s habit of delineating paintings that may represent worlds far removed in space and time from those of his rake—such as the Judgement of Paris in Hogarth’s plate 2. Hockney, I venture to say, knows the history of painting as well as Hogarth did, but he also knows that we are now accosted by images of every kind—in photographs, on billboards, on television, in magazines. Hockney’s art reflects the impact of these ubiquitous images even as it sometimes erases the line between them and three-dimensional “reality,” between what the rake sees directly and what he sees in pictures. In plate 3 (fig. 11.7), the Floridian palm trees and the sunlit seascape looming just beyond the door probably come from a picture in a magazine. Plate 5A shows the rake looking at

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pictures of manacled and numbered prisoners. Plate 6, Death in Harlem, includes pictures of a rose and a kneeling angel, and the whole etching— including the casketed corpse—is based on a photograph by Cecil Beaton (Webb 43). In plate 7, the whiskey glass appears on a billboard, and the number five standing beside it—an improbable number of dollars to pay for a glass of whiskey in the early sixties—may allude to Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), which Hockney could have seen at New York’s Metropolitan Museum.19 Hockney’s way of using pictures in these etchings is further complicated by the contest between three-dimensional perspective and cubist flatness. In plate 7, the right-hand squares of checkerboard tile in the billboard picture slant and shrink to signify recession, but the left-hand squares are vertically ranged, the oval rim of the glass suggests something nearer a top view than a side view, and the head that is supposedly looking at the billboard seems to hover beside it. In plate 1A likewise (fig. 11.3), the slanting of the table’s right side suggests a depth that is contradicted by the verticality of its left side, by the disproportionate size of the figure in the would-be background, and by the strictly two-dimensional side view of the potted plant, which seems almost to be standing on the upturned edge of the table. Anomalies such as these recall Hogarth’s Satire on False Perspective (first state February 1754), his graphic compendium of perspective errors such as the diverging (rather than converging) lines in the platform at bottom right, the sheep growing as they supposedly recede from the eye at bottom left, and the oversized man on the hill in the background seeming to light his pipe from a candle held out of the window in the foreground. But Hockney’s would-be “errors” in perspective cannot be ascribed to his ignorance of this print. On the contrary, he painted his own version of it—Kerby (After Hogarth), Useful Knowledge—in 1975. Hockney’s painting recapitulates the “errors” of Hogarth’s print only to turn Hogarth’s point upside down: to show that the fixed viewpoint of traditional one-point perspective is itself in error because it fails to admit the movement of the viewer and the multiple viewpoints from which we see the world in time. According to Hockney, the “ghastly errors” illustrated by Hogarth’s print “created space just as well, if not better, than the correct perspective he was praising.”20 This does not mean that Hockney shuns illusion. On the contrary, Domenichino’s Apollo Killing Cyclops (1616–1618) showed him early on that the painting of an uplifted curtain could at once construct and deconstruct illusion. Since first seeing this picture in London’s National

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Gallery, Hockney has used pictures of curtains to manipulate illusion and theatrical effect, as in Play within a Play (1963) and his drop curtain for the Glyndebourne production of the Auden-Stravinsky Rake in 1975, where the semicircle of cartwheeling figures is framed in a cross-hatched curtain that recalls both Hogarth’s engravings and his theatrical conception of them.21 In Hogarth’s Rake, curtains play a modest but nonetheless detectable role. The black mourning cloth being hung on the walls in Hogarth’s plate 1 (fig. 11.1) works something like a backdrop for the first act of Tom’s doomed life, and in plate 4, he steps out from a curtained sedan chair right into the scene of his arrest for debt. The world of Hockney’s rake also includes a curtain—a fringed and scalloped valence overhanging the bar in plate 4 (fig. 11.5), theatrically entitled The Drinking Scene. Working against the frieze-like flatness of the figures, including the narrow slice of the bartender’s mustachioed profile at left, the valence helps to create the illusion of backstage depth in the bar, where the shadowed grey bottles recede from the bold white forms just as the shadowy contents of the closet in Hogarth’s plate 1 recede from the foreground patches of white.22 Hockney’s late twentieth-century recreation of A Rake’s Progress thus shows what he can do with the inheritance he has received. Even while freely disclosing his debts to the famous old printmaker, Hockney undermines Hogarth’s precepts—both moral and pictorial—in telling a graphic story of his own. Like his other work of the early sixties, Hockney’s Rake’s Progress situates us in a homosexual or at the very least homosocial world. In plate 3A, the rake admires the muscular bodies of two male marathon runners while deprecating himself as a “7 Stone Weakling.” 23 In plate 4 (fig. 11.5), a man at the bar has his arm around the shoulder of another man, and the leaning sides of the bar suggest that these two drinkers can neither stand straight nor be straight. On the contrary, the first two letters of the word BEER run into their welded forms and thus seem to say, “BE gay.” In light of this covert message, it is startling to see what the rake does in the very next plate, where the title tells us that he Marries an Old Maid (fig. 11.4). This overt bow to the marriage scene of Hogarth’s plate 5 is made with a twist. For one thing, the original version of Hogarth’s plate— the oil sketch known as The Marriage Contract—includes among the objets d’art heaped in the foreground a painting of Zeus abducting Ganymede, which David Bindman reads as a possible allusion to homosexuality.24 Whether or not Hockney knew that Hogarth’s depiction of a heterosexual marriage overlays a veiled reference to homosexuality, it seems more than

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likely that the veiled figure shown on the arm of the rake in Hockney’s etching is a man in drag. As already suggested by plate 3 (fig. 11.7), Hockney considered cross-dressing a form of gay self-expression, and in 1961, the year he started work on the Rake plates, he painted a New York boy wearing heavy lipstick and a pink dress (Sam Who Walked Alone by Night). In Marries an Old Maid, the would-be bride not only dangles a hairy right forearm beside her flowing, full-length dress; her (or his) thicklipped, close-mouthed profile resembles somewhat the faces of the two men shown close together at right in plate 4 (fig. 11.5). Even the bluntnosed tapered cylinder projecting from the bride’s upper body seems a tranvestitial adjunct. Though it recalls the pendulous breasts of the gospel singer in Hockney’s plate 2A, its singleness and horizontal rigidity suggest a misplaced phallus—or something like it assumed for the nonce. If the bride of this plate is indeed a gay transvestite, the cubist flattening of his right forearm links the crossing of gender boundaries to the promiscuous overlapping of separate viewpoints. By the laws of one-point perspective, the dangling right arm of a figure whose face and breast appear in left-oriented profile—like the bride on this plate—could not be visible.25 But even as the hairiness of the bride’s right forearm betrays his gender, its full frontal position on the picture plane makes his homosexuality link arms with Hockney’s cubism: with his cubist assault on the traditional authority of one-point perspective and on Hogarth’s attempt to demolish—by means of graphic satire—any departures from its laws.26 Hogarth uses the geometry of one-point perspective to construct a world in which Tom is finally and fatally trapped. In the diminishing recession of its backgrounds—especially in the prison and madhouse of the last two plates—traditional perspective itself becomes an instrument of confinement, the means by which a thoroughly self-disciplined artist regulates and dominates the wild young man who has recklessly shirked his obligations. The final plate (fig. 11.2) shows the rake struggling against one-point perspective itself. While his body stretches out in three-quarter profile from left to right, his sharply turned head shows a three-quarter profile facing left. But his body can no more flout the laws of perspective than he can break the iron bands being fitted to his ankles. For all the contortions of the rake and his fellow inmates, the walls and doorways of the madhouse systematically shrink and converge by Albertian rules to signify recession. By contrast, Hockney’s cubism works to break the grip of the heterosexual paradigm that Hogarth leaves essentially untroubled and intact. Hockney’s Rake’s Progress thus exemplifies a point made initially by Sigmund Freud, reaffirmed by Jacques Lacan, and

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recently elaborated by Jacqueline Rose: that the violation of gender boundaries can destabilize the field of vision. For Freud and Lacan, Rose observes, Our sexual identities as male or female, our confidence in language as true or false, and our security in the image we judge as perfect or flawed, are fantasies. And these archaic moments of disturbed visual representation, these troubled scenes, which expressed and unsettled our groping knowledge of the past, can now be used as theoretical prototypes to unsettle our certainties once again. Hence one of the chief drives of an art which today addresses the presence of the sexual in representation—to expose the fixed nature of sexual identity as a fantasy and, in the same gesture, to trouble, break up, or rupture the visual field before our eyes.27

In Hockney’s marriage scene, the picture of the would-be bride ruptures traditional perspective even as it apes—and thus subverts—the paradigmatic ritual of heterosexual love. While Hogarth’s marriage scene reveals the incompatibility of a young rake and an old widow, their loveless yoking leaves gender boundaries undisturbed, and the rake is in fact married; his old bride reappears in the prison scene of Hogarth’s plate 7 to berate him for spending his money. But the veiled transvestite of Hockney’s marriage scene promptly vanishes, and the rake becomes again a solitary observer of various sights: drinkers denied their booze on election day because the bars are closed, pictures of prisoners manacled— like Hogarth’s rake in the leg irons of Bedlam—and marked with numbers, the photograph of a Harlem wake. What the rake sees complicates the meaning of what he does and suffers, which in some ways seems to repeat the experience of Tom Rakewell. Like him, Hockney’s rake is driven to Bedlam by the ruinous effects of drinking and reckless spending. Denied entry to the Washington Monument in Hockney’s plate 6A (The Wallet Begins to Empty) because he cannot even pay the fifty-cent entrance fee, he is banished from it by the pointing arms of Mahalia Jackson and the museum curator, forced to descend its precisely rectangular steps with head hanging in shame and then—as we have seen in plate 7—to feel his head breaking up as he contemplates the picture of a glass of whiskey priced at five dollars. But if these reverses drive him to Bedlam, he nonetheless enters it in a spirit quite different from Tom’s. The world witnessed by Hockney’s rake, who is above all else an observer, is itself deranged. With its ranting politicians, its numbered prisoners, and its throwaway mentality (the

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rake himself is Cast Aside in plate 7A), it compels the rake to seek the company of outcasts like himself. When he reaches the bottom of the long and now ragged stairway leading down from the Washington monument in Meeting the Other People, he seems to smile slightly—for the first time in the series—as he greets the figure listening by earphones to a transistor radio. The repetition of this figure in Hockney’s final plate (fig. 11.6) creates a bedlam very different from Hogarth’s. In Hogarth’s final plate (fig.11.2), the rake lies nearly naked on the floor. Comforted by a weeping Sarah Young and a clergyman as a warden shackles his right leg, he is surrounded by figures manifesting various kinds of madness in postures quite distinct from his own. As in nearly all the other plates of the series, the rake stands out by taking a conspicuous place in the foreground and drawing the attention of others in the picture. By contrast, the rake of Hockney’s final plate is marked only by the arrow pointing to the head of the figure standing second from left. He has all but lost his identity to the pop music addicts standing beside him with their faces erased.28 Speaking to us only through the ad slogan that is stamped on the front of their Tshirts (“I swing with WABC”) and that is contradicted by the plainly unswinging rigidity of their stance, they give up their faces to the profile on each of their torsos. It is formed by the wire running from the earphone to the transistor radio in each hip pocket, with the letter C for an eye and the little cove in the base of the wire making a mouth around the corner of the radio, thus sending notes—or singing notes—diagonally down from the figure’s waist. On one hand, then, the human face and the human voice in this final plate are displaced by something made of wire and by a commercial slogan that negates the identity of the would-be “I,” who wears it even as the eyes of each figure are supplanted by the final letter of the radio station’s name. The rake’s own profile is gone. Neither watching anyone else nor watched—like Hogarth’s rake—by others, he is apparently lost in the bedlam of music calculated to stun the brain by the relentless repetitiveness of its melody and beat—the auditory counterpart of the figures visually repeated here. Music becomes wholly impersonal. Unlike Mahalia Jackson’s “Hallelujah,” which she sings directly to her “God is Love” audience and raises up to “HEAVEN,” wordless notes now dribble down from a purely mechanical mouth. On the other hand, in the face of dissolution, rejection, and debt, the rake has found his own society—however mechanized—and his own way of turning his back on mid twentieth-century civilization. Unlike

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Hogarth’s rake, who is nearly prostrate in the final plate, Hockney’s rake ends up standing at attention. To complain that radio notes are not worth his attention is to forget that Hogarth made equal time for street cries and operatic arias, street signs and learned inscriptions, balladeers and music masters, high culture and low. Uniformed in identical T-shirts, equipped with matching radios, the five figures are an avant-garde of sorts, front line soldiers ready to march for contemporary culture. In joining them, the rake forsakes not just modern civilization but also the history of art—insofar as it fails to keep up with contemporary experience. This does not mean that Hockney fears or repudiates the art of the past. On the contrary, no one who openly links his own work with that of Hogarth or any other artist can forget his precursors. But Hockney’s approach to past art has nothing to do with enshrining and everything to do with reanimating it. “I think I’ve had a permanent affair with the art of the past,” he says, “and it goes hot and cold; the art of the past can be treated too pompously. And for me at that time [in the early sixties] most people who dealt with it did so in a pedantic, boring way, as though it wasn’t living” (DHDH 87). If the spirit of Hogarth remains alive three hundred years after his birth and more than two hundred years after his death, it is not only because scholars, critics, and curators have assiduously guarded and glossed his paintings and prints. It is also because he is still capable of inspiring his successors—including the singularly original artist who radically revised A Rake’s Progress for our time.

Chapter 12

Peter Milton’s Turn An American Printmaker Marks the End of a Millennium

I sometimes regret that because I am primarily a printmaker I live necessarily outside the critically sanctioned center of the contemporary establishment. But this has proved in a great many ways to be a blessing; at least it has reinforced my move inward, which is, after all, not the worst place for an artist to be.

—Peter Milton The prints of Peter Milton, who has produced well over a hundred of them since 1960, have generated a good deal of attention. He has been granted more than eighty one-man exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States as well as in London, Osaka, Bogota, and Paris; he has won prizes in Columbia, Korea, Ukraine, and Poland; his work has found its way into the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the British Museum, and the Tate Gallery. Yet he is anything but a household name. What Ann Landi wrote of him in 1997 remains true today: “Milton is known mainly to aficionados and a cadre of loyal collectors.” 1 Why is he not better known? Part of the reason is that except for a single painting called The Rehearsal (1984), now in the Currier Gallery of Manchester, New Hampshire, he has produced nothing but graphite drawings and black-and-white etchings since 1962, when he was diagnosed as color blind. In an age of ubiquitous color—on film, television, 253

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billboards, magazines, and newspapers (even the good grey The New York Times has become a painted lady)—it is very hard to capture the eyes of the public with an art of black and white alone. To make matters worse, Milton offers consummate draftsmanship at a time when drawing has been all but eliminated from art—first by abstract expressionism and then, starting in 1962, by the postmodern appropriation of photomechanical imagery in the work of such figures as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Like them, Milton incorporates photographs into his work, but unlike them, he redraws almost every photograph he uses, and he never uses anything like the instantly recognizable icons that dominate Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe Diptych (1962), with its fifty silkscreened variations on a famous face, or Rauschenberg’s Retroactive I (1964), which is built around the photo of a finger-stabbing John F. Kennedy. Nor does he take as his model a single photograph of a contemporary scene, as the photorealists did. The photographs Milton uses come chiefly from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and while a few of them—such as those of Henry James in The Jolly Corner suite (1971)—may be immediately familiar to some of his viewers, most of them are not. They are either anonymous or require identification, which is often helpfully furnished by Milton himself in his own commentaries. Just as his deep recesses flout the modernist prohibition against breaking the flatness of the picture plane, his mysterious figures defy modernity itself. Deployed in three-dimensional space, they signify a distant past—something available only to memory or to imagination that has been aided, perhaps, by some research. Ignoring both the decrees of modernism and the conventions of postmodernism, Milton’s work cannot be easily situated anywhere on the map of late twentiethcentury art. Yet it emphatically deserves a place on this map—if only because he marked the turn of the last millennium with a series of prints that take us from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. Since Milton brought to the making of this new series over three decades of printmaking experience, it may be helpful to know something of what he has done before. He was trained in the early 1950s at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where Josef Albers was the dominant influence. Though the geometric severity of Albers’s Homage to the Square series hardly seems to have fathered Milton’s exquisitely sinous draftsmanship, he credits Albers for giving him an Apollonian alternative to the Dionysian gospel of Vitality preached by another of his Yale mentors, Gabor Peterdi. Albers, he recalls,

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was both purely Apollonian and, I thought, wonderfully monk-like in the ascetic, demanding, disciplined quality of his particular search for beauty. . . . Hard as he could be, and he was apparently irreversibly discouraging to some, he introduced a concept of picture making that has been with me ever since. This concept as I interpreted it had Cezanne as the High Priest (I think he still may be)—picture making as a search for part relationships and an equilibrium of their tensions as demanding and structurally exquisite as the structure of a living organism.2

Preaching an organicism that surely evokes Coleridge as much as Cezanne, Albers defined picture making as the “natural” or inevitable solution to a set of pictorial problems that could not be resolved in any other way without resorting to something arbitrary or superimposed. For Albers, Milton recalls, there were many arbitrary solutions to any pictorial problem but only one right solution. . . . One could be non-objective, one could be literal—who cared? The point was to find the way, the one right way that, when you were through, turned out to be the only way it could be.3

Unlike most of his fellow students, Milton did not chafe under Albers. He did not rebel against the would-be Prussian absoluteness of the claim that for every pictorial problem there could be only one right solution, one organic way of resolving its tensions. Instead he has applied this principle to pictures of ever-increasing complexity, etching pure landscapes in the early sixties, adding small figures (chiefly his own two small children) in the later sixties, and then—in the early seventies—turning to urban scenery and intricate interiors populated with figures modeled on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs. Since 1971 his work has been deeply inflected by literature and subtly informed by history. Among other things, it includes a suite of twenty-one etchings based on Henry James’s novelette, The Jolly Corner; a suite of eighteen drawings suggested by James’s Aspern Papers; a set of two etchings and a painting that erotically explore the myth of beauty and the beast; and a suite of seven etchings that begin with a meditation on Milton’s familial past and end by evoking Europe on the eve of World War II. That moment is signified by a study of the railroad station from which the young Jewish girl who would later become Milton’s wife fled Germany in 1939.4 Mere listing of his themes, however, can hardly explain the kind of equilibrium that Milton achieves, the Albersian rightness—or inevitability—of his solutions to pictorial problems, the geometric precision with

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which he places and juxtaposes the often heterogeneous components of an individual print. Some of his prints offer us surreal collages. In The Jolly Corner II:3, the bearded face of Spencer Brydon (James’s protagonist) looks down over a stairway into a room containing only a leaping stag—the visible embodiment of James’s metaphor for Brydon’s alter ego as “the fanged or antlered animal brought at last to bay.” 5 In The Jolly Corner III:7, the face of Henry James in profile is flanked by a doubleended version of his full face and a locomotive; above are the crossed timbers of a work under construction (the Brooklyn Bridge), with workmen sitting on it, a bull and a man standing on the air beside it, and a large female nude posing over the locomotive at right. In A Sky-Blue Life (1976), a crowd stands on a long terrace floating above an urban park while a man’s bespectacled face looks down on them, children ride swings above them, a gigantic blurred outspread wing hovers at right, and—below them—a fully clothed man standing in thin air offers a sprig of greenery to the naked woman seated on the air beside him. But Chagallian touches like this play only a small role in Milton’s work. Most of his figures are governed by the laws of gravity and set within realistically drawn three-dimensional space or within the frames of pictures that are represented as such in the world of the print.

Daylilies: Art, Photography, Memory Daylilies (fig. 12.1) shows what Milton can make from a collection of photographs. Because it exemplifies not only his way of making art from photography but also his way of using photographs to signify memory, I treat it as a prelude to his much more recent series—Points of Departure. By 1975, when Milton produced Daylilies, he had begun to draw on transparent Mylar and to etch his copper plates with the aid of photoresist coating, which hardens when exposed to ultraviolet light but remains soft and permeable wherever covered by a mark. Interposed between the coating and the light, the marks made by a drawing, photograph, or collage leave the coating beneath them penetrable, so that when the coated plate is immersed in acid, the acid will bite in the trail or shadow (so to speak) of the marks.6 This method of etching allows Milton to combine on one plate an indefinite number of drawings and photographs that can be directly transferred. But generally he uses the photograph as a “guide or model” for his own drawing hand (CE 30). For Daylilies he transferred a photograph of his two children—just to the left

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12.1 Peter Milton, Daylilies (1975). Artist’s Collection.

of the central figure’s head—but almost every other element here comes from a photograph taken by someone else and redrawn by the artist. The photographs used span the history of photography, beginning with Hippolyte Bayard’s 1840 Still Life of a set of sculptures, one of which led Milton to draw the nude seated on the mantelpiece at right.7 Beside the nude is an oval portrait drawn from a daguerreotype of the same period; just above, the framed picture of a young woman is based on a contemporary photo cut from an advertisement in The New York Times. In between—chronologically—come the photos that stand behind the other figures. The white-shirted man in the center foreground and the cat seated beside him come from two photographs by Thomas Eakins. The little picture of the paralytic child walking on all fours at lower right comes from a photograph by Eadweard Muybridge of ca. 1885.8 The picture of the crowd near the top originates from a 1909 photograph of people watching a Zeppelin. Most of the other elements are drawn from photographs taken by Andre Kertesz, including the boy with the hat (1923), the three hatless figures just to the left of him (1934), the ballet dancers at upper left (1938), and the hand in the lower left corner of the mirror (1968). The question raised by this wide-ranging collection of photographs is what Milton makes from them—not just in redrawing nearly all of them

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individually but in making them work together as a whole. The simple answer is that he produces a collage.9 But two things sharply distinguish Milton’s prints from what are usually known as collages. Strictly speaking, a collage is a work of art assembled not from hand-drawn figures but from preexisting objects—such as photographs and news clippings—that are pasted onto a flat surface (coller means in French “to paste or glue”). Paste is not essential to collage, but arrangement is. In the early twentieth century, when collage became a serious form of art, some of its practitioners frankly dismissed the value of draftsmanship. Marcel Duchamp announced that his works aimed “to reduce the aesthetic considerations to the choice of the mind, not to the ability or cleverness of the hand. . . .” 10 Besides privileging the mind over the hand, a collage is free to be spatially incoherent. Rauschenberg’s Breakthrough II (1965), for instance, posits a purely conceptual set of relations between two-dimensioned images of the key, the eye chart, the inverted head of the Statue of Liberty, and Velasquez’s nude Venus. By contrast, Milton’s prints are both meticulously drawn and spatially coherent. Though largely taken from photographs, the components of Daylilies are drawn into a three-dimensional world which they inhabit together. They are not simply juxtaposed. The spatial cooperation of these components is nowhere more evident than in the center foreground, where a man drawn from one Eakins photograph is shown stroking a cat drawn from another. The original of the chair that is beside the man came to Milton from his maternal grandmother; the man’s hands are “vaguely” Milton’s own; and the spray of eponymous daylilies arching over the cat came from Milton’s garden.11 Spatially integrated, these things together constitute the meditative center of the print, the site of conciousness—so to speak—on which its other impressions weigh. To grasp the relation between this meditative center and the other photographically based elements in the print, we should first consider why a magisterial draftsman would not only use photographs as models but also take special pains to make his drawings look photographic. The history of the relation between painting and photography, like the much longer history of the relation between visual art and literature, is a history of mutual contention, resentment, envy, and emulation.12 Initially, the daguerreotype made artists feel suddenly eclipsed. “It is not painting,” wrote an anonymous French reporter in January 1839, “it is drawing, but drawing carried to a degree of perfection which art can never attain.”13 J. M. W. Turner thought his career was over. “This is the end of Art,” he reportedly said. “I am glad I have had my day.” 14

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But the very claim that photography would perfectly depict the world became the basis for a new argument about the value of art. In August 1839 a French critic assessed the new medium by means of the principle that art aims to interpret nature—not to imitate it. Since photography reproduces nature without the intervention of the artist’s genius, he wrote, it will never dethrone art (qtd. Martin Gasser 16). Twenty years later, Baudelaire likewise decried the notion that mere fidelity to nature could supplant the creative labors of an artist. Let photography, he wrote, “be the secretary and record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons. . . . But if once it be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us!” 15 In part, Baudelaire neutralized the impact of photography on painting by implicitly construing the opposition between them as a variant of the difference between color and drawing. These two partners in art have long been credited with contrasting personalities. As Jacqueline Lichtenstein has shown, drawing has traditionally signified the mind and its orderly, Platonic, articulable conceptions of the world while color has been thought to express the materiality of the body and its ineffable passions.16 In 1846 Baudelaire reconfigured these terms to distinguish between history and fiction in portraiture. Draftsmanship, he says, reproduces “faithfully, rigorously, minutely, the contour and modelling of the sitter.” But the method of the colorists is more subtle. The colorist “must know how to bathe a head in the soft light of a warm atmosphere or bring it out from the depths of ‘chiaroscuro.’ Here imagination plays a greater part, and yet, just as fiction is often truer than history, so a sitter may be more clearly interpreted by the rich and skilful brush of a colorist than by the pencil of a draughtsman” (“Salon of 1846,” SW 83–84). To read this comment in light of what Milton does with the central figure of Daylilies is to see how Milton’s draftsmanship dissolves Baudelaire’s distinction. For it is precisely “from the depths of ‘chiaroscuro’”—the would-be haunt of colorists alone—that Milton’s draughtsmanship elicits the central figure of Daylilies. Still more threatening to Baudelaire’s distinction is the fact that Milton’s model for the central figure is a photograph, product of a medium that Baudelaire identifies with “absolute material accuracy” and that, he says, must never be allowed to trespass on “the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary” (SW 297). Baudelaire’s notion that the materialism of photography threatened to usurp and corrupt the soul of art was radically reformulated by Walter

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Benjamin in his landmark essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). While Baudelaire decried what he thought photography might do to art, Benjamin hailed photography as an instrument of Marxist redemption. In denying the “unique existence” of a work of art and thus dissolving its “aura,” he argued, mechanical reproduction emancipates it from ritual, cult, and magic to make it available for public exhibition and political service.17 We may applaud or deplore this development. But we may also wonder whether it ever came to pass. For in explaining how photography could demystify or desanctify art, Benjamin signally failed to see—or foresee—how art would come to sanctify photography. Is the unique existence of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe Diptych (1962) nullified by the fact that it consists of fifty identical photographs which have been variously silkscreened? Is the unique existence of Warhol’s painting nullified even by the frequency with which it has been reproduced? Or do the reproductions simply enhance the notoriety and hence the aura of the original, which hangs in London’s Tate Gallery? To switch to the declarative mood with another example, it is precisely because they have seen countless reproductions of the Mona Lisa that nearly all visitors to the Louvre make a special pilgrimage to the original, which is displayed as if it were a shrine. Sixty years after Benjamin’s celebrated essay, the evidence against its claim is overwhelming. While mechanical reproduction has thoroughly invaded the world of art, it has only heightened the aura that it was supposed to expunge.18 All this may help to explain something that would have dumbfounded Benjamin: how photographs help Milton produce the “magic” of his art. Benjamin salutes photography for purging art of magic, turning the work of art from “an instrument of magic” into a politically serviceable item to exhibit. But Milton frankly defines himself as a kind of magician: “I find my reward,” he says, “in the unexpected pleasures of a surprising and mysterious effect, when all the knowns have finally, magically combined, to produce a completely unknown, magical end.” 19 Furthermore, photography plays a crucial part in generating this magic. Besides furnishing many of the pieces from which Milton makes a collage, photographs reveal to him the mysteries of both light and shadow. “We all know,” he writes, the old cliché about photography making realism in painting irrelevant. To me, the reverse is true—what the camera tells us about how light behaves is as interesting as what the camera tells us about how things look. I remember first becoming struck by this in the Parisian

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photographs of Atget. We know that shadows create mystery: but the camera shows how much mystery exists in the light. I am also fascinated by the ineffable implications of perception when all it takes is a lens, some silver nitrate, and a click to transform the randomness of the present into the absolutes of the past. (CP 16)

For Milton, part of the mystery of photographs lies precisely in their evocation of the past. He loves the photograph, he says, because it suggests “the mnemonic” (CE 30), the memory of moments captured from as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century. Memory lives in the central figure of Daylilies, who (as already noted) is modeled after a photograph by Eakins. Backed by a mantelpiece and what seems to be a mirror reflecting heterogeneous groups of people, his position recalls that of the young woman at the center of Édouard Manet’s Bar at the FoliesBergere (fig. 12.2). But to compare the two is to see more clearly how Milton’s central figure is made to signify memory. While Manet’s standing barmaid reaches nearly to the top of his painting, the central figure of

12.2 Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882). Courtauld Gallery, London. Photo: Marburg/Art Resource, NY.

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Daylilies sits beneath its center. Also, while her flesh-toned, fully illuminated face stares blankly out over the bright colors of the bar at us, or rather at the revelers reflected in the mirror behind her, Milton’s blackand-white figure looks somberly down, and his eyes are so deeply shadowed that we cannot tell what he is looking at—or even if he is observing anything at all. Unlike Manet’s mirror, the mirror behind this man cannot plausibly reflect the world in front of him.20 Instead it seems to display what temporally stretches out behind him—the landscape of his memories. The boy with a hat—perhaps a younger self?—is the geometrical centerpoint of the mirror, the intersection of two strong diagonals. An ascending diagonal runs precisely from the cross in the center of the Durer magic square at lower left through the boy’s right eye to the cross hanging from the rosary at upper right; the other diagonal descends from the raised arms of the ballerinas at upper left to the boy’s upper arm, the face of the man in the oval portrait, the waist of the seated nude, and the paralytic walker at lower right. Reinforcing the descending diagonal are the heads of the three figures ranged between the dancers and the boy; reinforcing the ascending diagonal are the stepped heads of the children in the photograph, the wings of the bird flying over the crowd, and the stepped cluster of shadowy figures beneath it. Across these intersecting diagonals run a series of horizontals (the mantelpiece, the lower edge of the mirror, the top edge of the sofa, the lower edge of the crowd painting) and verticals (the windows at left and right, the shadows at lower left, the left and right edges of the mirror, the edges of the wall at left and archway at right). This complex geometry does not encompass everything. In the picture next to the mirror at right, a young woman in a high-necked dress looks serenely away, lost in her own contemplation. But the geometry of the forms within the mirror is recapitulated in the central figure. His upright torso precisely bisects the horizontal line of the mantelpiece while the two sides of his body—together with the chairback at left and the cat and the daylilies at right—repeat the diagonals above him. The placing of the chair, in fact, seems far more designed to balance the cat and the flowers visually than to support the sitter. And the whole world of the mirror seems an outgrowth of the man’s head, which not only divides the bottom edge of the mirror but ruptures its alignment: the right half is slightly higher than the left. The print as a whole is a triumph of equilibrium in the balance of ascent and descent, flight and rest, darkness and light. The leaping bal-

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12.3 Peter Milton, Points of Departure I: Mary’s Turn (1994). Artist’s Collection.

lerinas raise up their arms to salute the bird in flight across (or within) the adjacent picture, but they are linked—via the downward trajectory of the figures ranged across the middle of the mirror—to the seated nude on the mantelpiece and the paralytic child walking on all fours. Gravity thus draws us down to the downward-looking central figure, whose fingertips rest—as if for support—on the lower margin of the print. Even the spray of lilies that arches up over the cat comes to rest here as well. And the figure who exemplifies both the geometry and the gravity of the print as a whole also epitomizes its chiaroscuro. While his pleated shirt gives us the brightest patch of light in the print, his left side sinks into the deepest well of shadow. What we have, then, is a collage that intersects and converges on the mystery of his memories.

Mary’s Turn: Cassatt and Degas To move from Daylilies to Mary’s Turn (fig. 12.3), the first print in Milton’s Points of Departure series, is to move from the generic consciousness of memory and age in a single anonymous figure to the dramatized confrontation of two celebrated artists: Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. Milton’s casting of the two in a billiard game derives from a photograph taken by Gertrude Kasebier in 1908. “A figure of a woman,” Milton

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writes, “is lining up a billiard shot, while the figure of a man, bathed in light, stands dreaming in a doorway. I was first attracted to the image by its mysterious light, but it was the drama of the purposeful woman and the pensive man which soon established the direction Mary’s Turn was to take.” 21 In this fascination with the mysterious light of the photograph we readily recognize the etcher of Daylilies, but we also begin to see something more: how the photograph of a purposeful woman led him to imagine a dramatic contest in which a woman artist would express her ambition to rival the work of a man, to take her turn in the making of art even as the century itself was about to turn. The pensive man in the doorway will turn out to be someone other than Degas, but since Degas makes his presence strongly felt elsewhere in Mary’s Turn, I will focus chiefly on him and Cassatt. “Cassatt and Degas,” writes Milton, are a wonderful pair for the contemporary gaze: Degas the cantankerous, annoyingly (for a slow worker) prolific, misanthropic master; Cassatt, the young novice who hated likenesses of herself, becoming the grande dame of painters, contemptuous of artistic triflers; the two together—misogynist and new woman, both supreme masters of the balance between the prose of observed fact and the poetry of painterly gesture. What appeals to me is that they’re a balance of opposites: male/female, master/student, vituperative/nurturing, European/American. After ten years, their friendship broke up on the shoals of Degas’s misanthropy, but they had a great deal in common in their old age. They both went blind; they both, in different ways, cut magnificent figures. I love the insurmountable elegance of Cassatt’s challenge to men who think women can only be second-rate artists. Degas once said just that when he announced to her that women artists had no style. She stormed to her studio and produced the amazing Girl Arranging Her Hair [fig. 12.4] now hanging at the National Gallery in Washington. Degas saw the painting, said, “What style!” and bought it. (CP 22)

The source of Milton’s anecdote is Achille Segard, who tells the story a little differently. In his version, published some years before Cassatt’s death, Cassatt herself struck the first blow by daring to say in Degas’ presence that a great painter who was also a friend of theirs had “no style.” When Degas laughed and shrugged his shoulders in a way that questioned her right to judge style, Cassatt “took offense” and produced the painting that prompted Degas to write of it in a letter to the artist herself, “What drawing! What style!” 22 Segard’s version differs from Milton’s in two small but possibly significant ways. Degas’ would-be pronouncement

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12.4 Mary Cassatt, Girl Arranging Her Hair (1886). Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery.

was not a gratuitous slur but a wordless gesture prompted by Cassatt’s open disparagement of a male artist, and it was to Cassatt herself—and in writing—that Degas expressed his admiration for the style and draftsmanship of her own work. In its original form, then, this is a story of wellmatched antagonists caught up in a contest eventually won by the woman and generously conceded by the man. In fact Degas’ words to Mary give us reason to question the charge of misogyny that Milton levels against him. In making this charge, Milton repeats what was said about Degas in his own time and has since become a commonplace of art history. But the

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case against this commonplace was first made over twenty years ago by Norma Broude, who has since amplified her critique of it.23 Broude contends that Degas’ work of the 1870s and 1880s—including his brothel monotypes and his bather paintings—reflects the influence of contemporary French feminism, specifically of ideas promulgated by the First International Feminist Congress held in Paris in 1878. While making no claim that Degas was himself a feminist, Broude plausibly suggests that he would have been exposed to feminism through his close friend Diego Martelli, an Italian art critic and journalist who by 1879 had “become a committed supporter of the feminist program of social and legal reform” (“EDFF” 647–48). Since Martelli published in 1880 an article reiterating the feminist attack on prostitution in all its forms, Broude argues that Degas’ brothel monotypes of 1878–1889 may well constitute “an indictment of the system of State-regulated and sanctioned prostitution, a system that, from the feminist point of view, numbered among its victims not only the women themselves, but also their ‘foolish’ clients, and even French society as a whole. . . . These women, officially classified as ‘other,’ have indeed been debased and commodified by the lives in which they have been economically trapped—they have become what patriarchal society intended them to be used for” (“EDFF” 651). The “bather” compositions that Degas exhibited from 1876 to 1886 serve a different but no less defensible purpose. They are not, Broude contends, pictures of prostitutes offering themselves to “the male gaze,” as often thought (even by some of Degas’ contemporaries), but pictures of “respectable” women: “women who are naked for no one but themselves. And therein lay their potential to disturb and repel male audiences. They are among the very few representations of the female nude by male artists in the Western tradition that challenge (albeit mildly and obliquely from our point of view today) the societal assumption that nude women can exist only for the pleasure and the purposes of dominant males” (“EDFF” 654–55). This point has a direct bearing on Mary’s Turn (fig. 12.3), which includes among other things a graphic allusion to Degas’ print, Mary Cassatt at the Louvre (fig. 12.5). The female subject of this print is anything but an object of the voyeuristic male gaze. Fully covered in black hat and form-fitting black dress, back slightly arched, head cocked, stiff right arm pointing her tightly furled umbrella like a rapier into the floor, she is herself a viewer of paintings, an assured and judicious appraiser of art. In Mary’s Turn, the large painting shown on the wall above the billiard table combines this viewing figure with Degas’ Dancers Practicing at the Barre. Mary now becomes a reversed silhouette or shadow of her for-

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12.5 Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery © 1879–1880. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Katherine E. Bullard Fund, in memory of Francis Bullard, by exchange. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts.

