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 history
- Proposes 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 culture
- Provides the first study of still life to consider the genre across
modern literature, visual cultures and dance
- Uncovers 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.
