Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music 3031395980, 9783031395987

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Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music Edited by Mette Gieskes · Mathilde Roza

Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music

Mette Gieskes · Mathilde Roza Editors

Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music

Editors Mette Gieskes Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Mathilde Roza Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

ISBN 978-3-031-39597-0 ISBN 978-3-031-39598-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Uwe Poth, Still even Show Window Nijmegen, 2007, oil on photocanvas, 210 × 130 cm. © Uwe Poth This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Wouter Weijers

Acknowledgments

We wish to extend our gratitude to the many people who have supported the production of this collection: student assistants Amber van Esseveld, Jasmijn Janssen, and Romy Mennen for helping us out on numerous occasions; Willy Piron of the Center for Art Historical Documentation (CKD) at Radboud University for his expert advice on image rights; Radboud Institute of Culture and History, under direction of Liedeke Plate, for its generous financial support; Bresser-Chapple’s Nina Bresser and Sophie Chapple for translating Daan Van Speybroeck’s chapter and editing the first draft of two other chapters; Julia Brockley, Emily Wood, Geetha Chockalingam, Liviyaa Sree, and Lina Aboujieb at Palgrave MacMillan for their editorial help, kind patience, and answers to our many queries. Finally, we want to thank our friends, colleagues, and family for supporting and bearing with us. Above all, we are grateful to Wouter Weijers, to whom this collection is dedicated, for his friendship and everything he gave us over the many years.

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Contents

Introduction: Retrospection and Revision in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Music Mette Gieskes and Mathilde Roza

1

Retrospection and Memory Stepping in the Same River Twice: Péter Forgács and the Revisiting of the Danube Exodus László Munteán

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Uwe Timm and the Ghosts of the Past—A Writer’s Ethical Impact on the Agenda of Collective Memory Yvonne Delhey

35

Australia and Morocco Revisited: The Materialized Travel Memories of Dutch Visual Artist Theo Kuijpers Mariëtte Verhoeven

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Revision, Politics, and Ideology The Fall and Rise of Exile’s Return: Malcolm Cowley and the Cultural Politics of Revision Hans Bak

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CONTENTS

Revision, Change, and the Native American Oral Tradition in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine(s) Mathilde Roza An Old Man Looking from the Window: Camille Pissarro, the Tuileries Garden Paintings, and Turning Points in His Career Lieske Tibbe

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Revisiting and Control: The Artist’s Legacy Retrospective Anticipation: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Efforts at Controlling Her Legacy Sandra Kisters

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Replaying the Past: Belgian Pop Band dEUS’s Return to Early Work Helleke van den Braber

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Confessin’ the Blues: The Rolling Stones’s Revisit of Their Musical Roots Frank Mehring

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Artists’ Haunts: Late Artists Revisiting Their Work Beyond Their Time Rudie van Leeuwen Story

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Transformation and Change in Late Work Space, Time, and Change in Claude Monet’s Late Paintings Thomas Baumeister and with Mette Gieskes

215

Winter Is Coming: The Voice of Spring by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1910) Jan Dirk Baetens

235

The Passage of Time: Jasper Johns’s The Seasons (1985–86) and 5 Postcards (2011) Sandra Mackus

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CONTENTS

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Creation, Aging, and the Prospect of Death Endpapers: Adrienne Rich’s Signature to Her Life Diederik Oostdijk

277

Jean Le Gac: Auto-Reflexive Artist Daan Van Speybroeck

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Yielding to Touch: Simon Hantaï’s Late Reactivations of Pliage Mette Gieskes

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CODA: Encore—Notes on Lacan’s Reference to Mysticism in the Late Seminars Marc De Kesel

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Jan Dirk Baetens (Ph.D. 2011, University of Leuven) is an assistant professor of nineteenth-century art at the department of History, Art History & Classics of Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). He has published widely on history painting and historical genre painting and on the nineteenth-century art market. He has also contributed to exhibition catalogues on Lawrence Alma-Tadema, James Tissot, and nineteenth-century Belgian art. He is currently preparing a book-length study on the painter Henri Leys. Hans Bak is Emeritus Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Radboud University (the Netherlands). He is the author of Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years (University of Georgia Press, 1993), the editor of The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987 (Harvard University Press, 2014), and the author of a forthcoming biography of Cowley. His articles on twentieth- and twentyfirst-century American and Canadian literature have appeared in leading European and American journals. Thomas Baumeister (Berlin, 1943 - Nijmegen, 2023) was an associate professor of the history of modern philosophy at Radboud University until his retirement. He studied philosophy, art history, and literary studies in Berlin and Heidelberg. Baumeister published widely on philosophy and aesthetics and is the author of the books Hegels Frühe Kritik an Kants Ethik (Carl Winter Universitäts Verlag, 1976, dissertation advisor

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Hans-Georg Gadamer) and De filosofie en de kunsten. Van Plato tot Beuys (1999; German version: Die Philosophie der Kuenste. Von Plato bis Beuys, 2012). Marc De Kesel is Professor of philosophy at Radboud University (The Netherlands). His fields of research are continental philosophy, theory of mysticism, Holocaust reception, Freudo-Lacanian theory, and theories of modern art. Recent publication are Ik God & mezelf: Mystiek als deconstructie (I, God & myself. Mysticism as Deconstruction, 2021); Effacing the Self: Mysticism and the Modern Subject (2023); and Seks in biopolitieke tijden: Levenskunst met Foucault en Lacan (Sex in Bio-political times: Art of Living with Foucault and Lacan, 2023). Yvonne Delhey is an assistant professor of German literature and culture at the Department of Modern Languages at Radboud University (The Netherlands). She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in 2002 with a thesis entitled Reform Socialism and Literature in the GDR. Her research focuses on autobiographical/autofictional writing and related types of texts, in which the relations between the individual and society are explored. Mette Gieskes (Ph.D. 2007, University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at Radboud University (The Netherlands). Her dissertation concerned the use of systems in American art of the 1960s and 1970s. Her publications include articles on Philip Guston, Sol LeWitt, Francis Alÿs, Tamara Muller, and Otobong Nkanga. Gieskes is co-editor of both Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music and of Humor in Global Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury 2024, with Gregory Williams). Sandra Kisters has been director of collections and research at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam since 2015. Previously she was an assistant professor in modern and contemporary art at VU University, Amsterdam, Utrecht University, and Radboud University. Her publications include Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam 2021), The Lure of the Biographical. On the (Self-) Representation of Modern Artists (Amsterdam: Valiz 2017), and The Mediatization of the Artist (Cham: Palgrave McMillan 2018). Sandra Mackus is active as an artist, art critic, and art historian. Both her art practice and writing concern contemporary drawing in its broadest

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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sense, as well as contemporary textile art. Her drawings have been shown at various art institutions in the Netherlands, Turkey, the USA, Canada, and Singapore. She has written on a great number of artists, including Tacita Dean, Rinus van de Velde, Lily van der Stokker, Seet van Hout, and Taisia Korotkova. Frank Mehring is Professor of American Studies at Radboud University (The Netherlands). His research focuses on cultural transfer, intermediality, and the function of music in transnational cultural contexts. His publications include Sphere Melodies (2003) on Charles Ives and John Cage, The Soundtrack of Liberation (2015) on WWII sonic diplomacy, and Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music (2018, with Erik Redling). Mehring unearthed a new visual archive of transatlantic modernism with the edition of Winold Reiss’s Mexico Diary (2016) and the anthology The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (2022). László Munteán is an assistant professor of cultural studies at Radboud University (The Netherlands). At the Radboud Institute for Culture and History (RICH), he leads the research group ‘Memory, Materiality, and Affect.’ His publications have focused on the memorialization of 9/ 11, photography, urban culture, architecture, and cultural heritage. In a broader sense, his scholarly work revolves around the juncture of material culture, visual culture, and cultural memory in American and Eastern European contexts. Diederik Oostdijk is Professor of English and American literature at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He has published widely on American poetry and the memory of World War II, including two books: Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II (2011) and Bells for America: The Cold War, Modernism, and the Netherlands Carillon in Arlington (2019). He is currently writing a book about a Jewish art dealer who got embroiled in Hitler’s Führermuseum. Mathilde Roza is associate professor of American Literature and American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen (the Netherlands). She is the author of the critical literary biography Following Strangers: The Life and Works of Robert M. Coates (South Carolina University Press, 2011). Next to American modernism and the international avant-garde, she publishes on Native North American visual art and literature, with an emphasis on intercultural encounters.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Lieske Tibbe (Ph.D., 1994, University of Amsterdam) was assistant professor at the Department of Art History at Radboud University (The Netherlands) from 1976 until the year of her retirement: 2012. She specializes in art, art theory, and political theory and their mutual relations around 1900, as well as in museums and exhibitions of applied art. She has published widely on a diversity of topics, including art nouveau and socialism, Roland Holst, William Morris, and art criticism around 1900. Helleke van den Braber is Professor of patronage studies at Utrecht University and an associate professor of cultural studies at Radboud University (The Netherlands). She publishes on the relationship between (cultural) value and legitimacy in pop music, on fan funding, and on patronage relationships in popular culture (notably hip-hop and rock). Rudie van Leeuwen Story is an art historian and religious studies scholar who specializes in the pictorial tradition of spiritual dissent. His Ph.D thesis (Radboud University, 2018) was devoted to Dutch and Flemish portraits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the guise of Biblical figures. He is the co-author (with Volker Manuth and Marieke de Winkel) of the XXL volume Rembrandt: The Complete Paintings (2019) and founder of the Karel van Mander Academy. Daan Van Speybroeck (1948) received philosophy degrees at the universities of Antwerp and Leuven (Belgium). Until his retirement in 2012, he held the position of art coordinator at Radboud University and Radboudumc Hospital in Nijmegen (The Netherlands). In that capacity, he formulated the art policy of both the university and hospital, developed the institutions’ art collection, curated exhibitions, initiated art committees, gave lectures, and realized publications, including The French Connection: Kunstcollectie UMC St Radboud (2012). Mariëtte Verhoeven (Ph.D., 2010) is a lecturer and researcher at the Radboud Institute for Culture and History at Radboud University. Her research focuses on cultural memory and heritage. Before Verhoeven entered academia, she graduated from a teacher training college in the disciplines of crafts and drawing where visual artist Theo Kuijpers was one of her teachers. Like Kuijpers, she traveled a lot, especially during her career in the travel industry. Against this personal background, Verhoeven wrote her contribution to this volume.

List of Figures

Australia and Morocco Revisited: The Materialized Travel Memories of Dutch Visual Artist Theo Kuijpers Fig. 1

Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Theo Kuijpers, Down Under, 1980, assembly and mixed media on board, 99 × 197.5 cm, Sammlung Heinrich W. Risken Stiftung, Versmold, Germany. Photo © Peter Cox Theo Kuijpers, Australia, 1983, mixed media on canvas and board, 135 × 229 cm. Photo © Peter Cox Theo Kuijpers, Wit Huis in Blauw (White House in Blue), 1998, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. Photo © Peter Cox Theo Kuijpers, Outback, 2010, mixed media on canvas, 170 × 200 cm, Museum van Bommel van Dam, Venlo, the Netherlands. Photo © Peter Cox Theo Kuijpers, Morning Light , 2011, mixed media on canvas, 165 × 200 cm. Photo © Peter Cox

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An Old Man Looking from the Window: Camille Pissarro, the Tuileries Garden Paintings, and Turning Points in His Career Fig. 1

Camille Pissarro, La Causette (Two Young Peasant Women), 1891–1892, oil on canvas, 89.5 × 116.5 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain

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Fig. 3

Fig. 4

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LIST OF FIGURES

Camille Pissarro, Le Jardin des Tuileries un Après-midi d’Hiver (The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon), 1899, oil on canvas, 73.3 × 92.4 cm, 1899, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain Camille Pissarro, Le Jardin des Tuileries, Matinée de Printemps, Temps Gris (The Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning ), 1899, oil on canvas, 73.3 × 92.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain Paul Signac, Au Temps d’Harmonie. L’Age d’Or n’est pas dans le Passé, il est dans l’Avenir (In Times of Harmony. The Age of Gold is not in the Past, it is in the Future), 1896, oil on canvas, 87.6 × 104.1 cm, Hôtel de Ville, Montreuil. Public domain Claude Monet, Les Tuileries (The Tuileries Gardens ) (study), 1876, oil on canvas, 54 × 73 cm, Musée Marmottan, Paris. Public domain

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Retrospective Anticipation: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Efforts at Controlling Her Legacy Fig. 1

Fig. 2

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Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918, photograph (gelatin silver print), 23.5 × 15.4 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source Art Resource, NY Georgia O’Keeffe, Abstraction White Rose, 1927, oil on canvas, 91.5 × 76 cm, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe (NM). Gift of the Burnett Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (1997.4.2). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe / Art Resource, NY Georgia O’Keeffe, From the River—Pale, 1959, oil on canvas, 105.41 × 79.69 cm, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe (NM). Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (2006.5.280). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe / Art Resource, NY Georgia O’Keeffe, Sky above Clouds IV , 1965, oil on canvas, 243.8 × 731.5 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago. Restricted gift of the Paul and Gabriella Rosenbaum Foundation; gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1983.821. © The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5

Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelvis IV , 1944, oil on masonite, 91.4 × 101.6 cm, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe (NM). Gift of The Burnett Foundation. © 1987, Private Collection. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe / Art Resource, NY

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Confessin’ the Blues: The Rolling Stones’s Revisit of Their Musical Roots Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

a Mick Jagger and Muddy Waters performing “Please Don’t Go” (17:40 min.) (Source Video Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago, Sunday, 22 November 1981. Recorded on 22 November 1981 by David Hewitt on the Record Plant Black Truck, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and released on 10 July 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32YQYJuxyn0. Accessed 24 April 2023). b Mick Jagger and Muddy Waters performing “Mannish Boy” with guitarist Keith Richards in the background (right) (30:45 min) (Source Video Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago, Sunday, 22 November 1981. Recorded on 22 November 1981 by David Hewitt on the Record Plant Black Truck, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and released on 10 July 2012. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=32YQYJuxyn0. Accessed 24 April 2023) a Mick Jagger on stage in-between Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy performing “Mannish Boy”, with guitarist Ronnie Wood in the background (35:24) (Source Video Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago, Sunday, 22 November 1981. Recorded on 22 November 1981 by David Hewitt on the Record Plant Black Truck, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and released on 10 July 2012. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=32YQYJuxyn0. Accessed 24 April 2023). b Mick Jagger on stage chewing on his nails next to his blues heroes Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, and Lefty Dizz (Source Video Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago, Sunday, 22 November 1981. Recorded on 22 November 1981 by David Hewitt on the Record Plant Black Truck, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and released on 10 July 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32YQYJuxyn0. Accessed 24 April 2023)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Ronnie Wood, album cover of Confessin’ the Blues (2018). © Ronnie Wood Mick Jagger hands the microphone to Barack Obama to join the band singing “Sweet Home Chicago” at the White House during the concert “In Performance in the White House: Red, White and Blues” in 2012. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Z7x4ZS7ZZWc&t=7s. Accessed 24 April 2023

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Artists’ Haunts: Late Artists Revisiting Their Work Beyond Their Time Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

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Nicholas Flamel via Victor Hugo, A Mercurian, July 26, 1854, 9:25 PM, from Chambers (1998, 153) (Source www.gavroche.org/vhugo/flamel.shtml) a Hafed’s Initiation into the Order of the Magi, engraving from Duguid (1876, 81). b Moses Consecrating Eleazer as Aaron’s Successor, engraving (detail), from Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, 1860, 244 The British magician William S. Marriott simulates automatic writing, inspired by a ghostly guide. Double exposed photograph, Pearson’s Magazine, 1910. The sling technique is similar to that used by Mühl in the treatment of her patients (Source https://thamesandhudson.com/pro ductattachments/index/download?id=37) Augustin Lesage painting in public at the Institut Métaphysique International, Paris, April–May, 1927. © Nicolas Dewitte/LaM © Adagp, Paris, 2020 (Source https:/ /www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/vivez-une-experiencehypnotique-grace-aux-oeuvres-d-augustin-lesage-peintre-spi rite-5718442) a Robert Swain Gifford, Landscape with gnarled, windblown trees, oil on canvas, whereabouts unknown (Source Hyslop (1919, 208, Fig. I). b Frederic L. Thompson, Two trees, sketch drawn while he felt overwhelmed by Robert Swain Gifford, left with Professor Hyslop (Source Hyslop (1919, 208, Fig. II)

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LIST OF FIGURES

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Space, Time, and Change in Claude Monet’s Late Paintings Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3 Fig. 4

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Claude Monet, Les Nuages (The Clouds ), 1914–1926, oil on canvas, three panels, fixed to the wall, 200 × 1275 cm, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. Public domain Claude Monet, Cathédrale de Rouen, Façade Ouest, au Soleil (Rouen Cathedral , West Façade, Sunlight ), oil on canvas, 100.1 × 65.9 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Public domain Claude Monet, Nymphéas (The Water Lily Pond), 1917–1919, Albertina Museum, Vienna. Public domain Claude Monet, Nymphéas (Water Lilies ), 1914–1926, oil on canvas, three panels, 200 × 1276 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York (Centrum voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie Radboud University, Nijmegen) Claude Monet, Reflets d’Arbres (Reflection of Trees ), 1914–1926, oil on canvas, three panels, fixed to the wall, 200 × 850 cm, Musée de l’Orangerie. Public domain

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Winter Is Coming: The Voice of Spring by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1910) Fig. 1

Fig. 2

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Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Voice of Spring, 1910, oil on panel, 48.8 × 115 cm, private collection (Source Photo: © Sotheby’s) Lawrence Alma-Tadema, On the Road to the Temple of Ceres, 1879, oil on canvas, 89 × 53.1 cm, private collection (Source Photo: © Sotheby’s) Lawrence Alma-Tadema, “The Year’s at the Spring, All’s Right with the World,” 1902, oil on panel, 34.2 × 24.1 cm, private collection (Source Photo: © Sotheby’s) Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Autumn, ca. 1874, graphite on paper, 16.5 × 54.6 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Friends of Drawings and Prints Gifts and Ian Woodner Family Collection Fund, 2018

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LIST OF FIGURES

The Passage of Time: Jasper Johns’s The Seasons (1985–86) and 5 Postcards (2011) Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

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Jasper Johns, The Seasons, 1985–1986. Installation view exhibition Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss, and the Cycle of Life, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, November 12, 2016—February 20, 2017. Photo: David Stover. © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Jasper Johns, 5 Postcards, 2011, encaustic, oil, and graphite on five canvases. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Jasper Johns, The Seasons:Spring, 1986, encaustic on canvas, 190.5 × 127 cm, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Jasper Johns, The Seasons:Fall, 1986, encaustic on canvas, 190.5 × 127 cm, collection of the artist. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Jasper Johns, 5 Postcards (#4), 2011, oil and pencil on canvas, 91 × 69 cm. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 97 × 65 cm. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

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Jean Le Gac: Auto-Reflexive Artist Fig. 1

