Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers

by Claudia Tobin

Overview

Explores the ‘still life spirit’ in modern painting, prose, dance, sculpture and poetry
Challenges the conventional positioning of still life a ‘minor’ genre in art historyProposes a radical alternative to narratives of modernism that privilege speed and motion by revealing forms of stillness and still life at the heart of modern literature and visual cultureProvides the first study of still life to consider the genre across modern literature, visual cultures and danceUncovers connections and cultural exchange between networks of European and American artists including the Bloomsbury Group and Wallace Stevens

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cézanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris.
Claudia Tobin reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement: the still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm; an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474455138
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/12/2020
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture
Edition description:	Critical
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dr Claudia Tobin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and the Huntington Library, California. She has published commissioned articles, scholarly book chapters, and exhibition catalogues on interdisciplinary topics including Virginia Woolf and still life, modernism and colour, and on Vanessa Bell's abstract painting as part of Tate's 'In Focus' series. She is General Editor, with Julian Bell, of Ways of Drawing, Thames & Hudson (2019).

Table of Contents

Introduction: ‘Nothing is statically at rest’: Cézanne and modern still life

1. ‘Quivering yet still’: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, and the aesthetics of attention

2. Still Life in Motion

3. ‘Past the gap where we cannot see’: Still life and the ‘numinous’ in British painting of the 1920s-30s

4. Wallace Stevens, Charles Mauron and ‘inactive contemplation’

Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, and Transfigured Things

Index

What People are Saying About This

Frances Spalding

Modernism and Still Life reminds us that Modernism not only introduced new ways of making art but also new ways of looking at art. Tobin is alert to the paradoxes inherent in the title 'still life' but also to the many ways in which stillness and movement enter into conversation in early modernism. This is a work of deft scholarship and considerable originality of thought. It makes a fresh intervention into a major subject and deepens understanding, offering another landmark in the historiography of Modernism.

Editorial Reviews

Modernism and Still Life reminds us that Modernism not only introduced new ways of making art but also new ways of looking at art. Tobin is alert to the paradoxes inherent in the title 'still life' but also to the many ways in which stillness and movement enter into conversation in early modernism. This is a work of deft scholarship and considerable originality of thought. It makes a fresh intervention into a major subject and deepens understanding, offering another landmark in the historiography of Modernism.

Frances Spalding

In this richly illustrated, closely argued, and carefully researched study, Claudia Tobin asks us to think afresh about the nature of modernist still life (including still-life paintings; still life in sculptural form; still life as represented in dance and in photographic documentation of the same; still life in poetry; and still life as it figures in contemporary criticism, aesthetic theory, and philosophical commentary).[...] Tobin’s primary aim is to enable us to understand that still life is not what we (probably) thought it was and to guide us to read it as a suggestive and vibrant form, which for those who developed the genre in the inter-war period offered new ways of thinking about stasis and mobility, aesthetics, objects, processes and, importantly in Tobin’s view, spirituality. [...] What we can take from Tobin’s impressive study is an understanding of the value of the slow contemplation of objects in (apparent) stasis as a mode of active engagement. Whether the tendency that she identifies in this selection of artists and thinkers is a manifestation of, or resistant to, the forces of modernity is still up for debate. Nevertheless, as Tobin concludes, there is evidence here that ‘transformation and movement live at the heart of stillness and the ordinary’.

The Review of English Studies - Jo Gill

Modernism and Still Life is a valuable and artfully elegant contribution to studies of the inter-arts aesthetic of modernist culture.

Wallace Stevens Journal - Lee M. Jenkins

Overall, Modernism and Still Life convincingly draws together aesthetic affinities between art forms but resists the temptation of simple analogies. The moments of intermedial collaboration are documented through discrete case studies but Tobin is keenly aware of the divergent aesthetic vocabularies and historical development of painting and literature, dance and sculpture, and other art forms. The book also historicises the scientific and theological thought of the time that gave significance to respective writer’s invocation of quivering, vibration, rhythm, transubstantiation, and a wider vocabulary of modern stillness. Modernism and Still Life is measured in the illuminating inter-aesthetic parallels it draws, while a uned to medium specificity and wary of comparing apples and oranges, or indeed apples and lemons.

The Modernist Review - Jack Quin