Literature, Painting and Aura (Behluli) Flashcards
What are some examples for ‘intermedial references’ (Rajewsky)?
- Henri Matisse’s Still Life with Books and a Candle (1890)
- Albert Anker’s Die Lesende (1883)
- Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
- Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)
What are some examples for ‘intermedial transposition’ (Rajewsky)?
- The Abduction of Europa (1632) by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE)
- Ophelia (1851–52) by Sir John Everett Millais, based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (ca. 1599)
What are some examples for ‘intermedial combination (Rajewsky)?
- Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” (2013)
History of Literature and Paintings
Antiquity: Sister Arts / Classical Rhetoric
Renaissance: Paragone
Enlightenment: Sister Arts (neoclassical revival) vs Paragone (Lessing’s Laocoon 1766)
Romanticism: Public museums further strong ties
Modernism: Gertrud Stein’s Paris Salon
Contemporary: “Pictorial Turn” / Intermediality
Antiquity: Sister Arts
- The study of the relationship between the different arts reaches back to Greek and Roman Antiquity, when painting and poetry were regarded as ‘sister arts’:
- “the ultimate point of reference for both poetry and painting is the visual imagination.” (Lipski 3) à hierarchy of the senses since Aristotle, with the sense of sight at the top
Renaissance: Paragone
- “The term sister arts hides the fact that the different art forms were increasingly understood as competitive ones” (Rippl 4)
- During the Renaissance, intellectuals and practitioners such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) promoted beliefs about medial ‘purity’ and argued in favor of one art as superior to the other. He wanted to elevate painting beyond its status as a ‘craft’. Painting, he argued in Il Paragone delle Arti, is an independent art form that requires even more creative skill and intellectual prowess than poetry.
- Paragone: Italian for “comparison” or “competition”
Enlightenment: Sister Arts vs Paragone
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) offers the first extensive comparison of poetry and painting, which is also applicable to verbal and visual arts more broadly, and highlights their medial distinctness
- Lessing’s claim: painting is spatially oriented and static (depicting bodies), but poetry is consecutive and narrative (depicting actions). Hence, to achieve aesthetic beauty, the arts should stick to their respective affordances —> against ekphrastic poetry (attempts to be visual), and allegorical and historical painting (attempt to be narrative)
- “The definitive dissolution of the ‘sisterhood’ in aesthetic theory is credited to Lessing and his Laocoon.” (Lipski)
Romanticism: Public museums further strong ties
- Public museums and galleries are established at the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth centuries [Louvre (1793), Rijksmuseum (1798), Museo del Prado (1819), National Gallery (1824), Metropolitan Museum of Art (1870)]
–> democratization’ of art / access to fine art is broadened beyond nobility - 1839: ‘birth’ of photography (‘daguerreotypes’)
- Mutual influence of the arts in aesthetic debates (Walter Pater, John Ruskin, etc.); also seen in shared myths, tropes, etc.
- myth of the artist/author as a ‘genius’ who creates ‘original’ art (like God)
- solitary figure in nature: triumph of subjectivity and emotions
Modernism
- Era of cross-artistic collaborations and inspiration!
- Gertrude Stein’s salon on 27 Ruede Fleurus, Paris (1903-1938): large collection of art and meeting spot for creatives and intellectuals from various spheres (Picasso, Hemingway, Joyce, Matisse, etc.)
- Bloomsbury Group in London: association of authors, artists, creatives and intellectuals (Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, etc.)
Contemporary Period: Intermediality Theories
- A more recent approach to the interactions of different media and arts, which has been expanding since the 1980s.
- Intermediality studies partially replace ‘sister arts’ and ‘paragone’, highlighting media collaborations. Study of intermedial relations, contacts, clashes, collaborations, etc. from a more ideologically neutral standpoint. —> “all arts are ‘composite’ arts (both text and image); all media are mixed media” (Mitchell 1995)
Example of ‘intermedial transposition’ and ‘intermedial reference’
Ovid’s myth of Daedalus and Icarus (ca. 8 CE) inspired Bruegel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1560), which inspired Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux-Arts” (1938)
Why do novels refer to art objects such as paintings?
- Literary Realism: Novel’s obsession with all objects and means of representing reality faithfully (descriptions add to the “reality effect”, cf. Barthes 1968, and “copy” reality)
- Aesthetic Theories: self-reflexive way to reflect on novelistic practices via other media
- Reception Strategies: Model certain modes of looking and interpreting
- Self-Canonization: ‘parasitic’ borrowing of the artwork’s “aura” to elevate the status of the novel
Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935)
- “a broad speculative account of the interaction of industrial production and modern aesthetics”
- Question: What is the relationship between social history and aesthetics?
- Answer: 19th-century changes – influenced by industrialization and the advent of capitalist mass production – have proven that the status of the artwork is not timeless. One effect has been the devaluation of the concept of the ‘original’.
–> The idea of ‘aura’, the definition of ‘art’, and even modes of perceiving and experiencing the world have proven to be unsustainable!
Benjamin’s binary opposition: “original” vs “reproduction”
- Benjamin claims that 19th-century technologies of mechanical reproduction of visual art played a central role in the formation of our concepts of the original and the copy.
- Mechanical reproduction (e.g., photographs, prints) strips the artwork of its aura because the copies lack the original’s history and presence. This makes art more accessible but also detaches it from its traditional, sacred aura.
What does Benjamin mean by aura?
describes the unique, ineffable quality of an artwork that stems from its authenticity, originality, and presence in time and space. The aura is tied to the artwork’s uniqueness (original artwork is singular and cannot be replicated, aura is connected to this rarity), historical context (aura reflects the work’s position in history, its provenance, and its association with specific traditions or rituals.), physical presence (aura arises from experiencing the work directly in its original form and location, creating a sense of awe or reverence.).
Reasons why ekphrasis is not a copy
- You can have an infinite number of ekphrases about the same image, which will not be identical copies = creative aspect
- Ekphrases of imagined artworks (cf. ‘notional ekphrases’, Hollander 1988) don’t have an ‘original’ referent
- Ekphrases do different cultural work by making images ‘legible’ in different historical contexts, so it doesn’t make sense to limit them to this temporal logic –> they can ‘reactivate’ and ‘re-auraticize’ the original
Summary — Literature, Painting and Aura
- The relationship between literature and painting goes back to the beginnings of both artforms, and their (“sisterly” to paragonal) interactions throughout the millennia have shaped their individual developments (e.g. the realist novel)
- The most recent scholarly approach to examine this relationship between the verbal and visual arts is intermediality studies (especially ekphrasis studies)
- There are numerous ways in which pictorial features can find their way into literature, from purely stylistic choices (‘painterly effect’) to explicit evocations of visual artefacts (’ekphrasis’)
- In today’s era of mechanical and digital reproducibility, intermedial interactions between literature and painting may generate intriguing perspectives on the nature and role of art
- Hence, the tension between ‘originals’ and ‘copies’ – especially in intermedial phenomena – should not be seen as static and limiting, but as highly productive