Fig. 2

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Jean Le Gac, Le Peintre (The Painter), 1973, ten photos, one circa 45 × 34 cm and the other nine 30 × 40 cm. Unsigned version in artist’s collection (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, owns a signed version). (Photo: © Jean Le Gac) Jean Le Gac, Le Délassement d’un Peintre Parisien (avec Ripolin) (The Parisian Painter’s Pastime (with Ripolin)), 1985, pastel, photo, and text, 150 × 212 cm, private collection. (Photo: © Jean Le Gac) Jean Le Gac, Story Art (avec À Mort le Peintre) (Story Art (with To Death with the Painter)), 1986–1989, mixed media on canvas, camera tripod, and projector, installation in artist’s studio. (Photo: Roland Favollet © Jean Le Gac)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4

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Fig. 6

Jean Le Gac, Le Bâtard d’Avignon (The Bastard of Avignon), 2008, mixed media on canvas and text, 210 × 314 × 60 cm, photo taken at exhibition Jean Le Gac, Choses peintes-photographiées-écrites (Jean Le Gac, Things Painted-photographed-written), 2016, Centre d’Art Contemporain Acentmetresducentredumonde, Perpignan, France. (© Jean Le Gac) Jean Le Gac, drawing based on an existing work, made for Jean Le Gac’s book Et le Peintre—Tout l’Œuvre Roman 1968–2003 (And the Painter—All the Novelesque Œuvre 1968–2003), Paris: Galilée, 2004. (© Jean Le Gac) Exhibition installation view Jean Le Gac, L’Atelier Parallèle, Musée de Carouge, Genève, Switzerland, 2015. (Photo: © Jean Le Gac)

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Yielding to Touch: Simon Hantaï’s Late Reactivations of Pliage Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4 Fig. 5

Simon Hantaï in his studio in Meun, France, 1976, photo by Édouard Boubat. © Archives Simon Hantaï/Pictoright Amsterdam 2023 Simon Hantaï, Laissées, 1981–1996, three silkscreens on canvas, each 300 × 98 cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023 Simon Hantaï, Suaire (Shroud), 2001, digital inkjet print on canvas; Suaire (Shroud), 2001, digital inkjet print on canvas; and Tabula Lilas (Lilac Tabula), 1982, acrylic on canvas. Exhibition installation view Fables du Lieu, Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Tourcoing, February–April 2001. © Archives Simon Hantaï/Pictoright Amsterdam 2023 Simon Hantaï unearthing paintings, Meun, France, 1997. © Archives Simon Hantaï/Pictoright Amsterdam 2023 Simon Hantaï, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, pages 78–79 of La Connaissance des Textes: Lectures d’un Manuscrit Illisible (The Knowledge of Texts: Readings of an illegible manuscript ), Paris: Galilée, 2001. © Archives Simon Hantaï/Pictoright Amsterdam 2023

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Introduction: Retrospection and Revision in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Music Mette Gieskes and Mathilde Roza

In her poem “These are the days when birds come back,” American poet Emily Dickinson imagines a scene in which birds return to cast “a backward look.”1 It is Indian summer, and the deceptively blue and sunny sky, the speaker realizes, is but a pretense of what once was: These are the days when birds come back, A very few, a bird or two, To take a backward look. These are the days when skies put on The old, old sophistries of June— 1 Dickinson first wrote the poem in 1859, but kept working on it for many years. Interestingly, the first published version, of 1864, speaks of a “final look,” which Dickinson later changed to “backward look.” For a reproduction of a handwritten draft of the poem, see: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/emily-dickinson/21. Accessed May 10, 2022.

M. Gieskes (B) · M. Roza Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Roza e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_1

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M. GIESKES AND M. ROZA

A blue and gold mistake. Oh, sacrament of summer days, Oh, last communion in the haze, Permit a child to join. Thy sacred emblems to partake, Thy consecrated bread to break, Taste thine immortal wine!

There can be no real return to the bustling season which has passed; the backward look is nostalgic, melancholic, the re-performance a “mistake,” and summer now no more than a memory. The speaker does see an opportunity to join the natural world in a ritual of commemoration: like the few birds that choose to return, she hopes to engage in a “backward look” that holds the desired promise of revival. As Dickinson’s poem suggests, such a backward look inevitably impacts thoughts and emotions about the present and the future. The desire to relive moments in the past and revisit earlier events also transpires in artistic production, where artists’ revisits of earlier works are frequently accompanied by a desire to transform that past— or the memory of that past—and sometimes by the aspiration to salvage what can and needs to be saved, if necessary in altered form. This interdisciplinary collection on retrospection and revision in modern and contemporary culture explores this impulse of artists, authors, and musicians to return to earlier work, ideas, themes, methods, motifs, or styles of their own as they engage in an inventive revival and transformation of the past in the present. Taking into account the “forward” intentions, hopes, and fears that tend to accompany artists’ “backward look,” the various chapters that constitute the book provide analyses—theoretical, historical, stylistic, thematical, or otherwise—of the artistic results of these processes. The case studies presented here explore this backward/ forward look across a diversity of art forms: in addition to visual art, we consider fiction, poetry, literary criticism, film, rock music, and philosophy. This scope, in addition to the time span covered in the volume, from the 1850s to the twenty-first century, allows for a diversified exploration of the ways in which European and North American practitioners of the arts have made retrospection and revision functional to widely different goals. Motivations that underlie these artists’ revisits of the past range from the inclination to respond to certain life events to concerns over artistic legacy and reputation, from mundane financial considerations

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to hopes of impacting collective memory, and from attempted audience satisfaction to the preparation for an approaching end of careers and lives. With the focus on the personal, social, and political motivations behind revisions, we engage with questions that relate to artists’ intentions, biographies, and convictions—a practice that, in some ways, runs counter to the discrediting of the role of the author inaugurated by influential texts like Roland “Barthes’” 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” of 1969. While we certainly do not conflate authorial objectives, impulses, persuasions, and intentions with the meaning of the artworks under discussion in this book or wish to restore authors to their traditional position of singular authority, our book is based on the conviction that analyzing an artist’s work within the context of that artist’s own statements and expressions, as well as in its historical context, can reveal experiential and ideological layers in the work that the reader/viewer/listener may not note otherwise. In fact, with our focus on retrospection and revision, we intend to further explore what poststructuralist theory also maintains: that texts and their meanings are unstable and plural, also for their authors. The phenomenon of revision, rewriting, and returns to earlier work and ideas as an outcome of personal retrospection has not received wide academic scrutiny, although there are several important exceptions. The work of Jack Stillinger on practices of revision in British and American literature, for instance, bears mention here: in works such as Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991) and Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (1994), he provides a view of authorship as multiple and unstable. In addition, practices of revision frequently prop up in monographs, catalogues raisonnés, and biographies of single artists, authors, and bands. Many publications that are devoted to practices of rewriting, however, tend not to focus on artists’ revisions of their own earlier creations and ideas but on artistic practices of rewriting and revision of well-known works created by others. These include the creation of new, often emancipatory, interpretations of canonical texts from the past in line with contemporary social, cultural, and political perspectives, seeking to reexamine the ways in which artworks manifest established ideas, structures, and myths that have underpinned—underwritten, we might say—contemporary cultures and societies. Two examples of scholarship that have focused on the revision of actual works of fiction from the past in this revisionary context—Peter Widdowson’s “Writing Back: Contemporary Re-visionary

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Fiction” (2006) and Liedeke Plate’s Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (2011)—accordingly “call to account formative narratives that have arguably been central to the construction of ‘our consciousness’” (Widowson 2006, 491). While the importance of such revisionist critique cannot be underestimated, our project takes on a very different subject, in that the authors, artists, and musicians discussed in this book returned not to other people’s but to their own earlier work, leading to very different questions. Retrospection and the consequent return to or revision of earlier work often occurs in artists of advanced age, a life stage at which—as Karen Painter has suggested—the relation between “biography and artistic creation” may be clearer than “in any other phase of life” (Painter 2006, 1).2 While younger artists certainly return to earlier creations as well, as our book also shows, there seems to be an especially strong connection between practices of (self-)reflection and revision and processes of aging. Although many chapters in our book are devoted to old artists’ return to earlier work, we do not aim to come to any general observations about creative retrospection and creativity at advanced age.3 As this book shows, aging artists that reflect on their oeuvre in retrospect all do so in a singular way, for different reasons, and in different cultural and personal contexts. In that sense, our project corresponds to the books Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (2007) by Gordon McMullan, which shows that late style is a critical construct; Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in art, literature, and music (2016), edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles; Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work (2006), edited by Karen Painter and Thomas Crow; and the exhibition catalog Letzte Bilder von Manet bis Kippenberger (2013), edited by Esther Schlicht and Max Hollein. As Painter argues in her introduction to Late Thoughts, one

2 It should be noted that one of the most cited theorists on late work, Theodor Adorno, avoided psychologizing late style. Writing in 1937, Adorno saw the disharmonies, contradictions, and lack of synthesis in Beethoven’s late, abstruse work as a rejection of the established bourgeois order. See Said 2006, 1–14, 91–92. 3 August L. Freundlich’s and John A. Shively’s “Creativity and the Exceptional Aging Artist” (2006), which combines insights from the humanities and medical studies, reminds us of the fact that old artists should not be seen as representative of all old people, given that artists of all ages tend to be more independent and prone to resist authority (Freundlich and Shively, 197).

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cannot generalize about aging artists’ various approaches: the conception that works by old artists have certain universal characteristics may well be a myth. Like Painter, we recognize the shortcomings of both the pre-romanticist tripartition of human life (birth/rise, culmination/ flourishment, decline/lessened quality) and the romanticist eulogy of late work as especially expressive, personal, profound, wise, serene, spiritual, and increasingly bold in its transcendence of previously mastered conventions (Painter 2006, 2–3; McMullan and Smiles 2016, 2).4 Though some of the chapters in our book refer briefly to the concepts of Spätstil (late style) and Alterstil (old-age style)—the former strictly speaking referring to the last works of artists, regardless of their age of death, and the latter describing works created by artists of advanced age—we use these concepts with caution as they imply the existence of a distinctive, transhistorical, and transcultural style common to all old artists.5 Indeed, our book recognizes, like Painter, McMullan, Smiles, and Linda and Michael Hutcheon (2016), that late and old-age styles are primarily retrospective, critical constructs that have been applied to a selected number of mostly white, male, canonical artists, authors, and classical composers (including Titian, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Beethoven), mostly by authors qualifying these “masters” as “geniuses” (see, for instance, Dormandy 2000, 181).6 The categories of old and late style run the risk of presenting nearly all elderly as alike while no generic statements can do justice to the diversity of individual artists’ work, lives, and historical contexts.7 However fascinating we find observations like Said’s 4 Updike appreciatively cites Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s term “senile sublime,” in the context of Henry James’s work at age 67, which Updike describes as marked by a “creativity liberated from his usual, anxiety-producing ambitions” (Updike 2006). 5 McMullan and Smiles and Hutcheon and Hutcheon bring up the fact that the terms “late style” and “old-age style” are often mistakenly used interchangeably (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2012, 1–2; McMullan and Smiles 2016, 6–8). 6 McMullan and Smiles, Hutcheon and Hutcheon, and Esther Schlicht are among the authors who have critiqued problematic usages of the term “late style” and have pointed out the tendency to associate late style with genius (Hutcheon & Hutcheon 2012, 3–4; McMullan and Smiles 2016, 3; Schlicht 2013, 12). Publications that, inadvertently or not, have associated late style with “grand masters” include not only older books like Albert Erich Brinckmann’s Spätwerke Grosser Meister (1925), but also the exhibition catalog “I Am Still Learning:” Late Works by Masters (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1992). 7 Very little literature on late and old-age style in artistic work by women has been written. Clearly, women have long had entirely different concerns than men in all life

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(based on Theodor Adorno’s writings on the late Beethoven) that “late” artistic works tend to be characterized by fragments and irreconcilabilities (Said 2006), and Amir Cohen-Shalev’s remark that musicians, artists, and writers in old age search new forms that allow them to “present ambivalence”—as they prefer the “ineffable” over “closure” (Cohen-Shalev 2002, 2)—we prefer to avoid such generalizations, focusing on diversity rather than on commonalities.8 We are especially wary of all too rash portrayals, found in texts like Kenneth Clark’s “The Artist Grows Old” (1972), of older artists as more melancholic (pessimist even), solitary, mistrusting of reason, and less inclined to imitate natural appearances. Though we recognize that it may be significant that many theorists of late style throughout the ages have equated late style with such qualities as serenity, depth, relative isolation, stubbornness, and resistance to conventional forms and expectations, it is just as important that others have come to entirely different conclusions. As Linda and Michael Hutcheon have pointed out, the values gifted to last works likely reflect more on the critic than on the artist: where Georg Simmel, for instance, appreciated the “wholeness, coherence, synthesis,” and tendency to consolidate in late works, modernist Marxians like Adorno and Said cherished “fragmentation, dissonance,” and “lack (or impossibility) of reconciliation” (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2012, 4).9 While most of the chapters on artists over the age of sixty-five in this book do not actively challenge universalizing notions of artistic lateness or intend to prove that such notions are mere critical or ideological constructs, together they demonstrate the great variety of artistic activity old age can produce. With chapters on Theo Kuijpers, Uwe Timm, Camille Pissarro, Georgia O’Keeffe, The Rolling Stones, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Jasper Johns, Adrienne Rich, Jean Le Gac, Simon Hantaï, Jacques Lacan, and even revenant artists, this volume adds to the growing phases. This problem is raised in Rich 1972 and comes up as well in Kisters’s chapter in the present volume. 8 Said’s description is indebted to Adorno’s characterization of Beethoven’s late compositions as refusing to “reconcile in a single image what is not reconciled” (Adorno 2002, 580). See also: Said 2000, 437. 9 Said’s descriptions of late style built on Adorno’s characterization of Beethoven’s late compositions as refusing to “reconcile in a single image what is not reconciled” (Adorno 2002, 580). Said acknowledged his indebtedness to Adorno, writing: “What I find valuable in Adorno is this notion of tension, of highlighting and dramatizing what I call irreconcilabilities” (Said 2000, 437).

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and increasingly diverse existing literature on old-age artistic creativity, which until some four decades ago tended to focus on a relatively small group of usual suspects—including Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, Monet, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Goethe, and Mann— but has over the past decades diversified as authors have turned to an increasingly larger and varied group of case studies.10 The present book is divided into five themed sections. Each of these presents specific circumstances and motivations that underlie the artistic practice of revisiting earlier work, and each aims to reveal techniques that the artists under review have employed to address or resolve major questions, tensions, and dilemmas arising from their retrospective considerations of earlier artistic choices, affairs of life, careers, or formative historical events. In the first section, “Retrospection and Memory,” we take on memory’s complex relation to the past and explore how the processes that artists engage in to arrive at personally, professionally, politically, socially, or morally acceptable understandings of the past impact their artistic practices of retrospection and revision. In the first chapter, 10 Publications on late and old-age art that have appeared since 1968 include: Baltimore Museum of Art’s exhibition catalogue From El Greco to Pollock: Early and Late Works by European and American Artists (1968-1969); Hugo Munsterberg’s The Crown of Life: Artistic Creativity in Old Age (1983), which discusses a large number of oldage visual artists and architects, including less commonly discussed case studies like Katsushika Hokusai and Louise Nevelson; the exhibition catalog “I Am Still Learning”: Late Works By Masters (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1992); the volume Late Thoughs: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work (2002), edited by Karen Painter and Thomas Crow, which devotes chapters not only to late compositions by Mozart, Mahler, and Wagner, but also to Piet Mondrian, Willem de Kooning, Eva Hesse, Frank Gehry, and Richard Strauss; Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006); the exhibition catalogue Letzte Bilder: Von Manet bis Kippenberger, edited by Esther Schlicht and Max Hollein (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt), which contains analyses of late works by a range of visual artists, including Brakhage; Carel Blotkamp’s The End: Artists’ Late and Last Works (2019)—which explores various types of “end” in art, from an artwork’s completion to death—featuring a large number of late and last works by visual artists but focusing on Raphael, van Gogh, and Mondrian. Besides books in which particular artists loom large, there is also a number of books on creativity and aging that is less focused on particular artists, including Martin Lindauer’s Aging, Creativity, and Art: A Positive Perspective on Late-Life Development (2003), which discusses such fields as psychology and gerontology and the topic of creativity in relation to cognition. Another example is the interdisciplinary volume Creativity in Later Life: Beyond Late Style (2019), edited by David Amigoni and Gordon McMullan, which includes contributions by gerontologists, sociologists, medical practitioners, a pharmacologist, and humanities scholars, in order to bridge the disciplinary divide and create new insights about late-life creativity that move beyond the notion of “late style.”

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“Stepping in the Same River Twice: Péter Forgács and the Revisiting of The Danube Exodus ,” László Munteán focuses on traumatic memory and the applicability of Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory. In his contribution, Munteán analyzes the Hungarian media artist Péter Forgács’s 1998 documentary The Danube Exodus , a film compiled from footage taken by river captain and amateur filmmaker Nándor Andrásovits on two of his journeys on the Danube, which Forgács later turned into an interactive exhibition titled “The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River.” Both the film and the installation ran the risk of offending the Jewish community by inviting viewers and visitors to compare Jewish and German suffering in a Holocaust-related context. Munteán focuses on the techniques that Forgács employs in revisiting The Danube Exodus to negotiate this ethical dilemma and his own responsibility as an artist. Questions of ethics and responsibility likewise animate Yvonne Delhey’s discussion of German author Uwe Timm (b. 1940). In “Uwe Timm and the Ghosts of the Past: a Writer’s Ethical Impact on the Agenda of Collective Memory,” Delhey relates practices of revision and revisiting to the constitution of collective memory. Delhey takes issue with David Rieff’s contention that collective memory often “functions as an escape and an idyll, providing a moral warrant for nostalgia,” as he wrote in In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (2016, 22). She takes Timm’s late novel Ikarien as a case study to explore whether, and to what extent, authors can influence collective historical remembrance through a literary engagement with the past. In the final chapter of the first section, Mariëtte Verhoeven addresses the workings of autobiographical memory in the visual art of Dutch “memory artist” Theo Kuijpers (b. 1939) against the background of explorations of memory by Aleida Assmann, Douwe Draaisma, Susan Sontag, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Wouter Weijers (2012). Her chapter “Australia and Morocco Revisited: The Materialized Travel Memories of Theo Kuijpers” documents the processing and visualizing of the travel impressions and images that Kuijpers accumulated during his long career. Specifically, Verhoeven focuses on a number of paintings Kuijpers made based on his memories of earlier journeys to Morocco and Australia and seeks to determine how these works revisit his earlier trips as well as works from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The second section, “Revision, Politics and Ideology,” presents the role of cultural-ideological layers in revisionary practices that alert us to

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the importance of politics and culture to artistic production, reception, and revision. In “The Fall and Rise of Exile’s Return: Malcolm Cowley and the Cultural Politics of Revision,” Hans Bak discusses the American literary critic and historian Malcolm Cowley’s revision, in 1951, of his seminal book on the “lost generation,” Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934). Written after Cowley’s Depression-inspired conversion to radical politics, the original edition repudiated the non-political aesthetics of the 1920s, and ended with a call to radical engagement. In 1951, the book was reissued in a revised edition, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. In his analysis, Bak argues that Cowley’s revisions need to be understood in the context of a cluster of changes—personal, literary, cultural, and political—that occurred between 1934 and 1951. In “Revision, Change, and the Native American Oral Tradition in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine(s),” Mathilde Roza examines the history of this Native American author’s debut novel Love Medicine. First published in 1984, the novel immediately became a popular as well as a critical success. In 1993, Erdrich published a revised and expanded edition of the novel, which she revised again in 2009. Roza situates Erdrich’s revisions in the context of the development of Native American writing since the late 1960s, the internal organization of Erdrich’s oeuvre, and the political agenda of reclaiming and revitalizing indigenous cultures, languages, and identities so deeply threatened under settler colonialism. She concludes that Erdrich’s allegiance to the continuation of the Native American storytelling tradition provides a useful framework to understand the practices of revision within Erdrich’s creative works. In “An Old Man Looking from the Window: Camille Pissarro, the Tuileries Garden Paintings and Turning Points in his Career,” Lieske Tibbe considers the return to impressionism in the late Tuileries Garden paintings of Camille Pissarro, who had previously deemed impressionist painting outdated. Emphasizing that Pissarro’s renunciation of neoimpressionism in the early 1890s certainly did not involve a disavowal of the anarcho-communist politics of the neo-impressionist group, Tibbe notes that Pissarro rather wanted to break free from neo-impressionist rigidity, which he dismissed as sickly and death-like. Pissarro’s return to the impressionist style can also be explained, Tibbe argues, by the artist’s more mundane financial concerns, his fraught relation with the dealer Durand-Ruel, and his deteriorating eyesight, rather than by the concept of “late style” or a desire to engage in retrospection.