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mer self deployed in multiple exposure as she confidently strides past Degas’ dancers stretching their legs against the bar to her left. Since the dancers have no frame of their own but seem poised in space above Mary, they hover suggestively between living fellow-creatures of her world and figures in a painting that she views as such. Either way, Milton’s composite picture evokes the breadth of Degas’ art and its capacity to represent women of all kinds, even women who may themselves be artists and judges of art—whether graphic or terpsichorean. In making Mary a viewer and judge of Degas’ own figures, Milton wittily shows Mary exercising a right implicitly—and perhaps unwittingly—granted by Degas himself. Further light on the complexity of Degas’ response to women emanates from a painting nowhere depicted in Mary’s Turn but nonetheless evoked by its paragonal theme: Spartan Girls Challenging Boys (ca. 1860/80). According to Broude, it epitomizes Degas’ response to feminism. First painted around 1860 and then repainted for the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition in April of 1880, this picture of Spartan girls aggressively challenging boys to a race presents the classical figures as “explicitly contemporary Parisian types,” thereby reflecting “the active and escalating challenge to male supremacy that was being laid down by the newly radicalized wing of the French feminist movement around 1879–80” (“EDFF” 645). Broude also notes that the vigorously active stance of the young women at left—especially of the girl leaning forward with her outthrust left arm—mimics the stance of the oath-taking men in David’s Oath of the Horatii and thus radically reverses the way in which this prototypically neoclassical history painting represents the relation between men and women.24 Mary’s Turn takes Degas’ revision of David one step further. Like Degas’ young woman, Milton’s Mary challenges Degas at the billiard table with a vigorously outthrust left arm. If she has entered his own painting of Dancers Practicing at the Barre, she has also taken her cue for self-assertion from his painting of Spartan girls. But like her tightly furled umbrella, the cue stick she wields so deftly is of course a figure for the pencil or brush of her art, which is here displayed in rich concentration. The children clustered along the edge of the billiard table and the teadrinking lady behind them are all drawn from her paintings, and the right half of Girl Arranging Her Hair (fig. 12.4) is shown hanging on the wall at left. In this work, which Cassatt painted in order to show Degas that women could have a sense of style, a white-smocked girl with chin up, mouth half open, and eyes half-closed reaches to the back of her head with her unseen left hand while raising high her sharply bent left elbow

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and tugging with her right hand at the long thick braid of black hair draped over her right shoulder. Milton’s print cuts the painting through the girl’s body so that we see just a little wedge of her hair over her forehead. The left elbow stays high, acutely framing the face, but the eyes are fully open, and what they appear to be looking at is the figure of Mary Cassatt herself in the adjacent painting, coolly appraising the work of Degas. Below, the girl of Mary’s painting reappears at the edge of the billiard table with her head slightly lowered, using her acutely bent left elbow now as a prop to lean on while she intently studies Mary in action. The fixity of her gaze stands out by contrast with the distracted mood of the tea-sipping woman behind her—from Cassatt’s own Five O’Clock Tea (1880)—and of the other children, all younger than she. A toddler whose head just reaches the tabletop vainly tries to dislodge her left forearm, and one of the other girls shows a left arm bent to reach behind her own head like the girl in the painting. But unlike the older girl, she looks distractedly away. Only the older girl gives Mary her undivided attention, intently watching her style of play. The virtually discipular relation between Mary and the girl in this print evokes another painting by Cassatt—a monumental icon in her struggle for the rights of women. To decorate the South Tympanum of the Women’s Building at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, Mary Cassatt produced a 12-by-58 foot oil painting entitled Modern Woman. This work shows women picking fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. And as Nancy Mathews observes, it also shows women handing down the fruit of knowledge to other women as well as to young girls, forming an unbroken female chain. The mural was a tribute to women’s education, in which there had been major advancements, especially on the secondary and college levels, during her lifetime. The mural was also a celebration of her own personal thirst for knowledge that was carried out every day in her studio, brush in hand. But at the same time it was a call to responsibility in that a woman who had plucked the fruits of Knowledge faced explusion from the safety of her Victorian Eden and would need to chart a new course in unexplored and often hostile territory.25

In Mary’s Turn, the fruit of knowledge plucked and handed by women to other women and girls in Mary Cassatt’s great mural becomes a cluster of billiard balls adroitly handled by Mary herself for the edification of a young girl plucked from one of Mary’s own paintings. The girl is made to

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focus on something quite different from the elegance of her coiffeur, the traditional sign of female allure. She sees a woman not only demonstrating her art—figuratively speaking—but also challenging a man. And the only other figure in the print who is likewise gripped by Mary’s performance is the very man she is challenging: Edgar Degas. He stands looking down at her, but his position of visual dominance is belied by his uneasy response to her proficiency in a game that requires—like drawing—an exquisite sense of touch and hand-eye coordination. Mary’s action casts him in a role drawn from his own Spartan Girls. Just as her straight left arm recalls the aggressive thrust of the young women in that picture, his own anxious, beard-stroking, sidelong gaze at Mary recalls the wariness of the young Spartan men being challenged. The wariness of the men, Broude suggests, “may reflect a component of fear and anxiety—not Degas’ personal fear of women as later writers have claimed, but rather, his perception of the fears of male society as a whole, as these would have been stimulated and evoked by the growing feminist movement of his period” (“EDFF” 658). Mary’s Turn makes Degas himself a wary onlooker, but given his willingness to recognize Mary’s achievements in art as well as to reckon with and represent the force of feminism in contemporary life, he might also be seen as simply an exacting judge. Cassatt herself observed that he was “dreadful” in attacking any work that failed to meet his standards, no matter what the artist’s gender.26 If the severity of his judgments frightened her, she nonetheless prized them. She feared showing him Modern Woman while it was in progress lest he “demolish me so completely that I could never pick myself up in time to finish for the exposition. Still,” she added, “he is the only man I know whose judgment would be a help to me.” 27 On his own side, Degas felt bound to admit—if only obliquely— that Cassatt’s achievements punctured his dismissive generalizations about women artists. Her Boy Before the Mirror moved him to call it “the greatest picture of the century” before making a snide quip on its “faults.” 28 Louisine Havemayer, an American collector who knew both of them personally, found “always a little dart” in his remarks on Cassatt, but he was surely pointing a dart at the balloon of his own prejudices when he said of Young Women Picking Fruit (1891), “I will not admit a woman can draw like that!” 29 In any case, the net effect of Degas’ grudging admiration for Cassatt’s work was to sharpen the edge of her ambition. When Homer St.Gaudens bought Young Women Picking Fruit for the Carnegie Institute in 1922, she wrote to him about Degas’ double-edged comment on the pic-

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ture and then observed: “If it has stood the test of time & is well drawn its place in a museum might show the present generation that we worked & learnt our profession, which isn’t a bad thing—” (CHC 335). The understated tone clearly conveys her self-confidence. She firmly believed in female suffrage and women’s rights, but what she prized above all was the right to compete with male artists—including Degas. While she persistently and “absolutely” refused to show her work in women’s art exhibitions, she welcomed the chance to have it appear in a New York exibition of 1915 with paintings not only by Degas but also by such grand old masters as Holbein, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. When Louisine Havemeyer asked her advice about the exhibition, she answered: “I advise you to put a Vermeer of Delft near the Degas and let the public look first at the one and then at the other. It may give them something to think about.” 30 Almost a century before, the same impulse had led J. M. W. Turner to direct in his will that two of his seascapes should hang beside two paintings of Claude in London’s National Gallery, where they hang today.31 Cassatt likewise thought that her own work could stand comparison with that of the old masters. While seeming to suggest only that a Degas be juxtaposed with a Vermeer, she fully expected that her own work would be seen—and thought about—in relation to both. To think about Mary’s Turn itself in relation to Daylilies is to see that if the earlier print is dominated by gravity, shadow, and the weight of memory, this one is animated by expectation, buoyancy, and light. Varying in tone (as if in color) from pearl to black and “coaxed into . . . levitation by the sure touch of Mary Cassatt,” as Milton says (PM/MT), the billiard balls rise like little balloons or like orbiting spheres in a model of the universe. Sharply outlined in the middle distance, the balls turn blurry in the foreground: bubbles of light that reflect and repeat the balls of light in the chandeliers overhead. The right edge of the billiard table, which divides the lower half of the painting, also blurs as it runs to the foreground and merges with the undulating border of Mary’s dress, so that the whole table becomes a part of her, the battlefield where even now she conquers. Mary’s audience of young female admirers includes not just the girl leaning on the table beside her but the two young women seated on the piano behind her. Watching her as intently as the young girl does, they reflect her influence even as their own reflections are infinitely multiplied by facing mirrors—one behind them, the other before them in the viewer’s space.32 Their multiple reflections fittingly appear in shafts of light streaming in through the doors and windows on the right. It is as if Mary’s deft touch and taut concentration has illumined their world.

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Between them and Mary stands a figure suggested by the “man, bathed in light, [who] stands dreaming in a doorway” in Gertrude Kasebier’s photograph (PM/MT). Milton turns this anonymous figure into Ludovic Halevy (1833–1908), librettist to Offenbach and Bizet, whose long friendship with Degas was commemorated by Degas’ 1879 painting of him with an umbrella in a composition prefiguring what he does with Cassatt and her umbrella in At the Louvre, painted the same year (PM/MT). Degas proved a fickle friend. When an Alsatian Jewish officer named Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of giving information to the Germans and then court-martialed and imprisoned for doing so in 1894, Degas’ virulent anti-Semitism led him to spurn Halevy because of his Jewishness.33 The placement of Halevy at the doorway in Mary’s Turn adumbrates this painful event. Marginal and liminal, he is still favored with the company of Degas at the time depicted here (which obviously precedes the Dreyfus affair), but isolated from the other two and already beginning to act out—unconsciously, it seems—his exclusion. Yet to understand Halevy’s relation to both of the other two, we should know that Cassatt warmly defended Dreyfus even as Degas reviled him, and that she rejoiced at his eventual vindication in 1906.34 Perhaps that is the final meaning of Halevy’s stance. Backed by shadow, he holds his cue perfectly upright, like a shepherd’s staff, and gazes into the light. As it is now Mary’s turn, it will one day be Dreyfus’s—and Halevy’s.

Nijinsky Variations: From Painting to Ballet Moving from Mary’s Turn to Nijinsky Variations (fig. 12.6) is first of all a journey through time. Though Mary’s Turn is based on a photograph taken in 1908, the middle-aged appearance of Degas and Cassatt as well as the presence of Halevy suggests the 1880s. By contrast, Nijinsky Variations evokes primarily the years 1912–1913, when the Russian-born Vaslav Nijinsky, who learned to dance in St. Petersburg and then moved to Paris, first performed many of ballet’s greatest roles there with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. The print is not bound to these years of Nijinsky’s triumph. Besides the white bearded face at lower right, which shows Degas as he would have looked in these years, the print also includes the black-fringed, black-hatted face of the young Degas (just left of the old one) and the old faces of Mary Cassatt and Nijinsky himself. But since the very midpoint of the print is occupied by the supremely confident face of the young Nijinsky in his prime, we may think of that as something like a tonic key.

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12.6 Peter Milton, Points of Departure II: Nijinsky Variations, first state (1996). Artist’s Collection.

Or perhaps as simply part of a thread that may guide us through this labyrinth. With its great curving tiers and columns leading up to a stagelike foreground on which groups of figures sit or stand and gaze or converse, the composition of Nijinsky Variations instantly arrests the viewer. But the profusion of figures and detail here makes instant comprehension of it all impossible—in spite of the old commonplace that visual art takes no time to absorb. In the eighteenth century, Joshua Reynolds argued that unlike poetry, painting could not gradually excite the curiosity of the reader and build suspense. “What is done by Painting,” he declared, “must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have” (Discourses 146). Milton himself largely concurs. “Unlike music and literature that must move through time,” he says, “art can be instantaneous. And one could say that a truly successful visual work provides something of an instant epiphany, where all its paramount information is experienced simultaneously—in a moment seemingly outside time” (CP 28–29). This conception of art is perhaps best exemplified by the “one-shot” perception that Kenneth Noland aimed to excite in the late 1960s with the minimalist, Hard Edge stripes of works such as Coarse Shadow and Stria. “To achieve maximum immediacy,” writes Barbara Rose, “Noland was ready to jettison anything interfering with the most instantaneous communication of the image.” 35 But Milton’s

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print is a loaded ship. While it may instantly give us a sense of columns and sweeping curves swathed in shadow and points of light, any moment of vision that truly embraces its chief features must be earned by the hard labor of scrutinizing them individually. Let us then do so. Ranged across the fore and middle grounds are six groups of figures largely based on photographs of known individuals but not always—according to Milton—identifiable with them. The young woman holding a furled umbrella and standing by the column at left, for instance, is based on a photograph of Olga de Meyer, who helped to bring the Ballet Russe to Paris. But this figure, says Milton, “stands in for” Romola Nijinsky, wife of the dancer, whose younger self stands before the column and whose older self sits beside it.36 Another photograph of Olga de Meyer was Milton’s model for the woman seated in profile at lower right and wearing a large plumed hat, and the bespectacled face looking straight out at us from behind the hat is a disguised version of Arnold Newman’s photograph of Dame Marie Rambert, whom I shall treat further below. Since Milton could not get permission to use Newman’s photograph directly, he says that neither the bespectacled woman nor the woman in the plumed hat represent anyone specific, that they “are just two women being alarmed by the last dance.”37 Further complicating the question of identities in this group is the young woman seated at left and facing us, who is based on Alfred Eisenstadt’s photograph of an unknown woman at La Scala but is supposed to represent the young Mary Cassatt.38 On the other hand, the head of the young woman at lower right—based on the Baron de Meyer’s photograph of an unknown model—may or may not stand in for Olga de Meyer.39 The three principal figures represented in the print—Nijinsky, Degas, and Cassatt—each appear at least once as young and old. At left, a young Nijinsky in street clothes (standup collar, necktie, coat, and vest) stands beside the seated figure of an old one who looks away to the left. Diagonally to the right below them are the black-hatted, blackbearded young Degas, drawn from a self-portrait of 1857, and the whitehaired old one, drawn from a photograph of about 1908. The old Degas faces left—like the old Nijinsky. Strengthening the visual link between these two old men is the repeated figure of the young Nijinsky standing over each in varied postures. While the young Nijinsky at left looks slightly up over the viewer’s head, holds his left arm across his chest, and—below the chest—fades into the column behind him, the young Nijinsky at right looks straight at the viewer, holds both arms at his sides with his hands resting on the parapet, and—in his double-breasted

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jacket—cuts a solid figure against the marble pavement behind him. The diagonal line running from the diaphanous Nijinsky to the opaque one also runs further on to another old Nijinsky: the grinning head in the bottom right corner caught between the forward leaning head of the anonymous young woman and the forward leaning head of Diaghilev—a visual rhyme—donning his shiny black hat. Beside the seated figure of the young woman representing the young Mary Cassatt is a spectral old one: a figure drawn from a photograph of the nearly blind Mary taken about 1914 and represented here as semitransparent from the neck down, with the marble stairs and the squares of the pavement showing through her dress. The old Mary looks serenely to our left, like the old Nijinsky (who is likewise semi-transparent from the knees down) and the old Degas; the young Mary, with her chin resting lightly on her right hand and her elbow on her knee, looks almost straight at us, like the foreground version of the young Nijinsky. Just behind and to the left of this pair stands Stravinsky in white tie and tails beside yet another young Nijinsky—this time costumed as Petrushka, the title role of the Stravinsky ballet which he first danced at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris on June 13, 1911. Beside and above these two figures in the first state of Nijinsky Variations are three near diaphanous dancers poised in space with butterflies hovering around them. Just above a tilted bentwood chair Nijinsky floats alone with right arm thrown up behind him, back impeccably arched, legs thrust down together, toes pointed, and left arm crossing his chest, like the left arm of the young Nijinsky at left. Above the floating figure flies Nijinsky once more, enfolding from behind—with black arms now—the extended white arms of a ballerina (perhaps Tamara Karsavina) as they lean back together with her skirt fluttering over her bent legs. In the second state of the print (fig. 12.7), these three airborne dancers—along with the butterflies—are replaced by a flock of crows. What remains of the most important figures in the fore and middle grounds, therefore, are two versions of Degas (one young, one old), two versions of Mary Cassatt (one young, one old), and five versions of Nijinsky (three young, two old). Among them are figures of lesser importance. At left a pair of slender young women with upswept hairdos, closefitting decolleté dresses, and black neckbands occupy a corner of the parapet—one leaning over the wide barrier to see what is below, the other turning back to look at her. At right, the bespectacled lady throws up her left arm in horror at the shocking antics of Diaghilev’s near-naked Ballet Russe, which is scaring off the full-skirted ballerinas drawn from

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12.7 Peter Milton, Points of Departure II: Nijinsky Variations, second state (1996). Artist’s Collection.

Degas’ canvases and shown decorously leaping away at right. Framed in the stalls of the fifth tier, looking up at a dancer whose cruciform figure hovers in space more than a tier above them, and—at right—bowing to touch the shiny marble pavement, they perform a new Stravinsky ballet: perhaps The Firebird (premiered 1910) or more likely Rite of Spring (premiered 1913), whose portrayal of a fertility rite—including a ritual sacrifice—scandalized early audiences. But the upthrust arm of the bespectacled lady facing us could signify something other than alarm. As already noted, she is a disguised version of Dame Marie Rambert, who danced with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in 1912–1913, founded (in London) the Rambert Ballet School and the Ballet Rambert in the 1920s, and remained a force in British ballet for more than fifty years. By adding spectacles and turning down the corners of her mouth, Milton turns a photograph of this renowned ballet teacher—taken in her nineties—into the picture of a bourgeois matron shocked at the audacity of Stravinsky’s art. But her upthrust arm, which is doubled by the black-sleeved arm (and its shadow) of another woman sitting behind the older Mary, parallels the leg of a dancer pointing his or her slippered toe and leaping out of the picture at right. To see the lower body of the bespectacled lady is to see further evidence of the dancer she once was. Only with a very supple torso could she face us squarely with

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her upper body while her crossed legs and feet point off to the right. Also, the intersection of her legs with the leg of the disappearing dancer allows us to see that the dancer’s slippers might still fit her slender feet. It is equally fitting that her upthrust arm comes from a photograph of a ballet teacher seated before a mirror: not Marie Rambert but Marina Semyonova, teacher at the Bolshoi, who raises her arm to guide and inspire the movements of the young Natalia Bessmertnova. The upthrust arms, then, ambiguously signify two antithetical reactions to the new cultural order exemplified by Stravinsky’s ballet: the shock of a prim matron or the exaltation of a great ballet teacher saluting a new generation of dancers. The older Mary Cassatt’s response to the ballet fits neither of these categories. Beside her younger self she sits serenely gazing (perhaps seeing nothing but a blur through her nearly blind eyes) while another version of her younger self—dating from about 1880—works on a canvas in the third and fourth stalls from the left of the second tier down from the top of the picture. According to Milton, she is painting not the group of five sitting two stalls away directly in front of her but rather her sister Lydia, who sits “buried in shadows” that hide her from us.40 Three stalls beyond the group of five stands what Milton calls a “dashing” young Andre Gide (CP 31), whose figure is repeated two tiers below in the third stall from the right, and the figure barely detectable in the third stall from the left of the bottom tier is, says Milton, “Cocteau . . . disappearing into the Underworld.” 41 Gathering all this information is one thing; grasping its connections and making them generate a comprehensive vision of the picture is another. The task is complicated by the fact that some of what we are asked to see or imagine here is invisible, like Lydia, or—absent the artist’s prompting—unrecognizable, like Gide and the would-be young Mary Cassatt seated with the group at right. But some things are unmistakably clear. Like virtually all of Milton’s prints, this is a picture of time, and of time running both ways at once. To represent the older selves of Nijinsky, Degas, and Cassatt sitting each by a younger self and gazing off to the left is to suggest that each may be remembering that self, fading away from the present (just as the old figures of Mary and Nijinsky fade into the marble pavement) and turning back to the past. On the other hand, to set the young Nijinsky just behind the old Degas—each based on photographs taken about 1908—denotes a moment of transition and generational change; the graceful ballerinas plucked from the canvases of Degas are now being routed by the acrobatic performers of Stravinsky’s new work, which liberates and discharges the energies of a rising generation.

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The new generation includes of course the young Nijinsky, but only the first state of the print displays his dancing form as a variation on the seated and standing ones. While his seated older self takes his place with the seated old Cassatt and the old Degas as the points of an inverted triangle, this is merely a base from which the young Nijinsky takes flight. His near-transparency signifies not a fading away, as in the seated figures, but the sublimation of his sinuous vitality. Hovering over a bentwood chair that is caught in a falling, multiple-exposure tilt, his arching body repeats the two great sets of curves—one sweeping up, the other down— that confront the vertical thrust of the columns and the lateral lines of the parapet, pavement, and steps. Nijinsky’s various forms incorporate the shapes of the surrounding architecture. While his standing young figures repeat the vertical line of the columns, and while his seated old figure—head facing left, knees pointed right—aligns itself with the pavement, the bending line of his airborne figure rhymes with the tiers. Since the elegant arch of this figure seems to epitomize the sublime vitality of the dancer as well as to echo the curve of the tiers, it is startling to find him and the other two dancers wholly erased from the second state of the print (fig. 12.7). This version follows a sequence of intermediate states: first the transparent dancers alone in flight, then the dark birds and at the same time the butterflies, which Milton added, he says, “to tie the birds into the floating dancers.” But, he adds, “their metamorphosis now reads in reverse and inadvertently I now have Goya’s and van Gogh’s metaphor for madness. The central, leaping Nijinsky, who is becoming transparent, is scattering butterflies. They, in turn, darken, becoming black birds, and move out to circle into the audience” (CP 31). In the second state of Nijinsky Variations, then, the black crows are all that is left of the aerial dancers. The spirit of Nijinsky as something diaphanous, immaterial, and therefore indestructible dissolves, and with him go the butterflies, which in Christian iconography signify the resurrection.42 Little remains to signify it now. Except for the cruciform dancer leaping out from the third tier and the bird-shaped flash of light at the top, which Milton calls “an ethereal white dove” (CP 31), the only things still rising here are black wings splayed against globes and starbursts of light. Milton sees Nijinsky “as a young man inevitably cut down in the full bloom of his power” by schizophrenia (CP 31). So while both states of the print offer us in the center foreground a poignantly commemorative still life of Nijinsky’s grave adorned with a rose and his danc-

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ing slippers, the second state of the print moves its soaring dancers from light to darkness, from transparency to opacity, and from inspiration to madness. The flitting little shadows that the butterflies ominously cast around the dancers in the first state grow in the second to a flock of crows slanting down right over the head of the costumed Nijinsky standing by the column. The crows evoke both the dark birds of van Gogh’s desolating Crows in a Wheatfield—an icon of his final derangement—and the flock of owls slanting down over the sleeping figure in Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799). As the crows loom just over the head of the costumed Nijinsky, the right half of his upper body fades into the column behind him, where the misty face of Diaghilev crowned by a black silk hat looms like an apparition.43 The prospect of death—whether psychic or physical—overshadows the theme of generational renewal. If this print shows the old giving way to the new—to the young Nijinsky and the new ballets of Stravinsky—it also marks the period of the first great war, which is signified here by the figure of a soldier in World War I uniform standing three columns behind the lady with the umbrella.44 Flitting behind the columns are slender silhouettes with upraised arms performing a Dance of Death reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal (CP 31). Since the columns grow transparent as they recede from the eye and the intervening spaces turn opaque, the dancing silhouettes seem to enter the columns and become immobilized there, like bas-reliefs on a funerary monument. Thus the regenerative effect of a new ballet, especially of a work such as Rite of Spring, is subtly undermined. And in this dark light, the upthrust arm of Marie Rambert, the disguised nonagenarian, gains a further meaning. Since she herself was dancing with Diaghilev’s company in 1913, when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiered, and since these young dancers—if alive at all—must “now” at the end of her life be as old as she, the upthrust arm may signify farewell to them as well as to the Degas dancers they displaced, or may simply express a desperate urge to stop the passage of time.

Twentieth Century Limited: The End of Art? According to Milton himself, the chief thing distinguishing Twentieth Century Limited (fig. 12.8) from its immediate predecessor is the absence of people. “The third print of Points of Departure,” he writes, “may well be as devoid of people as the second, Nijinsky, is crowded with them. There

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12.8 Peter Milton, Points of Departure III: Twentieth Century Limited (1997). Artist’s Collection.

was malice aforethought in collecting such a throng for Nijinsky: in the next print the personalities have vanished. There is a huge train wreck in the once glorious—now demolished—Pennsylvania Station” (CP 23). Milton mentions none of the tiny figures scampering across the foreground to save from imminent destruction various celebrated artworks of the twentieth century. But before scrutinizing the figures and the paintings they rush to preserve, let us consider what Milton presents as his main subject: “a huge train wreck” in Pennsylvania Station. The cluster of great steel arches is based on a photograph of Charles McKim’s Pennsylvania Station under construction in about 1910 (CP 23). Besides reversing the photograph so that the arches now stand on the right rather than the left, Milton adds fan vaulting and pointed arches at the top, creating a pattern of intricately interlocking curves reminiscent of Piranesi’s Carceri. He also converts a photograph of the station under construction into a print that anticipates its demolition.45 With the three steel pillars at left buckling below and dissolving above under the impact of the train that has just struck them, the print evokes both the great constructive power of the twentieth century and the impermanence—the conspicuously limited life—of what it has built. At right, the locomotive belching a vast cloud of smoke seems headed straight into the mess of derailed and mangled trains at left, which (we surmise) have already been struck by

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the locomotive now thrown on its side. On the side of a ruined passenger car is the name that gives Milton his title: “CENTURY XX LIMITED.” As Milton observes, this was a New York Central luxury supertrain that ran between New York and Chicago starting in 1902.46 Pennsylvania Station was built because the Pennsylvania Railroad Company—headed by Alexander Cassatt, the brother of Mary—needed a suitably grand point of departure for its own supertrain, the Pennsylvania Special, later renamed the Broadway Limited. But here the great monument to twentieth-century technology becomes an emblem of ephemerality. Completed in 1910 and demolished in 1963, it exemplifies in retrospect the restlessness of our century, its impatience with the past, and its relentless demand for change. This almost allegorical story of the train wreck and the doomed station, however, gets more complicated when we consider the figures and the pictures deployed across the foreground. For even as trains rush to their mutual destruction and the station begins to buckle, a myriad of tiny figures scramble to save the most celebrated works of Western art in the twentieth century. Among them are visual jokes and parodies, such as the “Y2K” carried by the ants just to the left of the center foreground. Y2K is computerese for “year 2000,” the year that once upon a dimly remembered time threatened to paralyze all computers programmed to calculate years in just two digits. The letter K also alludes, says Milton, to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” the story of a man who woke up as a bug. Since bug is now a well-established metaphor for a defect or breakdown in a computer program (Y2K was the millennium bug), it is singularly apt that the ants should be carrying the picture of a bug, or more precisely— says Milton—“an approximation of an insect version of a quasi Chuck Close” (“Key”). Just as fittingly, the ants carry their would-be painting of a bug, icon of high-tech disaster, directly in front of a downed and wrecked locomotive. Nearly every other work of art that has been drawn (in every sense) into this print is an icon of abstract expressionism or postmodernism— the two dominant movements in Western art since 1900. With pointed emphasis, Milton writes that “everything in this image—details and architecture—has been drawn by the artist without photo-mechanical or computer aids” (“Key”). Drawing gives him full control over the works of art he represents, which, he says, “were [all] modified and intentionally changed to a lesser or greater degree from the originals” (“Key”). Radical change appears in the lower right corner, where the famous legend that Magritte inscribed beneath his picture of a pipe (Ceci n’est pas

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une pipe [1929]) is superimposed on a drawing of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, a temple of art that has so far survived the twentieth century but that here seems almost to be going up in smoke—like a pipe or like the runaway locomotive heading for disaster behind it. A more subtle synthesis appears in the center foreground, where Milton’s version of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe Diptych (1962) is borne at right angles to his version of Marcel Duchamp’s LHOOQ (1919). Warhol’s two panels are reduced to one, and his five rows of five heads have each been reduced to four rows of three heads each. Conversely, Duchamp’s single picture of the mustachioed Mona Lisa has become a Warholian diptych, perhaps implying that Duchamp’s title/caption (pronounced letter by letter in French as Elle a chaud au cul [“she has a hot ass”]) could apply as well to Marilyn as to La Giocanda. In any case, Duchamps’s defacement of Da Vinci’s icon is here shown to have initiated a chain reaction with a twist on the end. While Duchamp makes his painting from a reproduction of Da Vinci’s, Milton makes a portion of his print by doubly reproducing Duchamp’s painting in the manner of Warhol—except that this would-be photo-mechanical reproduction is hand drawn. But Duchamp is himself iconized as well as redrawn. If any one figure personifies modern art in this print, it is he. Except for Jackson Pollock, shown leaning over to splash paint between the tracks just right of center foreground, Duchamp is the only painter delineated here. Running beside the passenger car in the center foreground, he carries—as if they were suitcases—a modified portfolio from his Box in a Valise Series and a framed rectangle of glass mullioned down the middle and veined with cracks taken from his Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923, left unfinished), which is being borne off horizontally just to the right. Large Glass appears bigger than any other work of art represented in the print, including Warhol’s Marilyn, actually the larger of the two (82” x 114” vs. 109 1/4” x 69”). But Duchamp is responsible for the smallest as well as the biggest work of art represented in this print. His running figure carries, says Milton, “a little vial of Paris air with which [Duchamp] exemplified an invented category he called infra-mince or sub-tiny” (“Key”). The little vial exemplifies the Lilliputianizing thrust of this print, which turns major works of twentieth-century art into infra-mince curiosities. The biggest one hardly exceeds the size of a postage stamp, and the shock of their novelty has shrivelled; in the left foreground an anteater placidly consumes the very letters of the words THE SHOCK

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OF THE NEW, title of Robert Hughes’s well-known book on twentieth century art.47 At this point Duchamp’s art—and his theory of art—tells us a good deal about the peculiar kind of distinction and longevity that modernism seeks. If the vial is so tiny or inconspicuous (tucked into his pocket, perhaps?) as to be invisible, the cracked rectangle of glass dangling from Duchamp’s left hand is by contrast a highly visible instance of infra-mince, which could mean not just miniscule but inconsequential, like the energy one expends in giggling or blowing out smoke (Hughes, Shock 387). For Duchamp, all such throwaway gestures can be salvaged and perpetuated by art, can even exemplify the inconsequence of art from a practical standpoint. (Da Vinci’s lady cannot speak or even sigh; Magritte’s would-be pipe cannot be smoked.) The mosaic of cracks that invaded Large Glass after a trucking accident is infra-mince: an increment that mars the glass or subtly enhances it, like the dust that Duchamp allowed to settle on it and then deliberately attached with fixative (Hughes, Shock 52). Since Duchamp seems to have mentally—one might almost say providentially—appropriated the cracks into his design for the work, which he claimed had “nothing spontaneous” (qtd. Hughes, Shock 55), Milton’s portrayal of Duchamp running away with the cracks is at once suggestive and witty. Does the painter seek—even after loftily accepting the cracks as “art”—to banish them from Large Glass after all? Or in leaving Large Glass to anonymous others while he himself scampers off with the cracked glass, is he telling us that he is more eager to save that? Either way, we are prompted to link both of these glass works—one real and one imaginary—with the square and rectangular windows of the passenger car just behind them. To make this link, we need not be able to see that behind the fourth and fifth windows from the left end of the car Marcel Duchamp is reenacting the chess game he played with a naked Eve Babitz, granddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, at the Pasadena Art Museum on 18 October 1963 (Milton, “Key”).48 That is a piece of esoterica. But what is most important here can be easily seen and read. In juxtaposing two glass objets d’art with the windows of a passenger train, Milton reminds us that “window” is a figure for art dating back at least to Alberti, who considered the rectangle that he drew to begin his work “an open window through which I see what I want to paint” (On Painting 56). Alberti’s figurative window has now become the cracked glass of modernism, less luminous than the windows of the passenger car at left and no more durable—it seems—than the trucks or trains used to carry it. Yet these are the very instruments that

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devour our monuments, large and small, architectural and artistic, grand and infra-mince. While the vast cloud of smoke in this print suggests something like apocalyptic destruction, it comes from one of our own machines. A truck accident cracks Large Glass; the gradual displacement of the train by the truck and the automobile in the later twentieth century makes Penn Station obsolete and thereby dooms it to demolition. At the left edge of the foreground in this print are the first and third panels of Roy Lichtenstein’s As I Opened Fire (1964). Aligned with the upraised right arm of the kneeling bomb victim in Picasso’s Guernica (1937) just above, the nearly vertical fuselage and guns of Lichtenstein’s fighter planes underscore the destructiveness of war machines even as they show what happens to paintings of war in the twentieth century: they shrink from epic canvases into comic strip panels. But in joining two of the panels from Lichtenstein’s As I Opened Fire to his Drowning Girl (1963), Milton offers an alternative to war as a metaphor for cultural self-destruction. The paintings carelessly heaped at left and ranged across the foreground to the right might be read as the flotsam and jetsam of a sinking ship, or as images that rush through the mind at the end of the century—like the high-speed movie of their lives that drowning persons are said to see as they go down. Even the glowing points and streaks and crosses of reflected light that lie athwart the tracks evoke a seascape by Claude. Framing these images of war and drowning is the geometry of modernism. Touching the edge of Jasper Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (1962) and propped just beneath Albers’s Homage to the Square (1954) is Milton’s own Homage to Kandinsky, painted the same year. Together, the two paintings not only recall Milton’s years at Yale under Albers’s tutelage but also suggest an alternative title for this whole print: Homage to Albers. For the whole print is a study in squares and rectangles, from the latticework of mullioned windows at the top to the windows of the passenger cars below and the shapes of the paintings, including a typically rectilinear Mondrian just to the left of the Albers. Squares and rectangles are ambiguous shapes. They may signify stability, containment, enclosure: the frame on which a canvas is stretched, the crate or vault in which paintings may be stored for shipping or safekeeping, the train that might be used to rescue them. But neither crates nor trains in this print can assure the preservation of art. Crammed into a crate just to the right of Warhol’s Marilyn is a jumble of Picasso’s paintings and metal sculptures that look as if they were being thrown out rather than salvaged. This crate of high modernist junk stands right on the rescue line: on the low

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diagonal of paintings being carried across the tracks to the intact locomotive and cars in the foreground. But the mangled condition of the trains just behind them, along with the imminent threat of yet another collision to be caused by the oncoming locomotive, sabotage the likelihood that the trains in the foreground are a safe haven for the art of the twentieth century. On the contrary, two or three women plucked from the canvases of Jean DuBuffet can be seen jumping down from the locomotive at lower right—evidently bent on escaping it.49




Since I initially wrote the foregoing words, Peter Milton has not only completed Points of Departure but launched a new series, Hidden Cities, with two spectacularly urban prints.50 Richly evoking European cityscapes of the earlier twentieth century, the new work gives us fresh reason to conclude that Milton has now taken his turn in the never-ending history of art precisely by returning to its past: turning back from the abstract shapes of modernism and the mechanical reproductions of postmodernism to an art of draftsmanship that is, like Augustine’s vision of truth, a pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, “a beauty both ancient and new.” Milton’s work radiates traditional virtues. It recalls the linear precision of Dürer, the sinuosity of Blake, the tenebrosity of Rembrandt, and the luminosity of Turner. At the same time, it demonstrates that he has learned as much about the mysteries of light and darkness from photographs as from his great precursors. Who can say, for instance, whether or not the little fireball of light that nearly dissolves one of the buckling stanchions in Twentieth Century Limited owes more to Claude or Turner than to Milton’s study of photographic effects? Milton is a twentiethcentury artist who has never forgotten or abandoned the lessons of the past. As if to show that his handiwork cannot be vanquished or superseded by photography, as Turner feared, he takes photography as both his model and rival, deliberately emulating its subtleties and evoking above all its mnemonic power, its capacity to fix forever a moment of the past. But his is an art of many moments, an art that turns back to the nineteenth century only in order to return us—with renewed understanding— to the twentieth. Thus he crosses the threshhold of the twenty-first.

