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Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886–1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists’ representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland, such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral, falling outside of the dominant disciplinary narratives of nationalism or modernism. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book chiefly examines artworks by of Walter Frederick Osborne (1857–1903), Rose Mary Barton (1856–1929), Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), Harry Aaron Kernoff (1900–74), Estella Frances Solomons (1882–1968), and Flora Hippisley Mitchell (1890–1973), encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate how the city was also the subject of a range of visual depictions, including those in painting and print. Focusing on the images created by these artists as they navigated the city’s streets, this book offers a vivid visualisation of Dublin and its inhabitants, challenging a reengagement with Ireland’s art history through the prism of the city and urban life.
1 Poverty, parks, and painting Reviewing the depiction of the urban scene in nineteenth-century British art, Caroline Arscott has noted that from the 1880s, the previous balance ‘between celebration and despair’ changed quite decisively to ‘a bleak vision of urban alienation’.1 Whereas previous generations of artists had sought to represent either ‘a marked confidence in the achievements of urban development’, or ‘a growing middle-class awareness of social problems’, this decade witnessed a marked ‘gloom and anxiety about the state of urban life
This is the first book-length study to intervene in both art-historical and narratological debates with a rigorous scholarly focus on nineteenth-century painting. The years roughly between 1830 and 1890 make up a moment in which European paintings spoke to a broad public in a way that was unprecedented and has probably not been achieved since, and narrative was a key ingredient in its appeal. The book defines narrative paintings as paintings that invite narrative responses. It analyses reviewers' language in detail, drawing on literary theory, and links reviews to close readings of selected paintings. The book draws on reception theory to argue that narrative meaning arises from an interaction between pictures and public. Story-telling critical reviews responded to story-telling paintings and addressed non-specialist audiences' delight in puzzling out a narrative. Paintings' non-perfomative technique, thought to appeal to connoisseurs, served narrative ends. Whereas earlier art had told stories through the body, nineteenth-century pictures shifted the focus onto inanimate objects. Narrativised objects became clues, and viewers reconstructed events from the material traces they had left. Case studies come from across Europe, with an emphasis on England, Scotland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.
. In the preceding chapters this issue has been explored in a number of ways. The power struggle between the emergent bourgeoisie and the aristocracy over the administration of the army mobilised middle-class opinion in favour of the private soldier, with concomitant interest in his daily life and work. Adjustments in the concept of history painting allowed importance to the representation of everyday
R&G 18_Tonra 01 11/10/2013 17:27 Page 183 18 Howard Barker’s paintings, poems and plays: ‘in the deed itself ’, or the triple excavation of the unchangeable Michel Morel Always the knowledge kills / […] You will starve of their scholarship1 My argument here is that painting, poetry and theatre being three generic means that make one see – painting shows, poetry lays bare and theatre does both through re-presentation on the stage – Barker’s triple creation operates a centripetal triangulation. I will take advantage of this fact to show how the paintings and the
The period from 1874, the year of the Ashanti expedition, until 1914 saw a dramatic increase in the number of battle paintings displayed at public exhibitions. Statistical analysis of the exhibits at the Royal Adacdemy shows that, even allowing for the general increase in the quantity of pictures, the number of battle pictures tripled the pre–1855 figures. 1 All military subjects, genre as well
The decade before Woodruff began working on the Atlanta murals saw the rise of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting, which came to be characterised as the first genuinely American modern art movement. Painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, were busy elaborating on what was distinctive about ‘American-type painting’, as Greenberg would come to refer to the paintings of Newman, Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson
R&G 19_Tonra 01 11/10/2013 17:29 Page 192 19 Memories of paintings in Howard Barker’s theatre Heiner Zimmermann Le musée imaginaire, the title of André Malraux’s essay on the psychology of the fine arts, denotes the body of works that fashion the sensibility of an epoch.1 In the following I shall speculate on Howard Barker’s musée imaginaire, or more precisely on some of his memories of paintings that had a part in the making of his plays and on the ways in which they inform his dramatic discourse. In Pablo Picasso’s Poèmes et Lithographies the editor remarks
joyful, the life pouring out of her (see Plate 2 ). In the painting she is emerging from lush, seemingly impenetrable vegetation, and she appears to move with ease. It’s a scene that has always led me to ponder the enigma of both the painter and his subject. For decades we admired the piece of art – me and Paty, and our children, Pablo, Agatha, and Daniel. In it, Leonora inhabits a landscape that seems to belong to her; she is clad in moss, surrounded by a jungle of lianas. Years later, when Leonora was no longer with us, I was unexpectedly deprived of this painting
Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black: race-ing the Carib divide In 2002 the government of St Vincent proclaimed the eighteenth-century Carib warrior Chatoyer a national hero. A chief among the so-called ‘Black’ Caribs, Chatoyer led valiant campaigns against British colonial forces during the two Carib Wars (1772–73 and 1794–98) that were the dramatic culmination of the Carib/British colonial contest. Recently, the hero’s bold image has emerged as an emblem of local pride – reproduced in promotional tourist literature, adorning the covers of