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The third section, “Revisiting and Control: the Artist’s Legacy,” examines artistic returns to earlier work as authorial strategies to shape, control, or cement artists’ public image and artistic heritage. In her chapter “Retrospective Anticipation: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Efforts at Controlling her Legacy,” Kisters explores the processes that American artist Georgia O’Keeffe engaged in to safekeep her legacy and influence interpretations of her oeuvre. She demonstrates how O’Keeffe at old age—when painting had become a physical challenge and she had gained experience with the artistic estate of her late husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz— actively participated in the production of publications and exhibitions of her work; the development of an O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe; the opening to the public of her Abiquiu house and studio; and the donation of works to museums. In these and previous efforts, Kisters shows, O’Keeffe consciously countered earlier interpretations of her work as connected to femininity and sexuality and presented herself as a modern, quintessentially American artist. In “Replaying the Past: Belgian Pop Band dEUS’s Return to Early Work,” Helleke van den Braber engages with the phenomenon of pop bands who stage full performances of classic albums. This chapter investigates the interest pop bands exhibit in their own past work. Is reverting to a classic album an exercise in nostalgia? Is it a form of self-organized heritage management? Or is this cultural practice a welcome attempt to bring a new form of involvement back into a pop culture that has become increasingly fragmented and distant through globalization and technology? Taking the re-performance of the album “The Ideal Crash” by Belgian band dEUS as a case study, van den Braber explores these dilemmas by investigating the interests of bands and their audiences in the (re-)creation of (a contemporary version of) the past. Frank Mehring takes on the Rolling Stones’s appropriation of the blues in the early 1960s. In “Confessing’ the Blues: The Rolling Stones Revisit of their Musical Roots,” Mehring traces the function of the blues in the musical history of the Rolling Stones. Specifically, he examines the significance of the word “confession” in the Stones’s exploration of their roots, which he discusses both as a way of denoting respect to African American pioneers of the genre and as a means to self-inscribe themselves into the blues canon. Taking his departure from musical recordings, live performances, and album cover design as a gateway to reflect on the intersection of autobiographic narratives and music, Mehring engages in what he calls “sonic life writing.”

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The closing chapter of the third section, ‘Artists’ Haunts: Late Artists Revisiting their Work Beyond their Time,’ describes the unusual phenomenon of artist-mediums who claim to paint under the influence of the spirit of deceased artists and, in that way, may be said to perform a curious revisit of these artists’ works. Rudie van Leeuwen Story discusses a wide range of so-called spirit or mediumistic art from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including psychic automatism and “precipitated art” attributed to revenant artists. Although hoaxes, hallucinations, mental disorders, and pseudo-perception pass in review, the aim of van Leeuwen Story’s contribution is not to assess whether the phenomenon of spirit art is real or pretend, but to identify its origins, different forms, and cultural contexts. The book’s fourth section, “Transformation and Change in Late Work,” focuses on the late paintings of visual artists Claude Monet, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Jasper Johns, revealing not only that oldage artists tend to be especially aware of change, transformation, and natural cycles, but also that these fundamental processes are expressed and materialized in highly divergent ways by artists of different backgrounds operating in disparate cultural constellations. Highlighting the connection between late paintings and early or mid-career work, this section discloses not only the modifications in style and shifting approaches to subject matter that mark an artist’s output with the lapse of time, but also brings out continuities in these artists’ oeuvres. In “Space, Time, and Change in Claude Monet’s Late Paintings,” Thomas Baumeister uses close visual analysis to demonstrate that Monet’s late, monumental waterlily paintings differ radically from the artist’s earlier work, although some do return to and continue earlier themes, motifs, and ways of applying paint. While recognizing that change already plays an important role in earlier paintings, like the cathedral and haystack series of the early 1890s, Baumeister posits that change and transformation are the essence of all features of the late nymphéa paintings, pervading structure, subject matter, as well as paint application. The major differences between the earlier and later works of Monet, Baumeister posits, are a consequence not only of the artist’s intense observation of natural phenomena in his gardens in Giverny, but are also a reflection of the artist’s old age. Aging was also a determining factor in Victorian artist Lawrence AlmaTadema’s The Voice of Spring , which returned to the awakening of nature in springtime, a subject the artist had represented many times, as Jan Baetens demonstrates in “Winter is Coming: The Voice of Spring by

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Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1910).” Although the work’s title and a festive scene in the background may suggest otherwise, the tone of the painting is manifestly melancholic. While Baetens recognizes that the recent death of Tadema’s long-time wife must have affected the nostalgic nature of the work, he argues that the artist’s final return to the theme of spring is also an extra-personal meditation on the cyclical nature of human existence, in which love and death succeed one another, like creation and demise. The theme of seasons is also related to life cycles in Sandra Mackus’s chapter “The passage of time: Jasper Johns’s The Seasons and 5 Postcards ,” which recounts how, from the 1970s onward, the theme of human mortality increasingly appeared in Jasper Johns’s work. Mackus shows how Johns’s series 5 Postcards (2011) returns to the earlier series The Seasons (1985–1986), which consists of four paintings that in turn revisited motifs from much earlier works. Mackus presents both series of paintings as puzzling contemplations on themes like aging and mortality, showing how they cite, recycle, and suggest recurring motifs and inspirational sources. Her analyses lead to the conclusion that the only certainty in these works, whose meaning is arguably increasingly unstable, is the certainty of impending death. The book’s fifth section, “Creation, Aging and the Prospect of Death,” explores the impact of aging and the prospect of imminent death on artists’ creative processes and ways of examining prior work, acknowledging, like Clark and Said, that old artists tend to be highly aware of the nearness of death, yet also seeing, like Goethe, that old age can ferment heightened creativity (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2012, 6–7).11 In “Endpapers: Adrienne Rich’s Signature to Her Life,” Diederik Oostdijk discusses the final works of the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929– 2012), in which she self-consciously reflects on her impending death while also revisiting her past life. By doing so, Rich follows the example of many other twentieth-century American poets, including James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens, but she revisits earlier themes and topics more assiduously than her contemporaries. Oostdijk’s chapter analyzes Rich’s poetic ruminations on the agile mind’s experience of a sick and decaying

11 As Hutcheon and Hutcheon have pointed out, theorists of late style have—again— come to divergent conclusions. Simone de Beauvoir argued that the approach of the end negatively affects creativity as a result of reduced strength and emotional deadening, while others have suggested that composers are prone to create masterworks intended to finalize their artistic legacy (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2012, 7).

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body, investigates the thematic, stylistic, and symbolic features that Rich uses to shape her late work, and examines the extent to which Rich’s last poems constitute a “late style” that is different from her earlier work. In his chapter “Jean Le Gac: Auto-reflexive Artist,” Daan Van Speybroeck discusses how the French contemporary artist Jean Le Gac, after having reached retirement age, retrospectively reflected on his oeuvre and place in the art world in his artistic work. Van Speybroeck describes how the artist in the twilight of his life and career returned in original ways to various works of his own. He also examines how the artist addressed the future survival of his work after his death, in both retrospective publications and the nearly invisible museum Musée Jean Le Gac. The returns to earlier works of another contemporary artist based in France, Hungarian-born Simon Hantaï, are the subject of Mette Gieskes’s chapter “Yielding to Touch: Simon Hantaï’s Late Reactivation of Pliage.” Gieskes explores various unusual procedures to which Hantaï submitted his earlier pliage (folding) works, including cutting, reframing, distorting, silkscreening, digitally manipulating, burying, and unearthing. Each of these revisits reinvented the artist’s signature pliage method and, Gieskes argues, reinforced the artist’s deep desire, also embodied in the earlier work, to relinquish his own control in dialogue with agencies outside of himself, including paint, canvas, and the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. The last chapter of our book is appropriately an “Encore,” one more analysis of an instance of retrospection—a kind of coda that refuses to resolve, settle, and bring matters to a close. In his contribution “Encore: Notes on Lacan’s Reference to Mysticism in His Late Seminars,” Marc de Kesel argues that psychoanalyst/philosopher Jacques Lacan’s twentieth seminar entitled Encore (1970–1971) follows the eighteenth and nineteenth seminars like a period, or point. Returning to two seminars from the 1950s, in which Lacan described the punctuation mark as a stop that retroactively bestows chains of signifiers with meaning, De Kesel presents Encore as functioning like a period that reflects on the previous seminars. Like Lacan’s earlier work, Encore portrays human beings as desiring subjects. Linking people’s unquenchable thirst for meaning to feminine jouissance and the ecstatic experiences of mystics—a fleeting, momentary fulfillment of an endless desire for the absent (divine) lover—Encore states, once more, with another set of signifiers, that the hoped-for attainment of the object of desire—the signified, meaning, closure—must be suspended,

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yet again. Ending our exploration of inventive revivals and transformations of the past in the present with De Kesel’s Lacanian reflections on the infinite postponement of closure indeed seemed a fitting way of wrapping up, a “conclusion” fully aware of its inconclusiveness.

References Adorno, Theodor. 2002. Late Style in Beethoven. In Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, 564-568. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Amigoni, David, and Gordon McMullan (eds.). 2019. Creativity in Later Life: Beyond Late Style. Milton Park, Oxon, and New York: Routledge. Blotkamp, Carel. 2019. The End: Artists’ Late and Last Works. London: Reaktion Books. Clark, Kenneth. 2006 [1972]. The Artist Grows Old. Daedalus 135 (1), Winter: 77–90. Cohen-Shalev, Amir. 2002. Both Worlds at Once: Art in Old Age. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Dormandy, Thomas. 2000. Old Masters: Great Artists in Old Age. London: Hambledon and London. Feldman, Frances. 1992. “I Am Still Learning”: Late Works by Masters. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art. Hollein, Max, and Esther Schlicht (eds.). 2013. Letzte Bilder: Von Manet bis Kippenberger. Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle. Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. 2012. Late Style(s): The Ageism of the Singular. Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 4, May 31. http://occasion.stanford.edu/node/93. Last accessed 13 May 2023. Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. 2016. Historicizing Late Style as a Discourse of Reception. In Late Style and Its Discontents, ed. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, 51–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindauer, Martin S. 2003. Aging, Creativity, and Art: A Positive Perspective on Late-Life Development. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, and Springer Science+Business Media. McMullan, Gordon. 2007. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMullan, Gordon, and Sam Smiles, eds. 2016. Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Munsterberg, Hugo. 1983. The Crown of Life: Artistic Creativity in Old Age. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Painter, Karen. 2006. On Creativity and Lateness: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work. In Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers

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at Work, ed. Thomas Crow and Karen Painter, 1–11. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Plate, Liedeke. 2011. Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Rich, Adrienne. 1972. When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision. College English 34 (1): 18–30. Rieff, David. 2016. In Praise of Forgetting. Historical Memory and Its Ironies. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Rosenthal, Gertrude (ed.). 1968–1969. From El Greco to Pollock: Early and Late Works by European and American Artists. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art. Said, Edward W. 2000. The Edward Said Reader, ed. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. New York: Vintage Books. Said, Edward W. 2006. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Pantheon Books. Stillinger, Jack. 1991. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stillinger, Jack. 1994. Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Updike, John. 2006. Late Works: Writers and Artists Confronting the End. The New Yorker, 7 August: 64–71. Weijers, Wouter. 2012. Verbeelde herinnering: Essays over naoorlogse beeldende kunst en het culturele geheugen (PhD diss., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2012). Widdowson, Peter. 2006. ‘Writing Back’: Contemporary Re-visionary Fiction. Textual Practice 20 (3): 491–507. https://doi.org/10.1080/095023606008 28984.

Retrospection and Memory

Stepping in the Same River Twice: Péter Forgács and the Revisiting of the Danube Exodus László Munteán

Introduction Media artist Péter Forgács’s 1998 documentary The Danube Exodus is a one-hour film compiled from footage taken by river captain and amateur filmmaker Nándor Andrásovits (1894–1958) on two of his journeys on the Danube. On the first journey, Andrásovits was tasked with the illegal transportation of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in Bratislava. On the second one, his ship was deployed in facilitating the forced migration of ethnic Germans from the Danube Delta to the Third Reich. In The Danube Exodus , these two voyages are presented in a chronological sequence but, with each given an equal length of thirty minutes, they also unfold as one another’s uncanny mirror images. In 2000, Forgács decided, as it were, to step into the same river twice, and turn The Danube Exodus into an interactive exhibition titled The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River. Premiering in 2002 at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the exhibition has since traveled to

L. Munteán (B) Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_2

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a variety of cities on both sides of the Atlantic, including Karlsruhe, Barcelona, Helsinki, Ulm, Budapest, Berlin, Berkeley, and New York. Its interactive features allowed visitors to delve deeper into the social and political circumstances of the two journeys and, with the help of touchscreens, freely navigate the installation’s reservoir of visual, textual, and audio materials. Alongside the exhibition, a website with additional information and interviews Forgács had made with survivors and their families was also launched.1 This chapter focuses on the techniques Forgács employs in revisiting The Danube Exodus to negotiate the taboo on comparison and find new solutions to the ethical dilemma of juxtaposing these two stories of migration. In an interview given at the exhibition’s opening in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Forgács explained that by revisiting the film in the form of an exhibition he wanted to address those who would seek contemplation, rather than information and entertainment, on the ethical dilemma of comparison (Erdelyi Figyelo 2013). The interactive surfaces of the exhibition granted visitors more agency and possibilities to engage with a variety of archival materials and filmic footage Forgács had recovered during his research. In this sense, by revisiting his award-winning film, Forgács also revisited and remediated Andrásovits’s original films as well as his own findings. The exhibition also inspired many visitors to contact Forgács about their own family archives, yielding even more information about the two exoduses, as he disclosed in the same interview. For all the critical acclaim they received, both the film and the installation ran the risk of offending the Jewish community by inviting viewers and visitors to compare Jewish and German suffering in a Holocaustrelated context. I pay special attention to the way in which Forgács conceives of his own responsibility as an artist who brings Andrásovits’s footage to today’s audience and what subject positions viewers of the film and visitors of the installation are invited to take vis-à-vis the footage as historical documents and vis-à-vis Forgács’s reanimation of these documents in the film and in the installation. Rather than highlighting the medium-specific similarities and differences between the film and the installation, this chapter focuses on Forgács’s revisiting of the film, which allows for the problematization of the subject positions that these two projects invite us to take. 1 For the interviews, photographs, and additional information Forgács acquired throughout his research, visit the film’s website at http://www.danube-exodus.hu.

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Found Footage of Two River Voyages Working as a media artist, Forgács is interested in the mundane details of ordinary life in Hungary throughout the years leading up to World War II and the subsequent Communist dictatorship. He uses home movies of family gatherings, summer vacations, and similar events as raw material for his compilations. Private Hungary, a series of twenty films based on amateur footage from the 1930s and 40s, brought Forgács international recognition in the realm of media art in the early 1990s. In many ways, Captain Andrásovits’s footage of his voyages on the Danube is similar to these home movies. He captures several intimate moments of his passengers’ life aboard his ship, the Erzsébet Királyné (Queen Elizabeth): a Jewish wedding, heated conversations about a word in the Torah, a dance party, but also the bitter sadness on the face of the Bessarabian Germans leaving their homes. The way in which his passengers return the gaze of Andrásovits’s camera attests to his conviviality, warmth, and care which evidently made them feel comfortable despite his persistent filming and status as a captain. Yet, this relationship between captain and passengers is also different from the familial bonds one usually sees in home movies. As much as he is able to get close to those whom he films, he is also an outsider to their upended lives. His footage therefore combines the visual conventions of the home movie with, as it were, an anthropological sensibility of participant observation. The historical context of the two journeys sheds light on the causes that impelled his passengers to leave their homes. The first voyage took place in the summer of 1939, a few weeks before the outbreak of the war. The Erzsébet Királyné, alongside another paddle wheeler, the Tsar Dusan, was hired by Bratislava-based Jewish businessman and activist Aron Grünhut to carry out the illegal transportation of a group of Orthodox Jews from Bratislava to the port of Sulina at the Black Sea, from where they would continue their journey to Palestine. Altogether Grünhut helped more than 1300 Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, and Austrian Jews to reach safety by ship or train (Robinson 2021). The following year, in 1940, the Erzsébet Királyné was sailing in the opposite direction, this time with a group of Bessarabian Germans on board who had been uprooted from their homes as a result of a non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, the treaty stipulated the annexation of Bessarabia by the Soviet Union, forcing ethnic Germans who had lived there for

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over a century to leave their lands and resettle in the Reich. Eventually, however, these German families would be settled in former Polish homes in German-occupied Poland. While both journeys were successful in that the passengers reached their destinations, Forgács’s film presents us with a bitter paradox: while the Jewish refugees managed to escape deportation and settle down in Palestine, many of the Bessarabian men who were “repatriated” to the Reich with their families would soon be enlisted in the Wehrmacht and killed in battle. Forgács received the original footage from the captain’s widow who had been hiding it for decades fearing that the Communist leadership might destroy it. He received additional footage of the Jewish exodus taken by the captain from historian and archivist János Varga who inherited the material from Captain Zalán Petneházy, Andrásovits’s close friend. Working closely with Forgács on compiling the story of the Jewish journey for The Danube Exodus , it was Varga who convinced Forgács to turn the film into a multimedia exhibition (Alexander and Kinder 2006).