Chapter 13

Reza, Pollock, Richter Language and Abstract Art In the play called Art by Yasmina Reza,1 first staged in Paris in 1994 and since then widely performed elsewhere, a single abstract painting threatens to destroy the longstanding friendship of three Parisian men. One of them—a dermatologist named Serge—spends 200,000 francs on a canvas about five feet by four and painted simply white, with a few “fine white diagonal lines” (Reza 1). Dumbfounded by Serge’s purchase, his friend Marc dismisses the work as nothing but “shit.” A third friend, Yvan, tries in vain to mediate between the two, and the play ends only when Marc impudently draws a little picture of his own on the canvas and Serge promptly erases it. One peculiar thing about this play is that the would-be avant-garde work at its center exemplifies a kind of painting long since canonized in histories of twentieth-century art. Abstract art began about 1900, and something very like the painting bought by Serge in Reza’s play was painted in 1918 by the Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, who produced a whole series of white-on-white canvases at that time. In 1951, during the heyday of abstract expressionism in New York, Robert Rauschenberg produced his White Painting by rolling ordinary house enamel onto a four-foot-square canvas.2 His white squares take their place with other monochrome works of the mid-twentieth century: works such as Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome (1960) and—from the same year—Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting, one of a series of “black” paintings that Reinhardt produced from 1954 to the year of his death in 1967.3 What then can we infer from the immense popularity of a play that challenges or at the very least questions the value of abstract art—of a 287

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kind of painting that would long since seem to have won its battle for a secure place in the history of art? We may first infer that abstract art continues to baffle most of us because we have not yet found a fully satisfactory way to talk about it. What sort of story, after all, can be told about an art that apparently turns its back on representation, on reference to any object or figure that we might recognize from our experience of the world outside the painting, and that might thereby give us something to talk about? In 1940 Clement Greenberg saluted abstract art for renouncing depth and perspectival space in favor of “pure” flatness, and for thus scrapping imitation, “literature,” and narrative of any kind.4 So defined, abstract art seems bent on gagging its viewers, leaving us mute. “The flight from interpretation,” wrote Susan Sontag in the early 1960s, “seems particularly a feature of modern painting. Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation.” 5 In the late 1970s, Rosalind Krauss made the point still more emphatically when she examined the grid as an emblem of modern painting. In works such as Agnes Martin’s Untitled (fig. 13.1), Krauss writes, “the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” 6 What then can be said about abstract art? Is it anything more than a painted word, as Tom Wolfe has called it7—an empty space that critics rush to fill with all the pictobabble known as “art theory”? Wolfe’s disdain for the supposed vacuity of abstract art trails a long history. To begin with, we might pluck a prescient phrase from an early nineteenth-century essay by the English critic William Hazlitt. Writing about the turbid landscapes of J. M. W. Turner—such as his Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (fig. 6.7)—Hazlitt complained that they were “too much abstractions of aerial perspective. . . . All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.” 8 Hazlitt overstates his case against Turner but nonetheless predicts what would happen to art. For even as Turner’s misted shapes and sweeping vortices anticipate abstract expressionism, the catchy phrase that Hazlitt coyly credits to an anonymous “someone” anticipates the received history of abstract art. In spite of its supposed hostility to narrative, abstract art has been given a history, and the essence of this history is purification: a Hegelian journey to the realm of pure Spirit, or in other words Nothing with a capital N. To quote Krauss again, The twentieth century’s first wave of pure abstraction was based on the goal, taken very seriously indeed, to make a work about Nothing. . . . If

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13.1 Agnes Martin, Untitled (1967). Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Purchased through the William S. Rubin Fund and the Contemporary

anything ever drove Mondrian and Malevich, it was Hegelianism and the notion that the vocation of art was defined by its special place in the progress of Spirit. The ambition finally to succeed at painting nothing is fired by the dream of being able to paint Nothing, which is to say, all Being once it has been stripped of every quality that would materialize or limit it in any way. So purified, this Being is identical with Nothing.9

The paradox here—which only a philosophically informed language can explore and explain—is that the pure emptiness achieved by abstract art is somehow a plenitude, that it signifies precisely the opposite of what it presents to the eye. The whiteness of the pure white canvas strikingly exemplifies this complex effect. In recent years the racial meaning of whiteness has become a whole new field of cultural study based on the recognition that even as white negates and excludes black, it necessarily evokes and includes blackness as something essential to its meaning and history.10 We commonly call Caucasians “white” not because that word

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accurately describes their color (which is more like “pinko-grey,” as E. M. Forster once observed) but because “white” signifies the antithesis of black and thus supports a system of absolute—or abstract—differences.11 These in turn have underwritten systems of exclusion and oppression such as slavery, apartheid, and segregation—all of which testify to the interdependence of the pigments they strive to separate: white’s need for black as its racial other, as the embodiment of what it disowns. In Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, the black protagonist perfectly illustrates this paradox when he describes his job in a paint factory. To make “the purest white that can be found,” he learned, he had to add ten drops of dead black liquid to each bucket of white.12 But the racial meaning of whiteness merely begins to reveal the complexity of its significance. In narrating Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, first published in 1851, Ishmael explains at length why he is both fascinated and appalled by the whiteness of the whale that Captain Ahab hunts. Besides signifying dominance and “giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe,” says Ishmael, whiteness can symbolize many good things: gladness, honor, justice, bridal innocence, divine spotlessness, and the sanctity of elders.13 But white, he says, can also terrify the soul because it is “the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind”—such as Polar Bears, white sharks, white squalls, and the bloodless faces of the dead. Why, Ishmael asks, should whiteness itself terrify us? Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? (Melville 169)

A dumb blankness, full of meaning: here is one definition of art at its most abstract. Ishmael here anticipates Rosenberg on the eloquence of minimalism (see above, 60). Precisely because white by itself offers nothing in particular to see, it can signify a whole universe of beauty, power, inno-cence, and terror. In Adonais, the elegy that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote for John Keats in 1821, white signifies Platonic Oneness by transcending all the colors of the spectrum, and thus all the transitory partic-

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ulars of mortal life: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass / Stains the white radiance of eternity / Until death tramples it to fragments.” 14 We can speak of abstract art, then, as the product of purification leading to paradox: the nothing that becomes everything, the repository of ultimate Being—whether Hegelian or Platonic. But so long as we live on earth, we must reckon with contrariety and particularity—even in art that calls itself abstract. To scrutinize the white paintings of Rauschenberg is to experience something tangible, specific, and measurable, something with a material presence. His friend John Cage, the American composer, called the white paintings “airports for lights, shadows, and particles,” meaning—writes Daniel Wheeler—“that their emptiness, as the artist intended, was actually illusory, since reflections from the outside world filled the air with moving life.” The result is again a paradox: in Wheeler’s words “a void that can never be truly empty” (129). These comments on Rauschenberg’s work remind us that abstract art is first of all an art of surface. But surface presupposes depth just as surely as white evokes black. Though Greenberg argued that the flatness of this surface—a distinctive feature of abstract art—purged all “fictive planes of depth” (43), the surface of an abstract painting may actually be read as a veil or screen for what stands behind it—either spatially, temporally, or both. Charles Harrison, editor of the English journal Art-Language, suggests that behind the pure white of modernist abstraction lies a history of paintings such as Lucas van Valkenborch’s Winter Landscape (1586). In this painting, a three-dimensional scene that has been painstakingly recreated in paint is partly occluded—or is gradually being occluded—by white dabs of paint on the surface of the canvas. As Harrison says, “It is not the illusion of depth in the picture that holds our sophisticated attention. . . . What gives us pleasurable pause is the strange and distinctive form of scepticism about appearances that is set in play when the allure of imaginative depth meets resistance from the vividness of decorated surface.” 15 If modern art results from the artist’s willing surrender to the flatness of that surface, as Greenberg argued, the sixteenth-century Dutch painter would seem to have anticipated not only works such as Monet’s Snow at Argentieul (c. 1874) but the gradual occlusion of all figurative content in modern art, as in Study for Index: Incident in a Museum 2, painted in 1985 by Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden of the Art & Language group. “In the conditions of their practice,” Harrison writes, “the idea of a surface of falling particles was conceived initially as a kind of indexical sign: as the pulverised residue of figurative content lingering

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in the studio like motes in the wake of an implosion. The potentially allwhite surface would symbolise both the obliteration of translatable representation and the buildup of a kind of surfeit—the surfeit, as it were, of Modernism’s nuclear winter, in which nothing is signified with increasing depth” (303). Just as dumb blankness radiates meaning, the surface of abstract art opens to reveal its depths. For even if modernist flatness aimed to obliterate depth, as Greenberg argued, the language of art criticism keeps retrieving it: rediscovering time and space behind the blank surface, uncovering history and narrative. This is poignantly dramatized at the end of Yasmina Reza’s play. Serge—proud owner of the pure white painting—goads Marc, who detests it, into drawing upon it with a blue felt-tip pen and thus turning it into something representational. As Serge watches impassively and their mutual friend Yvan looks on in horror, Marc draws a line along one of its fine white diagonal scars and then—on the slope thus constructed—he carefully depicts a little skier with a woolly hat. Serge does not protest because he knows that ink from felttips is washable, and he promptly obliterates the skier, literally purging his painting of anything representational. But Marc has at last discovered a way to read this painting, to articulate its meaning, to construe its fine white diagonal scars as the trace of a story. “Under the white clouds,” he says, “the snow is falling. You can’t see the white clouds, or the snow. Or the cold, or the white glow of the earth. A solitary man glides downhill on his skis. The snow is falling. It falls until the man disappears back into the landscape. My friend Serge . . . has bought a painting. It’s a canvas about five feet four by four. It represents a man who moves across a space and disappears” (Reza 63). One might object that this way of talking about abstract art simply evades its challenge by denying its enigmatic taciturnity, by domesticating it, by turning it back into something representational, familiar, and narratable. But familiar images can be just as challenging, elusive, and provocative as abstractions. In chapter 1, I explained how the titular label in Rene Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une Pipe (fig. 1.6) denies the apparent identity of the would-be perfectly familiar object depicted and thus turns it into an arbitrary sign of something intangible. In cutting the cable that traditionally binds images to specific objects in the real world, Magritte makes the meaning of his picture radically indeterminate—as indeterminate in its own way as the meaning of Rauschenberg’s canvas of pure white. Different as these two paintings are—one a wordless, imageless tabula rasa, the other a labeled image we can instantly recognize—

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each of them blocks our impulse to say what they depict. Each becomes a site and source of provocation, prompting us to rethink the way we read pictures. If a pure white canvas can drive us back to something tangible and narratable in quest of its meaning, the words inscribed beneath an instantly familiar image can prompt us to seek its meaning not in tangible objects, but in abstractions. Once we start thinking, talking, and writing about abstract art, we discover that the line between abstraction and representation is no more impermeable than the line between images and words. For a test case of this hypothesis, consider the work of the American painter who more than any other artist of his time epitomizes abstract expressionism: Jackson Pollock. In paintings such as Full Fathom Five (plate 10), Pollock’s huge, swirling, spattered labyrinths of line—especially in the peak years of 1947–1950—leave us almost literally gasping for words. As recently as 1999, Michael Fried, who has been writing about Pollock for nearly forty years, declared that Pollock’s work is “exceptionally difficult to describe, and—a truly astonishing fact—has remained so to this day.” 16 In quest of something to say, critics typically turn to biographical narrative in visual form: Hans Namuth’s photographs of the artist at work, dripping and flinging his paint onto the canvas.17 “From the moment that Pollock presented himself to Namuth’s lens and directorial eye,” writes Thomas Crow, “the acting out of a new artist’s persona entered the experience of the paintings; once the famous sequential photographs and films came to light, no observer could unknow them.” 18 Surprisingly enough, this focus on the genesis of a work of art is at least as old as Homer, who in the eighteenth book of the Iliad draws a verbal picture of Hephaistos making the shield of Achilles by forging upon it a series of richly detailed scenes. Namuth’s pictures of Pollock at work show him stepping onto giant lengths of canvas tacked to the floor of his barn studio, dribbling paint directly from cans and flinging it from his brush. He strove above all, writes Fried, to fill “every square millimeter of the surfaces on which he worked with a maximum amount of almost bodily energy” (“Optical” 97). But how does the critic get beyond the mere act of witnessing in words the creative energy of the painter and the creative process that generates his work? What can be said about the products of this energy, about the forms—let alone for a moment the meanings—of the paintings themselves? In 1948, just one year after Pollock started his drip paintings, Clement Greenberg proclaimed the birth of what he called “the ‘decentralized,’ ‘polyphonic,’ all-over picture which, with a surface

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knit together of a multiplicity of identical or similar elements, repeats itself without strong variation from one end of the canvas to the other and dispenses, apparently, with beginning, middle, and ending.” 19 Four years later, Greenberg described the “all-over” density of Pollock’s work more concisely: “every square inch of the canvas,” he wrote, “receives a maximum of charge at the cost of a minimum of physical means.” 20 Both comments identify a distinguishing feature of Pollock’s work, but the second defines it largely in terms of cost efficiency, and neither explains how the mildly varied repetition of “identical or similar elements” can avoid becoming “wallpaper patterns,” which is what Greenberg himself imagined that some people might say of them (qtd. Krauss 237). Unsurprisingly, Pollock hated this charge just as much as he loathed its opposite. When Time called his work “chaos” in November of 1950, he sent the magazine a telegram saying “NO CHAOS DAMN IT” (qtd. Krauss 226n). Taking their cue from this outburst, critics such as Daniel Wheeler have argued that Pollock’s great “drip” phase did not spring from “mindless spontaneity,” but rather from the bold discrimination of an artist seeking to reconcile “the deepest impulses of the unconscious” with “the lightning dictates of conscious aesthetic decision” (Wheeler 42). Wheeler thus begins to define the complexity of Pollock’s canvases and to move beyond the polarizing assumption that they give us either monotony or chaos: wallpaper patterns or raw anarchy. Pollock’s work fits neither category. Rosalind Krauss argues that it juxtaposes opposites: “line as opposed to color; contour as opposed to field; matter as opposed to the incorporeal. The subject that then emerges is the provisional unity of the identity of opposites: as line becomes color, contour becomes field, and matter becomes light” (239). Krauss here attempts something like a Hegelian resolution of the would-be chaos that Pollock’s most ambitious work presents to the eye. But since her own terms remain largely abstract, she can hardly offer us an Ariadne’s thread to guide us through the labyrinth of any one painting. For such a thread we might better turn again to Michael Fried, who first wrote about Pollock in 1965 and has not fundamentally changed his account of what Pollock did in the peak years of 1947–1950. In his finest paintings of this period, Fried contends, Pollock’s allover line does not give rise to positive and negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas deserves to be read as figure, . . . against another part of the canvas read as ground. There is no inside

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or outside to Pollock’s line or to the space through which it moves. And this is tantamount to claiming that line, in Pollock’s allover drip paintings of 1947-50, has been freed at last from the job of describing contours and bounding shapes. It has been purged of its figurative character. . . . In these works Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas. In a painting such as Number 1, 1948 [plate 12] there is only a pictorial field so homogenous, overall, and devoid both of recognizable objects and abstract shapes that I want to call it optical, to distinguish it from the structured, essentially tactile pictorial field of previous painting from Cubism to de Kooning and even Hans Hofmann. Pollock’s field is optical because it addresses itself to eyesight alone.” 21

Fried’s statement deserves close scrutiny because it tries to define as precisely as possible just what makes Pollock both decisively original and paradigmatically—or supremely—abstract. “Abstract” means “drawn out of” and is a relative term. In language, the word horse signifies a generic concept abstracted from or inductively drawn out of many distinct breeds of horses—all of whom are thereby reduced to a set of qualities they share. In Picasso’s Guernica (1937), for instance, the figure under the light bulb is constructed of cubist planes abstracted from multiple views of an animal surrealistically distended, but we can still recognize a horse in the painting, along with a bull and several human figures. In painting that is still more abstract, such as Kandinsky’s Composition 8 (1923), we find no representational figures—no natural objects of any kind, neither specific nor generic. Instead we find geometric figures abstracted from various material objects. The circles could be seen as abstracted from the eye or the whole head, the triangle from the nose, the rectangles from artifacts such as bricks or tiles, and so on. Nonetheless, because these geometric shapes are figures, Fried calls Kandinsky’s painting “clearly figurative” and therefore sharply distinct from what he would see as Pollock’s absolute abstraction, exemplified by Number 1, 1948. According to Fried, Pollock’s “all-over line” does not create any figures that stand out against a surrounding ground, as Kandinsky’s geometric shapes do.22 So in Fried’s opinion, Pollock liberates line not only from its traditional duty to represent actual objects “but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas.” By “abstract” Fried means geometrical as distinct from representational, which is to say

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capable of being construed as the outline of a natural object. This is a slippery distinction, for under certain conditions a geometric form can represent an object in the real world. A triangle, for instance, can represent a sailboat, and a circle can represent a head or an eye as it does in Pollock’s own Composition with Donkey Head (c. 1938–1941). But whether or not we can firmly distinguish between abstract and representational shapes, Fried’s term “figures” includes them both, signifying any kind of shape we can recognize or—presumably—name. Pollock’s line eludes such recognition because, Fried contends, it is absolutely nonfigurative. It cannot be caught in the act of describing a space—in the most graphic sense of drawing or scribing a line around it—and thus of producing any shape or figure we can identify. Nevertheless, the figurative components of Pollock’s abstractions begin to emerge as soon as we carefully scrutinize its materiality. Pollock’s articulation, writes Thomas Crow, “is nothing if not material; it is a matter of grain against slickness, of receding stains against knots, ridges, and swags of relief (one of Pollock’s repeated devices was to scoop up the congealed circle of paint that forms on an open can or enamel and transfer the sticky disks intact to the canvas, where they stand out as cupped, obsidian-like medallions of considerable beauty)” (94). Crow finds figures in Pollock’s work. He not only identifies the knots, ridges, and swags shaped by the paint; he can also see circles or disks of paint used as medallions, as in Number 8, 1949. Crow thus identifies a crucial part of what makes Pollock’s work so captivating. In spite of Fried’s claim, its webs and labyrinths incorporate figures that can be recognized and named. I do not mean just the figures that Fried himself identifies—such as the humanoid shape conspicuously cut from painted paper and mounted on canvas in Pollock’s Cut-Out of c. 1948/50. In Fried’s opinion works like these betray a “recurrent desire for figuration” that checks the freedom of Pollock’s purely abstract line (“Optical” 99). But this would-be retrograde desire for figuration—this failure of abstractive nerve, so to speak—manifests itself even in Pollock’s most radically abstract works. Let us return to Number 1, 1948 (plate 12), exhibit A in Fried’s case for the absence of figuration in Pollock’s greatest work. If we ignore the handprints ranged across the upper right, no particular shapes leap out at us from this painting, but they gradually present themselves to the patient, searching, attentive eye. At lower right a small, slightly angulated ring of white overlaps a large, broken circle of white that nearly forms the outline of a sphere filled with intersecting lines, like a ball of yarn. At the top—outlined in black—is a phallic projectile, and just

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below that is a distinctively fish-shaped form outlined in black and white and pointing to lower right. The fine upper outline of this piscatory form draws a thickening, undulating tail behind it. Though partly obscured by patches of white and silver, it trails a long S-curve reaching all the way to the upper left of the painting, where it becomes a streaked ribbon of black with a curl at the very end. The S-curve likewise reaches back into the history of art. In the eighteenth century, William Hogarth called it “the line of beauty”—probably because it evokes, among other things, the female body; he featured it in his self-portrait of 1745—on his palette at lower right—and on the title page of his Analysis of Beauty (fig. 13.2), where it takes an elegant stand within a crystalline pyramid.23 The same

13.2 William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty (1753). Title page.

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line reappears in Number 13, 1949, where serpentine filaments wind their way around the black legs of triangles. But something else demands our scrutiny in Number 1, 1948. Just below the midpoint of the painting, within a tent or inverted V of ragged white, a small, broken, somewhat angulated black oval encloses a dot of black (plate 13). This figure dimly recalls the eyes of the horse’s head in Picasso’s Guernica, a painting whose fierce surrealism powerfully influenced Pollock, especially in such pictures as Composition with Donkey Head, c. 1938–1941, and Pasiphae, c. 1943. In both of these surrealistic paintings, especially the second, the eyes of human beings and animals are variously represented by black circles, black ovals, and broken black ovals enclosing black dots: figures that abundantly recur in Pollock’s Eyes in the Heat (1946). Is it mere accident that a broken black oval enclosing a black dot appears just below the midpoint of Number 1, 1948? Might not this roughly circled point signify a human eye struggling to see order—“not chaos, damn it,” but order—in a whirlwind of apparent confusion? Might not the circled point signify an eye striving to discern through the labyrinth of apparently tangled threads the symmetry of geometrical shapes? At the end of a lecture that he regularly gave at England’s Royal Academy of Arts from 1811 to 1828, J. M. W. Turner quoted a passage of poetry that seems to answer this question, a passage that salutes our capacity to find “in matter’s mouldering structures, the pure forms / Of triangle, or Circle, Cube, or Cone.” 24 The poet is talking about geometrical forms that we might discern in ruined buildings, but Turner’s own work repeatedly prompts us to see how geometry can inform and organize what looks like chaos in the natural world, as in Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—the Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (plate 6). The bubble heads massed at lower right are scarcely more than dotted circles caught in a whirlwind of abstract color and light, but the whirlwind unmistakably forms a circle—or Turnerian vortex—with a serpentine twist in the center that makes of the whole picture a gigantic, all-seeing eye, a fit home for the ghostly figure of Moses writing just above the twisted serpent. Here is history as geometry. Concentrating ages into an instant, Turner’s prophetic vision encircles the temptation and fall of humankind, the story of the flood, the salvific return of light, and the vision of Moses, who sees and captures history in words even as Turner captures it in pigment. How then does Turner shape our vision of Pollock? To suggest that Turner’s geometry prefigures the restless, endlessly venturing line of the great American expressionist can only sound like heresy to those who,

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like Fried, deplore his “recurrent desire for figuration” and celebrate his daring achievement of “the most defiantly abstract art ever made.” 25 But does figuration truly undermine or enervate the power of Pollock’s work? In a painting called Vortex, c. 1947, Pollock recreates Turner’s favorite shape as a whirling bowl of intersecting black lines, a spinning web plainly defined by its circular form. Or consider a detail from the upper right section of Full Fathom Five (plate 11). The paint has been dripped, spattered, and smeared, but also steered across the canvas, set down in two parallel diagonals of orange crossing an oval outlined in black—as can be seen in the upper right portion of the painting as a whole. “When you’re painting out of your unconscious,” Pollock said, “figures are bound to emerge.” 26 Indeed they do. Whether geometric, biomorphic, or anthropomorphic, they inform his paintings, which may be seen or read as veils drawn over shapes we can recognize—and specify. “Veiling and unveiling,” writes Thomas Crow, “are the key terms in the current arguments over Pollock’s significance for artists in the twentieth century” (94). Pollock himself reportedly said that in one of his 1945 paintings (There Were Seven in Eight) he chose to “veil the image” by painting new figures over old ones (qtd. Crow 94). As a metaphor for abstract art, the veil reminds us of the snow that may cover a landscape or the dabs of white that may eventually merge into a canvas of absolute white. But does abstraction simply cover the familiar world of figures, or does it uncover something hidden beneath them? Percy Shelley once wrote of poetry that “whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being” (“Defense of Poetry,” in Shelley 505). Metaphor and simile may be seen as figured veils that paradoxically unveil. To say that life resembles a dome of many-colored glass is to veil or cover the life we ordinarily know, yet also to unveil or expose its polychrome fragility, its phenomenal impermanence, and to find beneath it the “white radiance” of eternity, the Platonic “one” of Shelley’s afterlife in Adonais. Shelley’s poetry is driven by his continuing search for what lies beneath the veil of life, as in this early passage on the Ravine of the River Arve beneath Mont Blanc: Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image. (“Mont Blanc,” lines 25–27 in Shelley 90)

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Just as the many-colored rainbow veils the waterfall, the waterfall veils the rocky wall looming behind it, which—for all its solidity—veils “some unsculptured image,” some figure waiting to be discovered—found and revealed—by the sculptor who carves it. But this figure lurking beneath a succession of veils—rainbow, waterfall, rock—remains abstract, no more concrete or specific than the white radiance of eternity. So we must ask: does abstraction veil figures, as a snowstorm engulfs a skier, or does it lift a series of figured veils to reveal something abstract—something unfigured—beneath them? For the hint of an answer, we might recall from chapter 2 what Leo Steinberg wrote about Jasper Johns’s Shade (fig. 2.5). In some ways this painting could hardly be less abstract or more concrete. Insofar as it is made with an actual window shade attached to the canvas, it aligns itself with what has come to be known as minimalism, wherein ordinary, three-dimensional objects—such a slab or a box—wear titles such as “slab” and “box” and thus defy us to say anything more about them.27 Nevertheless, a shade is virtually a two-dimensional object akin to a veil, and when covered with paint it can generate a whole series of questions about what it hides and reveals. Steinberg shows that the shade of abstraction may reveal, unveil, or expose just as much as it masks or occludes. His commentary also suggests a profound paradox about abstract art. No matter how daringly it seems to renounce narrative, representation, and language itself, it inexorably evokes all three. For if visual representation does not require resemblance, as Nelson Goodman insists, no essential barrier separates the kinds of signification that abstract and realistic painting can achieve; nothing thwarts their capacity to stand for something we can experience in the real world, or for something we may conceive or imagine. Contemporary German art now offers us a splendid illustration of this point. No one complicates the opposition between abstraction and realism more richly, persistently, and provocatively than the German painter whose work has given abstract art a new life at the beginning of the twenty-first century: Gerhard Richter. Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter crossed from East to West Berlin in 1961. Since then he has been crossing back and forth between photographic realism and blank—or nearly blank—abstraction. In the 1960s, he painted oils based on photographs, such as Woman Descending the Staircase and Ema (Nude on a Staircase), a realist riposte to Marcel Duchamps’s icon of cubism, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Yet Richter’s would-be realistic nude evokes the blurred effect of soft-focus

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13.3 Gerhard Richter, Schattenbild (1968). Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal. Serralves Foundation Collection.

photography; the woman is ghostly, and the stairs behind her melt into shadow. In 1968 Richter’s Schattenbild (fig. 13.3) renders precisely and photographically the shadows cast by a grille but at the very same time evokes that hallowed icon of abstract art, the grid. In the early 1970s Richter plumbs the depths or scales the heights of abstraction with a series of paintings called simply Grau (Gray). In the mid-1980s his work ranges from more abstraction to the photographic realism of works like Wiesenthal—as if to defy us to classify him. But whatever else he is, I think it is fair to call him a painter of abstract pictures, for Abstract Picture (Abstraktes Bild) is the title he repeatedly used for many of the works he produced in the 1990s, culminating in a series of six rhomboidal canvases that he completed in 1998. For this particular series Richter found a precedent in the work of Barnet Newman, the American abstractionist who started painting in monochrome about 1950 and went on to complete, in the mid-1960s, a series of fourteen largely monochromatic canvases titled Stations of the Cross.28 Newman’s series concludes with a wholly monochromatic work in pure white on white—yet another example of quintessentially white

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abstraction. But coming at the end of a series titled Stations of the Cross, this particular white canvas was inevitably construed as a sign of transfiguration (Lippard 229). Thus the power of language, or of a cultural context evoked by language, elicits the meaning of an otherwise inscrutable work. Richter, who greatly admires Newman, undertook a similar project when Roman Catholic officials asked him to paint the stigmatization of St. Francis for a modern church designed by Renzo Piano.29 When Richter produced a series of six largely monochromatic rhombi, they were rejected as too abstract for the church and purchased instead for a temple of art in Texas: the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. In the peculiar culture of our time, it seems, secular institutions welcome mysterious icons even as churches banish them.30 So what can we say of these mysterious icons? In his abstract paintings, Richter eschews anything that resembles a real object, for otherwise, he says, “all you can see is that object.” But he has also said that in abstract painting, “there is always some sort of narrative or reference,” and that “we only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us” (Storr 303–4). If we know the story behind the making of the stigmata series—as I venture to call it—we know what to look for in these Abstrakten Bilden. The question is, then, can language help us to see it? Let us start with the full title used for each of the six paintings: Abstraktes Bild (Rhombus). Even as it calls the Bild, the picture, abstract, the title gestures toward specificity, for a rhombus is a slanting square. More precisely, Richter’s rhombus is a square that has been set on one corner and then pressed down from the opposite corner into the shape of a diamond (plate 14). So here is not a painting of a rhombus but the thing itself. In calling this rhombus a rhombus, Richter evokes the minimalist practice of redundantly labeling ordinary objects—like slab and box—as such, and thus apparently forestalling any effort to construe or interpret them, to infer or say what they mean. But a rhombus is not a physical, three-dimensional object like a slab or cube. It is a conceptual, two-dimensional object that squeezes the square and thus rivals its most conspicuous precursor: the tilted square of Malevich’s Suprematist Composition (Red Square and Black Square) (1915), whose original title furnished the model for Richter’s title.31 Of Black Square, another painting by Malevich, Richter has said, “You can interpret [it] as much as you like, but it remains a provocation; you are compelled to look for an object and come up with one” (Storr 304). The same word, provocation, aptly identifies the first effect of Richter’s rhombi. By turning each one on its

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corner and then squeezing it down, he spurns the conventional practice of painting on rectangular canvases that are then hung on the level—a convention normally followed by even the most daring of abstract artists, Pollock included. So what does Richter’s tilting and squeezing of the canvas frame express? Consider first its purely physical features. To keep the rhombus in shape, squeezed down vertically and pressed out horizontally, Richter needed not only four stretchers for the sides of the canvas but two more

13.4 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man. Venice, Accademia. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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intersecting at the midpoint, forming a cross whose extremities touched and braced each corner. The shape of this cross recalls another that Richter cast in silver and gold two years before the stigmata series: a Christian cross with a very short top and a crosspiece as long as the upright. According to Richter himself, he modeled this cross on the proportions of the human body—more precisely his own—so that Robert Storr reads it as “a discreet self-portrait” (83). Just as easily it could also be an abstract version of Vitruvius’ formula for any human body, or at least any male body, as diagrammed and explained by Leonardo da Vinci (fig. 13.4): “the span to which the man opens his arms is equivalent to his height” (120).32 Either way, Richter links the shape of the cross to the shape of a human being standing straight with arms outstretched. The cross used to brace the rhombus is less obviously anthropomorphic because the crosspiece has been lowered to the midpoint of the vertical. But since a wooden cross braces the frame of each canvas in a series meant to represent the stigmata of Francis, we may reasonably infer that this particular rhombus helps to signify a crucified body. Is this too big a leap? “Abstract paintings,” says Richter, “are fictive models that make visible a reality we can neither see nor describe but whose existence we can postulate” (Storr 306). Wittingly or not, Richter echoes what Paul the apostle says about faith in his letter to the Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen” (11:1). Though we cannot see the cross beneath this canvas, we can—in Richter’s words—postulate its existence there. The canvas that veils the cross also reveals it. Its hidden presence is confirmed by what we can see on the canvas itself, where vertical and horizontal bands of predominantly reddishorange pigments intersect. In Rhombus #5, for instance (plate 14), the band of paint across the middle is literally underscored by a groove that cuts right through the row of vertical bands. Here is yet another version of the grid—that paradigmatic icon of abstract art. Far less uniform than Agnes Martin’s grid (fig. 13.1) or Richter’s own Schattenbild (fig. 13.3), Richter’s orthogonal bands recall the random crosses of Piet Mondrian’s early Pier and Ocean (1915), where the squeezed circle anticipates Richter’s rhombus. But Richter had been refining the grid for several years before the stigmata series, as in two highly textured abstractions: Kine (1995) and Abstraktes Bild (1997; fig. 13.5). In the stigmata series, therefore, Richter’s grid is far more subtle and suggestive than any of its precursors. The intersecting bands of red and orange seem woven into or out of the very warp and woof of the canvas itself, whose intersecting threads endlessly repeat the form of the cross beneath it. We cannot see

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13.5 Gerhard Richter, Abstract Picture (1997). Collection Isabel and David Breskin.

those threads, of course, anymore than we can see the cross, but we can read the painted canvas as a representation of them both. We can also plainly see that the reddish-orange surface of the paint on each canvas has been scraped away at various points to reveal an undercoating of black and blue flecked with yellow, green, and white. At first glance these abrasions seem randomly made, haphazard products of accident, caprice, or the flaking of paint. But careful inspection shows the principle of order that governs their deployment. Though they nowhere form an obvious cross in the center of the canvas—something Richter carefully avoids—they are made like the intersecting bands of reddish orange, with predominantly vertical and horizontal strokes. In the lower part of Rhombus #3, for instance, vertical streaks of black descend to a thin black channel that cuts across them; at the bottom of Rhombus #4, a ghostly column of black shrinks to a needle standing on the line scraped straight across the bottom tip. Even the diagonal row of abrasions at left in this picture are made with vertical strokes, as one can

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see by examining them closely. So the abrasions subtly reinforce the cruciform structure of the picture as a whole. Furthermore, in clustering chiefly along the edges of the canvas rather than intersecting at the center, the abrasions remind us that four of the five wounds of Christ—the originals of the stigmata of St. Francis—were made in his outstretched extremities: his hands and feet. Richter’s great enigmatic diamonds thus become eloquent signs of mutilation and blood. Richter’s latest work takes him one step deeper into the forest of abstraction, or rather shows even more daringly how its seemingly inscrutable shapes can be made to branch into something like words. In previous years, Richter has sometimes deconstructed his own “realistic” works by taking close-up photographs of certain details and then depicting those details in paintings that present themselves as abstract: one more way of erasing the line between abstraction and realism. In 2003, however, he trained his atomizing camera on an abstract painting called No 648–2 (plate 15), which he painted in 1987. To my eye, this magnificent abstraction evokes the elements. Its great black vertical bands suggest columns, or tree trunks rising from the earth amid lush green vegetation; its ragged tongues of orange and yellow suggest rising flames; its patches of blue suggest patches of sky or of water, or of sky reflected in water—the watery reflection of a forest ambushed by fire. Here then is something like a temple to Empedocles, the ancient Greek philosopher who first defined the universe as a compound of earth, water, fire, and air. To compose the illustrated book entitled War Cut, published in 2004, Richter photographed 216 details from this painting and juxtaposed them with blocks of prose: passages cut from articles published in a German newspaper (the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) on March 20 and 21, 2003—during the first days of the war in Iraq. Each pair of facing pages presents two photographed details with two paragraphs on topics that are sometimes quite distinct—though they all pertain to the war. Facing the picture on page 91 of the book, for instance (plate 16), the first paragraph concludes an article on the role played by American Jews in the Congressional debate leading up to the war; the second describes desert sandstorms in Kuwait, where American and British troops awaited orders. How shall we read or view this juxtaposition of journalism and abstract painting, this collage made up of news paragraphs and rectangles of abstraction squared, so to speak, redoubled by the abstracting power of photographic concentration and enlargement on the details of what is already an abstract painting? To begin with, it may help to recall—if only

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briefly—the history of newsprint in the world of art. Newspaper cuttings entered works of art almost a hundred years ago, when Braque, Picasso, and other cubists used them to make collages, and in the very center of Picasso’s Guernica, the body of the tormented horse is marked with rows of short strokes suggesting newsprint—a telling allusion to the worldwide press coverage of the destruction of Guernica by the Fascists (Hughes, Shock 110). But the scraps of newsprint pasted onto cubist collages or abstractly incorporated into cubist paintings do not demand to be read so much as to be caught immediately by the eye, just as we can recognize a column of newsprint as such without reading a single word of it. By contrast, the words in Richter’s book have been transplanted from newspaper columns to the printed pages of a book, so that they may gain the permanence of literature, which is the way Richter wants them to be read.33 He does not want them to be read as if they were lexigraphs, postmodern paintings of words such as Joseph Kosuth’s red, where the word “red” is defined by a text that is black and white and yet obviously meant—in the words of the tired old pun about newspapers—to be “read” all over. Richter’s new work does not iconize its words in this way. Neither collage nor lexigraph, it presents itself rather as an illustrated book that stretches the concept of illustration to the breaking point. Some of Richter’s images may perhaps illustrate parts of his text; the daubs of pink and red ranged across the broad yellow band of one picture (plate 16) might conceivably signify soldiers caught in one of the sandstorms described by the accompanying text. But since Richter says that he read most of the texts only after pairing them off with specific pictures (Thom-Prikker 26), we are challenged to see for ourselves—to find out for ourselves—what kind of meaning each image assumes when we view it, or read it, in light of the accompanying words. According to Richter himself, the book shows how “texts and images influence one another, change their meanings, with the images changing incomparably more because they are much more open and ambiguous” (26). This seems to imply that Richter’s images are as pliable as Rorshach blots, capable of signifying anything that a block of words projects onto them. But Richter’s images radiate a shaping power of their own. More precisely, they play a crucial role in constituting the form that this book seeks to impose on the ways in which we record, remember, and commemorate the opening of the war on Iraq. Consider an image (plate 17) that accompanies two paragraphs drawn from two different articles: one about the mood at a German housing area for American troops who have left for Kuwait, the other about worldwide demonstrations against the

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war. Neither of these topics can be easily illustrated. The mood of an evacuated housing area might be suggested by the picture of an empty street, and worldwide demonstrations might be exemplified by the picture of a single urban crowd brandishing placards, but neither picture would be self-explanatory; each could deliver its meaning only with the aid of words. What sort of meaning, then, do the words about a housing area and antiwar demonstrations help to deliver from this image? Or conversely, what sort of form does this image bring to the upheavals that marked the beginning of the war? To begin with, we might observe that two contrasting kinds of form govern this picture. One is rectilinear: streaks and bands of orange and black running left to right. By photographing a detail of the original painting at a tilt of ninety degrees, so that its strong verticals became horizontals, Richter produced a stack of stripes. Set against this rectilinear background are a set of curvilinear forms: rounded, sinuous, protoplasmic blobs of blue and white, with a flowerlike shoot of gold in the very center. Whatever this whole image signifies, or can be plausibly said to signify, must spring at least in part from the contrast between its two basic kinds of form. Let me then try one more step. Though I do not know how to link this image with the evacuation of housing areas, its juxtaposition of rectilinear and curvilinear forms can readily serve as a way of imagining worldwide demonstrations against the war. War and its instruments are pitilessly leveling. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 first leveled the World Trade Towers, and in response, tanks streaking across the deserts of Iraq leveled many of its people while bombs leveled buildings in Baghdad and elsewhere. Bombs are typically dropped, of course, but bullets travel horizontally, and it is not hard to see the streaks of black and orange as the sign of relentless gunfire, or—for that matter—as the red and white stripes of the American flag drastically discolored by the rocket’s red glare. In this light, literally as well as figuratively, the curvilinear blobs of white, blue, and gold could be viewed as explosions, bombs bursting in air, chaotic eruptions paradoxically generated by the relentlessly leveling uniformity of war machines and of men trained to march in straight lines. But the rounded and sinuous forms may also be viewed as signs of resistance and protest streaming irresistibly into the battlefield of our vision from nearly every corner of the picture and taking possession of its center. If the American flag has once again become a battle flag, this image may suggest that millions of protestors refused to be caught up in its fabric, that they would sooner rend it than be wrapped within its folds—like

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the more than two thousand American soldiers who—as of this writing—have come home in coffins draped with American flags.




War Cut is a new book, and I can hardly begin to say what all of its images mean in their new textual home. But I think I can confidently say that the recent work of Gerhard Richter shows two things. Abstract art is anything but dead, and it thrives on its symbiotic relation to language. In spite of its so-called “will to silence,” abstract art has always prompted us to think and to articulate our thoughts about what we see. If we think about abstract art in terms of pure abstraction, which is very difficult to do, we will see very little. But I believe that we can think, talk, and write about abstract art in specific and sometimes surprisingly traditional terms. When Michael Fried argues that Jackson Pollock liberated line from figuration, he is telling a story of what Pollock did and at the same time making a statement about what his pictures mean—even while simply seeming to describe their formal properties. If geometrical forms are figures, as Fried himself says, then Pollock’s work is geometrically figural, and we can recognize and name its figures just as readily as we can recognize the vortices of Turner. To talk about abstract art, even in rigorously formal terms, is to begin the work of translating it into words that return us to the world of specific objects in space and time, like the shade of Jasper Johns that separates night and day, inside and outside. As the twentieth century gives way to the twenty-first, Gerhard Richter’s restless alternation between photographic realism and enigmatic abstraction suggests, I think, that the wall between the two is beginning to fall. And his very latest juxaposition of abstract images and news stories about the war in Iraq seems to tell us one more thing. If the wall between realism and abstraction is falling, it is falling right into the meeting place of language and abstract art.

Notes Introduction 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), xii–xiv. On the distinction between synchronic and diachronic, Jonathan Culler writes: “The synchronic study of language is an attempt to reconstruct the system as a functional whole, to determine, shall we say, what is involved in knowing English at any given time; whereas the diachronic study of language is an attempt to trace the historical evolution of its elements through various stages” (Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975], 12). Philostratus, Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (London: Heinemann, 1931), 5. Nicolas Poussin, Letter of 28 April 1639 to Chantelou, qtd. Rennselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanist Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967), 30. In Laocoon (1767), G. E. Lessing called this moment the “most suggestive” (pragnantesten, most pregnant with meaning) because it is the moment “from which the preceding and succeeding actions are most easily comprehensible” (Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, ed. and trans. Edward Allen McCormack [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984], 78). David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001). For critiques by optical scientists, see David Stork, “Response to Hockney and Falco” (2002) and Christopher W. Tyler, “What Perspective Construction Reveals about Optical Aids,” both posted on Website http://www.artandoptics.com. For critiques by art historians, see Keith Christianson as quoted in J. L. Carrell, “Mirror Images,” Smithsonian 32, no. 11 (2002): 81 and Catherine Puglisi, who writes: “Caravaggio was perfectly 311

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capable of painting without a model when he so chose . . . [he was] not copying from an image reflected by such a camera” (qtd. A. Landi, “Optical Illusions,” Artnews 99, no. 3 [2000], 137). For better or worse, the distinguishing mark of postmodern art and literature is their embrace of new technology, especially television and digital media. On postmodern poetry see Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in an Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 7. Michael John Gorman, “Art Optics and History: New Light on the Hockney Thesis,” revised 26 April 2002 (http://www.stanford.edu/group/ shl/Eyes/ hockney), 5. 8. Susan Grundy, “On the Other Hand: A Positive Look at Caravaggio and the Camera Obscura” (http://webexhibits.org/hockneyoptics/post/grundy. html), accessed October 8, 2004. 9. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 87–90. 10. The “affective” method of interpreting a literary text, Stanley Fish writes, “is simply the rigorous and disinterested asking of the question, what does this word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter, novel, play, poem, do? And the execution involves an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time. Every word in this statement bears a special emphasis. . . . A reader’s response to the fifth word in a line or sentence is to a large extent the product of his responses to words one, two, three, and four” (“Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics” [first published in New Literary History, 1970] in Is There a Text in this Class? [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980], 26–27). 11. James Elkins, “Marks, Traces, Traits, Contours, Orli, and Splendores: Nonsemiotic Elements in Pictures,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 822–23. According to Mieke Bal, “subsemiotic” marks include “stylistic variation, light and dark, composition, or more technical aspects like brushstrokes, paint thickness, and lines.” To these, she says, semioticians do not usually “give . . . meaning in themselves” (Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the WordImage Opposition [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 400 n. 16). See also Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” Art Bulletin 73 (1991): 194: “We might try to say that below a certain threshold, perhaps roughly corresponding to phonetics in language, there are marks that contribute to, but which do not yet produce, signification— individual brushstrokes or lines, or dots or pixels; and that above that threshold these as yet nonsemantic marks emerge as productive of meaning. . . . But a painting is a continuous surface with marks that blend together inextricably. If no minimal units for images can be found, then a visual semiotics, deriving from Saussure, must be an impossible endeavour: we cannot establish where the ‘signifier’ actually is.” Bal and Bryson try to solve this problem by proposing that verbal texts are as “dense” as visual ones, and that instead of philologically reducing verbal texts to the words or sentences

Notes to pages 4–6

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that constitute them, we should regard them as “consolidated” in discourse, “inseparable” participants in “an event” of sign making (194). Yet as Elkins notes, “both linguistics and textual semiotics depend on the existence of minimal units of meaning, whether they are morphemes, phonemes, or entire propositions, and no matter how much attention we choose to pay to larger structures, atomic units remain essential for the sense of the enterprise” (826). As E. D. Hirsch has observed, construing is the private, silent prelude to the public act of interpretation; see Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 129–30. “There is no such thing as well-articulated concept of visual sign that does not depend immediately and explicitly on linguistic models” (Elkins, “Marks” 831). Vincent J. Bruno, Hellenistic Painting Techniques: The Evidence of the Delos Fragments (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), vii. The painting is so described in the “List of Illustrations” at the front of the book. The caption printed under the reproduction of the painting is simply, “Sacrificial ram, white monochrome frieze” (n.p.). Elkins, “Marks” 842. Within the context provided by its verbal frame (the label), the patch of white invites something like what Umberto Eco calls an “overcoded abduction”: an “explanatory inference” that is made “automatically or semiautomatically” (Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok, eds. The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, and Pierce [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983], 206). In this case, the inference is automatically made by the viewer looking for the ram. (My thanks to Carey Newman for drawing my attention to Eco’s term.) See Mark Twain’s account of Guido Reni’s painting of Beatrice Cenci in Life on the Mississippi, ch. 44, qtd. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 40; and Mitchell’s commentary on Twain’s response to the picture (40–42). In this respect they resemble what Roland Barthes calls the punctum of a photograph, which punctuates or breaks through the studium, its capacity to satisfy a generalized taste or “liking” for a certain kind of picture. “A photograph’s punctum,” writes Barthes, “is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill & Wang, 1981], 26–27, 51). He also writes: “What I can name cannot really prick me. [Ce que je peux nommer ne peut réellement me poindre.] The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance” (La Chambre Claire: Note sur la Photographie [Paris: Seuil, 1980], 118). Recent research suggests that language regulates perception almost as soon as we start to speak. In one study, a group of 47 two- and three-year olds were shown a series of line drawings “roughly shaped like various nameable objects, such as a man.” Half the children were told that each shape was

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created intentionally, while the other half were told that it was created accidentally. In this and a similar study conducted with adults as well as children, researchers “found that children and adults were more likely to name the object if it was described as intentionally created. . . . In both studies, what determined meaning was not just the perceptual attributes in the immediate context, but also the child’s construal of them” (Susan A. Gelman, The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003]). My thanks to Kevin Dunbar for drawing my attention to this book. In chapter 1, I briefly discuss what I call lectoral art—poetry that depicts the act of reading. I am happy to report that this neglected category is extensively and insightfully examined in a new book by Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). For a good reproduction, see Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1981), 343. Likewise, Masaaki Sato’s Kiosk paintings of 1987 show us racks of magazines—but with certain random letters in their titles reversed. On the whole topic of words in paintings, see also Michel Butor, Les Mots dans la Peinture (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1969). W. J. T. Mitchell has defined the “language of images” as a phrase denoting 1) “language about images, the words we use to talk about pictures, sculptures, designs” and so on; 2) “images regarded as a language: the semantic, syntactic, communicative power of images to encode messages. . . . and ‘speak’ to us”; and 3) “verbal language as a system informed by images,” either literally in the shape of letters or figuratively in “concerns for patterning, presentation, and representation” (“Editor’s Note: The Language of Images,” Critical Inquiry 6 [1980]: 361). I use “language of art” to denote something like the second of these meanings: what is represented, signified, or “spoken” by works of visual art, which in this book chiefly includes paintings, prints, and—to a lesser extent—photographs.

Chapter 1

1. 2.

3.

This essay originally appeared as “Literacy and Picturacy: How Do We Learn to Read Pictures?” in Prisms: Essays in Romanticism (1999): 17–49. Used by permission. John Constable, John Constable’s Correspondence, vol. 2, ed. R. S. Beckett (London: His Majesty’s Stationer’s Office, 1962–1968), 96. E. H. Gombrich, “Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation,” in Image and Code, ed. Wendy Steiner, Michigan Studies in the Humanities 2 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 12. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 16.

Notes to pages 13–18

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Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 17, qtd. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 294. Ernest Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 189–97. Plato, The Republic, sections 598, 602–3 in The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937), 855, 860–61. The Complete Bible: An American Translation, trans. J. M. Powis Smith, Edgar J. Goodspeed, et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); Exodus 20:4-5. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–1949), 3:75. Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon, 1973). For critical analysis of Maus as well as other graphic novels of the 1980s, see Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005). See Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 43–51—hereafter cited as Spencer. For more on Alberti, see ch. 3. Among practitioners of what has been called new art history, the concept of pictures as signs or graphic texts has clearly dislodged the windowpane metaphor; see Bal and Bryson, “Semiotics,” 174–208. But since the textual or linguistic concept of pictures remains far from universal, even among art historians, my aim in this essay is to explore the process by which we move from one paradigm to the other—as well as the kinds of resistance that such a move provokes. “To Sir Godfrey Kneller” (1694), line 114, in The Works of John Dryden. ed. Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenborg, Jr., vol. 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000), 4. Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War (New York: Dover Books, 1954), plate 41 and facing commentary (n.p.). Gardner, plates 40 and 41 and facing commentary (n.p.). Photographs, of course, may be not only staged and misleadingly captioned, but also reconstructed or “doctored.” For a recent study of how Josef Stalin systematically erased his enemies from the photographic record, see David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). Published by the American Postcard Company, Inc., and reproduced on the cover of Critical Inquiry 14 (1988). Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 38. For a detailed discussion of this figure, and especially of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of it, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on

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22. 23. 24. 25.

Notes to pages 18–22

Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 45–56. John Nichols and George Steevens, The Genuine Works of William Hogarth, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1808–1810), 140. Since Hogarth’s drawing does not survive, figure 1.4 is my own attempt to reconstruct it. Linda Chase, Introduction to Super Realism from the Morton G. Neumann Family Collection, Exhibition Catalogue (Kalamazoo, MI: The Institute, 1981), 4. See also Linda Chase, Hyperrealism (New York: Rizzoli, 1975). Whitney Davis notes that the Lascaux paintings follow by some 15,000 years the Aurignacian images incised on limestone blocks in the Valley of the Dordogne near the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic era—between 32,000 and 26,000 B.C.E. (“Replication and Depiction in Paleolithic Art,” Representations 19 [1987]: 113). Furthermore, Whitney contends, no one can interpret primitive images without recovering the history of their making, without archaeologically tracing a chain of replications so as to learn how “some particular resemblances between the pattern and things in the world image denote what they resemble” (118, 124). In other words, to interpret primitive images is to recover the original experience of what Wittgenstein called “seeing-as,” such as seeing a blot as a hole or a line as an edge (121–22). But, writes Davis, “since we cannot observe the whole chain of replications all the way back to the initial moment of seeing-as, we must assume our judgment of relevant resemblance to be identical with the seeing-as that actually produced the chain” (128). Davis thus seems to acknowledge some transhistorical capacity for the recognition of resemblance as a necessary—though not sufficient—condition for the experience of an image as such. AI 226. The contrast between the two pigments is like the structuralist difference between words such as big and small, which have no absolute value but take their meaning wholly from their opposition to each other within a given class of objects. A big pizza, for instance, is bigger than a small one but far smaller than a small house. E. H. Gombrich and R. L. Gregory, eds. Illusion in Nature and Art (New York: Scribners, 1973), 197, 200. Gombrich, “Image and Code,” in Steiner, ed., Image and Code, 21. For a critique of this argument, see Mitchell, Iconology 88–94. Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo on Painting, ed. Martin Kemp, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 34. On paintings of sound patterns, such as Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942/43), Gombrich asks, “Can there be real objective discoveries of good and better matches in these elusive spheres as there were in the discovery of visual analogues to visual experience?” (AI 367). His answer is yes. Given two contrasting pieces of music, one slow and one fast, “the Mondrian would give me a pointer—a pointer for the game which psychologists call

Notes to pages 22–25

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27.

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‘matching.’ Given a simple choice, Mondrian tells me in what class, category, or pigeonhole of music to seek for the equivalent” (AI 368–69). The viewer is thus made passive, animalized by the painting, pointed irresistibly to its “equivalent” or match. There is no place here for reading—for the act of construing what a picture means. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 12. Rorty here alludes to Ludwig Wittgenstein: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself to us inexorably” (Philosophical Investigations, vol. 1, trans. G. E. M. Anscomb [New York: Macmillan, 1953], 115). Alberti, for instance, says that artists should seek only to represent visible forms on the picture plane “as if it were of transparent glass” (Spencer I.12/51) and goes on to say that he himself begins to draw by inscribing a square “which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint” (Spencer I.19/56). John Greenstein has recently noted that “since Renaissance open windows do not have glass or transparent screens to look through, this simile does little to explain the qualities of finished paintings as crafted objects” (“On Alberti’s ‘Sign’: Vision and Composition in Quattrocento Painting,” Art Bulletin 79 [1997], 692). But by Greenstein’s account, Alberti conceives a pictorial sign as if it were a hole in the canvas, something that makes us see through the painted surface to the object it enables us to recognize. For Alberti, writes Greenstein, “the visual qualities of painting should belong primarily to the depicted surfaces rather than to the artwork as crafted object. These qualities are signs to the extent that they make the surfaces of depicted bodies recognizable. Thus, signs figure in Alberti’s theory of representation not because a painting is a sign but because surfaces are perceived by means of them” (692). For Alberti as Greenstein presents him, then, all pictorial signs are iconic, leading us not by any code or convention but rather by natural resemblance to recognize the surfaces they represent. In spite of Greenstein’s claim that the fenestral trope “does little to explain the qualities of finished paintings,” the finished painting is quite as much a window as is the empty square with which the artist initiates his work. The commentary includes at least one whole book: Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe, ed. and trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 141. Michael Ann Holly argues that Jacob Burckhart “learned from the painters how to look, how to visualize, how to think historically. His text, formally analogous to a painting by Raphael, makes everything appear in proportion, makes everything fit together, leaves nothing out of place. In both cases— that of the text and that of the image—the organon through which this

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34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

Notes to pages 25–29

panorama is systematized, the Albertian graph of space, is primarily dependent on the gaze of an external viewer whose directed focus singularly legitimates the arrangement of the rich and abundant details of the optical field” (Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996], 78). Holly, Past 70–74. She cites David Carrier, “Art and Its Spectators,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (1986): 6, and Michel Foucault’s discussion of Velazquez’s Las Meninas in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 4–6. Clement Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoon,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 32. A full-scale analysis of Panofsky’s theory of pictorial meaning would include his theory of perspective, which I can only glance at here. Michael Ann Holly has explained how Panofsky “translated Alberti’s description of perspective into a neo-Kantian model of perception,” treating perspective as “an artificial convention . . . because it is a system of knowledge that can be viewed, in its most enduring sense, as a powerfully revealing construct, a symbolic form interposed between the perceiver and the perceived” (Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984], 156–57). See also PT 17–34. Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art” (1939), in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 28–31—hereafter cited as Meaning. A female figure with a peach, for instance, may signify veracity, while a male figure with a knife may signify St. Bartholemew (Meaning 28–29). Meaning 33–34. The curious thing about these two examples, however, is that by Panofsky’s own account, the Van der Weyden requires no knowledge of the history of style, just the capacity to recognize a convention that has persevered from the fifteenth century to our own: the pictorial ground on which figures and objects are delineated in a landscape painting typically signifies the sky. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 203. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 350–51. Linda Seidel, “‘Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait’: Business as Usual? ” Critical Inquiry 16 (1989): 80. Constable first saw and copied this painting at the London house of Sir George Beaumont sometime before the summer of 1802, and according to C. R. Leslie, he “looked back on the first sight of this exquisite work as an important epoch in his life” (Memoirs of the Life of John Constable [London: Phaidon, 1951], 5).

Notes to pages 30–37

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41. John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 136–37. 42. Repr. Herta Schmitz-Cliever-Lipier, The Treasury of the Cathedral of Aachen, trans. Carole Steber (Aachen: Chapter of the Cathedral, 1986), 33. 43. George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 17, 21–22, 46. 44. Lessing 78. Lessing allows for just a little crossover between these two media of representation: “Painting too,” he writes, “can imitate actions, but only by suggestion through bodies” and “poetry also depicts bodies, but only by suggestion through actions” (78). 45. “Painting can use only a single moment of an action in its coexisting compositions . . .” (Lessing 78). 46. The Times [of London], 11 May 1843, qtd. Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), text, 254. For more on this painting in the present book, see pp. 128–29, 177–78. 47. I owe this example to Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 28–32, though I have raised questions about her reading of Gozzoli’s picture in my review of her book; see Yearbook of Comparative Literature 37 (1988): 215. 48. William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems, definitive ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 211–12. 49. From Sally Mann, Immediate Family (New York: Aperture, 1992). 50. Other examples include Joshua Reynolds’s Joseph Baretti (1774), Joseph Wright of Derby’s Sir Brooke Boothby (1781), the title page of Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789; see fig. 4.1), and Corot’s Young Girl Reading (1845–1850). By extension, this genre also includes pictures of books and other reading matter that could be read by anyone actually or potentially present within the space depicted—as distinct from words on the canvas that can be read only by the viewer. (A good example is van Gogh’s early Still Life with Bible, where the open Bible—with its words unreadably represented by smudged pigment—sits on a table next to a clearly identified copy of Zola’s La Joie de Vivre.) Since lectoral art depicts figures normally absorbed by words that we cannot read, it raises a number of special questions about the role of words in pictures. For more on this topic, see Stewart, The Look of Reading. 51. On the history of this difference in French painting, see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 52. The contrast between nude and clothed bodies in Mann’s photograph is more subtle than in Manet’s painting, where the nude’s pale flesh is starkly

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relieved against the black coats of the fully dressed men seated next to her. But Mann’s use of clothing as a marker of sexual difference is clear enough. When I saw this photograph in Atlanta’s High Museum in January 1998, I overheard one young woman’s comment after studying it for perhaps twenty seconds. All she said was, “The boy is the only one with clothes on.” 53. Lolita herself entrances Humbert while reading the Sunday funnies under a June sun, clad only in a two-piece bathing suit: “Silently the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She was the loveliest nymphet greenred-blue Priap himself could think up” (Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita [New York: Berkeley Medallion, 1966], 41). 54. “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence, lines 18–20. (William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, edited by Andrew Lincoln [Princeton: Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1991].) See also ch. 4 below.

Chapter 2

1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

This essay first appeared as “Speaking for Pictures: The Rhetoric of Art Criticism,” in Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 14 (1998): 1–15. Used by permission. “It’s the photographs,” he said, “that give one the vivid realization of what actually took place. Words do not do it. The words that there were abuses . . . you read that and it’s one thing. You see the photographs, and you get a sense of it, and you cannot help but be outraged” (Thom Shanker and Eric Schmidt, “Rumsfeld Accepts Blame and Offers Apology in Abuse,” The New York Times, 8 May 2004: A1+). Quintilian, Inst. Orat. 11.3.67 in Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, vol. 4 (London: Heinemann, 1921–1922), 281. Robert Anthony Bromley, A Philosophical and Critical History of the Fine Arts, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, vol. 1 (London, 1793–1795), 20. Quintilian, Inst. Orat. 6.1.30 in Butler 2:407. Elsewhere Quintilian extols the emotive power of pictures drawn by words, especially in the work of Cicero. See Inst. Orat. 8.3.63–69 and 9.2.40–41. Quintilian would perhaps have taken a grim satisfaction from the acquittal of O. J. Simpson in October 1995. Though police photographs of the two people he was charged with murdering were so gruesome that they could not be shown on television, they failed to speak as effectively as the attorneys for the defense. For more on the Simpson trial, see James Heffernan, “The Simpson Trial and the Forgotten Trauma of Lynching,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 801–6. PT 157. Like me, Mitchell defines ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (152). For more discussion of its meaning and the various ways in which it has been used and defined, see James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1–4 and 191 n. 2.

Notes to pages 41–43

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

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Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects [1550], vol. 3, ed. William Gaunt, trans. A. B. Hinds (New York: Dutton, 1963), 8. Denis Diderot, Salons, vol. 1, ed. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhemar, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975–1983), 63, 66. The translations are mine. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, vol. 10, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930–1934), 25; Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1992), 37. Baudelaire, it must be noted, had nothing but contempt for art historical genealogies. “In the realm of poetry and art, the great discoverers rarely have precursors. Every flowering is spontaneous, individual. Is Signorelli really the generator of Michelangelo? Did Perugino contain Raphael? The artist owes nothing to anyone but himself ” (SW 122). The quoted words are from Donald Preziosi, “The Question of Art History,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 370. In what follows I treat the border between art history and art criticism as highly permeable. Bernard Vouilloux, “La Description du Tableau dans les Salons de Diderot: La Figure et Le Nom” (Poétique: Revue et de théorie et d’analyse litteraire 18 [1988]: 28–29). The translation is mine. Salons 2:194; see also Bernadette Fort, “Ekphrasis as Art Criticism: Diderot and Fragonard’s ‘Coresus and Callirhoe,’ ” in Icons-Texts-Iconotexts, ed. Peter Wagner (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 68–69. Fort shows that Diderot’s whole commentary on the spectatorial, theatrical, and illusionistic features of this painting rivals its effect in words: “Thus all textual strategies unite to reproduce and cue the reader to the typical flickering of awareness and illusion at work in the painting. With this aesthetic, Diderot claims his place as ekphrastic writer next to the producer of pictorial illusion, Fragonard” (77). Robert Hughes, Nothing if not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists (New York: Knopf, 1990), 52. Mitchell has recently argued that “metapictures” provide their own metalanguage, their own “second-order discourse that tells—or at least shows us—something about pictures.” But while Mitchell develops this point by aiming to offer “faithful descriptions” of several metapictures, he knows very well that his procedure cannot prove their capacity to speak for themselves “without recourse to language, without resorting to ekphrasis.” And he explicitly declines to claim that his words are “free of special knowledge or interpretation or speculation.” (PT 38). His “faithful descriptions” of metapictures are in fact brilliantly interpretive. I am drawing here on Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 129–30. Leo Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Last Paintings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 6. “Art historians,” writes W. J. T. Mitchell, “may ‘know’ that the pictures they study are only material objects that have been marked with colors and

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21.

22.

23.

24.

Notes to pages 43–46

shapes, but they frequently talk and act as if pictures had will, consciousness, agency, and desire” (“What Do Pictures Really Want,” October 77 [1996]: 72–73). Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 6–7. See also Baxandall’s “The Language of Art History,” New Literary History 10 (1979): 457–59. Paradoxically, the creative activity of the beholder is most evident when his or her critical language highlights not the beholder’s response but the maker’s doing. “Where ego-words are formally and often substantially passive,” says Baxandall, “reporting something done by the work of art to the speaker as patient, causal words deal in inferred actions and agents. At the same time they involve the speaker in the activity of inferring . . .” (“Language” 461). “We perceive a picture,” writes Baxandall, “by a sequence of scanning. . . . One consequence of this is that no consecutive piece of verbal ostension, linear language, can match the pace and gait of seeing a picture as it can match the pace of a text. The read text is majestically progressive, the perception of a picture a rapid irregular darting about and around on a field” (“Language” 460). But literary critics commonly reconstruct our “progressive” experience of a text by defining its structure in spatial terms; see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1980): 545–46. A further objection is that Baxandall sounds even more rigidly categorical than Lessing, who finds “the consecutive nature of language” antithetical to “the coexistent nature of a body,” yet admits that the arbitrary signs of language can depict “the corporeal whole according to its parts” (88). In theory, there is no reason why language cannot represent viewing as faithfully as it represents reading—as Baxandall himself shows when he describes the viewing process. What can be said is that if the art critic opts to tell a coherent story about the making, the meaning, and the effect of a work of art, as art criticism typically does, the critic must reconstruct the viewing process. For more on this topic, see James Elkins, Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998). Alberti’s epithet for Narcissus ignores what Pliny the Elder wrote about painting centuries earlier: “there is universal agreement that it began by the outlining of a man’s shadow” (Natural History: A Selection, trans. John F. Healy [London: Penguin, 1991], 325). Pliny’s theory was depicted by the Scottish genre painter David Allan in Origin of Painting (1773). Deceptiveness was established as a criterion of versimilitude at least as early as the fourth century B.C.E., when—according to Pliny, Zeuxis’s painting of grapes deceived birds and Parrahasius’s painting of a curtain deceived Zeuxis himself (330). On the use of animals (including birds) to prove the decep-

Notes to pages 47–53

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

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tiveness of painted images, see Mitchell, “Illusion: Looking at Animals Looking,” in PT 329–44. “The Self,” writes Mitchell, “is that which sees, not only the truth in an illusion, but that it is to be seen as an illusion; the Other is the one taken in by the illusion, failing to see it (truly) as an illusion and mistakenly taking it for the reality it (truly) represents” (PT 333). Paul Barolsky, Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s Lives (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992), 10–11. See Svetlana Alpers, “Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960): 192. Had Vasari known that Raphael’s father died when the boy was 11, he might have written that Raphael “remembered” this grief. But as soon as he places his son with Perugino, Giovanni de’ Santi disappears from Vasari’s narrative of Raphael’s life. Alberti writes: “The istoria [narrative theme of a painting] will move the soul of the beholder when each man painted there clearly shows the movement of his own soul” (Spencer 77). Salon of 1765, no. 144, in Diderot on Art, vol. 1, trans. John Goodman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 125. When the cicerone dismisses Diderot’s praise of Vernet by saying that he “won’t abandon nature to run after an image of it,” Diderot says: “All right, but if you’d spent more time with the artist, perhaps he’d have taught you to see in nature what you don’t see now. How many things you’d find there that needed altering! How many of them his art would omit as they spoiled the overall effect and muddled the impression, and how many he’d draw together to double our enchantment!” (DoA 2:88–89). Likewise, reviewing Philippe-Jacques DeLoutherbourg’s Landscape with Figures and Cattle in 1763 (no. 154), he commends the artist’s management of the light, the trees, and the rocks, then invites his friend to lie down with him next to the animals and “admire the work of the creator” as they listen to the shepherd converse with the peasant woman; Salons 1.225–26, translation quoted from Fried, Absorption, 120. The “creator” here could be God or the artist. Opening his review of the Salon of 1765, Diderot writes: “I collected the verdicts of old men and the thoughts of children, the judgments of men of letters, the opinions of sophisticates, and the views of the people. . . . I’ve questioned [artists] and come to understand fine draughtsmanship and truth to nature; I’ve grasped the magic of light and shadow, become familiar with color, and developed a feeling for flesh” (DoA 1:3). In the Salon of 1765, the painting was called Young Girl Crying over a Dead Bird. For another example of Diderot’s precision in describing a painting, see his comments on Chardin’s Attributes of Music in the Salon of 1765: “Across the table covered with a reddish carpet, the painter has placed an array of

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37.

38.

39.

Notes to pages 53–55

various objects . . .: there’s a stand with music, in front of this stand an adjustable candle-holder; there’s a trumpet and hunting horn, the bell of the trumpet visible above the music stand; there are hautboys, a lute, scattered sheets of music, the neck of a violin with its bow, and upended books” (DoA 1:61–62). Emma Barker argues that Diderot’s reading of the picture insightfully shows how it “programmes the viewer’s response,” rousing on the one hand an erotic interest in the adult male viewer and—on the other hand—eliciting “a quasi-paternal concern” for the grief-stricken girl (Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 1). DoA 1:98–99. In a recent and formidably researched study, Mira Friedman argues that Diderot constructs his reading of Greuze’s painting from a number of iconographic clues: the image of a girl seen through a window is traditionally linked to love; the resting of head on hand signifies melancholy; the bouquet of flowers on the girl’s breast and the dead bird signify ephemerality and vanity; the image of the caged bird can variously signify the incarnate soul, the loss of virginity, or lust (“On Diderot’s Art Criticism,” http://www. tau.ac.il/arts/projects/PUB/assaph-art/assaph2/articles_assaph2/08 Friedman.pdf [accessed 27 November 2004], 117–23). Diderot has of course good reason to resist a strictly literal interpretation of Greuze’s title. Since Greuze himself elsewhere painted a grown woman filled with melancholy in front of a cracked mirror, he can no more believe that the girl is grieving only for the bird than that the woman is grieving only for the mirror (Salons 2:147). If the broken mirror of Greuze’s The Broken Mirror signifies the loss of virginity, as Friedman suggests (134), it may well be that Diderot is responding both to that connection and to similar iconographic cues in Greuze’s Girl. But Diderot himself furnishes absolutely no iconographic evidence for his analysis of the elements of the picture—let alone for the story he tells about it. Instead his novelistic narrative springs exclusively—so far as I can tell—from his study of the girl’s expression and pose. The painting, Fried writes, was designed “at once to elicit and to resist such attempts at consolation [as Diderot makes], and thereby to make perspicuous the depth and intensity of the young girl’s absorption in her grief” (Absorption 120). To buttress his argument about the true meaning of the girl’s grief, Diderot claims that her “robust” and “developed” arm and hand signify a girl of “eighteen or nineteen”—older than the head, which he considers “fifteen or sixteen” (DoA 1:99–100). If Diderot is right, the relative maturity of the hand and arm could subtly signal a story more mature than that of grief for a bird. But to me the slightly dimpled knuckles, which Diderot elsewhere notes (DoA 1:97), suggest a younger rather than an older girl. Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh (Oxford: Phaidon, 1980), #1124. See also J. B. de la Faille, Vincent van Gogh, trans. Prudence Montague-Pollock (New York: French & European Publications, 1939), where this picture is

Notes to pages 55–58

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41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

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numbered 255. In further references to van Gogh’s pictures I cite both catalogs, e.g., H #1124 / F #255. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–1936), trans. A. Hofstadter, in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns (New York: Random House, 1964), 662–63. Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh” (1968) in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 138—hereafter cited as “Still Life.” Citing this along with van Gogh’s other pictures of shoes (such as H 1234/F 332, H 1236/F 333), Schapiro notes that these pictures differ from van Gogh’s paintings of clogs (F 63, 64, H 1364/F 607), which he takes to be peasant footwear (“Still Life” 136). But absent other evidence, there is no reason why any van Gogh painting of shoes—as distinct from clogs—must be a painting of his own shoes. Elsewhere Schapiro tries to buttress his argument by suggesting that van Gogh’s painting of “his” shoes may have been suggested by Jean-François Millet’s drawing of his wooden sabots, reproduced in a book that “deeply impressed” van Gogh (“Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh” [1994] in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 145). But if, as Schapiro notes, the drawing of the sabots signified Millet’s “life-long commitment to the peasant life” (“FN” 146), how does Millet’s drawing lead van Gogh to represent himself with shoes supposedly coded as urban, the shoes of a man “of the town and city” (“Still Life” 138)? Derrida, Truth in Painting, 313. This assumption, writes Derrida, along with the assumption that shoes must belong to someone in particular and that feet cannot be detached from a body, “can’t stand up to the slightest question” (Truth 314). J. de Rotonchamp, Paul Gaugin 1848–1903, 2nd ed. (Paris: G. Cres, 1925), 33, qtd. “Still Life” 140–41. “It is not certain,” writes Schapiro, “which of the paintings with a single pair of shoes Gaugin had seen at Arles. . . . It does not matter” (“Still Life” 141). The low-cut shoes depicted in Pair of Old Shoes (August 1888), which Schapiro calls “evidently [van Gogh’s] own” (“Still Life” 136), are neither big nor hob-nailed nor much like the “shoes of the artist” allegedly depicted in the 1886 A Pair of Shoes. In “Further Notes,” Schapiro quotes testimony that while in Paris, van Gogh once bought a pair of “fancy” old shoes at the flea market, walked around in them on a rainy afternoon until they were spotted with mud, and then “copied [them] faithfully” (“FN” 145). Even if a single afternoon’s walk could make the shoes van Gogh’s “own” as a material sign of himself, these “fancy” shoes can hardly be the ones depicted in A Pair of Shoes. “Still Life,” 140, with quotation from Knut Hamsun, Hunger, trans. G. Egerton (New York: Knopf, 1941), 27. Though his paintings of shoes are classified as still life, shoes differ from the kind of objects most commonly identified with the genre: domestic artifacts

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50. 51.

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like plates, jugs, bowls, and pitchers. Norman Bryson argues that objects like these secrete a cultural memory reaching across the centuries and thus help to signify “an authentically civilized world” (Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990], 138). It might be fruitful to consider what adjustments this definition might require to accommodate shoes, which are made for individuals rather than familial or social groups and which don’t preserve stability of design across centuries. Also, the doubled over top of the shoe at left suggests flower petals. “FN” 146. Though Derrida’s Truth in Painting appeared in 1987, seven years before Schapiro’s second essay on van Gogh’s painting, Schapiro makes no reference to Derrida’s critique of his first essay. Here is a missing link in the chain of “Jamesian revisions” that Mary Ann Caws finds in the sequence of commentaries on A Pair of Shoes; see “Looking: Literature’s Other,” PMLA 119 (2004): 1303. “There is then in the work,” Schapiro continues, “an expression of the self in bringing to view an occasion of feeling that is unique in so far as it is engaged with the deviant and absorbing deformed subject that underlies the unique metaphoric paired shoes” (“FN” 147). As Hulsker notes, this point has become a commonplace in commentaries on A Pair of Shoes (H 244). Quoting a letter in which van Gogh explicitly links the stars to religion, Schapiro writes of this painting: “There is . . . in the coiling nebula and in the strangely luminous crescent—an anomalous complex of moon and sun and earth-shadow, locked in an eclipse—a possible unconscious reminiscence of the apocalyptic theme of the woman in pain of birth, girded with the sun and moon and crowned with the stars, whose newborn child is threatened by the dragon (Revelation 12, I ff.)” (Vincent van Gogh [New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1983], 45, emphasis mine). Here, I believe, the combination of precise description and tentative inference speaks for the painting credibly. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 9. For a fuller discussion of language and abstract art, see ch. 13 of this volume. I owe this final point to PT 215. Harold Rosenberg, “Defining Art,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 306. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” [1965], qtd. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 67. The quoted phrase comes from Robert Rosenblum, “Foreword,” in Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (1936; repr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 1. Krauss 237. Krauss is explaining what the modernists thought rather than making her own claim for such a progress in the arts. For her skeptical view of this claim, see her witty juxtaposition of Suzi Gablik’s Progress in Art with

Notes to pages 62–69

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the stone-sucking passage in Beckett’s Molloy and the would-be transcendently intellectual structures of Sol Lewitt (248–58). Krauss 237. Steinberg, Other Criteria 237. Steinburg, Other Criteria 265. More recently, Steinberg has openly questioned the notion that art historians should keep their own feelings hidden behind a mask of objectivity: “I admire the art historian who lets the ground of his private involvement show. Though we all hope to reach objectively valid conclusions, this purpose is not served by disguising the subjectivity of interest, method, and personal history which in fact conditions our work” (Other Criteria 309). Steinberg, Other Criteria 309. Steinberg elsewhere writes that “Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were the pabulum [!] of my teens” (Other Criteria 320). He has since told me personally that he tucks an allusion to Joyce into virtually everything he writes. In Joseph Strick’s film of Ulysses (1966), this moment is represented by a complete blackout of the screen—the cinematic counterpart of Johns’s Shade.

Chapter 3

1.

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This essay first appeared as “Alberti on Apelles: Word and Image in De Pictura,” in International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2, no. 31 (1996): 345–59. Copyright © 1996 Transaction Publishers. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 3. Except where noted otherwise, quotations from Alberti’s treatise are from this edition of the Latin original with facing English translation— hereafter cited as Grayson. Translations immediately following passages quoted from the Latin (and cited by paragraph number as well as page number in Grayson’s edition) are my own attempts to render it as accurately as possible, with no pretense to elegance. I quote the English translation of Spencer. David Rosand, “Ekphrasis and the Renaissance of Painting: Observations on Alberti’s Third Book,” in Florilegium Columbianum: Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Karl-Ludwig Selig and Robert Somerville (New York: Italica Press, 1987), 157. David Cast, The Calumny of Apelles: A Study in the Humanist Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 49, 56. Though Cast posits “some connection between” Alberti and Botticelli (41), it is not at all certain that either Mantegna or Botticelli took Alberti as his source. But along with some works by Raphael and his school, the compositions of Mantegna and Botticelli come closer to Alberti’s description than any other compositions

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Notes to pages 71–73

of the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries do; see Jean-Michel Massing, Du Texte à L’Image: La Calomnie d’Apelle et Son Iconographie (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1990), 82. Massing’s monograph on the Calumny complements two other studies that appeared shortly before it: Stanley Meltzoff, “The Calumny of Apelles by Botticelli,” in Botticelli, Signorelli, and Savonarola: Theologia poetica and painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano (Florence: Biblioteca di ‘Lettere Italiane,’ Studi e Testi XXXIII, 1987), 99–286; and Mark Jarzombek, On Leon Baptista Alberti. His Literary and Aesthetic Theories (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). Subsignare is a problematic term. Since its counterpart in the Italian version of Alberti’s treatise is not significare or subsignificare but disegnare, which commonly means “to draw,” subsignare may mean literally to make an underdrawing: to draw a figure that is overlaid with further drawing or pigment or both. But the final point of the passage is clear. The visible surface of the finished painting—the flesh and skin of the figure—should make intelligible what lies beneath them. The meaning of subsignare thus differs suggestively from the meaning of the modern term subsemiotic, which James Elkins applies to “nameless brushstrokes” that are illegible or in other words meaningless. (See my preface to this volume.) “By action the body talks . . . and nature has given us eyes . . . to indicate the feeling of the mind” (Cicero, De orat. 3.59.223, in De Oratore, vol. 2, ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942], 179). As Jacqueline Lichtenstein shows, Cicero believed that the dramatic expressivity of the body played a crucial part in moving the orator’s audience. See The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 74–77, 91–95. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 130–31. On Alberti’s use of Quintilian as a literary model, see D. R. Edward Wright, “Alberti’s De Pictura: Its Literary Structure and Purpose,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984): 52–71. De Inst. Orat 2.13.13. Cf. Cicero, on whom Alberti draws for the first part of his description: “The painter, after portraying Calchas as sad at the immolation of Iphigenia, Ulysses as even sadder, Menelaus in deep grief, sees the head of Agamemnon covered with a veil, since his absolute sorrow cannot be imitated with a brush” (Orator 22.74, qtd. Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, ed. Keith Aldrich, Philip Fehl, and Raina Fehl [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], 401–2). G. E. Lessing likewise uses the painting to show that expression should be kept in check. The concealment of Agamemnon’s face, he writes, “is a sacrifice that the artist has made to beauty; it is an example, not of how one pushes expression beyond the lim-

Notes to pages 74–77

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its of art, but how one should subject it to the first law of art, the law of beauty” (16–17). See for instance Cicero’s De inv. 1.7.9. The quoted phrase is from Rosand 154. It is hard to say precisely what Alberti means by inventio because, as Rosand notes, the word is “absent from his tripartite definition of painting” (155). Massing writes that for Alberti “Le terme inventio englobe le choix du sujet, mais également la définition de la composition (compositio)” (80). Yet if Alberti’s account of the Calumny exemplifies this concept of inventio, one wonders why he fails to mention such important compositional features as the position and posture of the judge. As Massing himself says, Alberti’s “recension” of Lucian’s text “est moins précise que l’original grec; elle n’indique pas la place du juge ni son attitude charactéristique” (78, 80). Lucian, vol. 1, trans. A. M. Harmon, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1913), 363. As Harmon notes (363n), the story is apocryphal, since Apelles flourished 332–329 B.C.E., over a hundred years before the conspiracy against Ptolomy occurred (in 220 B.C.E.). But there is no evidence that Alberti doubted the truth of the story. As Massing observes, Guarino’s approach to painting was essentially literary: his knowledge of art came chiefly from verbal versions of it (ekphrasis) and he was “plus sensible aux formules litteraire qu’au monde visuel, ce monde que Brunelleschi et Alberti ont commence a structurer au debut du siecle” (79). Again Massing is helpful, but he fails to note the remarkable irony that his own point helps us to see: Alberti’s account of a painting that for him exemplifies the silent eloquence of visual art comes from a literary source, from a man whose first allegiance was not to the world of paint but to “formules litteraire.” Guarino’s version of Lucian’s text, which is itself— as Massing notes—“plus qu’une simple description” (80), highlights the distinctively verbal art of interpretation. I quote Guarino from Baxandall, Giotto 154. Panofsky says that Alberti makes the change because he already imagines Truth “as a naked figure of the ‘Venus Pudica’ type”—the way artists such as Botticelli would represent her later. See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of The Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 158–59. On the other hand, Alberti may simply have mistaken the nominative pudibunda in Guarino’s manuscript for an accusative pudibundam modifying the veritatem just before it. See Richard Förster, “Die Verleumdung des Apelles in der Renaissance,” Jahrbuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen 8 (1887): 29–56, 89–113, and “Wiederherstellung antiker Gemalde durch Kunstler der Renaissance,” Jahrbuch 43 (1933): 126–36; N. Maraschio, “Aspetti del bilinguismo albertiano nel ‘De Pictura,’ ” Rinascimento 12 (1972): 183–228; Massing 56–57. On Alberti’s use of Lucian as a literary model throughout his writings, see the bibliography furnished by David Marsh in Dinner Pieces: A Translation of

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the Internecales, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 45 (Binghamton, NY: Renaissance Society of America, 1987), 222 n. 30. Louis Marin, “Towards a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds,” in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Sulieman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 305. Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 237–50; Marin, 295–96, 305–6. When Marin writes (following Beneveniste) that narrative enunciation excludes the present tense as well as all references to the speaker, the listener, and the circumstances under which the story is told, he is of course defining what might be called “pure” narrative and excluding from that such things as first-person and presenttense narratives, not to mention third-person narratives that may address the reader as “you.” Also, Marin’s claim that pictorial narrative makes no address to the viewer—contains no figure who speaks to us “as a representative of the sender of the message”—ignores the distinction between extroverted and introverted paintings—what Michael Fried has called theatricality and absorption. See Absorption. On this problematic conception of “factual” meaning, see ch. 1. Cast says that Alberti distinguishes between inventio, which denotes the subject matter of a speech or painting, and historia, which denotes a theme fully realized in paint: “if it was found in writers before Alberti to mean simply the subject or theme of a painting, he chose to extend its significance to include not only the theme but the expression of the theme” (Cast 36). Yet in the passage on Apelles’s Calumny, Alberti uses the two key terms almost interchangeably. After offering the description to show that invention by itself without a picture can please (sola inventio sine pictura delectet), he concludes by comparing the effect of this historia when recounted in words (quae . . . historia . . . dum recitatur) to the effect of the same historia in an actual painting (par. 53, Grayson 94–96). Cast 53–54. According to Vasari, who saw the picture at the Segni home in 1550, Fabio Segni attached to it a brief poem in which he glossed the painting as “a warning to the rulers of the earth to avoid false judgements” (qtd. Cast 29). For more on Pirckheimer’s knowledge of Lucian, see Niklas Holzberg, Willibald Pirckheimer: Griechischer Humanismus in Deutschland, Humanistische Bibliotek 1: Abhandlungen 41 (München: W. Fink, 1981), 298ff.