The Comparability of the Holocaust When The Danube Exodus debuted in 1998, a large-scale debate on how to remember the tragedies of World War II and the Holocaust in particular, had already been ongoing for at least a decade. Beginning with the Historikerstreit in West Germany of the late 1980s,2 by the 1990s the scope and the participants of the debate were already international. Often referred to as a “memory boom” (Huyssen 2003; Hoskins 2014), this new phase of the debate was increasingly centered on the study of trauma, which would become one of the focal points within the then-nascent field of memory studies (Bond and Craps 2020). One of the many reasons for this surge of interest in trauma had to do with lingering disagreements on the Holocaust’s relation to history and other genocides. Throughout the decades following World War II, it was widely accepted that the Holocaust was a historically unique event. This view entailed that the extermination of European Jews was without historical precedent and that it could not be interpreted on the basis of historical causality. By this rationale, any comparison of the Holocaust would be tantamount to the relativization of 2 A highly mediatized debate among West German historians and other intellectuals in the 1980s about the role of the Nazi past and the Holocaust in German history (see: Maier 1993; Rosenbaum 1995; Margalit and Motzkin 1996; Novick 1999).

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its uniqueness and consequently to the downgrading of Jewish suffering (Margalit and Motzkin 1996). By the late 1990s, however, this view was increasingly regarded as counterproductive because it removed the Holocaust from history and thereby foreclosed the possibility of learning from it (Stone 2003, 192). Concomitantly, this tendency to remove the Holocaust from its historical context resulted in the fetishization of human suffering and trauma as core constituents of political identity constructions (Zombory 2019, 31–33). Writing in the early 2000s, Andreas Huyssen recognized a certain “globalization paradox” in Holocaust memory (Huyssen 2003, 13), which he explained as follows: On the one hand, the Holocaust has become a cipher for the twentieth century as a whole and for the failure of the project of the enlightenment. […] On the other hand, this totalizing dimension of Holocaust discourse so prevalent in much postmodern thought is accompanied by a dimension that particularizes and localizes. It is precisely the emergence of the Holocaust as a universal trope that allows Holocaust memory to latch on to specific local situations that are historically distant and politically distinct from the original event. In the transnational movement of memory discourses, the Holocaust loses its quality as index of the specific historical event and begins to function as metaphor for other traumatic histories and memories. The Holocaust as a universal trope is a prerequisite for its decentering and its use as a powerful prism through which we may look at other instances of genocide. (2003, 13–14)

Huyssen underlines two interrelated tendencies in Holocaust memory. At one level, the special status of the Holocaust allowed it to become an icon of human cruelty and trauma. Simultaneously, its status as an icon turned it into a universal reference point to which other genocides could be compared. In a certain way, Huyssen’s observation foreshadows Michael Rothberg’s influential notion of multidirectional memory (2009). But while Huyssen’s tone is critical of the Holocaust’s implementation as a template to commemorate other atrocities, Rothberg highlights its potential for non-competitive comparison. Challenging advocates of the Holocaust’s uniqueness on grounds of their mistaken conception of comparison as an equation (Rothberg 2009, 18), Rothberg’s project emphasizes the productive possibilities in, for instance, the evocation of the Holocaust as a referential model in discourses on slavery and colonialism.

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Rothberg also nuances the interrelation between collective memory and group identity. Rather than regarding the two as inextricably tied together, he claims that “Memories are not owned by groups—nor are groups ‘owned’ by memories. Rather, the borders of memory and identity are jagged; what looks at first like my own property often turns out to be a borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant” (2009, 5). This is a crucial aspect of multidirectional memory, and it will play a key role in my discussion of The Danube Exodus and its transformation into an installation. The reconceptualization of the Holocaust’s relationship to history since the 1990s was intertwined with discussions of the suffering of German civilians during World War II, a topic formerly regarded as tantamount to relativizing Jewish suffering.3 The lifting of this taboo marked a discursive shift from the collective guilt of Germany as the nation of perpetrators toward Germans as victims of Nazism and, by extension, of the war. Simultaneously, the veneration of heroes and martyrs, typical of the terminology of commemorative practices in the early postwar years, gave way to the public recognition of victims and their suffering as the common denominator for practices of commemorating past violence. While the shared focus on the suffering of victims had been aimed to facilitate reconciliation and mutual solidarity among groups seeking recognition for their traumatic pasts, the logic of competition persisted, as evidenced by the phrasing of the Stockholm Declaration on Holocaust remembrance, drafted in January 2000: The Holocaust (Shoah) fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilization. The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning. After half a century, it remains an event close enough in time that survivors can still bear witness to the horrors that engulfed the Jewish people. The terrible suffering of the many millions of other victims of the Nazis has left an indelible scar across Europe as well. (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance 2000)

By highlighting its universal significance, the declaration renders the Holocaust a cornerstone of European identity. Paradoxically, as I already 3 Among others, W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction [Luftkrieg und Literatur, 1999], a book-length essay problematizing the silence of postwar German writers on the traumatic impact of the allied air raids on German cities, had a catalyzing role in these discussions.

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pointed out above, the sacralization of Holocaust memory also puts the straightjacket on the narrativization and memorialization of local histories of genocide and fails to provide answers as to what to do with the past (Zombory 2019, 15). A few years later, with the integration of countries of the former Eastern Bloc into the European Union, the connection between Holocaust remembrance and European identity was put to the test. These new member states, such as Hungary, which joined the EU in 2004, demanded that the atrocities of the Communist dictatorship be recognized as genocide on a par with the Holocaust. Whereas the April 2, 2009, resolution of the European Parliament on European Conscience and Totalitarianism acknowledges the fascist and Communist regimes “as a common legacy and brings about an honest and thorough debate on their crimes in the past century,” it also stipulates that “the uniqueness of the Holocaust must nevertheless be acknowledged” (European Parliament 2009). As a result, the same gesture that acknowledges the horrors of the Communist regime thus also foregrounds the remembrance of the Holocaust as a template on the basis of which the Communist dictatorship is to be commemorated (Zombory 2019, 159).

A Different Kind of Multidirectionality If the Holocaust is comparable as long as it remains the point of reference in the comparison, the risk of dedicating an equal amount of attention to both the Jewish and the German exoduses in The Danube Exodus is obvious. Even if the taboo on the suffering of Germans was losing its force in 2000, displaying it next to the persecution of Jews could well be regarded as a step too far. Unsurprisingly, Forgács often resorts to the oxymoronic expression of “comparing the incomparable” when talking about his film project (Erdelyi Figyelo 2013). His heedful use of the phrase, however, cannot hide the fact that what he wants us to do is nothing less than make a comparison. As a film, and subsequently an installation, The Danube Exodus foreshadows the ethical stance Rothberg advocates but, as I demonstrate below, the two fluvial journeys that it presents are essentially different from Rothberg’s case studies, which calls for adjustment. One of the key prerequisites of multidirectional memory is that “a certain bracketing of empirical history and an openness to the possibility of strange political bedfellows are necessary in order for the imaginative

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links between different histories and social groups to come into view; these imaginative links are the substance of multidirectional memory,” Rothberg contends (2009, 18). In a similar vein, the two stories brought together in The Danube Exodus “mutually reflect and contextualize each other,” as Forgács mentions in an interview (qtd. in Nichols 2011, 54). Speaking of his Private Hungary series, Forgács emphasizes the open character of his filmic compositions. The “open piece,” he says, “gives far more surface for the imagination than does the linear narrative. This accounts for the associative jumps in my work, the shifts from the personal to the public, back and forth, and for the frequent lack of imagery” (qtd. in MacDonald 2011, 17, italics in the original). These characteristics also hold true for The Danube Exodus . The film features a great variety of associative jumps catalyzed by sequences of montage that forge nexuses between the two journeys. The function of these nexuses is relatable to what Rothberg calls “imaginative links” between different histories of violence. Two scenes in the film are particularly illustrative of the ways in which associations triggered by the juxtaposition of images, texts, and voiceover narration forge imaginative links between seemingly unrelated histories. During the Jewish exodus, as the ship sails along the Romanian-Bulgarian border, the voiceover informs us of the escalation of Nazi brutalities in Eastern Europe that left nothing but the international waterway of the Danube as the route for the Aliyah Bet , the illegal migration of Jewish refugees to Palestine. Shortly afterward, as the ship passes the Romanian town of Turnu-Severin, we see a group of women taking a shower on the deck, wearing swimsuits and smiling (perhaps out of embarrassment) into Andrásovits’s camera. In a dialectical fashion, the information on Nazi brutalities disclosed by the voiceover dovetails with the take showing women in the shower, which in turn allows for the uncanny transformation of the showerheads into a synecdoche of gas chambers. By activating our collectively shared knowledge of the extermination of the Jews, the imaginative link established by the exchange between text and image unsettles the scene’s narrative continuity and forces upon the viewer a pause. Once the scene concludes in an uncomfortably long freezeframe, even if only for a second, we are compelled to bear the gaze of the women who look back at the captain whose vantage point we are made to assume. As the synecdochic meaning of the showerhead is intensified by

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the lingering freezeframe, we are compelled to bear witness also to those who died in the gas chambers.4 A similar scene appears in the second half of the film, but this time with a group of Bessarabian German men taking a shower at the exact same spot where Jewish women did a year before. The shot is taken from a similarly high angle but, instead of concluding in a freezeframe, the movement of the footage is slowed down at the end, showing one of the men splashing a handful of water onto his head and others looking back at the captain. Not unlike the uncanny reappearance of the same cities, ports, and natural landmarks encountered during the first voyage, this second shower scene partakes in the effect of repetition with a difference. Its difference from the first one, namely that it depicts Germans, renders the scene’s iconographic similarity to the first one the basis of a problematic comparison insofar as it reinforces the conventional identification of Germans as perpetrators and Jews as victims. Perceived in terms of the dialectics of perpetrator and victim, the two groups’ journeys are rendered mutually exclusive, with no moral ground for analogy. At the same time, the very same clash that cancels out the comparison between the two groups also instantiates an alternative platform of comparison, which in turn releases these groups from the bonds of mutually exclusive categories by revealing them both as refugees in transit, tossed about by forces beyond their control.5 Resonating with Rothberg’s separation of memory from identity, Forgács invites viewers to engage with these haunting similarities by surmounting the binary bond of victims versus perpetrators, as well as Jews versus Germans. His words, however, reflect the difficulty he experienced in overcoming the taboo on such a comparison: Creating, comparing the incomparable duet of the German-Jewish exodus in The Danube Exodus was revelatory for me. I found myself contrasting the Bessarabian German refugees’ saga (indeed, many of them were later recruited to the Wehrmacht) with the happy Jews destined for Palestine 4 In the summer of 2015, mist sprinklers were installed close to the entrance of the Auschwitz Museum to prevent queuing tourists from fainting. The indignation of several tourists at what they perceived as a Holocaust gimmick is indicative of the connotative effect of showers in such a context (see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03 1bcm2). 5 Elsewhere I provide an extended reading of these two scenes via Jacques Rancière’s notion of the sentence image (see: Munteán 2021).

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dancing on the ship. Altogether, it was a constant inner struggle for me. I was learning the acceptance of civil sufferings, even if it was German suffering. (quoted in Nichols 2011, 53)

Although echoing a multidirectional sensibility and solidarity, Forgács’s self-reflexive commentary speaks to a kind of multidirectionality that substantially differs from Rothberg’s examples. While Rothberg’s case studies explore the galvanizing role of Holocaust memory in facilitating discourses on other atrocities across the world, The Danube Exodus does not posit the Holocaust as an analogy for another genocide, in accordance with the stipulation of the European Parliament Resolution. Instead, the Bessarabian German exodus is presented as historically, geographically, and politically entangled with the Jewish one. The Holocaust is thus not mobilized as a mnemonic model but as a historical frame within which the migration of both the Jewish and the German refugees take place. Therefore, the kind of comparison that the film invites is between two fluvially interrelated micro-histories framed within, not outside, the master narrative of World War II. What is at stake here is thus not the comparison between victims of genocide but a reflection on types of civil suffering regardless of the political categories of victims and perpetrators. It is in this sense that Forgács’s uneasy acceptance of designating civilian suffering as a common denominator for comparison comes to the fore as a challenge that cannot be fully justified by Rothberg’s ethics of multidirectionality.

The Space In-Between So far, we have seen that, for Forgács, the greatest challenge of undertaking the comparison between the two journeys was to create a platform, in response to the discursive model of victims versus perpetrators, for a multidirectional exchange between the two stories to unfold. In 2002, he decided to revisit the film by way of turning it into an installation called The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River. The difficulties that the organizers, including Forgács himself, faced when installing the exhibition are illustrative of the ethical concerns related to the GermanJewish binary. Examining the choices that Forgács and the curatorial team made in the spatial arrangements of the installation also provides a lens through which to reevaluate the problematic comparison in the film.

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In much the same way that Forgács re-edited and reanimated Andrásovits’s footage in The Danube Exodus , so did the multiscreen museum installation reanimate the film into a new multisensorial experience. Originally, Forgács entertained the idea of creating a DVD containing the entirety of the original footage, additional information, as well as interviews with survivors, but, following János Varga’s suggestion, opted for the multimedia exhibition instead. The installation consisted of a central room with five large screens, as well as other rooms equipped with touchscreen monitors and headsets which allowed visitors to assume the role of the “investigative agent” (Bán 2012) and learn about specific details related to the lives of the Jewish and the German passengers, their backgrounds, and what happened to them after their respective journeys. The large screens constituting the exhibition’s centerpiece gave Forgács the opportunity to upgrade his montage technique by combining, juxtaposing, and multiplying visual and sound fragments of the two journeys. He explains, The films projected in the main exhibition space on the five screens were edited in parallel: five windows on the computer screen side by side, I could fiddle about with all five at the same time. It was a whole lot easier than cutting them each on five different machines. […] Things like a theme, a picture sequence passing from left to right on the five screens, or something popping up on the extreme-left and the middle screen at the same time. They reverberate like a choir or the instruments of a chamber orchestra. Which is why Rosemary Comella [Labyrinth’s interface designer6 ] referred to the clips as “orchestrations.” (Forgács 2006, 35)

Unlike the film, which divided the Jewish and the German exodus into two sections of equal length, the installation featured a third theme next to the two voyages: the captain and the river. Each theme contained two orchestrations that visitors could choose on a touchscreen located in front of the five monitors as though at the helm of a boat. These orchestrations also featured footage left out of the film. In her analysis of the installation,

6 Created by Marsha Kinder in 1997 at the request of University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center, The Labyrinth Project is a research initiative and art collective focusing on the production of new models of immersive database narratives (see: http:// www.marshakinder.com/multi/m4.html).

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Zsófia Bán talks about these orchestrations as “points of view” or “different windows of opportunity” replete with associative jumps. “The free associations triggered in the viewers’ minds are complemented by parallel, and often playful, positive–negative motifs incorporated by the artist himself and the programmers of the installation” (Bán 2012). Adjusted to the interactive quality of the installation, Tibor Szemz˝ o’s minimalistic musical score to the film played a key role in weaving together disjointed visual fragments and generating new image-sound combinations. Sound designer, Jim McKee enhanced Szemz˝ o’s score by introducing several non-diegetic sounds, such as the hum of the ship’s engines, the chirping of birds, and the marching of soldiers, to corresponding images in the orchestrations (Kinder 2011, 247–248). Having three, rather than two, themes in the central space of the exhibition also served as an experience to counteract the dualism of the two voyages and thereby anticipate potential charges, as Marsha Kinder, one of the installation’s curators, recalls: Forgács had appropriated the captain’s amateur footage for a new narrative that relied on historical hindsight—one that took new ideological risks in comparing the displacements of the Jewish and German refugees as if they were equivalent, a comparison many members of the Jewish community would find difficult to accept. In the captain’s original home movies, this comparison had been justified by his own personal presence in the narrative field and his participation as witness and documentarian for both groups of refugees, for he helped transport both groups into history. This is why Forgács insisted on the captain and the Danube River being the primary protagonists in the installation’s central poetic space, a decision that may have been intuitive or aesthetic but had ideological implications. (2011, 241)

The figure of the captain and the river, in other words, served as a buffer to relieve Forgács of the ethical weight of the comparison. The curatorial team chose Heraclitus’s precept—one cannot step into the same river twice—as the exhibition’s motto “to evoke the constant fluctuations in subjectivity and history” (Kinder 2011, 237). This metaphorical application of the river was complemented by reproductions of a series of meticulously drawn maps of the Danube region by eighteenth-century natural scientist Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, exhibited along the way leading to the central space of the installation. Forgács had discovered these maps as a resident scholar at the Getty Research Institute and

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instantly sensed a resonance between Marsigli’s documentation of the region’s flora and fauna and Andrásovits’s documentation of life on board of the Queen Elizabeth. Though they appear in different contexts within the installation space, the foregrounding of the captain and the exhibition of Marsigli’s maps work toward the same effect. Setting the stage for the installation, the maps (alongside his drawings of fish and other animals) do more than provide a geographical backdrop to the voyages. They also “expand” time by allowing the long durée of the river’s natural history to serve as a counterpoint to the migration of humans. This alternative temporality presents Marsigli as Andrásovits’s forerunner, as fellow travelers and scientists, separated by two centuries. In the same vein, the eighteenthcentury drawings are distant reflections of the screens in the installation. The analogy established between Marsigli and the captain enhances the centralization of the agency of the captain, not Forgács, as the filmmaker. As much as the installation “dramatized the rivalry among the three stories” (Kinder 2011, 242), its in-between space provided a neutral territory for the transference of responsibility for the comparison onto the captain and, as a result of the participatory quality of the installation, onto the visitor who is in turn compelled to reflect on the question of responsibility. This experience is a helpful feature to revisit the film and investigate the technique Forgács employed to negotiate responsibility. The captain makes only brief appearances in the film, which did not allow for a separate storyline. We see him first at the beginning, holding binoculars at the helm, then shortly afterward in the company of guests on board, and finally at the end of the Jewish exodus, when he meets the Yugoslavian captain of the Tsar Dusan, the other paddle steamer transporting Jewish refugees, and the Russian captain of the Noemijulia, the maritime ship that took the refugees to Palestine. These shots were most probably taken by one of the crew members. At the beginning of the film, however, several intertitles are used to bring Andrásovits and his filmmaking hobby into the focus of viewers’ attention. The film opens with the captain walking near a smoking volcano, perhaps on one of his earlier trips, with the famous melody from Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube Waltz” in the background. The caption reads “Captain Andrásovits,” shortly followed by another caption: “a persistent amateur filmmaker.” As we see the captain walking away, another text appears: “two Danube stories filmed by Captain Andrásovits.” As he is shown at

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the helm lifting his binoculars to his eyes, we read “Nándor Andrásovits, Captain of the Erzsébet Királyné,” followed by the film’s title, “The Danube Exodus.” Similarly to the central space of the installation, these cinematic gestures introduce the captain, rather than Forgács, as the filmmaker (Forgács’s name does not even appear in the opening credits). One needs to remember, however, that “hiding” behind the gaze of the maker of the original footage is not an unusual method in Forgács’s oeuvre. In relation to another one of his film projects, Own Death (2008), Ernst van Alphen refers to this technique as “radical perspectivism,” which entails a “character-bound focalization [that] helps to avoid explanations and comments from a narrator” (2014, 258). In The Danube Exodus radical perspectivism is thus employed as a rhetorical means to deflect attention from Forgács to the captain. For all these techniques of self-defense called for by the lingering taboo on the Holocaust’s comparability, both the film and the installation attest to Forgács’s ingenuity in creating a mnemonic platform for viewers and visitors to engage with the two stories comparatively. For him, the real value of the amateur films with which he works lies in their potential to “reveal a level of history that is recorded in no other kind of cinema—a level of history that governments and large commercial enterprises don’t see as important or valuable but that can show us a great many things about the realities and complexities of history as it is lived by real people” (quoted in MacDonald 2011, 12). The Danube Exodus impels viewers to engage with such complexities by conceptually “unmooring” the two groups on board from the bonds of identity constructions that render their micro-histories and collective memories incomparable and competitive. In doing so, both the film and the installation can be regarded as artistic practices of memory that not only foreshadow what would later be called multidirectional memory but also apply their ethics to a situation unaccounted for in Rothberg’s work.