Chapter 4 This essay first appeared as “Text and Design in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience,” in Imagination on a Long Rein: English Literature Illustrated. Copyright © 1988 Jonas Verlag-Presse. Used by permission of the publisher.

Notes to pages 83–91

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In fairness to Frye, I must note that in an important essay published after Fearful Symmetry, he has analyzed the components of what he calls Blake’s “radical form of mixed art, for which there is hardly a parallel in the history of modern culture” (“Poetry and Design in William Blake,” in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966], 123). Jean Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 3–12. E. P. Thompson, “London,” in Interpreting Blake, ed. Michael Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 6–10. W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 3. “From the start,” writes Frye, “Blake avoids all devices that would tend to obscure either design or text at the expense of the other. . . . The words are left alone to do their own work” (“PD” 121). See for instance the two plates of “Night” (plates 20 and 21) in William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. Andrew Lincoln (Princeton: Blake Trust/Princeton Unversity Press, 1991). Plate numbers preceded by the initials SIE refer to numbered plates in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Unless otherwise indicated, all other plate numbers refer to the color plates in the middle of this book. David Erdman, The Illuminated Blake (Garden City, NY: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1974), 79. I quote all of Blake’s Songs by plate number from the Blake Trust edition (SIE) cited above. I cite Andrew Lincoln’s commentary on the plates in this edition as Lincoln. Though I lack the space to discuss the music of Blake’s Songs, the melodies that Blake himself extemporized for some of his early lyrics were notated by musically adept listeners (Hagstrum, William Blake 14), and a number of the Songs have been set to music by such contemporary composers as George Rochberg, Vaughan Williams, and Virgil Thomson. For extensive treatment of this topic, see B. H. Fairchild, Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1980). Ronald Paulson, “Blake’s Revolutionary Tiger,” in Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, ed. Richard Wendorf (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 181. I am drawing here on Hagstrum, William Blake 79; Hazard Adams, William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle: University of Washington, 1963), 210–17; and IB 77–78. See also Lincoln 179–81. The subtitle of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience is Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. “A Babe two days old,” he wrote, “does not, cannot smile—and innocence and the very truth of Nature must go together. Infancy is too holy a thing to

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Notes to pages 93–99

be ornamented” (Letter of 12 February 1818 to Charles Augustus Tulk in G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records, 2nd ed. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004], 337). Though Coleridge generally admired the Songs of Innocence, it is hard to see how he could find anything like a realistic “truth of Nature” in their otherworldliness. William Blake, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman with commentary by Harold Bloom (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 285. PPWB 401. For the image of Christ on the clouds, see the prophesy of the Apocalypse in Matthew 24:30–31: “Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see ‘the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven’ with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” According to “the religious,” Blake writes, “Good is the passive that obeys Reason[.] Evil is the active springing from Energy” (Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Blake’s plate 3], PPWB 34). Geoffrey Keynes, ed. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (New York & Oxford: Trianon, 1967), 149. In The Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke argues that painting cannot represent sublimity because it lacks the quintessentially verbal power to represent obscurity. Commenting on a passage from the book of Job, Burke contends that its sublimity is principally due to its obscurity, “to the terrible uncertainty of the thing described. . . . Is it not, wrapt up in the shades of its own incomprehensible darkness, more aweful, more striking, more terrible, than the liveliest description, than the clearest painting could possibly represent it? When painters have attempted to give us clear representations of these very fanciful and terribale ideas, they have I think almost always failed . . .” (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968], 63). It is scarcely possible to overstate the importance of outline in Blake’s theory of art. “The more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line,” he wrote, “the more perfect the work of art” (PPWB 540). “Line,” says Morris Eaces, “is the fundamental dynamic principle in Blake’s artistic theory” (William Blake’s Theory of Art [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982], 43).

Chapter 5 This essay was originally published as “Blake’s Oothoon: The Dilemmas of Marginality,” in Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 3–18. Copyright © 1991, Boston University Scholarly Publications. Used by permission of the publisher.

Notes to pages 101–102

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Thomas Vogler, “ ‘In Vain the Eloquent Tongue’: An Un-reading of VISIONS of the Daughters of Albion,” in Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method, ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 271–309. Vogler mounts a formidably learned attack on the widespread assumption that Oothoon speaks for Blake, and is partcularly illuminating on what the study of eighteenth-century discourses can tell us about the ambiguities of the poem. But he pays surprisingly little attention to what I shall examine closely: the discourse of Oothoon herself. Unless otherwise indicated, I cite all plate and line numbers from William Blake, The Early Illuminated Books, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Vicomi (Princeton: Princeton University Press/William Blake Trust, 1993). See David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 228. Though Blake’s debt to Wollstonecraft’s book has never been definitely proven, commentators generally agree that Blake drew on it for Oothoon’s account of the roles women must play; see Michael Ackland, “The Embattled Sexes: Blake’s Debt to Wollstonecraft in The Four Zoas,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16 (1982–1983): 172. But Oothoon could hardly serve to exemplify the kind of education Wollstonecraft proposes for both sexes, “wherein the understanding, as life advances, gives firmness to the first fair purposes of sensibility—till virtue, arising rather from the clear conviction of reason than the impulses of the heart, morality is made to rest on a rock against which the storms of passion vainly beat” (Vindication of the Rights of Women, ed. Carol H. Poston [New York: Norton, 1975], 114). Leopold Damrosch, Jr., Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 198; Michael G. Cooke, Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 109. Vogler compares Oothoon to “one of those libertines in Sade who ‘sets up the postures and directs the over-all progress of the erotic operation.’ ” (302). Vogler quotes from Roland Barthes’s Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976), 5. Susan Fox, “The Female as Metaphor in William Blake’s Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 512–13; see also Ann K. Mellor, “Blake’s Portrayal of Women,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16 (1982–1983): 148–55. Vogler 300–302. Vogler invokes Michael Foucault’s theory of limit and transgression as mutually dependent polarities: “Can the limit have a life of its own outside of the act that gloriously passes through it and negates it? . . . Does transgression not exhaust its nature when it crosses the limit, knowing no other life beyond this point in time? . . . Toward what is transgression unleashed in its movement of pure violence, if not that which imprisons it, toward the limit and the elements it contains? . . . To what void

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does it owe the unrestrained fulness of its being, if not that which it crosses in its violent act and which, as its destiny, it crosses out in the line it effaces?” (Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977], 34–35). See Ann Rosalind Jones, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L’Ecriture feminine,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robin R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997): 375; and Paula Treichler, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ ” in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 72. Christiane Makward, “To Be or Not to Be . . . A Feminist Speaker,” in The Future of Difference, eds. Alice Jardine and Hester Eisenstein (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1970), 96. “The Madwoman and Her Languages” (Benstock 50). Vogler finds Oothoon’s language rhetorical, and in terms of eighteenth-century discourse, he says, rhetoric is dangerously and irrationally feminine; it threatens male identity—in this case Theotormon’s identity—because its deceitfulness and over-adornment can subvert the reason (303–4). The extent of the danger may be debated. In terms of Foucauldian logic, we could say that the more rhetoric transgresses rational terms, the more it confirms their authority. But whether it genuinely threatens rational order or merely confirms its power to control and exclude, the rhetoric Vogler describes belongs to a categorically “feminine” pole that is contraposed to a masculine one. I contend that Oothoon challenges polarity itself. I quote Marriage by plate and line number(s) from PPWB. See Burke 110–13; and Mitchell, Iconology 129 n. 30. See IB 125–26. See Burke 60–64 (partly qtd. above in ch. 4, n. 18) and Mitchell, Iconology 124–27. I cite The Book of Thel by plate and line number(s) from PPWB. What Hillis Miller says of Wallace Stevens applies here as well: “The difficulty . . . is to decide, in the labyrinth of interchanges, which is the metaphor, which the literal origin” (The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Wallace Stevens [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985], 12). The indeterminacy of the flower/nymph may also symbolize the kinetic life of the poetic word itself, which—as Holderlin would later suggest—originates in the way flowers do. See Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 3–4. By contrast, Blake’s design for Thel’s encounter with the worm shows only an infant bedded in the lily at Thel’s feet—nothing of the worm (Thel, plate 4). Qtd. Jones 364. See also Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. The New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachus-

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etts Press, 1980), 36 n. 8. As long ago as 1984, Jane Gallop wrote that jouissance had become “a doctrinal concept” no longer disturbing to established culture (“Beyond the jouissance Principle,” Representations 7 (1984): 112; qtd. Vogler 308). But whether or not Oothoon’s obsession with copulation still disturbs any readers of Blake’s Visions, the concept of jouissance can surely help to explain her copulative way of seeing. 19. For the Erdman comment see IB 134. 20. In this sense Oothoon might be seen as a protodeconstructionist, a precursor of the late Jacques Derrida. As Gayatri Spivak notes in the preface to her translation of Derrida’s first major book, Derrida exposed the gap that invariably looms between the word and its referent, the sign and what it signifies. “The structure of the sign is determined by the trace or track of that other which is forever absent. The other is of course never to be found in its full being. As even such empirical events as answering a child’s question or consulting the dictionary proclaim, one sign leads to another and so on indefinitely” (preface to Derrida, Of Grammatology, xvii). 21. Compare this passage with Walt Whitman’s description of the repressed young woman hiding behind the window blinds of her grand house by the shore and watching young men swimming: The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair, Little streams pass’d all over their bodies. An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not know who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray.

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24.

25.

(Song of Myself, stanza 11, in Walt Whitman, The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. [Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1959], 32). Since Oothoon herself makes no reference to her child, we may infer—as Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant suggest—that Bromion simply claims she is pregnant in order to increase her market value (Blake’s Poetry and Designs [New York: Norton, 1979], 73n). Here of course Oothoon echoes Gen. 1:26, wherein God says, “Let us make man in our own image.” As Mitchell notes, a long tradition of commentary on this passage indicates that it refers not to the reproduction of any corporeal image but rather to a spiritual likeness (Iconology 31). Later she asks Theotormon, “How can I be defiled when I reflect thy image pure” (3.16)? This question too is ironic. Since Theotormon is himself defiled—black with jealousy, as we are told earlier (2.4)—Oothoon is actually challenging him to reflect on the would-be purity of his own image. Since the frontispiece-tailpiece puts the reader-viewer within the cave, looking out through an opening occupied by the three figures, Vogler argues

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27. 28.

29.

Notes to pages 110–116

that both we and Oothoon may be psychologically “cavern’d.” “If Oothoon is chained,” he writes, “or bound back to back with Bromion, how can she free us? . . . Can our vision of her vision free us to free her? . . . As we gaze on the painting . . . how can we be anything but voyeurs caverned in our culturally coded perceptions, viewing representations equally bound?” (288). Essentially, these rhetorical questions restate what Lockean empiricism has dictated to Oothoon herself. “They told me,” she says, “that I had five senses to inclose me up, / And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle” (2.31–32). She thus describes the way the eye of empiricism sees both her and us in the frontispiece-tailpiece, where the sun appears as “a bright shadow, like an eye / in the eastern cloud” (2.35–36) gazing on the figures and the viewer. But Oothoon’s field of vision is not defined or “cavern’d” by what can be seen from any one vantage point; though graphically represented as bound to Bromion and facing down at the earth, she envisions the eagle lifting “his golden beak to the pure east” (2.25–26). It is by liberating her vision from the cave that she seeks to liberate ours. (On the cave of empiricism, which of course recalls the myth of the cave in book 6 of Plato’s Republic, see also Blake’s Marriage, plate 14: “man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”) Visions 4.15–22. Here I translate Bromion’s questions—which I take to be rhetorical—into the answers they invite. D. G. Gillham argues that Bromion is a sensationalist who denies real identity to the knower and believes (with Hume) that the mind is merely the sum of what it perceives. See William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 205–12. Alicia Ostriker, “Desire Gratified and Ungratified: William Blake and Sexuality,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16 (1982–1983): 158. Vogler notes that these words recur in the Four Zoas, where Enitharmon uses them as part of a seductively “delusive” song that prompts Los to seize her evanescent form in vain (Four Zoas 34.80, 92 in PPWB 317–18; Vogler 279). But Blake started work on the Four Zoas at least three years after writing Visions, and while Enitharmon admits (before singing her song) her “fierce jealousy” of Los and her determination to deceive him (Four Zoas 34.41–45), Oothoon denounces both jealousy (7.12–29) and deceit (6.7–10) before affirming the holiness of all living things. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, 60.

Chapter 6

1. 2.

This essay first appeared as “Painting Against Poetry,” in Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 7 (1991): 275–99. Used by permission. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), 186–87. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert Wark (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1959), 43, 57.

Notes to pages 117–121

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

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Jerrold Ziff, “‘Backgrounds, Introduction of Architecture, and Landscape’: A Lecture by J. M. W. Turner,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 26 (1963): 133, 135. Qtd. Jerrold Ziff, “J. M. W. Turner on Poetry and Painting,” Studies in Romanticism 3 (1964): 197. Jerrold Ziff, “Turner’s First Poetic Quotations: an Examination of Intentions.” Turner Studies 2, no. 1 (1982): 2. Jerrold Ziff, “William Turner’s Last Four Paintings,” Artforum 2, no. 10 (1964): 25. It also derives, of course, from the renaissance tradition of interart disputation epitomized by Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone. See Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 66–70; Claire Farago, A Critical Interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Paragone,” with a new edition of the text in the “Codex Urbinas” (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), and James V. Mirollo, “Sibling Rivalry in the Arts Family: The Case of Poetry vs. Painting in the Italian Renaissance,” in So Rich a Tapestry: The Sister Arts and Cultural Studies, ed. Ann Hurley and Kate Greenspan (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press; 1995), 29–71. Graham Reynolds, Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 142. Collected Correspondence of J. M. W. Turner, ed. John Gage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 86–87. Farington’s Diary of 8 May 1799, qtd. A. J. Finberg, The Life of J. M. W. Turner, R.A., 2nd ed. rev. by Hilda F. Finberg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 59. Andrew Wilton, J. M. W. Turner: His Art and Life (Seacaucus, NJ: Poplar Books, 1979), 87 and 105 n. 2. Kathleen Nicholson, “Turner’s ‘Appulia in Search of Appulus’ and the Dialectics of Landscape Tradition,” Burlington Magazine 120 (1980): 679–84. On Turner’s use of Ripa, see William Chubb, “Minerva Medica and the Tall Tree,” Turner Studies 1, no. 2 (1981): 30. James Thomson, “Spring,” lines 185–212 in The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1908). Following Turner, I have deleted Thomson’s comma after “sky” (line 188) and I have pluralized Thomson’s “mountain” (line 192). All further quotations of Thomson come from this edition. Ralph Cohen, The Unfolding of the Seasons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 92 and John Milton, Paradise Lost 11.879–98 in The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965). Bryson notes that Turner “altered the whole gamut of tonalities, so that the obvious contrasts observable by any amateur were played down, while the subtler distinctions of tonality, which one had to be Turner to see, were

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

Notes to pages 121–128

enhanced. There was expansion of tonality’s whole middle range. . .” (“Enhancement and Displacement in Turner,” Huntington Library Quarterly 49 [1986]: 53–54). British Museum Add. Ms. 46151, K, f.23. Turner quotes from Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (London: Dodsley, 1744), lines 137–38. Qtd. John Gage, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (New York: Praeger, 1969), 202. On the date of this picture see Martin Butlin, “Turner’s Late Unfinished Oils: Some New Evidence for their Late Date,” Turner Studies 1, no. 2 (1981): 43–45. Complete Works, 76n. For a full discussion of Hazlitt’s comment, see James Heffernan, The Re-Creation of Landscape (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), 163–69. B&J, text 236. Ruskin’s account of Slavers was “a favorite piece of declamation by William Morris during his Oxford days.” See Jack Lindsay, ed. The Sunset Ship: The Poems of J. M. W. Turner (Lowestoft, Suffolk: Scorpion Press, 1966), 26. From “Amyntor and Theodora,” by David Mallet (1705–1765), qtd. JMWT 328. Wilton reproduces the 1799 Caernarvon Castle (private collection) in JMWT 53. B&J, text 10. Lynn Matteson has suggested that Turner may be imitating Thomas Gray’s The Bard (1757), which he specifically evokes in the lines he wrote for the Caernarvon Castle that he exhibited in 1800 (“And now on Arvon’s haughty tow’rs / The Bard the song of pity pours”); see “The Poetics and Politics of Alpine Passage: Turner’s Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps,” Art Bulletin 62 (1980): 385–98, and also Andrew Wilton, Painting and Poetry: Turner’s ‘Verse Book’ and his Work of 1804–1812 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), 22, 115. But while Gray’s poem voices the rage of the last Welsh poet doomed to extinction by the army of Edward I, Turner’s lines express a somber pity. Duncaid 1.111–14. Quoted by book and line number(s) from Alexander Pope, Poetry and Prose, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969). Qtd. Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime (London: British Museum Publications, 1980), 140. The sketch is The Artist’s Studio, c.1808 (British Museum, Turner Bequest, CXXI B). Turner actually published—in his own fashion—three samples of his verse in 1809. Besides the verses he wrote for The Garreteer’s Petition, which appeared at the Royal Academy, he also wrote lines for two other oils exhibited at his own gallery: eight pentameter quatrains for Thomson’s Aeolian Harp, and three pentameter couplets for London. See Wilton, Painting and Poetry, 134–35.

Notes to pages 128–133

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27. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Metamorphoses of the Vortex: Hogarth, Turner, and Blake,” in Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, ed. Richard Wendorf (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 146. 28. Lawrence Gowing, Turner: Imagination and Reality (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 23. 29. Qtd. B&J, text 275. The deceit is twofold. By visiting the tomb, Aeneas and Dido together pretend that she will keep her vow of fidelity to Sychaeus, and at the same time, Aeneas deceives Dido about his intention to abandon her—an act that will lead Dido to the fiery end prefigured by the setting sun. 30. Turner’s title may derive from John Langhorne’s Visions of Fancy, which includes the phrase “Fallacious Hope”; see Jerrold Ziff, “John Langhorne and Turner’s ‘Fallacies of Hope,’ ” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 340–42. But in any case, as Wilton argues (Painting and Poetry, 62–63), Turner’s title plainly reflects the well-established eighteenth-century notion that insofar as hope focuses on material ends, it may delude and deceive. Behind The Fallacies of Hope stands not only Langhorne’s poem but also works such as Samuel Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes. 31. Karl Kroeber, “Experience as History: Shelley’s Venice, Turner’s Carthage,” ELH 41 (1974): 325. 32. He visited David’s studio during his sojourn in Paris in 1802; see Gage 100. 33. The human and more precisely sexual significance of the classical architectural orders was a theme Turner drew from his reading of Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (first published 1624) and developed in verses of 1805–1810 as well as in lecture notes of 1811, where he speaks of “Ionice softness Dorice simplicity and Corninthian magnificence.” The verses describe the Ionic capital as a “meretricious courtezan” and the Corinthian as “mature and Chaste” but liable to corruption Like the damsel out of place Who fears the thought of bursting lace Her full blown beauties float around Acanthus leaves and budding horns abound With great display above below Placed any where . . . to make a show

(See Wilton, Painting and Poetry, 30–33, 150). 34. On the sunset cliché see Jerrold Ziff, “Turner as Defender of the Art between 1810–20,” Turner Studies 8, no. 2 (1988): 22. On Turner’s “ensanguin’d,” see Ruskin: “The scarlet of the clouds was [Turner’s] symbol of destruction. In his mind it was the color of blood. So he used it in the Fall of Carthage. Note his own written words. . .” (Modern Painters V, qtd. B&J, text 100). 35. Capua, writes Livy, was “destructive of military discipline, through allurements of every kind of pleasure.” See The History of Rome, vol. 2, tr. George Baker (London: Strahan, 1797), 147, cited by Carl Woodring, Nature into

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36.

37. 38. 39.

Notes to pages 135–144

Art: Cultural Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 72–74. Turner owned Robert Anderson’s thirteen-volume anthology, British Poets (1795), which includes (in vol. 6) excerpts from Dryden’s translation of the Metamorphoses; see Wilton, Painting and Poetry, 113. But the story of Medea (from book 7 of the poem) is not among these excerpts, and I do not know which translation he used. See Cecilia Powell, “‘Infuriate in the Wreck of Hope’: Turner’s ‘Vision of Medea,’ ” Turner Studies 2, no. 1 (1982): 15. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 160. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983–1989), 65–67.

Chapter 7

1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

This essay first appeared as “Wordsworth, Constable, and the Poetics of Chiaroscuro,” in Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 5 (1989): 260–77. Used by permission. JCC 96. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: Or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, ed. Ernest De Selincourt. 2nd ed. rev. by Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), book 13 line 441—hereafter cited as Prelude followed by book and line numbers. I quote from the 1805 version. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “To William Wordsworth,” 3, 49–50, in Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (1912; repr. London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 403–8. See Leslie 173; see also JCC 3:49. Michael Rosenthal, Constable: The Painter and his Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 218. John Constable, John Constable's Discourses, ed. R. S. Beckett (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970), 60. Andrew Wilton, Constable’s “English Landscape Scenery” (London: British Museum Publication, 1979), 7. The term was similarly defined in 1807 by the portraitist John Opie, who said that chiaroscuro includes “the proper division and distribution of the whole surface of a picture into bright or dark masses” (OED). Since Constable’s use of the term to designate a natural phenomenon long anticipates the date of the earliest example of such usage cited by the OED (1878), Constable may have originated this application of the term. JCC 2:32. In his Memoirs, Leslie transcribes this sentence, “There is room enough for a natural painter” (15, emphasis in original). Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick that he wrote “The Thorn” after seeing a thorn—by which he means the spiny tree of that name—on a stormy day.

Notes to pages 144–147

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

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He then asked himself, “Cannot I by some invention do as much to make this Thorn permanently an impressive object as the storm has made it to my eyes at this moment?” (PW 2:511). Variant forms of “impressive” appear frequently in poems such as “Tintern Abbey,” where “the steep and lofty cliffs / . . . on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion” (PW 2:259, lines 5–7). John Constable, John Constable: Further Documents and Correspondence, ed. Leslie Parris, Conal Shields, and Ian Fleming-Williams (London: Tate Gallery, 1975), 21. S. T. Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 2, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957–2002), 2797 (emphasis added). Malcolm Cormack kindly informs me that Coleridge should have used “hue” in place of “tone.” On the other hand, the fact that we can barely discern a mother and child here complicates the meaning of the picture, as I argue in chapter 1 (see pp. 30–31). For more on the formalist tendencies in Constable’s work, see Rosenthal’s discussion of his “retreat to art from nature” (147) and his “representational ambiguity” (189). Karl Kroeber, British Romantic Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 40. The picture Wordsworth writes about, which I have not seen and have so far been unable to identify, was evidently given to Wordsworth by Beaumont sometime before 28 August 1811, when Wordsworth sent him the sonnet. Wordsworth’s recorded comments on the poem, together with the letter to Beaumont that accompanied it, indicate that the picture represents two hills (Cloud Hill and Bredon Hill) near Coleorton, Beaumont’s country estate (PW 3:420), and that its details include the smoke and the band of travelers mentioned in the poem; but “the rest were added,” Wordsworth says, “in order to place the thoughts in a clear point of view, and for the sake of variety” (The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 2, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. rev. by Chester L. Shaver, Mary Moorman and Alan Hill [Oxford: Clarendon 1967–1992], 506–7). “Midway in the journey of our life / I came to myself in a dark wood, / for the straight way was lost” (Dante, Inferno, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander [New York: Doubleday, 2000], canto 1, lines 1–3). Wordsworth certainly knew the The Divine Comedy and thought highly of Dante in his youth, though his admiration seems to have waned thereafter; see M. L. Peacock, Jr., ed. Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), 240. It is also worth noting that Wordsworth clearly distinguished between the depiction of smoke in a painting and the effect of real smoke on one. Though he praised Beaumont for capturing in his picture the “thin smoke” in the scene it represents, he took pains to preserve the picture itself from chimney smoke (Letters 2:507)—

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18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Notes to pages 148–152

just as Constable struggled to keep his own paintings free of the slime, soot, blacking, “cart grease, tar, and snuff of candle” venerated by connoisseurs and picture dealers (Leslie 97, 227, 240). PW 4:258–60. Beaumont painted more than one version of the stormwhipped castle, but the painting that suggested the poem is probably the one reproduced here as plate 8. See Jonathan Wordsworth, Michael Jaye, and Robert Woof, William Wordsworth and the Age of Romanticism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), cat. #264, 231. Not surprisingly, both of the Wordsworth poems that Constable quoted concern paintings by Beaumont, who introduced him to Wordsworth’s poetry; see Mark Reed, “Constable, Wordsworth, and Beaumont: A New Constable Letter in Evidence,” Art Bulletin 64 (1982): 481. It seems more than likely that Beaumont drew Constable’s attention to the poems prompted by his own pictures. Reproduced in Ronald Paulson, Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), plate 15. The mezzotint derives from the oil painting of Weymouth Bay that Constable exhibited in 1819 and that is now in the Louvre. In turn, the Louvre version is based on the oil sketch that is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum and that was made by Constable on his honeymoon. See Graham Reynolds, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), text, items 19.9 and 19.10. JCC 4:395. Here again he echoes Milton—this time with a twist. “In me,” says Milton’s Adam, “all posterity / Stands cursed. Fair patrimony / That I must leave ye, sons; O were I able / To waste it all myself, and leave ye none!” (Paradise Lost 10.817–20). But while Adam wishes he could waste the curse of mortality that he must bequeathe to his descendants, Constable bemoans the curse of a book that has led him to waste his children’s “sacred property.” Likewise, speaking of The Lock and The Cornfield, he wrote: “Now for some wise purpose is every bit of sunshine clouded over in me. I can never now look at these two flattering testimonies of the result of my singularly marked life . . . without the most painful emotions” (JCC 3:122). Letter of 2 October 1832 (JCC 4:382). Writing to Lucas five weeks later about what he now called A Ruin, he grimly puns: “Pray,” he asks, “bring me some sort of a proof of my Ruin that I may contemplate my fate—God help us, for no doubt our mutual ruin is at hand” (JCC 4:388). “Moral, and picturesque ideas,” wrote the highly influential William Gilpin in 1786, “do not always coincide” (Observations . . . on . . . the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland, vol. 2 [London: R. Blamire, 1786], 44). Gilpin’s way of looking at ruins can be gauged from his response to Tintern Abbey, which he found “splendid” in everything but its tidiness. “More picturesque it would certainly have been,” he wrote, “if the area, unadorned, had been left with all its rough fragments scattered around”

Notes to pages 153–160

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

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(Observations on the River Wye, 2nd ed. [London, 1789], 49–50). Constable owned both of the works just cited; see JC: FDC 31. David Hill, Constable’s English Landscape Scenery (Salem, NH: Salem House, 1985), 99. Here Constable echoes a passage from the Prospectus to Wordsworth’s poem, The Recluse. Since the prospectus was printed at the end of the preface to The Excursion (published 1814), Constable could have seen it or learned about it when he heard Beaumont read the poem in 1823. In his preview of the philosophic epic that he never completed, Wordsworth pledges to reveal “Paradise, and groves / Elysian, Fortunate Fields,” as “a simple produce of the common day” (PW 5:41). When first exhibited at the Royal Academy, the full title of the version now at Yale (fig. 7.2) was Hadleigh Castle—The Mouth of the Thames—morning after a stormy night (LP, text 199). The full title of the mezzotint based on this picture is The Nore, Hadleigh Castle—Morning after a Stormy Night (Hill 109). The degree of importance that Constable attached to the time of day may be judged from his reaction to the remark that his Englefield House (ca. 1833) was “only a picture of a house.” Constable said it was “a picture of a summer morning, including a house” (Leslie 221). The whole passage from “Summer” (found in CPW) may be read as a set of variations on Milton’s invocation to light in Paradise Lost 3:1–12, which Thomson plainly echoes (esp. in lines 175–78) and which of course Constable knew. Conal Shields and Leslie Parris, John Constable 1776–1837, 2nd ed. (London: Tate Gallery, 1973), 17.

Chapter 8

1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

This essay first appeared as “Self-Representation in Byron and Turner,” in Poetics Today 10 (1989): 207–14. Copyright © 1989 Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher. Richard Wendorf’s book is The Elements of Life: Biography and PortraitPainting in Stuart and Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Mordechai Omer, Turner and the Poets: Engravings and Watercolours from His Later Period (London: Greater London Council, 1975), 8. John Ruskin, “English Landscape” [1883], in The Lamp of Beauty, ed. Joan Evans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 170. Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage [1812–1818], canto 3, line 252, in The Oxford Authors: Byron, ed. Jerome J. McGann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 112. I cite prose from this volume as Byron followed by the page number(s). A. G. H. Bachrach, “The Field of Waterloo and Beyond,” Turner Studies 1, no. 2 (1981): 9. These things Turner learned not from Byron but from the

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Notes to pages 160–162

chapter on Waterloo in the 1817 edition of Charles Campbell’s Guide to Belgium and Holland, which Turner used on his tour of the battlefield and which also furnished him with the stanza he quoted from CHP, namely 3.28. See also B&J, text 105. 6. I describe the picture in its present state. In Exhibited Works of J. M. W. Turner, R. A. (London, 1901), C. F. Bell reported that the picture showed “the Pilgrim emerging from a grotto on the extreme left” (118), and the tiny figure of what is presumably the pilgrim can indeed be seen in the lower left corner of engravings made after the picture; see W. G. Rawlinson, The Engraved Work of J. M. W. Turner, R. A., vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1913), 412. 7. Michael Kitson, “Turner and Claude,” Turner Studies 2, no. 2 (1983): 2–15. 8. The elusiveness of the Byronic elements here becomes still more evident when we compare Turner’s picture to Charles Eastlake’s Lord Byron’s Dream (ex. 1829), now in the Tate Gallery, which may have led Turner to the subject of his own picture (B&J, text 194). Eastlake plainly illustrates the passage he quotes from “The Dream,” an autobiographical poem that Byron wrote in July 1816, when he was also writing canto 3 of CHP. In the passage Eastlake quotes (lines 114–22), a Byronic wanderer “in fiery climes” lies resting amid fallen columns, with camels grazing by him, steeds tethered near a fountain, and a man in flowing garments keeping watch for his sleeping fellow tribesmen. Eastlake puts all of these elements into his picture, with the sleeping wanderer prominently situated at the lower right. But in Turner’s picture, as I have already noted, the wandering Harold is conspicuously absent. 9. To see the difficulty of separating the two, consider CHP 3:29, which is supposedly part of what Harold “inly [says]” (CHP 3:53)—or in other words thinks—as he meditates first on the battlefield of Waterloo and then on the beauties and ruins of the valley of the Rhine. Writing about those who died at Waterloo in stanza 29, the narrator selects one of them for special commendation partly because, he says, “I did his sire some wrong.” The one thus selected is Byron’s cousin, the Honorable Frederick Howard, whose father was pilloried for his “paralytic puling” in Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (line 726). So the “I” in this stanza can refer only to the poet, who in canto 4 of CHP finally abandons all efforts to distinguish himself from Harold. 10. Reynolds’s self-portraits are all reproduced in Derek Hudson, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Personal Study (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1958). 11. J. M. W. Turner, “Royal Academy Lecture V” (1818), British Museum Add. Ms. 46151 H, ff. 41–42. For a different transcription of this not very legible passage, see Gage 209. On the portraits of Turner by himself and others, see R. J. B. Walker, “The Portraits of J. M. W. Turner: A Check List,” Turner Studies 3, no. 1 (1983): 21–32. Of Turner’s guardedness, his good friend George Jones recalled, “He was often derided on his close and careful habits

Notes to pages 162–170

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

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and always acquiesced to, and enjoyed the joke; he never appeared displeased but when he discovered an unbecoming desire to pry into his private affairs” (“Recollections of J. M. W. Turner,” in Turner, Collected Correspondence 1. Manuel Gasser, Self-Portraits from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Day, trans. Angus Malcolm (New York: Appleton-Century, 1963), 151. Louis A. Renza, “Poe’s Secret Autobiography,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 58–89. “Awaking with a start” is a dangling modifier made to seem grammatically dependent on “waves” rather than the speaker, “I.” But the grammatical confusion is poetically effective. It suggests the speaker’s psychic confusion as he suddenly awakens to see the waters heaving as if they too had suddenly awakened. Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 33. “To John Hobhouse” prefatory note to CHP 4, in Byron 145–46. Near the end of canto 4, the narrator and the pilgrim view the Mediterranean once more: The midland ocean breaks on him and me, And from the Alban Mount we now behold Our friend of youth, that ocean, which when we Beheld it last by Calpe’s rock unfold These waves, we followed on till the dark Euxine roll’d Upon the blue Symplegades. . . . (CHP 4.175–76)

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

Here the referent of “we” changes in mid-sentence. The pilgrim standing with the narrator turns into Hobhouse, who sailed with Byron in his youth from “Calpe’s rock” (Gibraltar, isle of the Homeric nymph Calpyso) to the “dark Euxine” (the Black Sea) at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses, 275. His life, says his first biographer, “was mysterious, and nothing seemed so much to please him as to try and puzzle you, or to make you think so; for if he began to explain, or tell you anything, he was sure to break off in the middle, look very mysterious, nod, and wink his eye, saying to himself, ‘Make that out if you can’” (Walter Thornbury, The Life of J. M. W. Turner, R. A., 2d ed. [London: Chatto & Windus, 1877], 229).. Lillian Schwartz, “Leonardo’s Mona Lisa,” Art and Antiques (January 1987): 50–54. For an extensive answer to this question see Leo Steinberg, “The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1980): 411–54. Just as poems about poets inevitably refer in some way to their authors, every painting of an artist potentially signifies the artist who painted it, and sometimes the self-signification becomes explicit. In William Rush and His Model (1877), Thomas Eakins depicts an early nineteenth-century Philadelphia

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23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

Notes to pages 170–178

sculptor working with a nude female model who is shown from the rear. Since it is unlikely that Rush’s model ever posed in the nude, John Hollander suggests that the Rush of Eakins’s picture partly signifies Eakins himself, who in 1877 was agitating for the right to use nudes in his art classes. The autobiographical import of the picture plainly emerges in a later version (1908), where Eakins replaces the figure of Rush with a self-portrait. See John Hollander, “Words on Pictures: Ekphrasis,” Art and Antiques (March 1984): 88–89. John Gage regards Rome from the Vatican as “an autobiographical statement” comparable to Courbet’s Atelier du peintre (1855). Noting that Turner’s picture of Raphael arranging his works was painted and exhibited at the very time when Turner was rebuilding his own gallery, Gage argues that Turner identifies himself with Raphael as the universal artist of history and landscape and as a colorist of “exquisite” mastery (93–95). Painted in 1515–1516 and brought to England about 1623, Raphael’s cartoons were well known through engravings and copies at the Royal Academy; Joshua Reynolds saluted Paul Preaching for its special emphasis on the “principal figure”—Paul himself—and for its explicitness in portraying him: “It is a rule that Raffaelle observed (and indeed ought never to be dispensed with) in a principal figure, to shew both hands, that it should never be a question, what is become of the other hand” (J. Reynolds, Discourse 156, 220). Ironically, Turner turns Raphael’s Paul into a figure who exemplifies precisely the opposite of what Reynolds commended it for. Jerrold Ziff, “Turner and Poussin,” Burlington Magazine 105 (1963): 315. JMWT 300–330; and B&J, cat. # 91, 102, 137, 149, 150, 347, 403. Though Ruskin noted that Turner followed Pope, Pope’s translation makes no reference to Ulysses’s upraised arms, only to “this arm” with which Ulysses yearns to slay the Cyclops, and to the “hands uplifted” of the Cyclops himself. See B&J, text 184, and Alexander Pope, trans. The Odyssey of Homer, Books 1–13 [1725–1726], ed. Maynard Mack et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 9.555–648, esp. lines 611–16. More than once Turner compared his pictures to ships. See Jack Lindsay, Turner: The Man and His Art (London: Granada, 1985), 3. In 1797 Turner copied Claude-Joseph Vernet’s Storm with Shipwreck (1754), reproduced—along with Turner’s copy—in JMWT 47. I have no evidence that Turner ever saw Horace Vernet’s picture, but since it made a considerable stir at the Paris Salon of 1822, Turner probably heard about it or least about the feat that it depicts. See B&J, text 247 and Steven Z. Levine, “Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling,” New Literary History 16, no. 2 (1985): 386. Mitchell, “Metamorphoses of the Vortex,” 146. What follows here amplifies my earlier discussion of this painting (pp. 128–29). B&J, text, 253. For more on Turner’s response to Goethe’s Farbenlehre (1809), which appeared as Theory of Colours (trans. Charles Eastlake) in

Notes to pages 178–180

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1840, see Gage 111 and James A. W. Heffernan, “The English Romantic Perception of Color,” in Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities, ed. Karl Kroeber and William Walling (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 141–43. 31. See Gage 187; Mitchell, “Metamorphoses” 149; and Numbers 21:9 and John 3:14-15, where Christ identifies his to-be-crucified self with the serpent of Numbers.