References Alexander, Zaia, and Marsha Kinder. 2006. A Dunai Exodus: A folyó beszédes áramlatai/The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River, 7–13. Budapest: Ludwig Múzeum. Bán, Zsófia. 2012. Forgács’s Film and Installation Dunai Exodus (The Danube Exodus). Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5. https://docs.lib.purdue. edu/clcweb/vol14/iss5/11/

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Bond, Lucy, and Stef Craps. 2020. Trauma. New York: Routledge. Erdelyi Figyelo. 2013. Forgács Péter Dunai exodus cím˝ u kiállítása a Tranzit Házban, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezz3PI4GQ7E&t=24s. Accessed 19 January 2021. European Parliament. 2009. European Parliament Resolution of 2 April 2009 on European Conscience and Totalitarianism. https://www.europarl.europa. eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P6-TA-2009-0213+0+ DOC+XML+V0//EN. Accessed 19 January 2021. Forgács, Péter and the Labyrinth Project. 2006. A Dunai Exodus: A folyó beszédes áramlatai/The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River. Budapest: Ludwig Múzeum. Hoskins, Andrew. 2014. Media and the Closure of the Memory Boom. In Media and Nostalgia. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, ed. Katharina Niemeyer, 118–125, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. 2000. Stockholm Declaration. https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/about-us/stockholm-declaration Kinder, Marsha. 2011. Reorchestrating History: Transforming The Danube Exodus into a Database Documentary. In Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács, ed. Bill Nichols and Michael Renov, 235–255. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Macdonald, Scott. 2011. Péter Forgács: An Interview. In Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács, ed. Bill Nichols and Michael Renov, 3–38. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maier, Charles. 1993. A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial. History and Memory 5 (2): 136–152. Margalit, Avishai, and Gabriel Motzkin. 1996. The Uniqueness of the Holocaust. Philosophy & Public Affairs 25 (1): 65–83. Munteán, László. 2021. Fluvial Migrations: The Ethics of Comparison in Péter Forgács’s The Danube Exodus. Image [&] Narrative 22 (1): 45–56. http:// www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/2592 Nichols, Bill. 2011. The Memory of Loss: Péter Forgács’s Saga of Family Life and Social Hell. In Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács, ed. Bill Nichols and Michael Renov, 53–54. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Novick, Peter. 1999. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Robinson, Rivka Ronda. 2021. Aron Grunhut: A Jewish Hero Who Rescued 1350 Jews. aish, October 3. https://aish.com/aron-grunhut-a-jewish-herowho-rescued-1350-jews/

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Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed. 1995. Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Boulder: Westview Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stone, Dan. 2003. Constructing the Holocaust. Elstree: Vallentine Mitchell. Van Alphen, Ernst. 2014. On the Possibility and Impossibility of Modernist Cinema: Péter Forgács. Own Death. Filosofski Vestnik 35 (2): 255–269. Zombory, Máté. 2019. Traumatársadalom: az emlékezetpolitika történetiszociológiai kritikája. Budapest: Kijárat Kiadó.

Film The Danube Exodus. 1998. Directed by Péter Forgács. Lumen Film.

Uwe Timm and the Ghosts of the Past—A Writer’s Ethical Impact on the Agenda of Collective Memory Yvonne Delhey

There can be no after without a debt, an unsettled relation, a haunting. Gerhard Richter

The need to look back and process the past, says David Rieff in his book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (2016), results from time’s acceleration or, one might say, from the historical phenomenon called progress that—in many parts of the world—has become the ruling human experience of modern times. Changes there have always been, he concedes, but not the large and rapid changes that have occurred in the last two hundred years. Within modern society,

I am grateful to Dr Michael Loughridge, former Lecturer in German at the University of St. Andrews, for his English translation of the first version of my contribution and Dr Mathilde Roza for her meticulous rereading and editing of the final version. Y. Delhey (B) Department of Modern Languages, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_3

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this process generates a nascent hunger for continuities and traditions, which we as members of different groups and nations try to quench with the construction of collective historical memories. Rieff questions these attempts to get a grip on the past, as he doubts in general the value of historical remembrance as “guarantor of tradition” (2016, 142). He points at the influence that collective memory exerts on our attitude toward the present and the past. In his opinion, collective remembrance cannot avoid that what actually has happened will be lost eventually. He cites Pierre Nora and the relationship Nora describes between historiography and collective memory: “Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again” (qtd. in Rieff 2016, 92; see also Nora 1989, 9). How we approach the past, in other words, is a matter of belief and doubt, of critical distance in our relation to the world. Collective historical remembrance, Rieff is convinced, takes more after “myth on one side and political propaganda on the other than [it does after] history, at least as that is understood as an academic discipline” (2016, 22). Going a step further, Rieff contends that collective memory often “functions as an escape and an idyll, providing a moral warrant for nostalgia” (2016, 92). In such a view, the whole enterprise into history, which is meant to give meaning to the present and the future, becomes rather regressive and ironically loses sight of contemporary issues. Intriguingly, in his argument Rieff attaches conspicuous importance to literature and with it the voice of an individual author. In his argument he invokes no fewer than three writers, Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz, and Jorge Luis Borges, and produces the three like a trump card at the close of his argument asserting the moral necessity of forgetting. The key point, as I see it, is the function he thereby assigns to literature as the eminent communicative vehicle for coming to terms with the past: ultimately it is literature that offers us an opportunity for reflective understanding of historical events and processes and uses our engagement with the past to relate these to ongoing societal developments. How much can be learnt in this way no doubt depends both on the particular issue and also on how urgently author and reader seek greater understanding. There are indeed other media and communication modes that serve the same ends, but in Rieff’s approach literature occupies a different position in that it is capable of opening up a communicative space to the individual’s perspective. What I seek to establish in this essay is how the individual voice of an author influences or can potentially influence collective historical remembrance in a critical or even unorthodox

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way. I shall explore the issue with reference to the works of German writer Uwe Timm (b. 1940), who identified as politically committed and whose life and work accordingly were to a large extent informed by historical events, specifically the student uprising of 1968 that politicized his generation. Timm is now in his eighties, and his writing reveals a distinct trend toward retrospection and revision–retrospection on his life, and revision of his past stances. Now that late style is once more a focus for debate across the arts and literature scene, it seems appropriate to consider Timm’s work in the light of the wider discussion, which is likewise concerned with what writers and artists achieve as individuals. It was Edward Said, in 2006, who revived the debate by reinvoking the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno (Said 2006). However, the return was not unproblematic: as Robert Spencer argues in Lateness and its Discontents (2016), Said’s reading of Adorno was one-sided because for Adorno lateness is historically related to the catastrophe of the Holocaust, which he, as a German man of Jewish decent, survived in exile. Given its uncompromising stance, it can be argued that Adorno’s aesthetic concept also reveals an imperishable artistic ideal, whereas Said, in his interpretation, expounds on the irreconcilable state that late style ties to exile. In Spencer’s view the case illustrates what Linda and Michael Hutcheon point out in the same anthology: that so-called ‘late style’ is above all a problem for reception aesthetics. Similarly to Hutcheon and Hutcheon, Gordon Mc Mullan— who analyzed the concept with application to William Shakespeare—had previously defined it as “a construct, ideological, rhetorical and heuristic, a function not of life or of art but of the practice of reading or appreciating certain texts within a set of predetermined parameters” (2008, 5). In order to explore Timm’s late style, the following section nevertheless engages critically with an author-oriented way of reading, though not one that sets the author on a pedestal like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men,1 instead pursuing a thematic thread through Timm’s oeuvre to date. As my analysis shows, Timm’s attempt to face 1 It was only quite recently that Kai Sina advanced a proposition based on Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s late works and Sina’s interpretation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s volume Representative Men (1850), and intended as a contribution to transatlantic literary studies from the perspective of reception aesthetics specifically. The collection of portraits, he contends, reflects an attempt by Emerson, despairing of any holistic approach (“GanzheitsMelancholie”, Sina 2020, 3), to reach a historical and critical diagnosis of the nineteenth century by way of a biographical perspective on the lives and works of individual men.

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German history surfaces early on, but finds literary form only with the late novel Ikarien, in which Timm examines National Socialism, racism, legacy cultural imprints and behavior patterns. A reading of this exemplar text can also show how Timm’s own artistic creations enabled him to independently create ‘memory spaces’ (Assmann 1999), which in their turn helped him penetrate the grey areas of collective memory, and in so doing potentially influenced ongoing debates in order to change perspectives on the past. Timm’s reputation in Germany is that of a very well-known and successful writer who found an international readership with books like Morenga (1978), Die Entdeckung der Currywurst (1993), and Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003). His last major international bestseller, Ikarien‚ appeared in 2017 and is dedicated to Dagmar Ploetz, his wife. Dagmar Ploetz is the grand-daughter of Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940), a German doctor regarded as a co-founder of the eugenics movement that took off alongside ‘social Darwinism’ in the last years of the nineteenth century. He coined the term Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene), which attained raison d’état status in Germany under the National Socialists. Ploetz and his life are central to the novel’s action. Dagmar Ploetz, it is worth mentioning, grew up in Villa Gesell, a town founded in Argentina by German émigrés —the name intended to recall the German economist Silvio Gesell (1862–1930). Seen as a social reform advocate, Gesell was a founder of the free economy school, and regarded by John Maynard Keynes as a non-Marxian socialist (Onken 2000, 609). None of all that remains today, it seems, except for the name itself in the eponymous Pacific watering place. It was Timm who drew attention once more to Villa Gesell and some other nineteenth-century social utopias, through Ikarien and a collection of essays he published in March 2020, Der Verrückte in den Dünen: Über Utopie und Literatur. While the novel presents a vanished world that despite some pretension to realism is ultimately fictitious, and moreover allows for multiple interpretations because of its narrative form, the essay collection announces the link to utopia in its title.2 Although not explicitly linked to the novel, the essays are

2 Unfortunately, the article does not provide space to discuss Timm’s understanding of utopia in detail. An approach such as Karl Mannheim formulated in his work Ideology and Utopia (1929, English translation 1936) seems particularly productive to me. Mannheim starts from the capacity for imagination inherent in human beings and defines the utopian state of mind as will for change (see introduction to Delhey et al. 2019).

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to some extent an afterword or subtext to the novel. The intertextual connection provides a clue to Timm’s working methods, namely his use of essayistic work as a way to express ethical considerations more explicitly than in his fictional work. Much the same applies to his lecture on poetics, Von Anfang und Ende; Über die Lesbarkeit der Welt, (2009) which came after the autobiographical narratives Am Beispiel meines Bruders and Der Fremde und der Freund (2005). The author’s style of working, traceable to still earlier in his career, shows a certain didacticism, an urge to inform, to educate, that had been there from the start of his writing career. This trait is evident also in the commitment he brought to his work as editor and writer for the AutorenEdition. This was a rather unique publishing project in the 1970s: initiated by Bertelsmann Verlag, it was essentially a grassroots democracy of writers publishing fellow writers. The AutorenEdition aimed to promote a new, politically aware realism intended to reach a large readership with vividly and entertainingly written new works dealing with contemporary social issues (cf. Rolf Parr 2017). Timm’s debut novel was published in the Autoren series in 1974: Heißer Sommer, an autobiographically inspired coming-of-age story about Ullrich Krause, an undergraduate in German studies. The story picks up on the rift between the 1968 generation and its parents, the concomitant criticism of the educated middle class, its affluence and its values, and the killing by police during a demonstration in West Berlin on 2 June 1967 of a student, Benno Ohnesorg, as a consequence of which the student movement in the Federal Republic stepped up its political radicalism. The effect the killing had on Timm came to light only when he himself revealed it much later, in literary form, in the autobiographical narration Der Fremde und der Freund. For a brief, intense period while both were at the Braunschweig-Kolleg, a further education college, he and Ohnesorg had been close friends. According to Timm’s biographer and former Lektor Martin Hielscher, Timm describes in autobiographical retrospect in Der Fremde und der Freund how his friend’s death provided the “decisive […] motivation for putting Heißer Sommer on paper” (2007, 181).3 Hielscher cites a scene in the book that takes the reader back to the friends’ college time and the point at which they read each other’s poetry. The scene ends with an assertion that can be seen as a

3 “maßgebliche […] Motiv zur Niederschrift von Heißer Sommer.”

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typical feature of ‘late style’ in that—retrospectively, it must be noted—it anticipates the author-narrator’s future: “It was the moment we knew we would be able to forge ahead with our own choices, with each and every effort, committed to that alone” (Timm 2005, 70–71; Hielscher 2007, 179).4 Also—and here is this autobiographical story’s special feature— Timm’s memory of his friend’s poetic efforts enables him to give the dead Benno Ohnesorg a voice of his own and, in that way, to release him from symbolic victimhood. Heißer Sommer is a legacy text of the 1968 movement. Also, Rolf Parr contends, it is to be seen as “a very precisely calculated attempt to advance the AutorenEdition literary readership project and with it his combination of realism, utopia and, of course, autofiction” (2019, 132).5 In an interview twenty years later with Manfred Durzak, Timm conceded the autofictional nature of the protagonist Ullrich Krause: “That is me and that is not me” (Timm/Durzak 1995, 318).6 Asked about the influence—Durzak calls it “produktives Erbe” (productive legacy)—that the student movement had on him, Timm mentions the liberating experience of having found a way out of his own isolation. With that, as he goes on to explain, Timm refers to the experience of opening himself up to emotions or—for a writer’s work probably more important—finding a language of his own for them. If one considers Timm’s published works with this aspect in mind, the liberation presumably has to be envisaged as proceeding by stages. This process in stages is corroborated by another publication, Am Beispiel meines Bruders , likewise autobiographical. Timm’s subject here is his much older brother Karl-Heinz Timm, who died in the Second World War in 1943, aged nineteen. He enlisted in December 1942, volunteering for service with the SS Death’s Head division, and was soon sent to the front. As the story begins, Timm states that he had often tried unsuccessfully to write about his brother. In the end he uses Karl-Heinz’s letters to their parents and the diary he had kept while on frontline service as a means of getting closer to him. This more intimate approach, as Timm likewise divulges at the outset, also reflects 4 “Es war ein Augenblick, in dem wir wußten, es wird gelingen, das Selbstgewählte voranzubringen, mit allem und jedem Einsatz, allein dem verpflichtet.” 5 “der sehr genau kalkulierte Versuch […] das literarisch-politische Publikumsprojekt der AutorenEdition und mit ihm die Kombination von Realismus, Utopie und eben auch Autofiktion umzusetzen.” 6 “Das bin ich und das bin ich nicht.”

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his own interest in their father and the latter’s values and ideals. It is not hard to discern the therapeutic motivation behind the writer’s seeking access by way of his dead brother to the world of his childhood—a childhood for which the family had had no room. In the Frankfurt lecture on poetics delivered soon afterward, Timm explains the unanswered question posed for him by Am Beispiel meines Bruders . “What was private had to become public once it was interrogated as to its social context. I needed to find out whether my brother’s unit, the Third Panzerpionier battalion of the SS Death’s Head division, had been involved in murdering Jews and Russian civilians” (2009, 78).7 Making public what had been private: for that, distance was needed, distance from the lived family memory that had accumulated through the individual members and their narratives.8 Timm admits in the poetics lecture that he could not face this question until after his parents and sister had died and he could feel free to give his own account of the past. In this critical confrontation with his own familial past his concern is not to apportion individual blame but to trace adopted values, behavioral patterns, and cultural imprints that made possible an ideology like National Socialism and a state like the Third Reich. In this way, Timm’s search into the hidden and even painful past of his family becomes an exercise in collective remembrance. Timm’s memory work ties in with what historian Ute Frevert calls the historical significance (Geschichtsmächtigkeit ) of emotions (2020). The History of Emotions research group she heads at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin studies social influences that are underlain by emotions and can, in turn, also trigger emotions.9 Timm’s short text “Der Aufwachraum,” from the essay collection Der Verrückte in den Dünen (2020), is especially illuminating in this regard. The piece, a short autobiographical account of coping with pain, starts off from a minor surgical operation: as a 12-year-old child, Timm had to have his tonsils

7 “Das Private musste öffentlich werden, indem es zu seinem gesellschaftlichen Umfeld befragt wurde. Ich wollte herausfinden, ob die Einheit des Bruders, das PanzerpionierBataillon III der SS-Totenkopfdivision, an der Ermordung von Juden und russischen Zivilisten beteiligt war.” 8 Mention should be made at this point of a study by Harald Welzer et al. (2002), who had carried out detailed research into the social function of family memory in coming to terms with the National Socialist past in Germany. 9 See https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/forschung/forschungsbereiche/geschichte-dergefuehle (last accessed 23 October 2020).

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removed because of recurrent inflammation. Given his birth date, the tonsillectomy can be dated to the early 1950s, during the Federal Republic’s postwar economic boom years. The memory that Timm recounts from the boy’s perspective touches on the ways in which the experience of war is transmitted between generations, from father to son: “The child thought about what his father had told him, as a memory from the war, that one had to accept the pain and fight against it, and then, even if the pain was bad, one could better stand it” (2020, 231).10 The scene as narrated may seem innocuous, but it acquires deeper significance from the questions that follow: is there a history of pain, and is pain the same experience across all cultures? Here the autobiographical memoir broadens out into philosophical reflection, with a historical perspective, not just on pain and illness, but also on aging and one’s personal mortality, and furthermore, as emerges from the argument, on the potential of medical research to contribute to the optimization of human life. In this context Timm ends up drawing a somewhat audacious comparison of the modern biotechnology of “genetic scissors,” or gene editing, with eugenics—a subject that would be central to Timm’s latest novel, Ikarien (cf. Timm 2020, 240). The essay’s title, “Aufwachraum,” although initially a simple reference to the room in which the boy wakes up after his operation, moves to another semiotic level and acquires wider meaning, first representing the end of childhood, then also the emotional liberation from pain described above, summarized at the end of the text in the sentence “Nonsense, there’s no need for pain anymore” (Timm 2020, 251).11 These words accompany Timm’s wish for an end to all the unnecessary pain that human beings are forced to endure by the social circumstances in which they live. They can also stand as a motto for his engagement with unjustifiable historical events as he excavates them in his second novel Morenga (1978). Having engaged in Heißer Sommer with the 1968 student protest movement, Timm turned his attention to the German colonial record in South West Africa (now Namibia) in Morenga, telling of the indigenous population’s battle against the oppression of German colonial rule. The novel’s title recalls Jakob Morenga, a leader of the uprisings that began 10 “Das Kind dachte daran, was ihm der Vater als Erinnerung aus dem Krieg gesagt hatte, man müsse dem Schmerz annehmen und gegen ihn ankämpfen, dann sei der Schmerz, auch wenn er groß sei, besser zu ertragen.” 11 “Unsinn, Schmerzen müssen nicht mehr sein.”

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in 1904 and ended in 1907 with the massacre of the Herero and Nama people—the first genocide of the twentieth century (Jørgensen, Markusen 1999). Morenga’s crucial link to Heißer Sommer is the scene that describes the toppling of a monument in front of the University of Hamburg’s main building, by a group of students. Both the statue and its overturning are historical (cf. Todzi 2018), and Timm later admitted having taken part. The statue, which commemorated Hermann von Wissmann (1853– 1903), a colonial officer and one-time Governor of German East Africa, had been unveiled on its Hamburg University site in 1922, in front of the building which had previously housed the Hamburg Colonial Institute. Originally erected in what is now Tanzania, the statue had been shipped to Germany after the First World War as part of a plan to create a central place of remembrance in Hamburg for the colonies lost in that war. After the student action, it was placed in storage and has since been brought out and put on view only occasionally, in conjunction with history exhibitions and art-related campaigns such as the digital afrika-hamburg.de project initiated by the Hamburg-based artist H. M. Jokinen in 2004– 2005. On that occasion the de-plinthed statue of Von Wissmann stood at the Landungsbrücken on the city’s waterfront for fourteen months. The people of Hamburg were polled on what was to be done with it.12 By the end of 2005, 5669 votes had been cast. The majority (95%) was in favor of keeping such monuments on display and encourage critical discussion of problematic aspects of Germany’s colonial past. In the 1995 conversation with Manfred Durzak mentioned above, Timm explains how he moved on to Morenga and his focus on German colonial history after describing the statue protest in Heißer Sommer. It is worth quoting the passage in full because it shows that while he reflected retrospectively on that incident, a process of attitudinal change set in: the internalized patterns of thinking and behavior acquired through background and socialization now ceased to be ingrained reflexes and made way for new mental attitudes that enabled the author to penetrate new literary worlds: It was this action – no, it was describing it later – that brought home to me, stuffed full though my memory was of the misdeeds of the fathers, just how much had been simply passed down. You had to be jerked into it, or for instance a statue you’d heedlessly walked past every day had to 12 http://afrika-hamburg.de/ (last accessed 23 October 2020).

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be knocked off its plinth—in your memory too, your awareness. An image that shifted things. How did something like fascism happen, how did something like genocide happen, extermination of whole peoples, what had to be put in place first so that it was OK with your conscience to kill human beings, sub-humans, savages—and then put up statues to the people who did that? And I remembered while I was working on Heißer Sommer, I remembered having heard a lot at home, as a child, about the Hereros and what they called the Hottentot revolt. What I remembered was exciting stories, with the Germans bringing civilization to the Africans. I looked at it again, and I realized the quelling of the revolt had been a prototype for the Holocaust. This attempt to eradicate the Herero people has the same roots as the later, fascist version, and similar stereotypical features. That unquestioning sense of national superiority. Social Darwinism. Competence is good, strong is good. I don’t mean crude obvious racism, I mean the subtler forms, insinuations. The way people treat their own cultural values, their own civilization as the standard. Duty, diligence, timekeeping, discipline. Most of that transfers down to the next generation without anyone realizing. I was looking at myself the whole time I was looking at those other people, the Nama.13 (Timm/Durzak 1995: 322, italics Delhey)

As Timm’s reflections suggest, the critical examination of one’s own history and culture, its values, and the ways in which these have been handed down does not simply provide a “moral warrant for nostalgia,” 13 “Bei dieser Aktion, nein, erst bei deren Beschreibung, wurde mir bewußt, wie sehr auch meine Erinnerung mit den Untaten der Väter vollgestopft war, was da alles weitergegeben worden war. Man mußte erst darauf gestoßen werden, beziehungsweise ein Denkmal, an dem man früher achtlos vorbeilief, mußte umgestoßen werden, auch in der Erinnerung, im Bewußtsein. Ein Bild, das etwas bewegte. Wie entstand so etwas wie Faschismus, wie entstand so etwas wie Völkermord, Genozid, was waren die Voraussetzungen, daß man mit bestem Gewissen Menschen umbringen konnte, Untermenschen, Wilde, und dann den Tätern noch Denkmäler setzen konnte? Und ich erinnerte mich, während ich am ‘Heißen Sommer’ schrieb, daß ich als Kind zu Hause viel gehört habe über den Herero- und den sogenannten Hottentotten-Aufstand. Ich hatte das in Erinnerung als spannende Geschichten, in denen die Deutschen den Afrikanern die Zivilisation brachten. Ich habe mich damit beschäftigt und habe gesehen, daß die Niederschlagung des Aufstandes eine Vorform des Holocaust gewesen ist. Dieser versuchte Völkermord an den Hereros hat dieselben Wurzeln und trägt ähnlich modellhafte Züge wie der spätere im Faschismus. Diese fraglose nationale Selbstüberheblichkeit. Der Sozialdarwinismus. Der Tüchtige, der Starke ist gut. Ich meine nicht den plumpen Rassismus, sondern die feinen subtilen Formen. Wie man eigene kulturelle und zivilisatorische Werte für sich absolut setzt. Pflicht, Fleiß, Pünktlichkeit, Ordnung. Vieles von dem wird ganz unbewußt von einer Generation an die nächste weitergegeben. So habe ich mich mit mir beschäftigt, indem ich mich mit den Fremden, den Namas beschäftigte.”

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as Rieff fears (cf. the opening remarks above). What the reader gains from Timm’s historical remembrance is in fact an opportunity to reflect critically on what is happening in the present. The passage also suggests how Timm arrived at the central theme of his last novel to date, Ikarien: the growth, linked to social Darwinism, of eugenics, which was itself to nurture the development of the racist ideology of National Socialism.14 The novel’s title, certainly, might suggest one of the nineteenthcentury social utopias. The early French socialist Étienne Cabet (1788– 1856), following the custom for literary utopias, had initially installed his projection of an ideal society on an island and described it in some detail in his novel Voyage en Icarie: roman philosophique et social (1842). He evidently struck a chord with the public, as the book was snapped up and Cabet and his ideas acquired so many adherents that he launched a political movement. Around 1850 he and his disciples emigrated to the US and founded a settlement that they developed on social utopia principles. Further settlements followed, but by the last years of the century they had all failed. The action of Timm’s novel—unexpectedly, given its title—opens in April 1945, at the end of World War II, and focuses on Michael Hansen, a young American of German descent, who has volunteered for US Army service and has been dispatched on a special mission to Germany, now on the brink of defeat. Selected for his language skills, Hansen is on a mission for the Psychological Warfare Division and it is this mission that introduces the central theme of the novel: eugenics and its history. Hansen is charged with completing the record on the eugenicist Alfred Ploetz, who had collaborated with the Nazis and is now dead. However, his disciple or famulus Wagner is still alive (Timm 2017, 62), and Hansen is to interview him. The greater part of the novel recounts conversations between Hansen and Wagner. Wagner is introduced as a former college friend of Ploetz—they both studied medicine—who became his assistant. At the point where Alfred Ploetz attempts to make utopia a reality, through breeding, his friend parts company with him. Wagner in the end is subjected to political persecution, while Ploetz becomes the protégé of a state that sought to breed a new master race by means of its racial policies. In his novel, Timm uses 14 Indeed, Timm actually took up the issue of eugenics and its historical origins in 1978, directly after completing Morenga, but failed at the time to find an “epic structure that would hold the material together” (Timm 2017, 501). The original certain version reads “es wollte sich keine den Stoff fassende epische Struktur finden.”

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this relationship to structure his analysis of how eugenics evolved to ultimately form part of National Socialist policies on race. He does not place this theme center stage, even if his account as a whole includes some substantive references to the history of a science that for a time—and by no means only in Germany—was considered thoroughly progressive, but fell into discredit worldwide with the collapse of the Third Reich and soon became taboo. Seen in retrospect, the past gains immediacy and so forces us as readers to grapple with questions that could not be more relevant to our contemporary present. In the novel, Wagner entertains the thought, “You are there, the past is here. In the here and now” (Timm 2017, 389).15 This thought expresses a relationship to time that makes the past become the present. If one picks up this thought and links it to one’s own being-here, then a term such as biodeutsch (biologically German), first listed in the German dictionary Duden in 2017 and defined there as meaning “of German descent and living in Germany,”16 must give cause for reflection. Duden, it is true, qualifies its definition by noting that the term biodeutsch is generally used with an ironic and pejorative tone. But that does not gainsay the entirely calculated deployment of the term in public debate by right-wing populists ever since the refugee crisis became a major issue in 2015, aiming by their use of the term to promote a discourse that explains cultural differences in terms of biology (cf. Angele 2019). And the newest developments in genetic research—I am thinking here of the debate on genome editing and the shock triggered in this connection by the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui in 2018—show that one of the fundamental ideas behind eugenics is very much alive and well in twentyfirst-century science.17 The science journalist Angela Saini, in her latest publication Superior: The Return of Race Science (2019), reminds us that race science first began during the European Enlightenment. It was

15 “Du bist da, die Vergangenheit ist hier. Im Jetzt.” 16 “deutscher Abstammung und in Deutschland lebend.” https://www.duden.de/rec

htschreibung/biodeutsch. Accessed 29 January 2023. 17 Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced in November 2018 the birth of twins whose DNA he had edited. They can be seen as “the first ever humans born with heritable changes to their genomes” (National Geographic 06/03/2019 qtd. in Regaldo 2018). The news instantly sparked an ethical and medical controversy about his research.

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such books as On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1795),18 by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), that provided the intellectual underpinning, by way of a discourse on race, for power struggles at national and global level (cf. Saini 2019, 3). Saini also points out that in the following century scientists like Francis Galton (1822–1911), who coined the term eugenics, promoted the institutionalization of the racial idea in scientific centers such as the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College London and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (now Max Planck Gesellschaft) in Germany (cf. Saini 2019, 62–110). Saini’s conclusion may sound bitter, but points clearly to what is at stake today: “Intellectual racism has always existed, and indeed for a chunk of history, it thrived. I believe it is still the toxic little seed at the heart of academia. However dead you might think it is, it needs only a little water, and now it’s raining” (2019, 291). This paper’s starting point was the question of how literature can make the exploration of historical remembrance productive. To some extent the question springs directly from the concepts of retrospection and revision that are central to this volume. However, as I mentioned early on, retrospection and revision themselves derive from one of the fundamental experiences that modern-age humans go through: an experience expressed in reflection on ‘historical time.’ Recalling Walter Benjamin, the US Germanist Gerhard Richter coined for it the term ‘afterness’ (2011). He sees it as a feature of the modern period that we develop an awareness of the antecedents (the German term is Vorgeschichte, glossed in this context as ‘fore-history’) to which we are tied and by which our existence is shaped—and that this awareness becomes increasingly acute over time. Richter sums up his view in the motto that heads the present essay: “There can be no after without a debt, an unsettled relation, a haunting” (2011, 6). Where Rieff doubts our ability to remember conscientiously and fundamentally questions the continuity between past, present, and future, Richter emphasizes the moral responsibility we have in coming to terms with the past. My consideration of some representative novels and stories, it may be hoped, has succeeded in showing how Uwe Timm’s quest for the ghosts of the past has become a linking theme integral to his literary output. The writer he became was decisively shaped by the student protest movement of the 1968 generation. It was in that 18 This was Blumenbach’s Göttingen University dissertation De generis humani varietate nativa (1775). The English translation was published in 1795.

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decade that a fundamental reckoning with the immediate German past began to take place in the Federal Republic. Fifty years on, and in the new context of present-day America and the opposed political surges of white supremacists and Black Lives Matter, the progress of that reckoning inspired the US philosopher Susan Neiman’s book Learning from the Germans. Race and the Memory of Evil (2019). Neiman—currently Director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, where she has lived since the 1980s—asserts that Germany is the first nation not to hide its national guilt away and instead keeps working, “slowly and fitfully, to acknowledge the evils their nation committed” (2019, 25).19 Interestingly, Neiman acknowledges for her part that when she tests this assertion conversationally with individual Germans their reaction tends to be reticent. This suggests that it is individual doubt as to the awareness of the collectively borne memory that characterizes German attitudes to the German past. Support for Neiman’s contention can be found in the writings of an author like Uwe Timm, which should be viewed as critical verdicts on his time. At the same time, they prove that, unlike Rieff’s suggestion mentioned at the opening of this chapter, rewriting of history in fiction need not lead to idyllic revisions of the past.

References Angele, Michael. 2019. “Nicht über jedes Stöckchen springen.” Was ist rechte Rhetorik – und wie soll man mit ihr umgehen? Ein Streitgespräch mit der Soziologin Franziska Schutzbach. Freitag, August 12, 2019. https://www.fre itag.de/autoren/michael-angele/was-ist-rechte-rhetorik. Assmann, Aleida. 1999. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: C.H. Beck. Delhey, Yvonne, Rolf Parr, and Kerstin Wilhelms (eds.). 2019. Autofiktion als Utopie/Autofiction As Utopia. Paderborn: Fink. Frevert, Ute. 2020. Mächtige Gefühle. Von A wie Angst bis Z wie Zuneigung. Deutsche Geschichte seit 1900. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.

19 Neiman refers to Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung —“working-off-the-past […] one of the first words I added to my German vocabulary” (Neiman 2019, pp. 7–8). The term first came into widespread use after the collapse of the GDR. It is more apposite than Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the key term for dealing with the National Socialist past, and still commonly used in everyday discourse. Translator’s note: It can be argued that ‘workingoff-the-past’ is not the most helpful translation for Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. A closer approximation might be ‘reappraisal of the past’.

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Hielscher, Martin. 2007. Uwe Timm. Munich: dtv. Jørgensen, Torben, and Eric Markusen. 1999. Genocide of the Hereros. In Encyclopedia of Genocide, ed. Israel W. Charny, 288–289. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. McMullan, Gordon. 2008. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing. Authorship in the Proximity of Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMullan, Gordon, and Sam Smiles (eds.). 2016. Lateness and Its Discontents. Essays in Art, Literature and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neiman, Susan. 2019. Learning from the Germans. Race and the Memory of Evil. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations 26: 7–24. Onken, Werner. 2000. The Political Economy of Silvio Gesell: A Century of Activism. The American Journal of Economy and Sociology 59 (4), October: 609–622. Parr, Rolf. 2017. Die AutorenEdition bei Bertelsmann: Ein ‘volkspädagogisches’ Verlagsexperiment und seine ‘didaktische’ Umsetzung. In Gestaltungsraum Deutschunterricht. Literatur – Kultur – Sprache, ed. Dieter Wrobel, Tilman von Brand, and Markus Engelns, 249–256. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider. Parr, Rolf. 2019. Utopische, biographische, autobiographische und autofiktionale Elemente in Texten der 68er-Schriftsteller: Uwe Timm, Peter-Paul Zahl, Bernward Vesper. In Autofiktion als Utopie/ Autofiction As Utopia, ed. Yvonne Delhey, Rolf Parr, and Kerstin Wilhelms, 127–143. Paderborn: Fink. Regalado‚ Antonio. 2018. Chinese scientists are creating CRISPR babies. MIT Technology Review, November 25. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/ 612458/exclusive-chinese-scientists-are-creating-crispr-babies/ Richter, Gerhard. 2011. Afterness. Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press. Rieff, David. 2016. In Praise of Forgetting. Historical Memory and Its Ironies. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Said, Edward. 2006. On Late Style. Music and Literature Against the Grain. London: Bloomsbury. Saini, Angela. 2019. Superior. The Return of Race Science. London: 4th Estate. Spencer, Robert. 2016. Lateness and Modernity in Theodor Adorno. In Lateness and Its Discontents. Essays in Art, Literature and Music, ed. Gordon McMullan, and Sam Smiles, 220–234. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sina, Kai. 2020. Polyphonie und Poetik. Eine transatlantische Einführung. In Goethes Spätwerk/ On Late Goethe, ed. Kai Sina, and David E. Wellbery, 1–11. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Timm, Uwe, and Manfred Durzak. 1995. Die Position des Autors. Ein Werkstattgespräch mit Uwe Timm. In Die Archäologie der Wünsche. Studien zum

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Werk von Uwe Timm, ed. Manfred Durzak, Hartmut Steinecke, and Keith Bullivant, 311–354. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Timm, Uwe. 2003. Am Beispiel meines Bruders. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Timm, Uwe. 2005. Der Fremde und der Freund. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Timm, Uwe. 2009. Vom Anfang und Ende. Über die Lesbarkeit der Welt. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Timm, Uwe. 2017. Ikarien. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Timm, Uwe. 2020. Der Verrückte in den Dünen. Über Utopie und Literatur. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Todzi, Kim. 2018. 50 Jahre Denkmalsturz. Der Sturz des Wissmann-Denkmals an der Universität Hamburg 1967/1968. Hamburgs (Post)Koloniales Erbe, blog dated November 30, Hamburg University. Accessed 23 October 2020. https://kolonialismus.blogs.uni-hamburg.de/2018/10/30/50-jahre-den kmalsturz-der-sturz-des-wissmann-denkmals-an-der-universitaet-hamburg-196 7-68/ Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. 2002. Opa war kein Nazi. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer TB.