Chapter 9

1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

This essay first appeared as “Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film,” in Critical Inquiry 24 (1997): 135–58. Used by permission. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Going Too Far with the Sister Arts,” in Space, Time, Image, Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. James A. W. Heffernan (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 8–9. Andre Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 52. I cite Bazin precisely because he treated sound as an asset to film, unlike critics such as Rudolph Arnheim, who thought sound fundamentally alien to the art of manipulating silent images for expressive effect (Arnheim, “Film as Art” [1933], FTC 275–77). More recently, Stanley Cavell has argued that while movies can effectively break silence with speech, their power lies chiefly in their images, which convey “the unsayable by showing experience beyond the reach of words” (The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged ed. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979], 152). Long before Bazin asserted that “the sound image” is “far less flexible than the visible image” (55), Roman Jakobson had argued that sound should be used asynchronously and contrapuntally with images in film so as to combat the effect of mere reproduction (“Is the Cinema in Decline? ” [1933], in Russian Formalist Film Theory, ed. Herbert Eagle [Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1981], 161–66; cited in Noel Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988], 99). Christian Metz, “Film Language” (1968), FTC 173. Kaja Silverman, “The Subject of Semiotics” (1983), FTC 199–200. Percy Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry” (1821), in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 483. The namelessness of the being created by Victor Frankenstein makes the very act of designating him problematic. Victor calls him a “miserable monster” from the moment he is animated—simply because of the way he appears (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, ed. Maurice Hindle [New York: Penguin, 1992], 160). Shorn of Victor’s instant prejudice

348

Notes to pages 180–181

against him—a prejudice shared by everyone else who sees him—he is properly Victor’s “creature,” which is what he calls himself (F 96). Yet when he sees his own reflection for the first time, he concludes that he is “in reality [a] monster” (F 110). Taking this cue, I call him variously “monster” or “creature”—depending on the context. 9. Following common practice, I refer to the 1931 Universal Frankenstein as James Whale’s version because he directed it. But the genesis of this film exemplifies the way filmmaking disperses the notion of authorship—a topic I cannot adequately explore in this chapter. Based on an Americanized version of Peggy Webling’s 1930 London stage play of the novel, the screenplay for the 1931 Frankenstein was credited to Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh but shaped in part by three other writers, and at least one more— the young John Huston, no less—helped with the prologue. See Wheeler Winston Dixon, “The Films of Frankenstein,” in Approaches to Teaching Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990), 169, and David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Norton, 1993), 138. Even if we hold Whale chiefly responsible for translating a multi-authored screenplay into the film we call his, the crucial scene in which the creature unintentionally drowns Maria—a scene that for one critic “utterly” shapes the meaning of the film as a whole (Dixon 171)—embodies not so much Whale’s intentions as those of Boris Karloff. See also the opening of section 3 below. 10. My source for the total number of Frankenstein films, including independent and privately distributed versions, is Steven Earl Forry, Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 127. For annotated lists of the more notable versions, see Alan G. Barbour, “The Frankenstein Films” in Radu Florescu, In Search of Frankenstein (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975), 189–211; Leonard Wolf, “A Selected Frankenstein Filmography,” in Kenneth Branagh, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with Screen-play by Steph Lady and Frank Darabound, ed. Diana Landau (New York: Newmarket Press, 1994), 186–88. I must add that since this article was originally published (1997), Frankenstein has begotten yet more films. In the year 2004 alone, USA Films and Universal each released its own version of the novel, and two other adaptations were broadcast on television. Hallmark Entertainment’s Miniseries version (called simply Frankenstein), scripted by Mark Kruger and directed by Kevin O’Connor, follows the novel closely—with due attention to such often-slighted characters as Walton (played by Donald Sutherland) and Waldman (played by William Hurt), but the handsome, chiseled features of Luke Goss (who plays the creature) make it hard to see why he should repel everyone who looks at him. 11. Bette London, “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity,” PMLA 108 (1993): 263.

Notes to pages 181–184

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12. Peter Brooks, “What is a Monster?” in Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 218. 13. “He was ugly [while unfinished],” says Victor; “but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived” (F 57). 14. Brooks 210, emphasis mine. Quoting (and translating) from Jacques Lacan, Le Transfert, vol. 8 of Le Séminaire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991), 415, Brooks writes: “What is finally desired by the speaker is ‘the desirer in the other,’ that is, that the speaking subject himself be ‘called to as desirable’ ” (210). 15. Like the creature, Porphyro addresses a sleeping lady with feelings of profound ambivalence, eager to awaken her—“And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!”—yet petrified when he succeeds: “Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone: / Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone” (The Eve of St. Agnes, lines 276, 296–97 in John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982], 237). 16. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 19. 17. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concept of Psycho-Analysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 72, qtd. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 129–30. Lacan’s terms are le regard and l’oieul (the eye), which Silverman respectively calls “gaze” and “look.” 18. Carol Clover likewise argues that in slasher films such as Hell Night (1981), the Final Girl—a would-be victim who survives to take revenge on a murderous male—finally assumes the gaze, “making a spectacle of the killer and a spectator of herself” (“Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Representations 20 [1987]: 219). 19. Elaine Scarry, “On Vivacity: The Difference between Daydreaming and Imagining-Under-Authorial-Instruction,” Representations 52 (1995): 1–26. 20. On this point see Ellen Esrock, The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 183. 21. In film theory as in Mary Shelley’s novel, the idea of artificial reproduction has sometimes excited alarm. In 1933 Rudolph Arnheim wrote that films were already approaching the “dangerous goal” of manufacturing “an image . . . which is astoundingly like some natural object” (“Film as Art,” FTC 50). Declining to tell Walton just how he made the monster, Victor likewise calls such information “dangerous” (F 52). 22. Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1988), 102–7. 23. William Nestrick, “Coming to Life: Frankenstein and the Nature of Film Narrative,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 294–95.

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Notes to pages 184–186

24. The story of this development is complicated by the fact that some pioneer filmmakers such as Louis Lumière (inventor of the Cinematographe) actually resisted “the Frankensteinian dream . . . of analogical representation, the mythology of victory over death” even as their inventions helped to realize this dream (Noel Burch, Life to Those Shadows, ed. and trans. Ben Brewster [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 20). As Siegfried Kracauer long ago noted, Lumière aimed to reproduce the world while Méliès sought to recreate it (“Theory of Film,” FTC 11–17). 25. See Skal 131–33 and Donna Haraway, who explicitly exempts the cyborg— a composite of animal and machine—from the creature’s heterosexual longing for organic or Edenic wholeness. See Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 151. 26. While the novel often asks us to imagine the monster’s looking, as I have already noted, the only description of his looks appears in Victor’s account of his newly animated form (F 56). Not even when the monster is terrified by his own reflection in a pool (F 110) do we get any further instructions on how to visualize him. 27. The first part of Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947), however, is shot this way, giving us only the voice of Humphrey Bogart played over shots of what his character—an escaped convict—sees. 28. In chapter 5, for instance, David recalls how he drifted in and out of sleep during breakfast with the flute-playing Master of Salem House, hearing by turns the actual strains of the flute and the imagined sounds of the coach he would soon be taking. But the drawing shows him simply as an insensate object—a boy sitting asleep on a chair (David Copperfield, ed. E. K. Brown. [New York: Modern Library, 1950], 79–81). My thanks to Grant Cerny for this example. 29. According to Seymour Chatman, one of the many differences between fiction and film is that while fictional narratives may operate from a generalized perspective, film is always shot from a specific point of view—the viewpoint of the camera (“What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t [And Vice Versa],” FTC 411–12). But the paradoxical corollary of this axiom is that film versions of a novel told from the viewpoint of a single character are never consistently shot from that viewpoint. 30. On the other hand, the frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, which depicts the moment of the monster’s first stirring, shows a well muscled male nude whose only serious abnormalities—apart from his size—are an elongated right hand and the sprouting of his head from his right shoulder (reproduced as the frontispiece to The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990]). Staged versions of the novel include at least one beautiful monster. In the Royal Ballet version, which premiered in London on 26 July 1985, the monster was represented by an Ariel-like figure costumed and made up wholly in white. (My thanks to Linda Hughes for this information.)

Notes to pages 186–190

351

31. I quote Moers from “Female Gothic” in Levine and Knoepflmacher, 81. Mary Shelley called Frankenstein her “hideous progeny” (F 10), and as critics often remind us, she had already known before writing it the anguish of begetting children doomed to early death; her first child, born prematurely in February 1815, lived just two weeks. In itself this hardly explains why Victor is horrified by the very “animation” of the creature (F 57) and dismayed by its stubborn survival. But Victor’s “labour” in his “filthy workshop of creation” (F 52, 53) may well signify the replusiveness of child-bearing. Moers calls Frankenstein “a horror story of teenage motherhood” (81). 32. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, 14; Joshua Reynolds, Discourses, 45. 33. Marie-Helene Huet suggests that the creature is monstrous because Frankenstein’s art is purely reproductive or (in Plato’s term) eikastiken, “without interpretation, without proportion or the necessary betrayal of the model that makes the phantastiken object unfaithful to nature but at the same time aesthetically beautiful” (Monstrous Imagination [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993], 132). Yet even if we construe Victor’s act of assembling actual features as the reproduction of a human body, the creature is an explicitly enlarged—and thus artfully transformed—version of the model: “about eight feet in height, and proportionably large” (F 52, emphasis mine). 34. Whale ordered him to raise the girl over his head and brutally cast her down; Karloff wanted to “pick her up gently and put her in the water exactly as he had done to the flower” (qtd. Donald F. Glut, The Frankenstein Catalog [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1984], 112–13). 35. Mary Poovey, “My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism,” PMLA 95 (1980): 337. 36. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (London: Penguin, 1985), 354. 37. Michael Hollington, “Dickens, ‘Phiz,’ and Physiognomy,” in Imagination on a Long Rein: English Literature Illustrated, ed. Joachim Moller (Marburg, Germany: Jonas Verlag, 1988), 125. 38. Mary Shelley, Journals, vol. 1, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 26n. 39. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 123–24. 40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingsdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), 30. 41. Leonard Wolf, Annotated Dracula (New York: Crown, 1975), 300. Daniel Pick aptly notes that Dracula should not be lumped with Frankenstein under the undifferentiated heading of “gothic” because the later novel reflects a major issue of the late nineteenth century. It expresses, he argues, “a vision of the bio-medical degeneration of the race in general and the metropolitan population in particular” (“‘Terrors of the Night’: Dracula and

352

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

Notes to pages 191–194

‘Degeneration’ in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Critical Quarterly 30, no. 4 [1988]: 75). Jeffrey Dahmer killed seventeen young men and boys, had sex with some of their dead bodies, skinned and dismembered them, tried to lobotomize at least one of them, spray-painted their skulls, preserved body parts in formaldehyde so he could look at them while masturbating, kept human hearts in his freezer, and ate body parts so as to reanimate the dead within him. He was murdered in 1994 while serving a life sentence. See Edward Walsh, “Murderer Jeffrey Dahmer Beaten to Death in Prison” [Lebanon, NH, USA] Valley News, 29 November 1994: A1+. On the construing of monsters as portents in the sixteenth century, see Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 93–124. Percy had read the Symposium in Greek by 7 December 1817, when he cites the speech of Agathon in a letter to Godwin (Letters, vol. 1, ed. Betty T. Bennett [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980], 574). He translated the whole dialogue in July 1818 and it is from this translation, which Mary promptly transcribed (Journals 1:220–22), that I quote the Symposium below. William Veeder treats Plato as one of several sources for Mary’s views on androgyny (Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], 23–24), a topic central to Aristophanes’ definition of love in the dialogue and to Mary’s critique of the isolated, self-absorbed masculine ego. Whether or not Mary knew anything about the Symposium before publishing the first edition of Frankenstein in 1818, she uses Plato’s Diotima in the frame-story for the first version of the next novel she wrote, Mathilda; see Andrea Henderson, Romantic Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 125. In any case, the ugliness of Socrates sheds an important and generally neglected light on the kind of monstrosity the creature embodies. Plato, Symposium #215; Percy Shelley, “The Banquet of Plato,” in Prose, vol. 7 of Complete Works, ed. Roger Ingen and Walter E. Peck (London: Ernest Benn, 1930), 210–11. Betsy Hearne, Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 34–35. The earliest known literary version of the myth appeared in France in 1740, and in 1811 (when Mary was 14) an English poem attributed to Charles Lamb and titled Beauty and the Beast: or a Rough Outside with a Gentle Heart appeared as a children’s book (Hearne 2, 34). Since Lamb first met William Godwin in 1805 and since Mary Shelley saw him socially at least twice in the winter and spring of 1817, when she was writing Frankenstein (Journals 1:164, 172), it seems more than possible that she knew something of this book. Reminding us that Victor sees Elizabeth at various times as his “cousin” and “sister” (F 35, 146) and that she dissolves into his dead mother in his dream (F 57), James Twitchell argues that Victor unconsciously uses the creature

Notes to pages 196–200

48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

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to punish Elizabeth for exciting Victor’s incestuous desires; for Twitchell the novel as a whole allegorizes “the male impulses and anxieties about incest as well as the female impulses and anxieties about birthing” (“Frankenstein and the Anatomy of Horror,” Georgia Review 37 [1983]: 50–53, 60). Twitchell’s argument is plausible as far as it goes, but does not—in my judgment— reckon sufficiently with Victor’s misogyny and the creature’s desires. He thus reverses the process by which, according to Linda Williams, a woman is punished for looking at a monster by being made to see his freakishness as a reflection of her own (“When the Woman Looks,” in Re-Vision, ed. M. A. Doane, P. Mellencamp, and L. Williams [Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1984], 85). Strikingly enough, a real mirror is used to generate a wholly different effect in the final scenes of the Edison Frankenstein of 1910. When the creature enters Victor’s bedroom on his wedding night, he stands before a large mirror and then gradually fades away, leaving only his reflected image to be seen by Victor when he enters, as if the mirror now showed Victor his own monstrosity. But gradually the creature’s image gives way to that of Victor in his young manhood—a sign that he has purged himself of monstrosity and can now marry Elizabeth. (For more on the Edison version, which has been recently rediscovered, see Dixon 166–69.) Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990), 118. Both Victor and the creature link themselves to Milton’s Satan. The creature identifies himself with “the fallen angel” (F 97) and deliberately echoes his words (“Evil thenceforth became my good,” F 212, cf. PL 4.110); Victor compares himself to “the archangel who aspired to omnipotence” (F 204). While rape can of course lead to impregnation, it can also serve as a crime against generation. During the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Bosnian Serbs systematically raped Muslim women in order to make them unmarriageable and thus to extinguish the Muslim population. Noel Carroll, “Disgust or Fascination: A Response to Susan Feagin,” Philosophical Studies 65 (1992): 85; emphasis mine. William S. Walsh, A Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1893), 1052. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919), in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. supervised by Joan Rivière (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 375. Freud quotes Schelling from Daniel Sanders’s Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprach (1860). “Traditionally,” writes Barbara Creed, “the male body has been viewed as norm; the female body a deviation” (“Male Masochism in the Horror Film,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae [London: Routledge, 1993], 118). Aristotle argued that monstrosity began with female deviation “from the generic type.” See Generation of Animals [section 4.3], trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 401–3, and Huet 3. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1, 4. Mitchell has recently

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Notes to pages 201–206

argued that insofar as pictures can be personified, they embody a conflict between the desire to master the beholder and a feminine sense of abjection; pictures and women, he writes, seek a power “manifested as lack, not as possession” (“What Do Pictures,” 76).

Chapter 10

1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

This essay first appeared as “Love, Death, and Grotesquerie: Beardsley’s Illustrations of Wilde’s Salomé and Pope’s Rape of the Lock,” in Book Illustrated: Text, Image, and Culture, 1770–1930, ed. Catherine J. Golden (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2000): 195–240. Used by permission. Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 30. Lorraine Kooistra, The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1995), 3. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 376. Mark Samuel Lasner, A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley (Boston: Thomas G. Boss, 1995), 12. Kenneth Clark, The Best of Aubrey Beardsley (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 70. All of Beardsley’s illustrations for Salomé are photographed from Oscar Wilde, Salomé (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894). My thanks to Dartmouth College Library for the photographs. Oscar Wilde, Salomé, lines 1067–68, in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Salomé, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 65–91. All further references to the play are to this edition of the English translation. It was made by Lord Alfred Douglas with considerable help from Wilde and possibly others (Lasner 32). Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 52. As D. J. Gordon notes, most of Beardsley’s drawings originate from works of literature (“Aubrey Beardsley at the V. & A.,” Encounter 27, no. 4 [1966], 14). He read voraciously, thought of himself as a man of letters even after making his name as an artist, wrote an unfinished novel (Under the Hill), and planned to write a good deal more, including—at the time of his death—a critical introduction to Ben Jonson’s Volpone (Snodgrass 105). In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), published just the year before Wilde wrote his play, the satanically seductive Alec d’Urberville likewise accuses the guileless Tess of having tempted him away from his life as a preacher: “And why then have you tempted me? I was firm as a man could be till I saw those eyes and that mouth again—surely there never was such a maddening mouth since Eve’s. . . . You temptress, Tess; you damned

Notes to pages 206–210

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

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witch of Babylon. . . .” Even the would-be virtuous Angel finds Tess serpentine—before their fateful wedding night. Though he takes her to be a virgin during their courtship at Talbothays, he sees at one point “the red interior of her [yawning] mouth as if it had been a snake’s” (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Scott Elledge, 3rd ed. [New York: Norton, 1991], 254, 133). Ewa Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex. The Grotesque: Origins, Iconography, Techniques (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 196. Ellmann 42. In addition, Beardsley’s voracious reading must have included the poetry of Keats, since he attended the unveiling of a bust of the poet at Hampstead in the summer of 1894. (Haldane MacFall, Aubrey Beardsley: The Man and His Work [London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1928], 17.) Like Keats, Beardsley died of tuberculosis at the age of 25, living just two months longer than the poet had. From his student days at Oxford, Wilde admired the Pre-Raphaelites (Ellmann 31) and staunchly defended them in his very first American lecture of 9 January 1881 (Ellmann 164–65). On Beardsley’s admiration for the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward BurneJones, see Ian Fletcher, Aubrey Beardsley (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 5, 30–31. On wavy hair, note Milton’s account of Eve’s “disheveled” tresses “in wanton ringlets waved / As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied / Subjection, but required with gentle sway” (Paradise Lost 4.305–308). On the morning after Eve is tempted by Satan in a dream, Adam awakens to find her “With tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek / As through unquiet rest” (5.9–10). But while John rejects both sensual love and Salomé consistently, Julien rejects Mathilde only after having an affair with her and then emotionally returning to his original mistress, Mme de Renal. Stendhal, Red and Black, trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1969), 243–44. James Cuno, ed. French Caricature and the French Revolution (Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Wight Art Gallery University of California, 1988), 194 and plates 89–90. Neil Horty, “Medusa’s Head,” in The End of the Line: Essays on Psycho-analysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 162. In “The Dancer’s Reward,” which shows Salome receiving John’s head on a platter and gripping his forelock, his hair is wavy and black—just like that of Salomé herself in “Salome with St. John’s Head.” Kuryluk 3, 7. She also suggests that the gradual ossification of Christianity in the twentieth century makes the end of the nineteenth century “the last period in European history when the sacrosanct mattered enough to provoke sacrilegious attacks” (6). In light of the stir generated by recent works such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (a crucifix immersed in what the artist claims to be his own urine), Kuryluk overstates her point.

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Notes to pages 210–214

20. After deleting the genitalia at the request of his publisher, Beardsley composed a bit of verse: Because one figure was undressed This little drawing was suppressed. It was unkind, but never mind, Perhaps it was for the best. (qtd. Lasner 32)

21. See Snodgrass 57–58; Karl Beckson, “The Artist as Transcendental Phallus: Aubrey Beardsley and the Ritual of Defense,” in Reconsidering Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Robert Langenfeld (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 214; and Milly Heyd, Aubrey Beardsley: Symbol, Mask, and Self-Irony (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 160–61. 22. William Rothenstein, Men and Manners (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), 183–84. On the other hand, Beardsley’s picture of Salomé with the head of John had prompted Wilde to commission from him the illustrations for the English edition of the play (Ellmann 376) and to send him (in March 1893, even before the picture was published) a copy of the Paris edition inscribed, “For Aubrey: for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance. Oscar.” From the copy in the Sterling Library, University of London, qtd. Rupert Hart-Davis, ed. The Letters of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 348n. 23. See the review of criticism ranging from Arthur Symons’s Aubrey Beardsley (1898) to Malcolm Easton’s Aubrey and the Dying Lady (1972) in Fletcher 57–59. 24. Elliot L. Gilbert, “‘Tumult of Images’: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome,” Victorian Studies 26 (1983): 133–59; Linda Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 94–95; Fletcher 64. 25. Robert Schweik, “Congruous Incongruities: The Wilde-Beardsley ‘Collaboration,’ ” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 37 (1994): 9–26. 26. As Chris Snodgrass notes, the perfectly unmarked body of Salomé in this picture shows no sign of having been crushed to death by the shields of Herod’s soldiers, which is what is said to happen at the end of the play (147, Salomé 1070–71). 27. Snodgrass finds in the original (expurgated) version of The Toilette “a surfeit of cunningly disguised sexual ‘perversions’ ”; four of its five figures, he says, are covertly masturbating (65). While only two of the five could actually be masturbating (the hands of the other three are all otherwise engaged), the picture does mingle domestic implements with signs of lust and potential castration: the phallic spout of the teapot pointing at Salomé, the bladelike shelf pointing directly to the naked genitals of the boy at right (Snodgrass 65). 28. All of Beardsley’s illustrations of Pope’s Rape of the Lock are photographed from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock: Embroidered with Nine Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley (London: L. Smithers, 1896). My thanks to Dartmouth College Library for the photographs.

Notes to pages 216–223

357

29. Unless otherwise noted, the italics in lines quoted from The Rape are in the original. 30. Robert Halsband, The Rape of the Lock and its Illustrations 1714–1896 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980)91. 31. Qtd Halsband 86; see also R. H. Super, ed. English Literature and Irish Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 180. 32. Elizabeth G. Gitter, “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination,” PMLA 99 (1984): 943. 33. Elvan Kintner, ed. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 1845–46 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 288–89, qtd. Gitter 943. 34. In fact, since a trace of semen on a dress owned by Monica Lewinsky played a leading part in the 1998 impeachment of U.S. President Bill Clinton, the staining of a brocade might itself signify dishonor. 35. Linda Zatlin construes Belinda’s final cry as evidence that she finds the Baron impotent because of his “inability to cut her pubic hairs” (51, 189). But in my view, we may far more plausibly infer that Belinda unwittingly refers to being quite literally raped or ravished, sexually “sieze[d].” 36. Overstating her point, however, Zatlin sees the whole configuration of candle and altar in Beardsley’s illustration as a giant phallus, with the books forming a scrotum and the flames pubic hair (51). 37. Even apart from the allusions to Milton’s Satan in this passage, any portrayal of a “sleepwatching” man—a man gazing on a sleeping woman— implies the possibility of rape. See Steinburg, Other Criteria, 99, and Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 47, 76–77. 38. In Beardsley’s frontispiece for Aristophanes’s Lysistrata (1896), which appeared just a few months after the illustrated Rape, an openly sensual Lysistrata stands fingering her crotch (she is ostensibly “Shielding Her Coynte”) and tickling a huge erect phallus with a leafy branch. Like Belinda in The Billet Doux, she wears a heavily ruffled dressing gown and bares one breast. 39. On the lasciviousness of Beardsley’s dwarves, see Zatlin 188–89. Since Beardsley does not show Clarissa handing the scissors to the Baron, as she does in the poem (3.127–30), the dwarf is something like the Baron’s coconspirator. 40. “The dwarf’s smile is a knowing one,” writes Heyd; “he is aware of what is about to happen, since the illustration does not show the actual cutting off of the lock. The dwarf is conscious of the danger lurking in this seemingly idyllic situation, but he stands aside and does not take an active part in the action” (81–82). Noting the similarities between Beardsley’s illustrations for The Rake and Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode (such as the use of screens, coffee drinkers, and overturned chairs), Heyd reads Beardsley’s dwarf as a variant of the black boy in plate 4 of Hogarth’s Marriage, where the black boy

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42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

Notes to pages 227–232

kneeling at lower right grins and points to the horns of his toy Actaeon as a sign that his lady (in line with his pointing finger) will soon be cuckolding her lord (81). Halsband 106. As Heyd notes (81), there is also ample precedent for Beardsley’s overturned chair in Hogarth—in pictures such as plate 2 of Marriage à la Mode (1745) and plate 6 of The Rake’s Progress (1735); the latter shows not only a downed chair but a kneeling Tom Rakewell on the floor beside it, anticipating the kneeling Baron. While far less violently aggressive than Du Guernier’s Belinda, she is decidedly more hostile than in Thomas Stothard’s watercolor of 1798, where Belinda looks down sweetly on the Baron as he kneels ardently before her. Halsband 109. Pope’s consciousness of his physical deformity was likewise matched by Beardsley’s. Though Beardsley’s height (approximately 5’10”) placed him well above the stature of a dwarf, he was extremely thin, with a “hatchet face” fringed by tortoiseshell-colored hair hanging to the eyebrows (Lord Edward Cecil, Max: A Biography [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964], 95.) “Beardsley,” writes Heyd, “lived with the conviction that a physical deformation clung to him like a black silhouette and his self-image underwent parallel reductive transformations. The flight from physical limitations and the capacity to rise above them is expressed in his art, which is drawn to metamorphosis” (83). Snodgrass 163, citing Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 21; and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 51. Snodgrass 164, drawing on Victor Hugo. “Preface to Cromwell,” in Dramas, vol. 3 of The Works of Victor Hugo (Boston: Little Brown, 1909), 8–23. She examines “five dialogic relations” that I have space only to enumerate here: quotation, impression, parody, answering, and cross-dressing (249).

Chapter 11

1.

This essay first appeared as “Hockney Remakes Hogarth: A Gay Rake Progresses to America,” in Art on Paper 4.2 (Nov.–Dec. 1999): 45–61. Used by permission. David Hockney, David Hockney by David Hockney, ed. Nikos Stangos (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), 91–92. To the best of my knowledge, the only extended discussion of Hockney’s series is that of Richard Martin in “David Hockney and William Hogarth: The Rake Redivivus (Twice) in the Twentieth Century,” Arts Magazine 62 (1987): 28–33. A recent essay on twentieth-century responses to Hogarth’s series barely mentions Hockney; see Verena Bertmaring, “Twentieth-Century Interpretations of A Rake’s Progress: The Inspiration of a ‘Modern Moral Subject,’ ” in A Rake’s Progress

Notes to pages 232–237

2.

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4. 5. 6.

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From Hogarth to Hockney, ed. Robin Simon and Christopher Woodward (London: Apollo Magazine, 1997), 31–33. The head (Robin Darwin) actually wanted twenty-four etchings, but given the technical demands of the job and Hockney’s reluctance to pad out his story, they settled on sixteen (DHDH 92). The book was published by the Lion and Unicorn Press of the Royal College in 1967. The paintings on which the engravings are based, now in Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, are titled as follows on the frames: 1. The Heir, 2. The Levee, 3. The Orgy, 4. The Arrest, 5. The Marriage, 6. The Gaming House, 7. The Prison, 8. The Mad House. Soane bought the paintings in 1802 from the estate of William Beckford, and after his death in 1837 they joined the many works of art that Soane left—along with his house and the bulk of his fortune—to establish the Soane Museum. In so doing, he virtually disinherited his sole surviving son George, who—ironically enough—combined some of the worst features of Tom Rakewell and the feckless husband of Marriage a la Mode: he did nothing constructive, got himself imprisoned at one point for fraud, and he and his wife lived chronically in debt because of their lavish spending. See Dorothy Stroud, Sir John Soane: Architect, 2nd ed. (London: Giles de la Mare, 1984), 86, 98. Since in a recent interview Hockney recalls his great pleasure at seeing the paintings of A Rake’s Progress, and since he probably saw them (in Sir John Soane’s Museum) before making his own series, Christopher Woodward has suggested to me that Hockney’s remarks refer to the paintings rather than the engravings. But Hockney begins the interview by saying, “I first came across William Hogarth’s paintings and engravings when I was at Bradford Grammar School” (“Eye Witness,” Interview with Geordie Grieg. The Sunday Times [of London], 23 February 1997; emphasis mine). Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd ed. (London: The Print Room, 1989), 92. Ronald Paulson, High Art and Low 1732–1750, vol. 2 of Hogarth, 2nd. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 23. Though the sixteen plates are numbered 1, 1A, 2, 2A . . . rather than 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . the letter “A” signifies no special relation between a plate so marked and the one just before it. This peculiar way of numbering seems to have been Hockney’s way of making his 16 etchings correspond to Hogarth’s eight. Also, just as the plates of Hogarth’s series were inscribed with verses by Dr. John Hoadley, Hockney’s etchings were published in 1967 with a poem by David Posner in A Rake’s Progress: A Poem in Five Sections; David Hockney, A Rake’s Progress (London: Lion & Unicorn Press, 1967). Posner’s blankverse poem on early 1960s America is a curious pendant to Hockney’s work; though it begins by deftly describing plate 1 of Hogarth’s series, it has few specifics on Hockney’s series.

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12.

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Notes to pages 237–242

Imprisoned for debt, Richard Hogarth—the artist’s father—tried to extricate himself by devising a “New Scheme” for relieving the national debt and sending the scheme in 1710 to Robert Harley, then Chancellor of the Exchequer (HGW 97). As for the dramatic conception of his pictures, the subscription ticket for The Rake’s Progress was a picture called The Laughing (or Pleased) Audience (1733), and near the end of his life Hogarth wrote of his pictures generally: “Subjects I consider’d as writers do[;] my Picture was my Stage and men and women my actors who were by Mean[s] of certain Actions and expres[sions] to Exhibit a dumb shew.” See “Autobiographical Notes” (ca. 1760); qtd. HAL 19. As Theresa Newman and Ray Watkinson observe, “Brown did not emigrate, and The Last of England is among the great painted fictions of the nineteenth century. But the picture is the most nakedly autobiographical of his works—at once a tribute to England and a measure of the artist’s disenchantment when, unrecognised and penniless, he contemplated a new life in India” (Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle [London: Chatto & Windus, 1991], 3). According to Henry Geldzahler, Hockney’s admiration for Bacon reinforced his commitment “to maintaining the human figure as the fittest subject for a painter” (Introduction to HGW 10). As Hockney said some years later, “What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something I felt hadn’t been propagandized, especially among students as a subject: homosexuality. I felt it should be done. Nobody else would use that as a subject” (DHDH 68. “The reverse of spiritual autobiography,” Paulson writes, “Hogarth’s ‘progress’ shows the closing off of awareness—or the replacement of rebirth—with mere mimicry, imitation, and masking” (HAL 21). Whitman’s lines tell us that public recognition (he was praised in the nation’s capital) gives him less pleasure than private companionship (sleeping with his male lover). Hockney’s work repeatedly reflects the influence of literature. Besides using the poetry of Whitman, he alludes to Blake’s “The Tyger” in four of his 1960 paintings; in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (1961) he uses lines by C. P. Cavafy, whose poems he went on to illustrate in 1966; his first Los Angeles painting, Building, Pershing Square (1963), was suggested by a passage in John Rechy’s novel, City of Night (1963); and in 1976–1977 his reading of Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Blue Guitar” led him to ten drawings and a series of twenty etchings. He won first prize in the “Graven Image” exhibition held at the R. B. A. Galleries in 1961. Marco Livingstone, David Hockney, rev. ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 37. Though Lieberman’s rejection of Hockney’s asking price obliquely recalls the rejection of the play written by Hogarth’s rake (see above, p. 237),

Notes to pages 242–248

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

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Hockney’s etching fetches a bid. What Lieberman actually bought from Hockney, however, was not Myself and My Heroes (on the table in fig. 11.3) but two other etchings done in 1961: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall and Kaisarion with all His Beauty (HGW 91; Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney [London: Chatto & Windus, 1988], 41). David Solkin has suggested to me that Receiving the Inheritance is anti-Semitic, and he may be right. Since there is no evidence that Lieberman tried to cut Hockney’s asking price for either of these etchings, since Hockney was in fact delighted that Lieberman bought them, and since (according to reliable testimony), Lieberman was not bald at the time, we may infer at least that the etching treats him unfairly. Designed to recall Hogarth’s peculating steward, his black-bearded figure in the etching may also evoke the anti-Semitic stereotype of the hard-bargaining Jewish merchant. Hockney, DHDH 92; Webb 42. “Altogether,” Hockney writes, “I made about thirty-five plates of which nineteen were abandoned, thus leaving sixteen in the published set” (Hockney and Posner front matter [n.p.]). The bottom half of the showcloth hung for Punch’s Glory (over a stage on the right of the central building) shows Punch wheeling his wife Joan into the open jaws of a dragon, which Paulson construes as a “hell mouth” (HGW 87). Alternatively, since the rake is sent down a flight of stairs in plate 6A and reaches the bottom in plate 8, the snake’s head of plate 7A may well come from the board game called “Snakes and Ladders,” where a token that lands on the head of a snake in its winding, boustrophedonic journey to the top of the board must drop back down to the snake’s tail. Hockney loved seeing men in drag, and for the Royal College Christmas revue in 1961 he donned a blonde wig and a woman’s dress and sang—to thunderous applause—“I’m just a girl who can’t say no” (Webb 45). As Robert Hughes notes, Demuth’s painting was prompted by “William Carlos Williams’s image of a firetruck roaring down a Manhattan street, with its engine-company number glittering on its red flank under the streetlamps” (Shock of the New, 330; see p. 331 for a reproduction of the painting.) My thanks to William Cook for alerting me to this connection. David Hockney, That’s the Way I See It, ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 31. Hockney also says that he found one-point perspective “terribly constricting” (qtd. William Hardie, “Novelties: 1990s,” in David Hockney, ed. Paul Melia [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995], 136). For Hockney’s own comments on theatrical illusion in his pictures, see DHDH 12, 89–90. On the Auden-Stravinsky Rake, see Ronald Paulson, “Auden, Hogarth, and The Rake’s Progress,” Raritan (1996): 22–51. According to Henry Geldzahler, “it is only in the years since 1968 that Hockney has moved forward in his own thinking and back into tradition by introducing accurate perspective, trompe-l’oeil and illusionistic space into

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26. 27.

28.

Notes to pages 248–251

much of his work” (Hockney, David Hocney 20). But even in the early sixties, to judge from A Rake’s Progress, Hockney complicates modernist flatness with glimpses of illusionistic depth. Since a stone is 14 pounds, this phrase recalls a comic-strip ad about a “98 pound weakling” widely circulated in mid-twentieth century American comic books and magazines. Ostensibly, the point of the comic-strip story of the weakling’s progress is that Charles Atlas’s body-building course enables him to win a girl as well as to punch the bully on the beach—the guy kicking sand in his face in the first panel. But Hockney’s way of alluding to the weakling’s story elicits its gay subtext. In casting himself as the admirer of the muscular male runners, he implicitly links them to the sort of male bodies regularly shown in Physique—a Los Angeles magazine that was aimed at homosexual men and that Hockney began to collect in the early sixties. See Paul Melia, “Showers, Pools, and Power,” in his David Hockney, 54. David Bindman, Hogarth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 62. Son of Tros or of another Trojan prince, Ganymede was so handsome that Zeus took the form of an eagle in order to abduct him (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.155ff.). When Hogarth’s plate 4, for instance, shows the rake emerging from his sedan chair, the only part of his right arm visible beneath the left-oriented profile of his face is his outstretched right hand. See Hockney’s own account of cubism in TWI 16–31. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 227–28. See also Freud’s “Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 22 (London: Hogarth, 1953–73), and Rose’s chapter on the Lacanian Imaginary, a salutary effort to reconnect Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary to “the optical language of projection and identification” as distinct from the “drive toward fabrication” with which it has lately and loosely been associated (Rose 169–97). Because we do not see their faces, I thought at first that the figures were shown from behind. But Andrew Edmunds has drawn my attention to several details that indicate the figures are facing us: the little visor on each of their caps (which likewise appears over the face of the Hockney figure in Myself and My Heroes), the delineation of their ears, and the rounded little triangles at the bottom of each figure, which probably represent the fronts rather than the heels of their shoes.

Chapter 12 This essay was originally published as “Peter Milton’s Turn: An American Printmaker Marks the End of a Millennium,” in Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 16 (April–June 2000): 177–96. Used by permission.

Notes to pages 253–258

1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

363

Ann Landi, “Prints: Black and White and Layered All Over,” Art News 96, no. 5 (1997): 107. Peter Milton, Complete Etchings 1960–1976, ed. Kneeland McNulty (Boston: Impressions Workshop, 1977), 12–13. Whether or not Cezanne is the high priest of pictoral organicism, in literature and literary theory it is generally treated as a concept that S. T. Coleridge derived from A. W. Schlegel. Coleridge defined poetry as “the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” and adopted Schlegel’s distinction between “mechanic” and “organic” form, where the first is superimposed and the second innate, “develop[ing] itself from within” (Biographia Literaria, vol. 2., ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983], 16, 84n). Peter Milton, Complete Prints 1960–1996 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996), 13. Most of Milton’s work is now available on his Website: http://www.petermilton.com. Begun in 1969, The Jolly Corner Suite was first published in book form by Aquarius Press (Baltimore & New York) in 1971 and is fully reproduced in CP 74–94, as well as in the Terra Nova illustrated edition of The Jolly Corner (see n. 5). The nineteen drawings of The Aspern Papers (made 1990–1992) were reproduced by David Godine (Boston) in 1993, and also appear in The Primacy of Touch: The Drawings of Peter Milton (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1993), 96–119. The seven etchings of the Interiors suite, begun with Family Reunion (1984) and completed with The Train from Munich (1991), are reproduced in CP 121–31. For helpful commentary on this suite I am indebted to Irving Finkelstein, “Peter Milton Revisited: A Decade of ‘Interiors’ Prints,” which can be found on the Milton Website (http://www. petermilton.com/notes/finkelstein.htm). Henry James, The Jolly Corner. Illustrated by Peter Milton (London: Terra Nova Editions, 1979), 42. For a more detailed explanation of the difference between resist-ground etching and lift-ground etching (which is what Milton used originally), see CE 28–30. I should add that Milton usually refines his etched plates with engraving—that is, with cuts made by a burin directly into the plate. For this and all the other photographs mentioned in this paragraph, see CE 114–17. Long before Milton used this photograph in his print, Francis Bacon used it as the model for his painting, Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge) (1961), repr. in Van Deren Coke, The Painter and the Photograph (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1964), 170. But while Bacon turns the child into something that can hardly be distinguished from an animal, Milton’s drawing preserves the lineaments of the child and the pathos of the child’s condition. Milton himself says that in 1974 he “began to explore the collage potential inherent in the photo-resist approach” (CP 17).

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Notes to pages 258–260

10. Charles Newton, Photography in Printmaking (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1979), 31. Cf. Duchamp’s defense of his Fountain (1917), a urinal turned on its side and signed R. Mutt 1817. When it was segregated from all the other works displayed in the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in the spring of 1917, Duchamp wrote, “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object” (qtd. Amy Conger, “Edward Weston’s Toilet,” in Perspectives on Photography, ed. Peter Walch and Thomas Barrow [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986], 178). Josef Albers— Milton’s mentor—defended the mechanical construction of art works (such as his own Homage to the Square) as a legitimate response to a mechanical age. See Prints/Multiples 13; qtd. Margot Lovejoy, “Innovations in American Printmaking: 1956–1981,” The Print Review 13 (1981): 45. 11. CE 116–17. He later discovered that the flower “was not a daylily at all” (CP 28). 12. In what follows, I treat briefly just a few aspects of this history. For more comprehensive analyses, see Coke (cited above) and Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London: Allen Lane /The Penguin Press, 1968). 13. Qtd. Martin Gasser, “Between ‘From Today, Painting is Dead’ and ‘How the Sun Became a Painter’: A Close Look at Reactions to Photography in Paris 1839–1853,” Image 33 (1990–1991): 12. About the same time, Jules Janin wrote of daguerreotype: “The earth or the sky, a cathedral disappearing in a cloud . . . all these things, big or small, which are equal before the sun, engrave themselves instantaneously inside the camera obscura preserving all impressions. Never has the art of the greatest masters produced similar drawings” (qtd. Gasser 12). Janin went on to say also: “Art cannot compete with this new rival anymore” (qtd. Gasser 14). 14. The Richmond Papers, ed. Anna Maria Wilhelmina Stirling (London: Heinemann, 1926); qtd. Gage 121. 15. Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859,” in SW 297. Whistler in 1878 wrote likewise: “The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of colours to treat a flower as his key, not as his model” (qtd. Scharf 194). 16. Lichtenstein, Eloquence of Color, 3–4. 17. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 220–25.

Notes to pages 260–266

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18. Even in the Soviet Union, artists of the early 1970s used mass-produced imagery to create a new kind of aura. Following in the postmodern footsteps of Rauschenberg and Warhol, artists such as Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, and Eduard Gorokhovsky used propagandistic photographs to signify the ideological aura of political mythmaking. One of their works is particularly notable. In One Thousand Four Hundred Forty-Eight Portraits of Lenin (1988), Gorokhovsky uses 1,448 variously silkscreened heads of Lenin to compose an extraordinarily unique portrait of Stalin. See Margarita Tupitsyn, “Veil on Photo: Metamorphoses of Supplementary in Soviet Art,” Arts Magazine 64 (1989): 81, 84. 19. CE 17. Once again, Milton echoes Coleridge, who writes that a poet “diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination” (BL 2:16). 20. In other words, the spatial coherence of this print is at least as problematic as the spatial coherence of Velazquez’s Las Meninas. The would-be reflection of the sofa shown just over the man’s head, for instance, could not be seen where it is from our straight-on viewpoint unless some part of the actual sofa were also visible in the front of the painting. Also, Milton says that the boy with the hat “peers out at us from his interior world” (CE 116). Yet if the framed space over the mantelpiece is truly a mirror, wouldn’t the boy have to be looking back at his own reflection? A further problem arises from the little disk in the lower left corner of the mirror. If this disk is itself a small mirror reflected in the big one, it can only reflect what is before the viewer, not what is behind us. Alternatively, if it’s simply a small mirror embedded in the large one, it’s reflecting something the big mirror doesn’t catch. Milton himself says that the little mirror “reflects, in place of our real world, an imaginary world of windows behind windows which produces the light patterns on the left mantel” (CE 116). Finally, the crowd of figures defined by rectilinear bands can be read as a “painting” reflected in the mirror, and so can the framed group of ballerinas at left. But the three unframed figures deployed between the picture of the ballerinas and the picture of the crowd hover implausibly in space—well above the floor on which the sofa may be presumed to stand. 21. I quote from Milton’s unpublished, untitled notes to Mary’s Turn. 22. Achille Segard, Mary Cassatt: Un Peintre des Enfants et des Meres (1913) in Nancy Mowll Mathews, ed. Cassatt: A Retrospective (China: Hugh Lauter Levin,1996), 150. 23. See Norma Broude, “Degas’s Misogyny,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 95–107; “Edgar Degas and French Feminism, ca. 1880: ‘The Young Spartans,’ the Brothel Monotypes, and the Bathers Revisited,” Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 640–59; and Edgar Degas: Images of Women, Images of Men (New York: Rizzoli, 199), 3.

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Notes to pages 268–274

24. “EDFF” 646–47. Broude here draws on Richard Brettell and S. F. McCullagh, Degas in the Art Institute of Chicago (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1984), 34–35. On David’s Oath (fig. 6.61) see pp. 132–33. 25. Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), n.p. 26. “Oh, my dear, he is dreadful!” said Cassatt to Louisine Havemayer. “He dissolves all your will power. . . . Even the painter [Gustave] Moreau said to Degas after years of friendship, that he could no longer stand his attacks” (CAR 112). 27. Letter of 1 December 1892 to Bertha Palmer, president of the Board of Lady Managers of the Women’s Building at the Chicago Exposition (CAR 180). 28. “He went over all the details of the picture with me,” Cassatt reportedly said, “and expressed great admiration for it, and then, as if regretting what he had said, he relentlessly added: ‘It has all your qualities and all your faults—c’est l’Enfant Jesus et sa bonne anglaise’” [“It’s the baby Jesus and his nanny”] (Louisine Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector [1930]; in CAR 112). 29. “A Tribute to Degas and Cassatt” (April 6, 1915) in CAR 313. For Cassatt’s own account of this episode, see her letter of 28 December 1922 to Homer St. Gaudens in Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 335. 30. Havemeyer, “Tribute,” in CAR 313. On her refusal to let her work appear in women’s exhibitions, see her letter of January 22, c. 1898 to Paul DurandRuel (CAR 238) and Havemeyer, Sixteen in CAR 239. 31. B&J, text 96. 32. The figure standing just to the right of the pair is a secondary reflection of the man standing in the doorway, who is first reflected from a mirror in the viewer’s space. The door between the man and his reflection makes it impossible to link the two directly. 33. Referring, presumably, to the mid-1890s, Havemeyer recalls: “Degas was such an anti-Dreyfusard that he wrote to his lifelong friend Halevy, who was a Jew, not to put his place at the table as he could no longer dine with him on Sundays” (Sixteen in CAR 110). 34. Havemeyer, Sixteen in CAR 239. 35. Barbara Rose, “Quality in Louis,” Artforum 10 (1971): 65. 36. The quoted words come from Peter Milton’s letter of 23 September 1997 to the author. 37. Peter Milton to the author, 3 October 1997. 38. Peter Milton to the author, 3 October 1997. 39. Peter Milton to the author, 23 September 1997: “Woman [at lower right] is taken from a Baron de Meyer photograph of an unknown model—but I was thinking of the Baron’s wife, Olga, who was one of those who got the Ballet Russe to Paris.” When I talked with Milton in person two months later, he said that the young woman at lower right represents no one in particular,

Notes to pages 277–285

40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

367

but the fact that she is based on a photograph by Baron de Meyer obviously allows us to associate her with his wife and her services to the Ballet Russe. CP 31, and letter of 23 September 1997 from Peter Milton to the author. Used by Mary Cassatt as the model for a series of paintings shown at the Impessionist Exhibition of 1881, Lydia died of Bright’s disease in 1882 (Mathews, MC, n.p.). CP 31 and letter of 23 September 1997 from Peter Milton to the author. “The meaning [of the butterfly] is derived from the three stages in its life as represented by the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the butterfly, which are clearly symbols of life, death, and resurrection” (Ferguson, Signs and Symbols, 13). Since this was written Milton has produced a third version of Nijinsky Variations—this time with some touches of color. Milton says that he used “a photographic self-portrait by the German Expressionist Ernst Kirchner posing in his uniform and holding a cigarette. Though he was among the lucky who survived the war, in the end he committed suicide” (CP 31). Turner does something comparable in Dido Building Carthage (1815), where the unfinished buildings and the fragments of stone around them already begin to resemble the ruins they will become, and thus negate the high constructive purpose they are supposed to signify. Peter Milton, “Key to Sources and Figures [in Twentieth Century Limited].” Unpublished notes by Peter Milton. “An aardvark,” writes Milton, “having only ‘a’ vowels, has eaten the first ‘e.’ He is after the ants and may develop a taste for all the art rescuers” (“Key.”) Beyond reducing Duchamp to a figure that can be read, if at all, only with a magnifying glass, Milton here ties the central figure of Twentieth Century Limited to a subsidiary figure of Nijinsky Variations with a thread so inframince that perhaps only Duchamp himself could detect it without the artist’s help. The Dubuffet women are aligned with another Dubuffet item at lower left: a cow plucked from The Cow with the Subtile Nose (1954). Since the cow here appears to be inspecting Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic 34 (also 1954), Milton is also reminding us of Mark Tansey’s The Innocent Eye Test (“Key”). Points of Departure concludes with the elegaic Pavanne (1999), whose title echoes Maurice Ravel’s Pavanne for a Dead Princess; in it a lone cellist plays among fallen leaves in a setting based on the Tuileries Gardens of Paris. Hidden Cities I: The Ministry (2003) reconstructs Paris in the spring of 1922, when James Joyce briefly met Marcel Proust just after Ulysses was published and soon before Proust died. At bottom center sits the mature Joyce gazing at a chessboard and brooding like the man at the bottom center of Daylilies. Across the rainswept square behind him looms an imaginary building (the

368

Notes to pages 287–290

Ministry) based on a Dresden villa, while the square itself displays—among other things—Sylvia Beach lurking in a doorway as a lady of the night, Marcel Duchamp sitting with a young woman at a café table, Proust and Joyce as boys witnessing a game of hopscotch, and a taxi containing the two of them as men. Hidden Cities II: Embarkation for Cythera (2004) reconfigures Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera as a European cityscape of wide steps descending in gaslit terraces at left and rising at right to a Dresden villa piled on a Palladian edifice; next to that, the Spanish steps of Rome climb to the Trinita del Monte as an onion-domed airship moored beside it floats like a cloud.

Chapter 13 This essay first appeared as “Speaking for Pictures: Language and Abstract Art,” in Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image, ed. Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fatima Lambert (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006): 25–44. Used by permission of the publisher. 1. Yasmina Reza, Art, trans. Christopher Hampton (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). 2. Daniel Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1992), 129. 3. Jim Jordan reminds me that Reinhardt’s so-called “black” paintings “are . . . not really black, but composed of nine dark colored squares that are very difficult to perceive” (email of 3 June 2005). 4. Clement Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoon” [1940], in Collected Essays and Criticism, 1:35. 5. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in 20th Century Literary Criticism, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1972), 657. 6. Krauss 9. In ch. 2 I discuss the paradoxical features of this statement (see above, p. 60) 7. Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1975). 8. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 76n. 9. Krauss 237. 10. See for instance Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Uli Linke, German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 11. Treating the work of art as a structure rather than an organism, Rosalind Krauss cites Ferdinand de Saussure’s definition of language as a system of “differences without positive terms.” By this structuralist conception of language, Krauss suggests, neither a word nor a picture signifies a particular

Notes to pages 290–297

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

369

object; it signifies rather the negation of possible alternatives or substitutes. See Krauss 3. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Signet, 1952), 175–77. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), 163–64. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, lines 462–64, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 405. Charles Harrison, “On the Surface of Painting,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 294–95. Michael Fried, “Optical Allusions,” Artforum 37, no. 8 (1999): 97. Barbara Rose, ed. Pollock Painting: Photographs by Hans Namuth (New York: Agrinde, 1978). For detailed analysis of what we can learn from the visual record of Pollock in action, see Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth” in Kirk Varnedoe with Pepe Karmel, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998). In 1947 Pollock himself said that he normally began by tacking unstretched canvas to the wall or floor: “On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting since in this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting” (Possibilities I, ed. Robert Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg, 1947–1948; qtd. John Golding, “Pollock and the Search for a Symbol,” in Paths to the Absolute [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000], 134). Thomas Crow, “Moving Pictures,” Artforum 37, no. 8 (1999): 92. “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948); qtd. Fried, “Optical” 97. “Feeling is All” (1952); qtd. Fried, “Optical” 98. Michael Fried, “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella” [1965], in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 224. The painting that Fried designates Number 1, 1948 was originally called that by Pollock himself, but in November 1949 his dealer—Betty Parsons—placed the letter “A” after the number 1; See Francis Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 1. In this catalogue the painting is titled Number 1A, 1948 and numbered #186. Pollock himself told an interviewer in 1949 that he tried “to stay away from any recognizable image” and “do away with it” if it crept into his work. Qtd. Kirk Varnedoe, “Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work,” in Varnedoe, Jackson Pollock 54. See William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), figs. 2 and 9. Figure 9 is Gulielmus Hogarth, the 1749 engraving of the 1745 painting of Hogarth with his dog. Of the figure on the title page Hogarth writes: “the triangular form of the glass, and the serpentine line itself, are the two most expressive figures that

370

24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

Notes to pages 298–302

can be thought of to signify not only beauty and grace, but the whole order of form” (11). J. M. W. Turner, British Museum Add. Ms. 46151 K f.23. Taking some freedom with the punctuation, Turner quotes lines 137–38 of Akenside, The Pleasures. John Haber, “The Last Dance” [1999], www.haberarts.com/pollock.htm 1. In rather general terms, John Golding compares the overwhelming effect of Pollock’s large abstractions to the awe-inspiring impact of Turner’s landscapes (137) but makes no reference to any figural correspondence. Seldon Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 82; qtd. Golding 140. He also said, “I’m very representational some of the time and a little all of the time” (Rodman 82; qtd. Golding 140). Mitchell, PT 246–47. One might say that minimalist sculpture tries to affirm what Magritte denies in Ceci n’est pas une pipe, but this would ignore the difference between painting and sculpture. To affirm that a three-dimensional object is a slab is not the same as affirming that a two-dimensional image is a pipe. Lucy Lippard, “The Silent Art” (1967), in Minimalism, ed. James Meyer (London: Phaidon, 2000), 229. Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 82. The Rothko Chapel in Houston interestingly complicates this formulation. Originally Catholic but now interdenominational, this octagonal chapel houses a series of giant, largely black canvases commissioned for it and painted by Mark Rothko in 1965–1966. They are “works thematically devoted to the Passion of Christ but executed in a formal idiom that verged on the most reductively abstract of [Rothko’s] career. Comprised of two triptychs and one panel displaying black hard-edged rectangles on maroon fields and one triptych plus four single all-black panels filtered by thin washes of maroon, the Houston series hangs, silent and solitary, in a twilit space whose simple void echoes the paintings’ mournful witness to the death that inevitably brings to an end life and all its earthly promise. But the pale, evanescent illumination also rewards the attentive viewer with the inkling of a dark afterglow from deep within the paintings’ color, like the last embers of some inner fire, banked but still alive although engulfed by penumbral bleakness” (Wheeler 50). The Rothko chapel thus makes explicit the religious implications of Rothko’s abstract art. Rothko himself told an interviewer: “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!” (qtd. Wheeler 50). Jim Jordan reminds me that Richter’s tilting of the canvas was also anticipated by Piet Mondrian, who (starting in 1918) painted a series of diamond-

Notes to pages 304–307

371

shaped “lozenges” such as Composition No. 1 (1930). But these are actually squares set on a point—not squeezed parallelograms like Richter’s. 32. Richter told Storr: “I tried to make it my shape. It’s not everybody’s shape” (83). But the equality of height and armspan is evidently normative for the human body; at least—as I have discovered—it applies to mine. 33. Jan Thom-Prikker, and Gerhard Richter, “A Picture is Worth 216 Newspaper Articles.” Interview. The New York Times, July 4, 2004, Arts and Leisure 26.

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Index Bold numbers alone (e.g. 261) signify the page on which a picture is reproduced in blackand-white. Bold numbers follwing the letters CP designate the number of a color plate. abstract art: art criticism and, 44, 59–66, 254; defining, 1, 288–92; history of image and word in, 8–9, 287–88; interpretation of, 22; photographic realism and, 306–09; Pollock and, 293–300; religion and, 302, 304–06; Richter and, 300–309; salute to the “purity” of, 25–26 Abstract Painting (Reinhardt), 287 Abstract Picture (Abstraktes Bild) series (Richter, 1997), 301–06; Abstract Picture (Rhombus) #5 (1998), CP 14 Abu Ghraib prison, 39 acculturation, art and, 21 Adams, Hazard, 83 Adelmann, Bernhard, 81–82 Adonais (Shelley, 1821), 208, 290–91, 299 Aeneas and the Sibyl (Turner, c. 1798), 129 Aeneid (Virgil), 129–30 Aeschylus (Greek dramatist), 184 Akenside, Mark, 122 Albers, Josef, 254–55, 284 Alberti, Benedetto, 75 Alberti, Leon Battista, 8, 15, 40–41, 46, 69–82, 116

Alberti, Lorenzo, 75 Alcibiades (Athenian politician), 191 allegory, 80, 179, 194 Allegri, Antonio. See Correggio (Antonio Allegri) Alpers, Svetlana, 50 The Amateur Artist (Turner, c. 1808), 170 Analysis of Beauty (Hogarth, 1753), 297 “A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley” (Pennell, 1893), 204 anti-Semitism, 272, 361n15 Apelles (Greek painter), 40, 44, 69, 70–82 Apollo Killing Cyclops (Domenichino, 1616–18), 247 Approach to Venice (Turner, 1844), 160 Apullia in Search of Appulus vide Ovid (Turner, 1814), 119 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 115 Aristophanes (in Plato’s Symposium), 191 Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (Rembrandt, 1653), 243 Arnheim, Rudolph, 23

397

398

Cultivating Picturacy

Arnold, Matthew, 217 The Arnolfini Wedding (van Eyck, 1434), 28–29, 28 art: beauty as first law of, 16, 328n8; beauty in, 187, 191–92; cinema as, 179–81; collage as, 258, 306–07; “coming out” as gay in, 239–41; corrupting influences in, 25; depiction of war in, 306–09; feminism in, 265, 268; iconophobia and, 14–15; photography and, 258–59, 364n13; printmaking as, 253–56; reworking the works of others as, 242; storytelling and, 15–16; systematic structure for, 116–17, 119, 317n25; theory of discursive information and, 115–16; as a “window,” 283–84; women competing with men in, 264–72 Art (play), 8, 287–88, 292 art appreciation, 45 art criticism: abstract art and, 59–66, 292–309; availability of reproductions for, 41–42; on Blake’s Songs, 83–85; in cinema, 180–81; Diderot: Art Criticism as Fiction, 51–54; history of ancient art as, 39–41, 69–82; Philostratus as father of, 7, 44–48; Schapiro and the Facts of Art History, 54–59; semiotics and, 2; understanding the language of, 7–8; Vasari and The Birth of Art History, 48–51; the viewing process in, 322n22; words and narrative structure of, 42–44. See also interpretation of pictures; rhetoric; verbal description art history: abstract expressionism in, 287–88; changing perspective in, 24–26; cinema in, 179–81; concept of pictures in, 315n11, 321n18; ekphrasis and, 40–41; English School of painting in, 116–17; Gombrich version of progress in,

21–22; importance of words in interpretation, 6–7; Renaissance, 69–70; semiotics and, 2; Shapiro and, 54–55; subjectivity vs. objectivity, 327n61; Vasari as father of, 7, 48 Artist and Model (Hockney, 1973–74), 245–46, 245 The Artist in his Studio (Vermeer), 3–4 The Artist’s Studio (Turner, c. 1808), 170 Art-Language, 291 Art Nouveau, 202 Aspern Papers (James), 255 Atta Troll (Heine, 1847), 207 Avant-garde arts, 25 Babitz, Eve, 283 Bacon, Francis, 239, 363n8 Baglione, Atalanta, 49 Baldwin, Michael, 291 Ballet Rambert, 276 Ballet Russe, 272, 274 A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (Manet, 1882), 261–63, 261 The Barge (Beardsley), 223–24 Barnard, Frederick R., 39 Barolsky, Paul, 48–49 The Baron’s Prayer (Beardsley, 1896), 218–20 Barr, Alfred H., 61 Barrell, John, 30 Barrett, Elizabeth, 218 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 7 Battle of the Beaux and Belles (Beardsley, 1896), 226–27, 226 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 41, 259 Baxandall, Michael, 41–43, 47, 53, 66, 72 Bayard, Hippolyte, 257 Baym, Nina, 103 Bazin, Andre, 179–80, 347n3 Beardsley, Aubrey, 8, 201–29, 358n43; The Barge, 223–24; The Baron’s Prayer (1896), 218–20; Battle of the

Index

Beaux and Belles (1896), 226–27, 226; The Billet Doux, 221; The Cave of Spleen (1896), 223–25, 228; The Climax (1984), 205, 211–13; The Dancer’s Reward, 212–13, 213; The Dream, 220; “Enter Herodias,” 210; “Eyes of Herod,” 210; The Impatient Adulterer, 220; Lysistrata (1896), 357n38; The Rape of the Lock (1896), 214, 222–23, 222; Salomé with St. John’s Head (1893), 203–04, 203, 210–11; The Tail-Piece (1894), 211–12, 211; “The Woman in the Moon,” 210; The Toilet (1896), 214–16; The Toilette of Salomé (1894), 212–13, 213, 223, 356n27 Beaton, Cecil, 247 Beaumont, George, 145–55; Peel Castle in a Storm, CP 8 Beauty and the Beast: or a Rough Outside with a Gentle Heart (Lamb), 193–94, 255, 352n46 Bedlam (Hockney, 1961–63), 237–38, 238, 250–52 Benjamin, Walter, 259–60 Benveniste, Emile, 79 Bergman, Ingmar, 279 Bessmertnova, Natalia, 277 Beware of a Holy Whore (Fassbinder, 1970), 183 Beyle, Marie-Henri. See Stendhal biblical subjects in art. See religious art; Scripture Bibliotheque Nationale, 253 Bicknell, Maria, 153 The Billet Doux (Beardsley), 221 Bindman, David, 248 Blake, William, 8–9, 37, 285; The Book of Thel, 106; Frontispiece to Visions of the Daughters of Albion, CP 5; “Infant Joy,” 91–94, CP 3; “Infant Sorrow,” 91–94, CP 4; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 95, 103; Poetical

399

Sketches, 85, 94; and Song of Songs, 109; Songs of Experience (1794), 83–99; Songs of Innocence (1789), 83–99; Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 101–13 Blind Fiddler (Wilke, 1807), 118 Blue Monochrome (Klein, 1960), 287 Bond Street Gallery, 242 The Book of Thel (Blake), 106 Botticelli, Sandro, 33, 69, 81 Box in a Valise Series (Duchamp), 282 Boyle, Peter, 198 Branagh, Kenneth, 180, 183–84 Braque, Georges, 307 Breakthrough II (Rauschenberg, 1965), 258 Bridge of Sighs...Venice: Canaletti [sic] Painting (Turner, ex. 1833), 171–72, 171 The Bright Stone of Honor and the Tomb of Marceau (Turner, 1835), 160 Bromley, Robert Anthony, 39 Brooks, Mel, 181, 193 Brooks, Peter, 181–82, 188 Broude, Norma, 265, 270 Brown, Ford Madox, 238 Browne, Halbot Knight “Phiz,” 186, 189 Browning, Robert, 218 Browning, Tod, 186 Bryson, Norman, 1–4 Buonarotti, Michelangelo. See Michelangelo Burke, Edmund, 103, 127 Butlin, Martin, 127, 138 Butor, Michel, 24 Buttermere Lake (Turner), 120, 122 Byron, Lord, 163–68 Byrydon, Spencer, 256 Caernarvon Castle (Turner, 1799), 126 Caernarvon Castle (Wilson, 1762), 149 Cage, John, 291

400

Cultivating Picturacy

Calumny (Apelles), 40, 44, 69–82 Calumny of Apelles (Botticelli), 69, 81 Calumny of Apelles after Mantegna (Mocetto, c. 1506), 82 Camera obscura, 2, 311n6, 364n13 captions: adding meaning to photographs, 16–18; interpretation of art by, 18–20; misleading, 315n14. See also labeling art Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), 2–3, 311n6 Carceri (Piranesi), 280 Carroll, Noel, 197–98 Cassatt, Alexander, 281 Cassatt, Lydia, 277, 367n40 Cassatt, Mary, 263–72; Five O’Clock Tea (1880), 269; Girl Arranging Her Hair (1886), 264–65, 265, 268–69; Modern Woman (1893), 269–70; Mother and Child (c. 1899), 270; Young Women Picking Fruit (1891), 270–71 Cassirer, Ernst, 13 The Cave of Spleen (Beardsley, 1896), 223–25, 228 Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Magritte, 1929), 6, 8–9, 23–24, 24, 281–82, 292–93 The Cenotaph (Constable, 1836), 243 Cezanne, Paul, 255, 363n2 Chagall, Marc, 256 Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de, 41 Chase, Linda, 20 chiaroscuro: defined, 340n7; in landscape painting, 142–58; photography and, 37–38; poetics of, 8; in printmaking, 259; in works of art, 30 Chicago World’s Fair, 1893, 269 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 163–68 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage-Italy (Turner, 1832), 159–63, 168 “The Chimney Sweeper” (Blake), 86–87

Christianity. See iconography; religious art; Scripture Christ Resurrecting the Youth of Nain (ca. 1000), 27 cinema. See film and film theory Clark, Kenneth, 204 Claude. See Lorrain, Claude Clemens, Samuel L. See Twain, Mark The Climax (Beardsley, 1984), 205, 211–13 Close Reading (Tansey, 1990), 7 Coarse Shadow (Noland), 273 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 91, 141, 144, 255, 363n2 collage, 258, 306–07 Colotes (ancient Greek painter), 73 comics/comic books: in black-andwhite photography, 36–37; influence on art, 26; as literature, 15. See also literature Commedia (Dante), 147 Composition 8 (Kandinsky, 1923), 295 Composition with Donkey Head (Pollock, c. 1938–41), 296, 298 Constable, John, 8, 11, 141–58; The Cenotaph (1836), 243; Dedham Vale (1828), 4, 29–31, 145–46, CP 1–2; English Landscape, 142; Glebe Farm, 152–53; Hadleigh Castle (1828–29), 141, 152–55, 156, 157; The Hay Wain (1821), 26, 144; Landscape: Noon, 144; Landscape Sketch: Hadleigh Castle, CP 9; Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds (1831–34), 141; Spring, 153–54; The Valley Farm, 154; Weymouth Bay, Dorsetshire, 145, 149–50 contemporary art, 6–7, 300–309 context: culture and art in, 20 Coresus and Callirhoe (Fragonard, 1765), 41 Coronation of the Virgin (Lippi, 1447), 173 Correggio (Antonio Allegri), 142

Index

Correspondance Litteraire (Grimm), 52 A Country Blacksmith Disputing upon the Price of Iron (Turner, 1807), 118, 128 Crow, Thomas, 293, 296, 299 Crows in a Wheatfield (van Gogh), 279 cubism: Alberti laws of perspective and, 34; Duchamps’s works and, 300; Hockney’s works and, 231; newsprint collage in, 307; origins of abstract art in, 295, 298; perspective in, 243, 247, 249 Cubism and Abstract Art (Barr, 1936), 61 Culler, Jonathan, 12 culture: abstract expressionism and, 302; language development and, 13–15; racial overtones of color in art, 289–91; representational art in context of, 20; viewer perception and, 17–18 Custine, Adam-Philippe de Comte, 209 Cut-Out (Pollock, c. 1948/50), 296 daguerreotype, 258, 364n13 Dahmer, Jeffrey, 191, 352n42 Damrosch, Leopold, Jr., 102 Dance of Salome and Beheading of St. John the Baptist (Gozzoli), 34 Dancers Practicing at the Barre (Degas), 266, 268 The Dancer’s Reward (Beardsley), 212–13, 213 Dante, 147, 190 David, Jacques-Louis, 132, 268 David Copperfield (Dickens), 186 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 170, 282, 303–04 Death in Harlem, A Rake’s Progress (Hockney, 1961–63), 247 The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (Turner, ex. 1817), 130–31, 131, 133–34 Dedalus, Stephen, 65–66

401

Dedham Vale (Constable, 1828), 4, 29–31, 145–46; CP 1–2 Degas, Edgar, 263–72; Dancers Practicing at the Barre, 266, 268; Mary Cassatt at the Louvre (1879–80), 266–67, 267, 272; Spartan Girls Challenging Boys (c. 1860), 268, 270 Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Manet, 1863), 36 Delacroix, Eugène, 41, 141 della Fonte, Bartolommeo, 81 Della Pittura (Alberti, 1436), 69, 75 della Porta, Giambattista, 2–3 Demuth, Charles, 247, 361n19 De Niro, Robert, 186–87, 192 Dennis, John, 199 De Pictura (Alberti, 1435), 8, 15, 40, 69–82 Deposition (Raphael, 1507), 49 Derrida, Jacques, 29, 57, 335n20 Descartes, René, 22 Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich, 272, 275, 279 Dickens, Charles, 186, 188–89, 201 Diderot, Denis, 7–8, 41, 43, 51–54, 323n31 Dido Building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire-1st Book of Virgil’s Aeneid (Turner, ex. 1815), 130–31, 130, 133–34 Diotima (in Plato’s Symposium), 191 Discourses on Art (Reynolds), 116–17 The Distressed Poet (Hogarth), 127, 171 Doldabern Castle (Turner, 1800), 126–27 Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), 247 Dracula (Browning), 186 Dracula (Stoker, 1897), 189, 351n41 The Dream (Beardsley), 220 Dreyfus, Alfred, 272 The Drinking Scene (Hockney, 1961–63), 237, 248

402

Cultivating Picturacy

Drowning Girl (Lichtenstein, 1963), 284 Dryden, John, 16 DuBuffet, Jean, 285 Duchamp, Marcel, 258, 282, 300 Duck-Rabbit (from Fliegende Blätter, 1892), 19 Du Guernier, Louis, 227 Dunthorne, John, 143 Dürer, Albrecht, 285

The Fallacies of Hope (Turner), 128–39, 170–71 Fall of the Manna in the Wilderness (Poussin, 1667), 2 The False Mirror (Magritte, 1928), 25 Faragoh, Edward, 348n9 Fassbinder, Werner, 183 Fawkes, Francis, 138 feminine/feminism. See woman Fenwick, Isabella, 147 fiction: art criticism as, 51–54; in art Eakins, Thomas, 257, 261 history, 49; as autobiography, 163, Earlom, Richard, 119 360n9; cinema and, 185, 350n29; Eastlake, Charles, 344n8 horror, 198; as illustrated books, 15, Echo: Number 25 (Pollock, 1951), 63 202; realism and, 91, 190–91, 259. Eddie Diptych (Lichtenstein, 1962), 26 See also Literature Edison, Thomas, 184 The Field of Waterloo (Turner, 1818), Editions Alecto, 231–32 160 Eisenstadt, Alfred, 274 Fifth Impressionist Exhibition, 1880, Eisenstein, Sergey, 179 268 ekphrasis: art history and, 40, 49, 115; The Fifth Plague of Egypt (Turner, ex. defined, 320n6; of Philostratus, 51; 1800), 172–73, 172, 178 as rhetorical exercise, 45; as verbal ‘58 Ford with White Hood (Salt, 1973), representation, 321n15, 329n12. See 20 also rhetoric film and film theory: animation as arti“Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture ficial reproduction, 184–85; art critiof Peele Castle, in a Storm” cism and, 180–81; image as language (Wordsworth), 148 in, 179–80, 347n4; plot changes for, Elkins, James, 4–5 198–99; women in, 181–83, 191–98 Ellison, Ralph, 290 film versions of Frankenstein: adaptaEllmann, Richard, 207 tions to, 348n10; Frankenstein Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (Richter), (Whale, 1931), 180, 182, 187–88, 300 190, 198–200, 348n9; Mary Shelley’s English Landscape (Constable), 142 Frankenstein (Branagh, 1994), 180, Erdman, David, 84, 87–88, 90, 107 183–84, 186–87, 192, 196–98; Young Essay on the Origin of Languages Frankenstein (Brooks, 1974), 181, (Rousseau), 13 193–95, 198–99 etching, 256–57 The Firebird (Stravinsky, 1910), 276 Euphranor (ancient Greek painter), 74 First International Feminist Congress, Eve of St. Agnes (Keats), 182 1878, 265 Excursion (Wordsworth), 145–46 Fish, Stanley, 3 Exposing of Moses (Poussin, 1654), 173 Fisher, John, 144 Eyes in the Heat (Pollock, 1946), 298 Five O’Clock Tea (Cassatt, 1880), 269

Index

Flaherty, Robert, 179 Fletcher, Ian, 211 Forster, E. M., 290 Förster, Richard, 77 Fort, Garrett, 348n9 Foucault, Michel, 15–16, 115–16 Fox, Susan, 102 Fragonard, Jean Honoré, 41 Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818): creating the monster of, 184–85, 352n44; defining what makes a monster, 188–92; objectifying the creature of, 185–87; Oedipal conflict in, 197–98; role of woman in, 193–96, 352n47, 353n48; visualizing the monster of, 181–84, 199–200, 350n30, 351n31. See also film versions of Frankenstein Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 306 The French Revolution (Blake, 1791), 93 Freud, Sigmund, 199, 249–50 Fried, Michael, 293–96, 299 Frontispiece to Visions of the Daughters of Albion (Blake, 1793), CP 5 Frye, Northrop, 83 Full Fathom Five (Pollock), 293, 299; CP 10–11 Gainsborough, Thomas, 116–17 galleries. See museums and galleries Gardner, Alexander, 17 The Garreteer’s Petition (Turner, ex. 1809), 127–28, 170–71, 178 Gaugin, Eugène Henri Paul, 57, 59 Gellée, Claude. See Lorrain, Claude gender: Beardsley depiction of, 225–27; culturally generated signs of, 17–18; in Hockney art, 240, 246, 249; roles in cinema, 181–83. See also homosexuality; sexuality Ghandi, Mahatma, 241 Gibbon, Edward, 166 Gide, Andre, 277 Gilbert, Elliott, 211

403

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 103 Giotto di Bondone, 71–72, 80 Girl Arranging Her Hair (Cassatt, 1886), 264–65, 265, 268–69 Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (Vermeer, c. 1657), 36 Girl with a Dead Canary (Greuze, 1765), 52 Gitter, Elizabeth, 217–18 Glebe Farm (Constable), 152–53 Gleckner, Robert, 83 Glen, Heather, 83 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 160, 177, 185 Gombrich, E. H., 1, 3, 12, 20–23 Gonzaga, Giovanni Francesco, 75 Goodbye to All That (Graves, 1929), 159 Goodman, Nelson, 9, 18–21 Gorman, Michael John, 2 The Gospel Singing (Hockney, 1961–63), 236 Gosse, Edmund, 217 Gowing, Lawrence, 128, 177 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco José de, 42, 278–79 Gozzoli, Benozzo, 34 graphic space in works of art, 27, 32 Grau (Gray) (Richter), 301 Graves, Robert, 159 Great Expectations (Dickens), 188–89 Greenberg, Clement, 25, 60–61, 288, 291–94 Grenadier entering a tavern with a rifle over his shoulder and a dog beside him (Hogarth), 19 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 52 Griffith, David, 179 Grimm, Melchior, 52 grotesquerie, 228–29. See also Beardsley, Aubrey Grundy, Susan, 2 Guernica (Picasso, 1937), 284, 295, 298, 307

404

Cultivating Picturacy

Hadleigh Castle (Constable, 1828–29), 141, 152–55, 156, 157 Hagar and the Angel (Lorrain, 1646), 29–31 Hagstrum, Jean, 84, 90 Halevy, Ludovic, 272 Halsband, Robert, 216, 225 Hamilton, Richard, 6 Hannibal Taking the Oath (West, 1771), 133 Hardy, Thomas, 190, 354n9 Harker, Jonathan, 190 Harris, Moses, 128, 177 Harrison, Charles, 291–92 Havemayer, Louisine, 270–71 The Hay Wain (Constable, 1821), 26, 144 Hazlitt, William, 41, 125, 288 Heidegger, Martin, 55–59, 61 Heine, Heinrich, 207 Henreid, Paul, 193 Hertz, Neil, 209–10 Heyd, Milly, 214, 223, 227–28 The “Hey Wayne” (Johnson, 1991), 26 Heywood, J. C., 207 Hidden Cities (Milton, 2003), 285, 367n50 Hirsch, E. D., 83 historia. See pictorial narrative history of style, 27–33, 318n33 “History painting,” 30–31, 116–17 Hoadley, John, 233–34 Hobhouse, John Cam, 167 Hockney, David, 2–3, 8, 231–52, 359n2 & 3; Artist and Model (197374), 245–46, 245; Bedlam (1961–63), 237, 250–52; Death in Harlem, A Rake’s Progress, 247; The Drinking Scene (1961–63), 237, 248; The Gospel Singing (1961–63), 236; Kerby (After Hogarth), Useful Knowledge (1975), 247; The Last of England? (1961), 238; Love Paintings