Australia and Morocco Revisited: The Materialized Travel Memories of Dutch Visual Artist Theo Kuijpers Mariëtte Verhoeven

I cannot paint what I see. So I don’t feel the need to travel all the time […]. But what I paint always and increasingly seems to me to be memory. It is memory that creates images. And it is traveling, leaving, and returning home that creates memories.1

Traveling, gaining impressions, and processing and visualizing acquired impressions and images is the thread that runs through the life and work of Dutch visual artist Theo Kuijpers (b. Helmond 1939). Kuijpers has visited many countries, including Egypt, Indonesia, Iceland, Italy, and 1 Theo Kuijpers /Herinnering Marokko [Memory Morocco] (Heusden aan de Maas: Galerie Tegenbosch, 1995). Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at Galerie Tegenbosch (March 18–April 24, 1995), introduction (n.p.): “Ik kan niet schilderen wat ik zie. Dus daarvoor hoef ik niet zo nodig telkens op reis. Maar wat ik schilder, lijkt me altijd, en steeds meer, de herinnering. Het is de herinnering die beelden schept. En het is het reizen, weggaan en thuiskomen, dat herinneringen schept.”

M. Verhoeven (B) Radboud Institute for Culture and History, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_4

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France. The two countries that impressed him the most, however, were Morocco and Australia, to which he has made repeat visits. His memories of the journeys to these destinations are the strongest.2 This chapter focuses on the series of works that Kuijpers made based on the memories of his journeys to Morocco and Australia. I will determine to what extent—and how—Kuijpers resumed his earlier work of the 1960s to 1980s in the art he produced later in his long and productive career. More specifically, I will investigate how Kuijpers’s early travel experiences and the output from that earlier period have affected his more recent work. For Kuijpers, resuming earlier work arises from his way of working. Kuijpers works from memory and defines himself as a “memory artist.”3 Based on examinations of the mechanism of memory by Susan Sontag and memory scholar Aleida Assmann, the text below will first discuss and contextualize the notion of memory in relation to Kuijpers’s work, followed by an outline of the artist’s early career and work. This first section forms the framework for the investigation of how Theo Kuijpers revisited Australia and Morocco in his artworks. Aspects covered are the multi-layeredness of Kuijpers’s art; the tension between present and past and between presence and memory in his work, and the return to the past and autobiographical memory in later life.

Materialized Travel Memories Theo Kuijpers does not paint or draw what he sees before him in the way that many artists do. Kuijpers’s method is to observe, to absorb impressions with all his senses, and to convert his impressions into works of art in the studio. While this studio is usually that of his home base in the Netherlands, during his longer stays abroad he has also worked in studios on location. When Kuijpers does sketch or paint on location, he works with his back to the subject to avoid direct impressions. He rarely takes photographs. Rather, Kuijpers’s works are materialized and visualized travel memories and, as such, the result of a process of resuming and revisiting. 2 As stated by Theo Kuijpers during the interview the author held with him at his house in Nuenen and his studio in Eindhoven on November 12, 2019. 3 All quotations by Theo Kuijpers in this chapter, unless otherwise mentioned, are taken from the interview of the author with Kuijpers, November 12, 2019 (see note 2).

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Kuijpers’s approach is similar to that of his contemporary Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017), whose work he admires.4 The Turner Prizewinning, British artist Hodgkin traveled to India numerous times during his long career.5 Without making sketches or photos, Hodgkin absorbed impressions on the spot, which he then processed after returning to his studio, just like Kuijpers. According to the writer Colm Tóibín, for Hodgkin, “painting is not a question of capturing the moment, it is almost the opposite of that. It is trying to find in an experience whatever it was the way it is remembered. To try and make that something that would matter.”6 While Kuijpers mainly processes his travel impressions spontaneously and intuitively in series of works on which he sometimes continues to work for up to five years after returning from a destination, Hodgkin worked on one individual painting for years. Susan Sontag describes Hodgkin’s way of working as follows: What is worth painting remains in, and is transformed by, memory. And what survives the test of long-term deliberation and countless acts of revision. Pictures result from the accretion of many decisions (or layers, or brush strokes); some are worked on for years, to find the exact thickness of feeling.7

Both the intuitive and spontaneous working method of Kuijpers and the extremely intensive and time-consuming approach of Hodgkin have resulted in what could be called “abstract landscapes.” However, neither artist considered himself an abstract painter. Hodgkin defined himself as “a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances.”8 Kuijpers 4 From interview author with Kuijpers, November 12, 2019. 5 Peter Parker, “How India inspired Howard Hodgkin,” Apollo. The International Art

Magazine, vol. 186 (September 2017); Howard Hodgkin / Painting India (London: Lund Humphries Ltd., 2017). Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at the Hepworth Wakefield (July 1–October 8, 2017). 6 From a conversation between the writer Colm Tóibín and Howard Hodgkin, quoted

by Tóibín in the documentary A Picture of the Painter Howard Hodgkin (2016), accessed 15 June 2020, https://youtu.be/FvRtznZ3m1M; minutes 33:31-33:45. 7 Susan Sontag, “About Hodgkin,” in Where the Stress Falls (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 2002), 158. Also published in Howard Hodgkin Paintings (1995) and in Writers on Howard Hodgkin (2006). 8 https://howard-hodgkin.com/, accessed 15 June 2020.

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does not reckon his work abstract, because it invariably has a connection with reality: “it always derives from somewhere.”9 Neither Hodgkin nor Kuijpers has used paint primarily to bring memory to life. They shared a love for the material properties of paint; where Hodgkin mostly used paint on canvas, Kuijpers has also used tent canvas and linen shopping bags as carriers for multiple layers of painting to create works with “the exact thickness of feeling,” in addition to pieces of paper, branches, and twigs. Kuijpers’s works emanate in the first place from memories of the natural and urban landscapes he saw during his travels abroad. He draws first and foremost from what memory theorists would call his autobiographical memory, which relies on people’s ability to store personal experiences and to recall them later.10 According to Aleida Assmann, autobiographical memory is subjective, nontransferable, fragmentary, fleeting, and unstable. It only takes shape and structure in narratives, through which it is supplemented and stabilized at the same time.11 How this process might work for a visual artist, psychologist Daniel L. Schacter illustrates with an excerpt from Matthew Stadler’s Landscape: Memory (1990), a novel in which the story’s protagonist, Maxwell Kosegarten, explores and retrieves from his memory again and again to paint a landscape he saw several years earlier. In the novel, the artist states: If my memory ought to be an accurate replica of the original experience, if that was so, my painting was hopelessly inaccurate. It was a bad painting of a fuzzy memory. But I preferred to think that memory is never frozen, nor should it be. My painting was a successful rendering of the dynamic memory that had simply begun with the original event.12

Similar to the narrative that in Assmann’s account stabilizes transitory and fragmentary autobiographical memory, Kuijpers’s painting, like

9 From interview author with Kuijpers, November 12, 2019. 10 Douwe Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older. How Memory Shapes Our

Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 1 (unpaginated e-book). 11 Aleida Assmann, “Individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis – Formen, Funktionen und Medien,” in Das Gedächtnis der Kunst. Geschichte und Erinnerung in der Kunst der Gegenwart, ed. Kurt Wettengl (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000), 21. 12 Quoted in: Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory. The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 4.

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Kosegarten’s, begins with the “original” event but is ultimately a rendition of dynamic memory. A work by Kuijpers is, however, arguably less stabilized than Assmann’s narrative, precisely because the surface in a Kuijpers work is multi-layered and contains a multiplicity of materials and forms that make the work lively, giving the work a kind of animated presence. Through its materiality, scale, forms, color, and dynamic surface, a work by Kuijpers not only references the past, but also very much enters into a dialogue with the viewer in the present. This is what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht refers to with the term “presence effects,” which are constituted by physical stimuli that appeal to the senses of the observer and are as significant as meaning-related effects.13 Art historian and memory studies scholar Wouter Weijers states that at the level of the individual human being, memory is subjective and unknowable to other people. In artistic culture, we tend to deal with representations of memory that are aimed at shared experiences, or experiences to be shared, representations that are therefore recognizable for others and negotiable.14 While Kuijpers draws primarily from his autobiographical memory by recalling the sensory experiences he had abroad and by converting these into paintings, the meaning of his artworks is not purely autobiographical. In her discussion of Hodgkin’s work, Sontag argues against basing the meaning of artworks on artists’ biography. Sontag’s insistence that “what is on display is not the emotional state of the artist” applies as much to Hodgkin’s as to Kuijpers’s art.15 Kuijpers’s works emerge from, but are not representations of, his inner self. He moreover gives shape to his memory by appropriating and referring not only to individual, but also to collective experiences and images. Regarding his representation of Australian landscapes, Kuijpers has stated: “I make my own things out of it, but everyone recognizes it as Australia.”16 As I will demonstrate, the same goes for his visualizations of Moroccan landscapes, which, although abstract like his Australia-inspired works, show colors and shapes that are unmistakably Moroccan.

13 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 14 Wouter Weijers, Verbeelde herinnering: Essays over naoorlogse beeldende kunst en het culturele geheugen (PhD diss., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2012), 24. 15 Sontag, “About Hodgkin,” 156. 16 From interview author with Kuijpers, November 12, 2019.

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Early Career and Work In 1966, Theo Kuijpers traveled to Morocco for the first time.17 He traveled with the Moroccan husband of a niece and stayed with his family in the historical royal city of Meknes. Because of the rituals he was introduced to, he describes the experience as a revelation.18 However, it was mainly the sober architecture and primary form language of the buildings and their decoration that inspired him artistically. Kuijpers saw many similarities in color and form between what he observed in Morocco and the Art Informel of artists such as Alberto Burri and Antoni Tapiès. In the work he made after his trip to Morocco, Kuijpers used geometric elements like lozenges, triangles, and arches for the first time. He developed a variation on Art Informel , working with materials such as burlap, plaster, textile, and rope, mainly using muted colors such as brown, red-brown, and gray. His assemblages also acquired an increasingly spatial character.19 In 1971, Jean Leering—then director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven—advised Kuijpers to seek inspiration in his personal and cultural background: the agricultural environment of the province of Noord-Brabant. In response to Leering’s suggestion, Kuijpers initially made designs for large objects in the landscape. After a short while, he began, spontaneously and intuitively, to create sketches and preliminary studies on a flat surface, using materials such as lead, tin, sticks, rope, leather, beeswax, and dried pig and beef bladders. From 1974 onward, he presented these assemblages in shallow cabinets of wood and glass. Many of these artworks are characterized by tightly-arranged compositions with a strong geometric tendency. With the materials mentioned, he constructed circles, triangles, rectangles, arcs, and cross shapes on a white background. This formal language mainly is an abstraction of the agricultural environment of his youth, but also of the forms of the buildings and decorations that he had seen during his time in Morocco in

17 The section on Theo Kuijpers’s early career and work is mainly based on Rick Vercauteren, “Theo Kuijpers, de evolutie van een markante Brabantse kunstenaar,” in Theo Kuijpers – Terugblik op 20 jaar kunstenaarschap (’s Hertogenbosch: Noordbrabants Museum, 1988), 11–53. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at the Noordbrabants Museum (January 30–April 10, 1988). 18 From the introduction in Theo Kuijpers / Herinnering Marokko, n.p. 19 Much of Theo Kuijpers’s work is published on the artist’s website: https://www.the

okuijpers.nl/work.

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1966—an early instance of the layering of multiple memories. In terms of materials, he showed a preference for the handmade and traditional. Inspired by the Dutch-Australian lithographer Fred Genis, who worked with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns in the United States, between 1977 and 1979, Kuijpers changed his technique and use of materials. Genis had invited Kuijpers to make a number of color lithographs with him and encouraged him to draw with ink, pencil, chalk, and paint. With the technical support of Genis, Kuijpers made a series of color lithographs with forms that are reminiscent of tents, pointed gables, and forked twigs, works that, partly thanks to the help of Genis’s printing skills, do justice to Kuijpers’s expressive style. It was Genis who pointed out to Kuijpers a degree of similarity between his work and that of native Australians. Kuijpers decided to investigate this parallel, and at the end of 1979 secured a two-month travel grant, which he used to visit the sacred places of indigenous communities in Arnhem Land in Northern Australia. As in Morocco, Kuijpers was primarily interested in the formal characteristics of the architecture and art of indigenous people, rather than in their meaning and function. Without delving into their background, he was impressed by the figurative paintings the indigenous people made, especially the mythical images that play a role in rituals. The lay-over technique—the painting over earlier images—fascinated him. He also recognized in these images the same intuitive, geometrical forms he had used in Brabant in his own work. Kuijpers made sketches on the spot, destroying them after returning to the Netherlands in order to rid his mind of the examples he had seen, showing that he indeed prefers to work from memory and in dialogue with the material in the here and now: a much more dynamic and complex process than working from an example. In the subsequent series of drawings, gouaches, lithographs, and collages, Kuijpers appropriated the form language of the Arnhem Land indigenous people and transformed it into his own abstract style. A good example is the collage Down Under (1980; Fig. 1), which consists of a large, triangular shape pointing downwards, in which refined pencil hatches, expressive brushstrokes, and pieces of lead, straw, rope, and bladder can be seen. Down Under is an abstracted representation based on multiple memories of the artist, yet one that is clearly the result of a very physical and dynamic dialogue Kuijpers had with the material a year after his return from Arnhem Land: both a rendering of dynamic memories and an “accretion of decisions, layers, and brushstrokes,” as Sontag

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put it. The use of different materials, each evoking its own associations, contributes to the character of the work as an accumulation of different “temporalities.” Kuijpers’s observations in Arnhem Land were, along the lines of Kosegarten’s fictional experiences, only the beginning of the work art, which is as much a representation of dynamic memory as an animated physical object in the here and now that shows the traces of the creative process. In 1981, Kuijpers spent six months in New York, where he got to work in the Dutch studio of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. Inspired by the large-scale works of abstract expressionist artists such as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, Kuijpers started experimenting with working on a larger scale. When he returned to the Netherlands, he left almost all of this work behind.20 After his residence in New York, Kuijpers continued to work on a much larger format. On large sheets of paper, he processed elements cut out from small, older works and fragments of earlier collages and objects. He then applied new shapes, such as spirals and boomerangs, to the surface with beeswax, ink, oil stick, and self-made pigments. Rick Vercauteren describes this

Fig. 1 Theo Kuijpers, Down Under, 1980, assembly and mixed media on board, 99 × 197.5 cm, Sammlung Heinrich W. Risken Stiftung, Versmold, Germany. Photo © Peter Cox

20 Vercauteren, “Theo Kuijpers,” 43.

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process as "the search for a synthesis between his richly variegated, partly Australian-inspired formal language and his deep-rooted desire to make compositions with informal materials.”21 This search resulted in works like Australia (1983; Fig. 2), which are multi-layered in several ways: in terms of surface materiality, which is the result of collage and assemblage, with the incorporation of fragments from older work that was based on previous experiences and memories; in terms of the imaged memories of his trips to both New York and Australia; and above all, in terms of the creative process, of which the traces are so clearly visible. In 1984, Kuijpers joined the IJmuider Kring , a group of artists including Lei Molin and Pieter Defesche, all of whom had studios in the harbor of the Dutch town of IJmuiden on the North Sea coast. In the three years of Kuijpers’s residence in his studio in IJmuiden, he painted large canvases in oil paint, acrylic, chalk, and wax. These abstract works with expressive colors, such as The Night Turns Love Red (1985), are clearly inspired by American abstract expressionism.22 The way in which

Fig. 2 Theo Kuijpers, Australia, 1983, mixed media on canvas and board, 135 × 229 cm. Photo © Peter Cox 21 Vercauteren, “Theo Kuijpers,” 43. 22 See https://www.theokuijpers.nl/work/ijmuiden-1985-tot-1989, for an overview of

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the thick layers of paint were applied and Kuijpers’s expressive style are reminiscent of the work of action painters such as Kline and De Kooning, while the large fields of color with abstract signs are reminiscent of the color field paintings of Mark Rothko and Motherwell. At the end of 2019, Kuijpers stated about his earlier work, and in particular the period of the IJmuider Kring (1984–1986): I no longer have that vitality, especially that of the Sturm und Drang period of IJmuiden. If I were to make those works now, I would make them more beautiful. But if I did, they would no longer be authentic. I would be plagiarizing myself, and you would be able to see that. Now I have to stop myself from doing that, telling myself to stop play–acting. According to my wife, my work has more soul now, but [laughing] I doubt whether I have a soul.23

In 1985, at the time when Kuijpers had a studio in IJmuiden, he traveled to Australia for the second time, now with his wife, the visual artist Ellen Jess. He visited Sydney and the coastal area and neighboring inland of New South Wales. Subsequently, he traveled to the coast of Queensland with its Great Barrier Reef. In Townsville, Kuijpers visited the DutchAustralian artist Anneke Silver and went with her to Magnetic Island, just off the coast, then traveled further north to Cairns. Especially on Magnetic Island, Kuijpers was impressed by the variety of flora and fauna and the untainted beauty of the landscape, but also by the toughness of nature, in which animals eat each other, both on land and in water. In Kenthurst, a suburb of Sydney, Kuijpers produced a series of color lithographs entitled Australia, with the technical support of lithographer Fred Genis, who had been living in Australia since 1979. Kuijpers applied his abstract signs, including many arrow-like shapes, directly to the lithographic stones that were then printed by Genis in multiple color layers, measuring 76 cm by 57 cm. Although in a different medium and format, the 1985 Australia series shows the vitality, expressiveness, and form language that also mark the work that Kuijpers produced in his IJmuiden studio, both before and after his journey to Australia. It therefore seems to be mainly the colors of the Australian lithographs—black, blue, red,

Kuijpers’s IJmuiden works. 23 From interview author with Kuijpers, November 12, 2019.

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and gray—that were inspired by what Kuijpers saw on his journey and that distinguish this series from his IJmuiden works. Kuijpers brought the Australia series along with him to the Netherlands, where part of it was exhibited at the retrospective exhibition Theo Kuijpers—Terugblik op twintig jaar kunstenaarschap (Theo Kuijpers – Looking back on twenty years of artistic practice) in the Noordbrabants Museum in ’s Hertogenbosch in 1988. Much of this early work, especially the collages and assemblages, is now in the collection of the Heinrich W. Risken Stiftung in Germany.

Revisiting Australia and Morocco Having made his first trip to Morocco in 1966, Kuijpers returned ten years later, in 1976, and again in 1994. Kuijpers’s wife Jess had taken the initiative for this last trip, as she wanted to see the Atlas Mountains to find inspiration for her own work. Kuijpers and Jess flew to Agadir and subsequently went to the High Atlas by car. North of Ourzazate, in the fortified village of A’l’t Ben Haddou, Kuijpers was impressed by the light, the colors, and the shadow play unfolding before his eyes. They also visited the castle of Tamdaght, where Kuijpers saw a dome-shaped vault with star-shaped patterns that he describes as having “melancholic, ancient, and also incomprehensible symbols.”24 This illustrates Kuijpers’s preference for the ambiguous nature of illegible symbols that evoke all sorts of associations. In the village of Irhezm-n-Ougdal, located at an altitude of 2000 meters, the enclosed courtyard of the little hotel where Kuijpers and Jess stayed for some time served as his studio. Thinking back to A’l’t Ben Haddou and the Berber symbols of Tamdaght Castle, he created a series of transparent, calligraphic watercolors, the colors of which are inspired by what he saw in Morocco and, as he put it himself, “many other colors, reminiscent of home and the usual.”25 Upon Kuijpers’s return to the Netherlands, these small watercolors served as aid for a series of paintings and gouaches incorporating his memories of Morocco, such as Illusion Marocaine (1994). The work that Kuijpers made in Morocco in 1994 and

24 Theo Kuijpers/Herinnering Marokko, 1995, introduction, n.p. 25 Theo Kuijpers/Herinnering Marokko, 1995, introduction, n.p.