(1960–61), 239; Marries an Old Maid, A Rake’s Progress (1961–63), 236, 248–49; Meeting Other People, 251; Meeting the Good People (Washington), A Rake’s Progress (1961–63), 244–45, 244; Myself and My Heroes (1961), 241; Play within a Play (1963), 248; Queer (1960), 239; Receiving the Inheritance, A Rake’s Progress (1961–63), 235–36, 235, 241, 361n15; Sam Who Walked Alone by Night (1961), 249; The Start of the Spending Spree (1961–63), 240, 246; The Student: Homage to Picasso (1973), 244–45, 244; Teeth Cleaning, W11 (1962), 239; The Third Love Painting (1960), 240; Viewing a Prison Scene (1961–63), 237; The Wallet Begins to Empty, 250–51 Hogarth, William, 8, 18–20, 127, 171, 231–52; Analysis of Beauty (1753), 297; Marriage à la Mode, 357n40; The Marriage Contract (c. 1732), 243, 248; A Rake’s Progress, 233, 235, 246; Receiving the Inheritance, 240–42; Satire on False Perspective (1754), 247; Southwark Fair (1733–34), 243 Holbein, Hans, 271 Holly, Michael, 25 Holocaust, 15 Homage to Kandinsky (Milton, 1954), 284 Homage to the Square (Albers, 1954), 254, 284 Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg (Gardner, 1863), 17 Homer (Greek poet), 43 Homer, Winslow, 36 homosexuality: grotesquerie and, 210; Hockney “coming out” in art, 239–41, 248–49, 360n11, 362n23;

Index

Hogarth’s depiction of, 248; Whitman and, 360n13; in works of art, 8. See also gender; sexuality Hughes, Robert, 42, 283, 361n19 Hunt, William Holman, 208 Huston, John, 348n9 Huysman, Joris, 207–08

405

in, 6–7; integration of words and image, 83–99; language of cinema in, 179–81; minimalism and, 302; Philostratus rhetoric of, 45–48; picturacy and, 1, 7, 12; in religious art, 30–36; theory of pictorial meaning for, 26–30, 318n33; verbal description and, 39–42, 66–68; visual semiiconography: grotesquerie in, 210; otics and, 4–6. See also art criticism; iconoclasm and iconophobia, 14; reading pictures Panofsky’s theory of pictorial mean- “interpreter”: art critic as, 42–43; ing and, 27–30, 318n33; postmodviewer as, 1–3, 21–22, 24–26 ernist, 281; in religious art, 30–33, invention: Alberti on power of, 75–82, 278, 302, 304–6; of stages of life, 330n18 367n42 Invisible Man (Ellison), 290 Iconologia (Ripa), 119 As I Opened Fire (Lichtenstein, 1964), Iliad (Homer), 43, 190 284 illusion: deceptiveness and, 322n24; Isabella (Keats), 208 and learning to read pictures, 22–25; Isabella and the Pot of Basil (Hunt, Narcissus as a study in, 47; recogni1867), 208 tion of, 21–22; in works of art, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (Demuth, 247–48 1928), 247 illustrated books: as author/illustrator Islam: iconoclasm and, 14 collaboration, 202, 211, 229; Richter’s War Cut as, 306–09; tech- Jackson, Mahalia, 236, 240, 250–51 nological development of, 201. See Jacob with Laban and his Daughters also Beardsley, Aubrey; fiction; liter(Claude), 119 ature; poetry James, Henry, 254–56 illustration, Lessing’s theory of, 33–34, Johns, Jasper, 9, 64–66, 284, 300 94, 328n8 Johnson, Dick, 26 Imagines (Philostratus), 44 Joll, Evelyn, 127, 138 Immolation of Iphigenia (Timanthes), 40 The Jolly Corner (James, 1971), 254–55 The Impatient Adulterer (Beardsley), 220 The Jolly Corner (Milton), 256 impressionism, 61, 141, 268 Joseph Vernet Attached to the Mast “Infant Joy” (Blake), 91–94, CP 3 Studying the Effects of the Storm “Infant Sorrow” (Blake), 91–94, CP 4 (Vernet, 1822), 176 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 2, iournalism: abstract art and, 306–09 162–63 Joyce, James, 65, 159, 367n50 instinct: art and, 12, 21–22 Judaism: anti-Semitism and, 272, International Photography Council, 16 361n15; Holocaust and, 15; visual interpretation of pictures: abstract art in, 14 expressionism and, 288; depiction of Judgement of Paris (in Hogarth, A war in, 306–09; importance of words Rake’s Progress), 235, 246

406

Cultivating Picturacy

Jug with Red and White Carnations (van Landscape Sketch: Hadleigh Castle Gogh), 58 (Constable), CP 9 Junius, Franciscus, 40–41 landscape painting: Constable and, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s 141–42; Gainsborough and, 116–17; Homes So Different, So Appealing? origins of abstract art in, 288, 291; (Hamilton, 1956), 6 reading pictures in, 29–31; Vernet and, 51 Kafka, Franz, 281 language: of art criticism, 42–44, Kandinsky, Wassily, 61, 284, 295 66–68, 314n22, 322n22; culture of Kant, Immanuel, 22 literacy and, 14–15; linguistic comKarloff, Boris, 187–88, 190, 200 petence and, 20–21; perception and, Kasebier, Gertrude, 263, 272 313n18; stages of development, 13; Kasmin, John, 242 synchronic vs. diachronic study of, Keats, John, 182, 208, 290, 355n11 311n1; words and image of cinema Kent, William, 121 as, 179–81, 192. See also words Kerby (After Hogarth), Useful Laocoon (Lessing, 1766), 15, 162 Knowledge (Hockney, 1975), 247 Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Kertesz, Andre, 257 Her Bachelors, Even (Duchamp, Kine (Richter, 1995), 304 1915–23), 282–85 Klein, Yves, 287 Lascaux cave paintings, 7, 20, 316n20 Kneller, Godfrey, 225 Las Meninas (Velazquez, 1656), 25, 42, Kooistra, Lorraine, 202, 229 365n20 Kosuth, Joseph, 307 Last Judgement (Michelangelo), 170 Krauss, Rosalind E., 60, 288–89, 294 The Last of England (Brown, 1852–55), Kristeva, Julia, 200 238 Kroeber, Karl, 130 The Last of England? (Hockney, 1961), Kuryluk, Ewa, 206–07, 210 238 Last Words of Marcus Aurelius labeling art: in Hogarth’s A Rake’s (Delacroix), 41 Progress, 232–34; importance of “Laughing Song” (Blake), 92 words in, 6–7; minimalism and, 302; Lavater, Johann Caspar, 189–91 as parody, 24; Turner use of poetry law of beauty, 16, 328n8 in, 117–39; using subsemiotic fraglectoral art, 36–37, 314n19, 319n50 ments in, 5–6. See also captions “Leda and the Swan” (Yeats), 34–35 Lacan, Jacques, 102, 181–82, 249–50, Le passé et le présent (Rousseau, 1890), 362n27 162 Lamb, Charles, 352n46 Leprince, Jean-Baptiste, 51 “The Lamb” (Blake, 1789), 96–97, 96 Leslie, C. R., 151, 153–54 Landi, Ann, 253 Leslie, Mrs. C. R., 149–50 Land of the Meuse (ca. 1100), 31–33, Les Mots des Artistes/Painted Words 31 (Flammarion, 1998), 6–7 Landscape: Noon (Constable), 144 Le Soir qui tombe (Magritte, 1934), 22–23, 23

Index

Lessing, G. E., 15–16, 25, 33–34, 94, 162, 328n8 lexigraph, 307 LHOOQ (Duchamp, 1919), 282 Liber Studiorum (Claude), 119 Liber Studiorum (Turner), 118–19 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, 259 Lichtenstein, Roy, 26, 284 Lieberman, William, 242–43 Light and Colour (Turner, 1843), 33–34, 122, 128, 177–78, 298; CP 6 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 163 Lippi, Fra Lippo, 173 literacy: cultural advancement and, 13–15; linguistic competence and, 20–21; reading and the origin of, 12; in relation to picturacy, 1 literature: “affective” interpretation of, 312n10; corrupting influence on art, 25–26; origin of art criticism in, 44; Richter’s War Cut as, 306–09; role of pictures and words, 9, 12–16; selfrepresentation in painting and, 159–63. See also fiction; poetry “A Little Girl Lost” (Blake), 84, 87 “The Little Girl Found” (Blake), 87 “The Little Girl Lost (Blake), 84, 87 Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Vasari, 1551), 48 Lombroso, Cesare, 189–91 London, Bette, 181 Lord Byron’s Dream (Eastlake, 1829), 344n8 Lorrain, Claude, 29–31, 126, 161, 271, 285; Jacob with Laban and his Daughters, 119; Liber Studiorum, 119; Sacrifice to Apollo, 118; Seaport, 130 Louis XVI (King of France), 209 Love Paintings (Hockney, 1960–61), 239 Lucas, David, 142, 151–52, 156–57, 157 Lucian (ancient Greek writer), 74–82 Lugosi, Bela, 186

407

Lumière, Louis, 350n24 Lysistrata (Beardsley, 1896), 357n38 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 199 “Mad Song” (Blake), 94 Magritte, René, 6, 8–9, 22–25, 281, 292 Malevich, Kazimir, 287, 302 Manet, Édouard, 25, 36, 261–63 Manfred (Byron), 162 Mann, Sally, 7, 36–37 Mantegna, Andrea, 69, 81 Marilyn Monroe Diptych (Warhol, 1962), 254, 260, 282, 284–85 Marin, Louis, 79 Marriage à la Mode (Hogarth), 357n40 The Marriage Contract (Hogarth, c. 1732), 243, 248 Marriage of Figaro (Mozart, 1786), 195 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake), 95, 103 Marries an Old Maid, A Rake’s Progress (Hockney, 1961–63), 236 Martelli, Diego, 265 Martin, Agnes, 288, 304 Marxism, 30, 260 Mary Cassatt at the Louvre (Degas, 1879–80), 266–67, 267. 272 Massing, Jean-Michel, 77–78 Matisse, Henri Émile Benoît, 7 Matthew Called (Caravaggio, 1599–1600), 3 Matthew Killed (Caravaggio, 1599–1600), 3 Maus (Spiegelman), 15 Mazzola, Girolamo. See Parmigianino (Girolamo Mazzola) McGann, Jerome, 164 McKim, Charles, 280 mechanical reproduction as art, 2–3, 312n6 medieval art, 22, 27–33 Meeting Other People (Hockney), 251

408

Cultivating Picturacy

Meeting the Good People (Washington), A Rake’s Progress (Hockney, 1961–63), 244–45, 244 Meisel, Martin, 201 Méliès, George, 184 Mellor, Anne, 184, 194 Melville, Herman, 8, 290 Menn, Barthelemy, 162 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 119, 184 “Metamorphosis” (Kafka), 281 metapictures, 321n15 Metz, Christian, 180 Meyer, Olga de, 274 Michelangelo (Bonarotti), 35, 170 The Mill (Rembrandt, c. 1650), 125, 143 Milton, John, 65, 92, 151, 154, 185 Milton, Peter, 8, 253–85; artist as printmaker, 256–56; Daylilies (1975), 256–63; Drowing Girl (1963), 284; Hidden Cities, 285, 367n50; Homage to Kandinsky (1954), 284; Mary’s Turn (1994), 263–72, 263; Nijinsky Variations (1996), 272–79; Points of Departure series, 256, 263, 285; The Rehearsal (1984), 253; A Sky-Blue Life (1976), 256; Twentieth Century Unlimited (1997), 279–85 minimalism, 60, 300, 302 Mitchell, W. J. T., 40, 86, 112, 128, 179 Moby Dick (Melville, 1851), 290 Mocetto, Girolamo, 81–82 modernism, 60–66, 254, 282–84 Modern Rome-Campo Vaccino (Turner, 1839), 160 Modern Woman (Cassatt, 1893), 269–70 Moers, Ellen, 186 Mohammed (founder of Islam), 14 Mona Lisa (da Vinci), 16, 170, 282 Mondrian, Piet, 61, 284, 289, 304 Monet, Claude, 291

Moreau, Gustave, 207–08 Moses (Hebrew prophet), 14, 29 Mother and Child (The Oval Portrait), (Cassatt, c. 1899), 270 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 195 Mulvey, Laura, 182 mural fragment, Delos (ram led to sacrifice), 5 Murillo, Bartolomé Estaban, 41 museums and galleries: Bond Street Gallery, 242; British Institution, 119; British Museum, 253; Carnegie Institute, 270; Currier Gallery, Manchester, NH, 253; Guggenheim Museum, 282; Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 302; Metropolitan Museum, New York, 243, 247, 253; Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 242, 253; National Gallery, London, 118–19, 138, 247–48, 271; National Gallery of Art, Washington, 264; Pasadena Art Museum, 283; Soane Museum, 359n3; Yale School of Art and Architecture, 254. See also Royal Academy of Arts; Tate Gallery, London Muybridge, Eadweard, 257 Myself and My Heroes (Hockney, 1961), 241 mythological subjects in art, 30–31 Namuth, Hans, 293 Narcissus as “inventor of painting,” 46–48 National Gallery of Art. See museums and galleries Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 74 naturalism, 2 natural resemblance: meaning of pictures in, 12–13; relational models and, 20–21; windowpane metaphor and, 317n27 Navicella (Giotto), 71–72 Nestrick, William, 184

Index

Newman, Arnold, 274 Newman, Bamet, 61, 301, 301–02 The New Novel (Homer, 1877), 36 Newton, Isaac, 121 The New York Times, 257 Nicholson, Kathleen, 119 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 189, 191 “Night” (Blake), 95 Nijinsky, Romola, 274 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 272 Nijinsky Variations (Milton, 1996), 272–79 Noland, Kenneth, 273 nonfiction. See literature Norham Castle, Sunrise (Turner, late 1840s), 124–25, 124 Norham Castle on the Tweed, Summer’s Morn (Turner, ex. 1798), 122–23, 122, 126 Now, Voyager, 193 Nude Descending a Staircase (Duchamp, 1912), 300 nudity: in Beardsley’s works, 211–12, 356n20; grotesquerie and, 210; in Milton’s prints, 257, 262, 283; as model for art, 346n21; objective in art, 265; in Richter’s works, 300–301; in works of art, 25, 36–38, 319n52 Number 1, 1948 (Pollock), 295–98; CP 12–13 Number 8, 1949 (Pollock), 296 Number 13, 1949 (Pollock), 298 No 648-2 (Richter, 1987), 306; CP 15

409

pacifism, 241 painting: as an act of encoding, 21–22; Alberti principle of depiction in, 70–74; border between art and work, 26; defining modernist abstraction in, 291–92; “history painting,” 30–31; integration of words and images in, 83; as “mute poetry,” 40; Narcissus as “inventor” of, 46–48; relation between photography and, 258–59; self-representation in literature and, 159–63; semiotic approach to, 2–6; systematic structure for, 116–17, 119, 317n25; theory of discursive information and, 115–16; theory of pictorial meaning in, 32–33 On Painting (Alberti), 69 Painting of the Ancients (Junius, 1638), 40–41 Pair of Old Shoes (van Gogh, 1888), 57 A Pair of Shoes (van Gogh, 1886), 55–59, 61 Panofsky, Erwin, 4, 26–33, 77, 79 Paradise Lost (Milton, 1667), 65, 92, 121, 151, 154, 182, 190–91, 193, 197, 206, 220–21 Parmigianino (Girolamo Mazzola), 41 Parrhasius (Greek painter), 40 Parrott, S. W., 174 The Parting of Hero and Leander-from the Greek of Musaeus (Turner, ex. 1837), 138–39, 138 Partridge, John, 228 Pasiphae (Pollock, c. 1943), 298 Oath of the Horatii (David), 132–33, Paul Preaching at Athens (Raphael, 132, 268 1515–16), 173 Odysseus (Homer), 174 Paulson, Ronald, 86, 209, 234 Olympia (Manet, 1863), 25 Peake, Richard Brinsley, 180 Opticks (Newton, 1704), 121 Peele Castle in a Storm (Beaumont), Original Sin and Expulsion from Paradise 148–55; CP 8 (Michelangelo), 35f “Peele Castle” (Wordsworth), 148, 152 Ostriker, Alicia, 111 Pennell, Joseph, 204 Ovid (Roman poet), 119, 184 perception: in abstract art, 292–93; captions and viewer, 17; language

410

Cultivating Picturacy

and, 313n18; painting as record of, 3; semiotics and, 3–6; viewer as “interpreter,” 1–2; the viewing process in, 322n22 perspective: abstract expressionism and, 288; cubist, 243, 247, 249; errors in, 247; invention of, 22, 34–35; in multitemporal works, 33–34; in printmaking, 254, 262; recession, 249 Perugino, Pietro, 49 Peterdi, Gabor, 254–55 Philostratus (ancient Greek writer), 2, 7, 44–48 “Phiz”. See Browne, Halbot Knight photography: art of printmaking with, 253–56; decoding the language of art in, 7–8; in Milton’s Daylilies, 256–63; in Milton’s Hidden Cities, 285; in Milton’s Mary’s Turn, 263–72; in Milton’s Nijinsky Variations, 272–79; in Milton’s Twentieth Century Limited, 279–85; political propaganda in, 365n18; realism of, 320n1, 320n5; of Richter’s War Cut, 306–09; sexuality in, 36–37; as a universal language, 16–17 Picasso, Pablo, 7, 242, 245–46, 245, 284, 295, 298, 307 pictorial competence, 20–21 pictorial meaning: Panofsky’s theory of, 26–33, 318n33 pictorial narrative: in abstract art, 8–9; art criticism and, 41–46, 51–53, 59–60, 65–66; historia as, 70–74, 80–81, 330n18; linear perspective and, 34–35; reading a picture as, 2, 33, 330n16. See also verbal description pictorial organicism, 363n2 picturacy: creating the skill of, 12; decoding the language of art in, 7; defined, 1

pictures: art criticism as speaking for, 40–44; as autobiography, 345n21; depiction of war in, 306–09; as female objects, 200; as metapictures, 321n15; as worth ten thousand words, 39–40 Pier and Ocean (Mondrian, 1915), 304 Pierce, Jack, 187, 190 Piranesi, Giambattista, 280 Pirckheimer, Willibald, 81–82 Plato, 13–14, 191, 352n44 Play within a Play (Hockney, 1963), 248 Pleasures of Imagination (Akenside), 122 Pliny the Elder (Roman scholar), 74, 322n23 Plutarch (Greek biographer), 185 Poe, Edgar Allen, 163 Poetical Sketches (Blake, 1783), 85, 94 poetry: Byron’s self-representation in, 163–68; in illuminated books, 8, 37, 83–86, 91, 99; lectoral art of, 36–37, 314n19; as literature, 15; as subject matter for art, 116–17; Turner use in art, 117–39. See also Blake, William; literature Points of Departure series (Milton), 8, 256, 285; Mary’s Turn (1994), 263; Nijinsky Variations, first state (1996), 273; Nijinsky Variations, second state (1996), 276; Twentieth Century Unlimited (1997), 280 Polidori, John William, 189 political metaphor: art and, 15–17, 260; postmodernism and, 365n18; racial overtones of color in, 289–91 Pollock, Jackson, 9, 61–64, 282, 293–300; Composition with Donkey Head (c. 1938–41), 296, 298; CutOut (c. 1948/50), 296; Eyes in the Heat (1946), 298; Full Fathom Five, 293, 299, CP 10–11; Number 1, 1948, 295–98, CP 12–13; Number

Index

8, 1949, 296; Number 13, 1949, 298; Pasiphae (c. 1943), 298; There Were Seven in Eight (1945), 299; Vortex (c. 1947), 299 Poovey, Mary, 188, 194 pop art, 25–26 Pope, Alexander, 127, 174, 202, 212–29, 358n43 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce, 1916), 159 postmodernism, 64–66, 254, 281, 307, 312n6, 365n18 Poussin, Nicolas, 2, 173 Powell, Cecilia, 136–37 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 141–42, 162–63 Presumption (Peake, 1823), 180 Printers Ink, 39 Printmaking, 253–56. See also Milton, Peter Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), 184

411

in, 11–13; decoding art by, 7; iconophobia in, 14–15; illusionism in, 22–25; language development and, 13–14; in multitemporal works, 33–36; Panofsky’s theory of pictorial meaning in, 26–33, 318n33; pictorial competence and, 20–21; pictorial narrative as, 2, 33–34; political metaphor in, 15–17; viewer as “interpreter” in, 1–2. See also interpretation of pictures Reagan, Nancy, 17 Reagan, Ronald, 17 realism: in fiction, 91, 190–91, 259; photography and, 306–09, 320n1, 320n5; in works of art, 18–22. See also super realism A Rebours (Huysman, 1884), 207 Receiving the Inheritance, A Rake’s Progress (Hockney, 1961–63), 235–36, 235, 241, 361n15 Red and Black (Stendhal), 209 Queer (Hockney, 1960), 239 referentiality, 24–27 Quintilian (Roman rhetorician), The Rehearsal (Milton, 1984), 253 39–40, 72–74, 320n5 Reinhardt, Ad, 287 religious art: end of the sacrosanct in, A Rake’s Progress (Hockney, 1963), 355n19; iconography in, 30–33, 278; 231–52 interpreting pictorial meaning in, A Rake’s Progress (Hogarth, 1735), 8, 27–30, 33–36; Raphael works of, 231–33 49–51, 49; Richter works of, 302, Rambert, Marie, 274, 276–77, 279 304–06; Rothko works of, 370n30; Ramsden, Mel, 291 Scripture and, 27, 29; Turner works The Rape of the Lock (Beardsley, 1896), of, 128–29, 177–78 214, 222 Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn): The Rape of the Lock (Pope), 8, 202, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of 212–29 Homer (1653), 168–69, 243; Cassatt Raphael, 39–40, 49–51, 49, 173, exhibitions with, 271; chiaroscuro in 346n23 works of, 142–43; The Mill (c. 1650), Rather, Dan, 11 125, 143; self-portraiture of, 162–63; Rauschenberg, Robert, 254, 258, Turner and, 161–62, 171, 285 287–93 Renaissance art: Alberti and history of, reading pictures: changing the perspec15, 69–70; grotesquerie in, 210; lintive in, 25–27; construct of meaning ear perspective and, 22, 34–35, 116;

412

Cultivating Picturacy

pictorial meaning in, 27–33; postmodernism and, 65 representational art: abstract expressionism and, 288, 295–96; decoding the language of, 9, 21–22; doctrine of Perceptualism in, 1; linear perspective and, 22, 34–35, 116; natural resemblance in, 12–13, 317n27; Panofsky’s theory of pictorial meaning in, 26–33, 318n33; “realism” and, 18–20; Renaissance and, 15. See also art reproduction, 282, 285, 313n14, 314n20, 335n23, 347n4; abstract art and, 60; art criticism and, 41–42, 44, 66–67; Benjamin on, 259–60; Warhol and, 260 Retroactive I (Rauschenberg, 1964), 254 Reynolds, Joshua, 162, 187, 243, 273; Discourses on Art, 116–17, 169; SelfPortrait as Doctor of Civil Law (c. 1773), 168–69 Reza, Yasmina, 8, 287–93 rhetoric: and art criticism, 7, 40–41, 44–45, 66–68; ekphrasis as, 320n6; femine challenge to, 334n10; of silence in art, 70, 72, 80, 82 Richter, Gerhard, 8–9, 300–309; Abstract Picture (Abstraktes Bild) series (1997), 301–06; Abstract Picture (Rhombus) #5 (1998), CP 14; Ema (Nude on a Staircase), 300; Grau (Gray), 301; Kine (1995), 304; No 648-2 (1987), 306, CP 15; Schattenbild (1968), 301, 304; War Cut (2004), 306–09, CP 16–17; Wiesenthal, 301; Woman Descending the Staircase, 300 Ripa, Cesare, 119 The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky, 1913), 276, 279 Rome from the Vatican. Raffaelle...Preparing His Pictures for

the Decoration of the Loggia (Turner, ex. 1820), 170 Rorty, Richard, 22 Rosand, David, 69, 74–75, 79 Rose, Barbara, 273 Rose, Jacqueline, 250, 362n27 Rosenberg, Harold, 60 Rosenthal, Michael, 142 Rothko, Mark, 370n30 Rousseau, Henri, 162 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 13, 166 Rowlandson, Thomas, 209 Royal Academy of Arts: Constable at, 141–42, 155, 343n26; Parrott at, 174; Reynolds at, 116–17, 168; Turner at, 117–18, 122–23, 126, 129, 160, 169, 298, 338n26. See also museums and galleries Royal College of Art, 231–32, 238, 242 Rumsfeld, Donald, 39 Ruskin, John, 125–26, 160 Russian Pastoral (Leprince, 1765), 51 Sacra Conversazione (Botticelli, 1485), 33 Sacrifice of Iphigenia (Timanthes), 72–74 Sacrifice to Apollo (Claude), 118 Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds (Constable, 1831–34), 141 Salomé (Heywood), 207 Salomé (Wilde, 1893), 8, 202–12 Salomé with St. John’s Head (Beardsley, 1893), 203–04, 203 Salt, John, 20 Sam Who Walked Alone by Night (Hockney, 1961), 249 Satire on False Perspective (Hogarth, 1754), 247 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1 Scarry, Elaine, 183 Schapiro, Meyer, 8, 44, 54–59 Schattenbild (Richter, 1968), 301, 304

Index

Schelling, Friedrich, 199 Schlegel, A. W., 363n2 School of Athens (Raphael), 173 Schweik, Robert, 211 Scripture: Book of Revelation, 190; Salomé story in, 207; Song of Solomon, 182. See also religious art Seaport (Claude), 130 Seasons (Thomson), 120–22 Secret Knowledge (Hockney), 2 Segard, Achille, 264–65 Segni, Antonio, 81 Segni, Fabio, 81 Seidel, Linda, 29 Self-Portrait (Turner, c. 1798), 159, 169 Self-Portrait as Doctor of Civil Law (Reynolds, c. 1773), 168 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Parmigianino, 1525), 41 Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (Menn), 162 Self-Portrait of the Artist at the Age of Twenty-four (Ingres), 162–63 Self-Portrait with an Oriental Costume (Rembrandt, 1631), 163 self-portraiture, 159–78; Degas, Edgar, 272, 274; Hockney, David, 170, 242–46; Hogarth, William, 297; Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 162–63; Leonardo da Vinci, 170; Menn, Barthelemy, 162; Michelangelo, 170; Parmigianino (Girolamo Mazzola), 41; Rembrandt, 159, 161–63; Reynolds, Joshua, 162; Richter, Gerhard, 304; Turner, J. M. W., 159–61, 168, 169, 178; van Gogh, Vincent, 57–58 semiotic conception of art: cinema and, 180; natural resemblance and, 12–13; perceptualism and, 2–6; picturacy and the, 7, 312n11. See also signs, art of Semyonova, Marina, 277 Serrano, Andres, 355n19 Seventh Seal (Bergman), 279

413

sexuality: in cinema, 181–83; exploitation of women, 101–13; in Frankenstein, 193–96; and male dominance in art, 95; nudity and, 319n52; Oedipal conflict and, 197–98; A Rake’s Progress and, 249–50; in The Rape of the Lock, 212–29; in Salomé, 202–12; The Toilette of Salomé (1894), 356n27; in works of art, 36–37. See also gender; homosexuality; nudity Shade (Johns, 1959), 64–66, 64, 300 shadow. See chiaroscuro Shakespeare, William, 190 Shelley, Mary, 8, 180, 186, 191, 195, 351n31 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 180, 191, 290 signs, art of: Bryson definition of painting as, 1, 3–4; Culler on the, 12; culture and, 17–18; labeling the, 4–6, 24–25; windowpane metaphor in, 315n11, 317n27. See also semiotic conception of art Silverman, Kaja, 180, 182–83 Simonides (Greek poet), 40 Simpson, O. J., 320n5 Sistine Chapel, 35 A Sky-Blue Life (Milton, 1976), 256 The Slavers (Turner, 1840), 133 Slaves throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (Turner), 125 The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Goya, 1799), 279 Snodgrass, Chris, 210, 228–29 Snow at Argentieul (Monet, c. 1874), 291 Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (Turner, ex. 1812), 129, 134 Snow-Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth (Turner, ex. 1842), 175–77, 175 Socrates, 191

414

Cultivating Picturacy

Song of Songs, 109 Songs of Experience (Blake, 1794), 8, 37, 87, 89–91, 89 Songs of Innocence (Blake, 1789), 8, 37, 83–88, 88, 89–95, 95, 96 Sontag, Susan, 288 Southwark Fair (Hogarth, 1733–34), 243 Spanish Beggar Boys (Murillo), 41 Spartan Girls Challenging Boys (Degas, c. 1860), 268, 270 Spiegelman, Art, 15 Spring (Constable), 153–54 Starry Night (van Gogh), 59 The Start of the Spending Spree (Hockney, 1961–63), 240–41, 240, 246 Stations of the Cross (Newman), 301–02 Steinberg, Leo, 8, 42–43, 59–66, 300 Stendhal, 209 Stewart, Garrett, 7, 314n19, 319n50 St. Gaudens, Homer, 270 Still Life (Bayard, 1840), 257 Stoker, Bram, 189–90 Storr, Robert, 304 Stravinsky, Igor Fyodorovich, 275–76, 283 Stria (Noland), 273 Stroheim, Eric O., 180 The Student: Homage to Picasso (Hockney, 1973), 244–45, 244 The Studio (1893), 204 Study for Index: Incident in a Museum 2 (Baldwin, 1985), 291 Sulpicius, Servius, 166 “Summer” (Thomson), 122–23, 155 Sunday Funnies (Mann, 1991), 36–37, 36 Sun Rising Through Vapour (Turner, 1807), 118 Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1951), 179 super realism, 20, 25–26

Suprematist Composition (Red Square and Black Square) (Malevich, 1915), 302 surrealism, 256, 295, 298 Symposium (Plato), 191, 352n44 The Tail-Piece (Beardsley, 1894), 211–12, 211 Tansey, Mark, 7, 367n49 Target with Plaster Casts (Johns, 1962), 284 Tate Gallery, London: Constable at, 153–55; Eastlake at, 344n8; Hockney at, 242; Peter Milton at, 253; Turner at, 127, 160; Warhol at, 260. See also museums and galleries Teeth Cleaning, W11 (Hockney, 1962), 239 television, 11–12, 312n6 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy), 190, 354n9 “Thanksgiving” (Wordsworth, 1816), 146 “The Contrast” (Rowlandson, 1792), 209 There Were Seven in Eight (Pollock, 1945), 299 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin, 1936), 260 The Third Love Painting (Hockney, 1960), 240 The Third of May 1808 (Goya), 42 Thompson, E. P., 84 Thomson, James, 120–25, 134–35, 155 Timanthes (ancient Greek painter), 72–74 Time (magazine), 294 The Toilet (Beardsley, 1896), 214–16 The Toilette of Salomé (Beardsley, 1894), 212–13, 213, 223, 356n27 “Toward a Newer Laocoon” (Greenberg, 1940), 25

Index

Treichler, Paula, 102–03 Turner, J. M. W., 8, 33, 117–39, 159–78, 258, 271, 285, 298, 338n26; Aeneas and the Sibyl (c. 1798), 129; The Amateur Artist (c. 1808), 170; Approach to Venice (1844), 160; Apullia in Search of Appulus vide Ovid (1814), 119; The Artist’s Studio (c. 1808), 170; Bridge of Sighs...Venice: Canaletti [sic] Painting (ex. 1833), 171–72, 171; The Bright Stone of Honor and the Tomb of Marceau (1835), 160; Buttermere Lake (ex. 1798), 120, 122; Caernarvon Castle (1799), 126; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage-Italy (1832), 159–63, 168; A Country Blacksmith Disputing upon the Price of Iron (1807), 118, 128; The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (ex. 1817, 130–31, 131, 133–34; Dido Building Carthage (ex. 1815), 130–31, 130, 133–34; Doldabern Castle (1800), 126–27; The Fallacies of Hope, 128–30, 134, 170–71; The Field of Waterloo (1818), 160; The Fifth Plague of Egypt (ex. 1800), 172–73, 172, 178; The Garreteer’s Petition (ex. 1809), 127–28, 170, 178; Liber Studiorum, 118–19; Light and Colour (1843), 33–34, 122, 128, 177–78, 298, CP 6; Modern Rome-Campo Vaccino (1839), 160; Norham Castle, Sunrise (late 1840s), 124–25, 124; Norham Castle on the Tweed, Summer’s Morn (ex. 1798), 122–23, 122; Norham Castle on the Tweed, Summer’s Morn (ex. 1798), 126; The Parting of Hero and Leander–from the Greek of Musaeus (ex. 1837), 138–39, 138; Rome from the Vatican. Raffaelle... Preparing His Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia (ex. 1820),

415

170; Self-Portrait (c. 1798), 159, 169; Slaves throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, 125; Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (ex. 1812), 129, 134, 288; Snow-Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth (ex. 1842), 175–77, 175; Sun Rising Through Vapour (1807), 118; Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus-Homer’s Odyssey (ex. 1829), 173–75, CP 7; Van Goyen, Looking out for a Subject (ex. 1833), 170; The Visions of Medea (ex. 1828), 135–39, 135; Watteau Study by Fresnoy’s Rules (ex. 1831), 170 Turner on Vanishing Day (Parrott, c. 1846), 174–75. 174 Twain, Mark, 6 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche, 1889), 189 “The Tyger” (Blake, 1794), 96–99 Ulysses (Joyce), 65 Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus-Homer’s Odyssey (Turner, ex. 1829), 173–74, CP 7 Unofficial White House Photograph (American Postcard Co., 1988), 17, 18 Untitled (Martin, 1967), 288–89, 289, 304 “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture, Painted by Sir G. H. Beaumont” (Wordsworth, 1811), 146–47 The Valley Farm (Constable), 154 The Vampyre (Polidori, 1819), 189 Van der Weyden, Roger, 27, 32, 318n36 Van Eyck, Jan, 2, 28–29 van Gogh, Vincent, 55–59, 278–79 Van Goyen, Looking out for a Subject (Turner, ex. 1833), 170

416

Cultivating Picturacy

Van Valkenborch, Lucas, 291 Varley, Cornelius, 170 Vasari, Giorgio, 7, 41, 43, 48–51 Velazquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva, 25, 365n20 verbal description: film vs. written word, 183–84; history of ancient art as, 39–41; illustrated books and, 201; image as language of, 192; indirect language of art criticism, 43–44; regenerating ancient art from, 69–82. See also art criticism; pictorial narrative; rhetoric; words Vermeer, Jan, 3–4, 36, 271 Vernet, Claude-Joseph, 51, 176, 323n31, 346n28 Vernet, Horace, 176, 346n28 Verona, Guarino da, 74–82 viewer as “interpreter”: being deceived by art, 21–22; changing the perspective of, 24–26; doctrine of Perceptualism and, 1–3; pictorial narrative and, 330n16 Viewing a Prison Scene (Hockney, 1961–63), 237 The Village Politicians (Wilkie, 1806), 118 Villeneuve (French artist), 209 Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft, 1792), 101 Virgil, 129–30 Vision of the Three Magi (Van der Weyden), 27, 32 The Visions of Medea (Turner, ex. 1828), 135–39, 135 Visions of the Daughters of Albion (Blake, 1793), 8, 101–13 visual representation: abstract expressionism and, 300; availability of reproductions for, 41–42; cinema and, 179–81; language and, 313n13; words vs., 320n1 Vitruvian Man (da Vinci), 303–04, 303 Vogler, Thomas, 101–02

Voltaire (French writer), 166 Vortex (Pollock, c. 1947), 299 Vouilloux, Bernard, 41 The Wallet Begins to Empty (Hockney), 250–51 War Cut (Richter, 2004), 8, 306–09, CP 16–17 Warhol, Andy, 254, 260, 282 Watteau Study by Fresnoy’s Rules (Turner, ex. 1831), 170 Webling, Peggy, 348n9 Wendorf, Richard, 159 West, Benjamin, 133 Weymouth Bay, Dorsetshire (Constable), 145, 149–50 Whale, James, 180, 348n9 Wheeler, Daniel, 291, 294 “When I Heard at the Close of Day” (Whitman), 240–41 White Painting (Rauschenberg, 1951), 287–93 Whitman, Walt, 240–41, 360n13 Wiesenthal (Richter), 301 Wilde, Oscar, 8, 202–12 Wilder, Billy, 179 Wilder, Gene, 193 Wilkie, David, 118, 128 Williams, William Carlos, 361n19 Wilson, Richard, 118, 149 Winter Landscape (van Valkenborch, 1586), 291 Wolf, Leonard, 190 Wolfe, Tom, 288 Wollett, William, 118 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 101 woman: Constable on, 149–51; depiction in Frankenstein, 191–98; depiction in Salomé, 202–12; female suffrage and women’s rights, 271; French feminism movement, 266–68; as heroine, 101–13; image in cinema, 179, 181–83; image in

Index

visual art, 16, 133, 136–37, 200; “line of beauty” and, 297; male dominance in art, 59, 334n10; rivaling man as artist, 264–66, 270 Woman Descending the Staircase (Richter), 300 Woolf, Virginia, 163 words: displacing images in art, 7; history of ancient art in, 40–41, 69–82; iconographic coding in, 29; integration with images in Blake’s Songs, 83–99; integration with images in War Cut, 306–09; and lectoral art, 36–37, 319n50; as noble discourse, 14–15; a picture as worth ten thousand, 39; in works of art, 6, 25–26. See also language; literacy; literature; verbal description

417

Wordsworth, William, 8, 14–15, 141–58; Excursion, 145–46; “Peel Castle,” 148, 152; The Prelude, 141–42, 162–63; “Thanksgiving” (1816), 146 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 282 writing about art: language of criticism in, 7–8 Yeats, William Butler, 34 “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman), 103 Young Women Picking Fruit (Cassatt, 1891), 270–71 Zatlin, Linda, 211, 220 Zeuxis (ancient Greek painter), 187, 322n24 Ziff, Jerold, 120, 126