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subsequently after returning home was shown at an exhibition entitled Theo Kuijpers/Herinnering Marokko (Memory Morocco) in 1995.26 Although Kuijpers visited Morocco for the last time in 1994, he continued his paintings based on his travels to Morocco for many years, repeatedly returning to his earlier work and to his memories of the country, for instance in Wit Huis in Blauw (White House in Blue; Fig. 3). In his late Moroccan work (2015 and 2016), just as in his early work, the colors yellow and ocher predominate. It is also clear that the architectural forms he saw in Morocco again appeared twenty years later in the abstract signature style that Kuijpers had developed over the years.27

Fig. 3 Theo Kuijpers, Wit Huis in Blauw (White House in Blue), 1998, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. Photo © Peter Cox

26 See note 1. 27 See https://www.theokuijpers.nl/work/marokko-1966-tot-heden, for an overview of

Kuijpers’s work based on his travels to Morocco.

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After two journeys to Australia in 1979 and 1985, Kuijpers visited the country again in 2009, at the age of 70. In Sydney, he attended the opening of the exhibition Intensely Dutch in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which showcased the work of some of the most renowned post-war Dutch artists, including the artists associated with CoBrA, Dutch-American artist Willem De Kooning, and many of Kuijpers’s own works, though his Australian works were missing.28 The exhibition was curated by Hendrik Kolenberg, an Australian of Dutch descent, with whom Kuijpers had been friends since Kolenberg visited him in his studio in Eindhoven in 2007.29 Following the exhibition in Sydney, the artist visited the World Heritage-listed Blue Mountains National Park near Sydney, where more than ninety species of Eucalyptus trees grow. He subsequently traveled again to Townsville and Magnetic Island in Queensland, and this time also explored, together with painter-friend Anneke Silver, part of the rugged Outback around Charters Towers, heading toward Mount Isa from Townsville. After Kuijpers’s return to the Netherlands, an especially productive period started, during which he created large and small works from memory in his studio in Eindhoven, on paper as well as canvas.30 In these works, he not only processed his most recent travel experiences, but also revisited the memories of his first Australian journey and his introduction to the culture and form language of indigenous people. Museum director Rick Vercauteren rightly notes in the book Theo Kuijpers & Australia. Memory and Experience (2019) that Kuijpers, in his memory, connected the Australian tours of 1979 and 2009.31 The Australia-inspired works Kuijpers has been making since 2009 are again multi-layered, both materially and in their incorporation of accumulated memories, such as those from his two visits to Magnetic Island. In 28 Intensely Dutch—Image, Abstraction and the Word, Post-war and Beyond, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, June 5–August 23, 2009. A catalogue with the same title accompanied the exhibition. 29 Kolenberg is also the author of the essay “Shaping the chaos – Theo Kuijpers in Australia,” in Theo Kuijpers & Australia. Memory and Experience (self-published by the artist, 2019), 109–23. 30 Selections from the 2009–2014 Australia series were shown at various places, including the De Pont Museum in Tilburg in 2014; see https://depont.nl/tentoonst ellingen/archief/theo-kuijpers-18-januari-16-maart-2014, accessed 15 June 2020. 31 Rick Vercauteren, “In memory’s sieve: Australia,” in Theo Kuijpers & Australia. Memory and Experience (2019), 7–25, at 19.

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addition to several layers of paint and cut pieces of painted paper, Kuijpers also applied branches and textile-wrapped curved twigs to the carriers of textile and tent cloth, giving the canvases relief. In doing so, he revisited the assemblages he made in the 1970s, as well as the collage-like works he made in the 1980s, after returning from the United States. In works such as Outback (2010; Fig. 4) and Morning Light (2011; Fig. 5), painted and constructed forms in relief—which clearly refer to the form language of Australian indigenous people—constitute landscapes that, as far as the composition is concerned, resemble his Moroccan work, but in terms of color and shape are undeniably connected to Australia. In 2019, Kuijpers remarked with reference to the Australia-inspired works he has been making since 2009: Earlier work always plays a role. That love for matter. Tapiès immediately struck me and I have always kept that. Those collage-like things from the past come back again. Those Australia works with branches and triangles. And so the circle is complete. But that befits my age.

In 2018, Kuijpers stayed in Australia for three months, the fourth journey the artist made “down under.”32 During this trip, Kuijpers created new work in a studio in the Crow’s Nest neighborhood of Sydney that the painter Daniel Pata placed at his disposal. As a stimulus to begin working in Sydney as quickly as possible, Kuijpers brought along some small paintings he had made in the Netherlands on a Dutch supermarket chain’s linen shopping bags, which he had cut open. He then made a series of works on shopping bags from Woolworths (also cut open), on house painters’ dust sheets, and also created larger paintings on linen. The smaller works, with titles such as Harbor City (2018) and Crow’s Nest (2018), capture the urban landscape of the environment in which Kuijpers worked and lived during the six weeks he spent in Sydney. They are painted in bright colors, with red, blue, and yellow dominating. The impressions that Kuijpers gained in this urban environment are also captured in a series of small watercolors. Kuijpers again visited Magnetic Island, off the coast of Townsville in Queensland. On Magnetic Island, he worked with his back to the landscape of water-branching mangroves and bushes, in the open air. 32 See https://www.theokuijpers.nl/work/australia-1979-tot-heden for an overview of Kuijpers’s 2018 Australian works.

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Fig. 4 Theo Kuijpers, Outback, 2010, mixed media on canvas, 170 × 200 cm, Museum van Bommel van Dam, Venlo, the Netherlands. Photo © Peter Cox

He incorporated his impressions into a series of calligraphic and transparent watercolors with titles such as Tropics II and Mangrove. When he returned from his trip to Magnetic Island, Kuijpers also made several larger paintings on linen in the Crow’s Nest studio. These are clearly inspired by the landscape of Magnetic Island. However, in terms of both their titles and the form language, works such as Outback (yellow sky) (2018) and Outback (midday) (2018) show that he drew inspiration from the memory of his visit to the Outback on his third Australian trip in 2009. The series of around forty works that Kuijpers made in Australia in 2018 remained in Sydney, where a selection of works from the series was shown in the 2020 exhibition Theo Kuijpers–New Australian Work at King Street Gallery on William. For health reasons, the artist had to

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Fig. 5 Theo Kuijpers, Morning Light , 2011, mixed media on canvas, 165 × 200 cm. Photo © Peter Cox

abandon the plan to visit Australia for the fifth time to attend the opening. The publication Theo Kuijpers & Australia. Memory and Experience (2019) presents a representative selection of all of Kuijpers’s Australian work.33 When asked about the motivation behind the selection of earlier and more recent work, Kuijpers answered that it was “purely intuitive, just like my work itself.”

33 The book was presented on September 14, 2019 at Gallery O-68 in Velp, the

Netherlands, in conjunction with a short-term exhibition organized for the occasion. The book contains an overview of the more than sixty solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions, both in the Netherlands and abroad, in which Theo Kuijpers took part. See also https://www.theokuijpers.nl/work/australia-1979-tot-heden for an overview of Kuijpers’s Australian work.

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Conclusion Psychologist Douwe Draaisma compares the functioning of our autobiographical memory to the city as palimpsest: the living city is built atop the remains of older cities just as our past life serves as a support and hidden foundation of our present life.34 The metaphor of the palimpsest, the phenomenon of old text shining through the new text of a reused piece of parchment, has bearing on the artworks of Theo Kuijpers, layered as they are, both in terms of matter and content. Kuijpers’s Moroccan and Australian work of the 2000s and 2010s is founded on reminiscences of earlier experiences and earlier work. From memory, he has intuitively drawn from his earlier impressions of Berber symbols and those of indigenous communities of Australia, as well as from the forms and colors of urban and natural landscapes he saw in Morocco and Australia. Over the years, this formal language was increasingly integrated into his own expressive signature style, which is deeply entwined with the artist’s recurring accumulation of memories. Morocco and Australia became for Kuijpers what Draaisma has identified as the “narrative threads” in the autobiographical memory of older people—patterns or themes that can only be recognized as such much later in life.35

References Assmann, Aleida. 2000. Individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis—Formen, Funktionen und Medien. In Das Gedächtnis der Kunst. Geschichte und Erinnerung in der Kunst der Gegenwart, ed. by Kurt Wettengl, 21–28. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Draaisma, Douwe. 2004. Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older. How Memory Shapes Our Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Howard Hodgkin/Painting India. London: Lund Humphries Ltd. and The Hepworth Wakefield, 2017. Intensely Dutch—Image, Abstraction and the Word, Post-war and Beyond. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2009.

34 Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up, Chapter 14 (unpaginated e-book). 35 Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up, Chapter 13 (unpaginated e-book).

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Kolenberg, Hendrik. 2019. Shaping the Chaos—Theo Kuijpers in Australia. In Theo Kuijpers & Australia. Memory and Experience (self-published by the artist, 2019), 109–123. Parker, Peter. 2017. How India Inspired Howard Hodgkin. Apollo. The International Art Magazine, vol. 186, September 2017. Schacter, Daniel L. 1996. Searching for Memory. The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Sontag, Susan. 2002. Where the Stress Falls. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. Theo Kuijpers – Terugblik op 20 jaar kunstenaarschap. ’s Hertogenbosch: Noordbrabants Museum, 1988. Theo Kuijpers / Herinnering Marokko [Memory Morocco]. Heusden aan de Maas: Galerie Tegenbosch, 1995. Theo Kuijpers & Australia. Memory and Experience (self-published by the artist, 2019). Vercauteren, Rick. 1988. Theo Kuijpers, de evolutie van een markante Brabantse kunstenaar. In Theo Kuijpers – Terugblik op 20 jaar kunstenaarschap, 11–53. ’s Hertogenbosch: Noordbrabants Museum. Weijers, Wouter. 2012. Verbeelde herinnering: Essays over naoorlogse beeldende kunst en het culturele geheugen. PhD diss., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Revision, Politics, and Ideology

The Fall and Rise of Exile’s Return: Malcolm Cowley and the Cultural Politics of Revision Hans Bak

In 1934, the American literary critic and historian Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) published Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas. Presenting himself as a representative voice of the “lost generation” of American writers, Cowley sought to explain the role they had played in the emergence of modern national American literature from cross-fertilization with European modernism. Written under the auspices of his Depressioninspired conversion to radical politics, his book repudiated the aesthetic, non-political poetics that had marked his generation in the 1920s, and ended with a stirring call to radical engagement. The book was controversial, and met with a strongly mixed reception that was devastating for the author. In 1951, the book was reissued in a revised edition, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. Cowley claimed he had left the core of his account unaltered, but the 1951 revision amounted to a different book: it placed the intellectual and artistic peregrinations of Cowley and his generation in a depoliticized light and emphasized the timeless

H. Bak (B) Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_5

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mythical underpinnings of its “odyssey.” This time, the book was hailed as a contemporary classic of American literary history and established Cowley’s reputation as a major critic. In this chapter, I examine the nature, extent, and effects of Cowley’s 1951 revisions of his 1934 narrative. I suggest that Cowley’s revisions need to be understood in the context of a combination of personal, literary, cultural, and political changes that occurred between 1934 and 1951—in Cowley’s life and literary career, in the canonical status of the “lost generation,” and in the Zeitgeist marking American culture, society, and politics.

Exile ’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934) The original Exile’s Return emerged from the political-economic crisis of the early 1930s. In the wake of the 1929 Crash, Cowley, newly appointed literary editor of The New Republic, became convinced that the bankruptcy of the American economy was but a reflection of the bankruptcy of traditional American values. Persuaded that a once sacred individualism needed to give way to a more effective and just social and economic organization, he was drawn into the orbit of Communism, translated his beliefs into public action, and became one of the magazine’s more controversially radical voices. A fervent fellow traveler, he often wrote with a distinctly leftist slant, but never joined the Communist Party. The economic and political crisis was paralleled by a complex personal crisis. In early 1931, Cowley separated from his first wife Peggy Baird. In April 1932, sailing home from Mexico with Peggy, his good friend, the poet Hart Crane, leaped off the stern of the ship. To Cowley, Crane’s tragic suicide seemed symbolic of the end of an era misdirected in its social and aesthetic aims, and, with the break-up of his marriage, reinforced Cowley’s impulse toward “cleaning out the breakage of the past” that inspired the writing of Exile’s Return (1980, 51). Composed intermittently between 1931 and 1934, the book was a journey of self-rediscovery, a critical revisiting of the past, and a search for a new framework of understanding, of himself, and of the writer’s place in history and society.1 Participation in the revolutionary movement, Cowley became convinced, 1 For an account of the book’s genesis, see Hans Bak, Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years. 1993. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 465–66.

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could give the artist “a perspective on himself—an idea that his own experiences are not something accidental and unique, but are part of a vast pattern” (1967, 90). In terms of genre, Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934) was a hybrid mix of personal and generational autobiography, literary and cultural history, Marx-inspired class analysis, and conversion narrative, the story of his and his generation’s “ideological odyssey from bohemianism to Marxism” (Hazlett 1983, 179). Cast within the framework of Cowley’s newly adopted Marxian beliefs, it revaluated, and repudiated, the social and aesthetic beliefs by which he and his coevals had steered their literary aspirations since World War I. It traced the formative years of the postwar “young generation,” from being “uprooted […] from its attachment to any region or tradition” in high school and university; through volunteer service in World War I; through a stint as struggling Greenwich Village artists-on-the-make; to disaffiliation from an America in the grip of puritanism, philistinism and prohibition; to the embrace of “salvation by exile,” expatriation to Europe, the negotiation with international modernism, the rediscovery of America’s aesthetic potential, and the coming home to America on the eve of the Depression. With his revaluation came the recognition, as Cowley wrote in 1934, that “[t]heir real exile was from society itself, from any society with purposes they could share, toward which they could honestly contribute and from which they could draw new strength” (1934, 11, 84, 223). The early 1930s were “a time of penance for past sins and declarations of future rectitude” (Pells 1973, 153). Read in this context, Exile’s Return was symptomatic: it confessed to past failure and testified to a newfound creed. Though its nuanced insights and literary eloquence raised it above a crude ideological attack, Cowley’s radical perspective was evident in his class-conscious analysis of the social and economic dimensions of his experiences as a middle-class pupil at a Pittsburgh public high school, and his realization that in Harvard’s “disembodied” world of higher learning, with its “mansions in the air,” he and his coevals had been groomed in the “salesrooms and fitting rooms of culture” for elitist positions in bourgeois society (1934, 31, 36). The “long process of deracination,” which made them “homeless citizens not so much of the world as of international capitalism” had been intensified during their experience as “gentlemen volunteers” in World War I, during their “long furlough” in Greenwich Village, and their years of “exile” in Europe (ibid., 29, 46, 57).

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The core of Cowley’s critique of the past was his repudiation of the symbolist aesthetics of modern literature and what to him were its ethical, social, and political implications. Though he granted that the “religion of art” had left an impressive heritage, his analysis of the lives of its “saints”—Eliot, Joyce, Proust, Valéry—and of what he took to be symbolism’s extreme manifestation in Dada showed that, by 1934, Cowley had become convinced that in what he considered the movement’s dissociation of art from life, its pursuit of a “pure and purposeless art,” and its hermetic subjectivism, the religion of art had proved “essentially antihuman” and “anti-social” (ibid., 11, 123–140, 150, 146–67, 151). As an ideology and an ethics, symbolism was the equivalent of bankrupt individualism in the economic and political sphere. As Cowley concluded: “The system that had made these dead things possible, […] the capitalist system itself was sick, was convulsively dying, and everybody, even the artist, had to decide whether or not he wanted to save it” (ibid., 287–88). Cowley flaunted his radical credentials overtly in three sections that stood as testimony to his newfound creed: “The Other Side of the Tracks,” “Political Interlude,” and “Epilogue: Yesterday and Tomorrow.”2 “The Other Side of the Tracks” was intended as a proletarian foil to Cowley’s own education at Peabody High (Pittsburgh) and Harvard, where an understanding of culture as “the outgrowth of a situation,” grounded in and organically emerging from life, was supplanted by the notion of culture as “a veneer, a badge of class distinction […] a uniform that made us citizens of a privileged world” (1934, 35). By contrast, he argued, boys from Pittsburgh’s socialist working class, growing up on a diet of Marx, the class struggle, strikes, and labor unions, experienced “no break […] between education and life, even though the life was full of hardships” (ibid., 41). They had a “proletarian culture” of their own, organically connected to the life from which it arose, dynamic and unjustly forgotten (ibid., 42). “Political Interlude” charted the change in political opinions of young writers between 1924 and the early 1930s, from a non-political individualistic rebellion against a society from which they felt alienated but whose premises they still supported, to becoming committed to systemic change:

2 For a fuller examination, see Hazlett, “Conversion, Revisionism, and Revision,” 183– 86, and his later My Generation: Collective Autobiography and Identity Politics. 1998. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 14–36.

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Once a writer had recognized that society contained hostile classes, that the result of their conflict was uncertain and would affect his own fortunes, then he ceased to believe that political action was silly: he became ‘politicized.’ If he also decided that the class whose interests lay closest to his own was the working class, that the home he was seeking lay with them, he became a radical. (Ibid., 241)

As a conversion narrative, Exile’s Return (1934) was written from a teleological perspective and pointed to a clear political moral. Cowley’s epilogue radiated his belief that involvement in the class struggle could put an end to the enfeebling isolation of the American writer and that “the desperate feeling of solitude and uniqueness” could be redeemed by “a sense of comradeship and participation in a historical process vastly bigger than the individual” (ibid., 302). Cowley ended his book with a ringing peroration that he later remembered as “the high summit” of his “revolutionary enthusiasm” at the time (1980, 224). Cowley awaited the critics’ verdict of his first prose book with trepidation: he had audaciously cast himself as representative of his generation and laid claim to its literary importance, he had publicly confessed his belief in revolutionary change, and he had stuck his neck out by “speaking candidly” of his past. “Any judgment of the book,” he later recalled, “would be a judgment of my private self” (1980, 224, 228). The book was controversial, and led to debates in newspaper columns and editorials, where, as Cowley retrospectively noted, critical verdicts were “tossed about like lethal bouquets, each hiding a hand grenade” (ibid., 229). In his column “Books of the Times,” John Chamberlain called it “the most-argued-about book of the Spring”—“everyone seems to be spilling critical blood” over it.3 He went on to observe that critics under 35 mostly praised it, while older critics attacked it: “Is this an example of the age war in criticism?” he wondered. The week before, in an extensive review, Chamberlain had thought the book an important “key to American literature of the post-war period” and a pertinent “record of a progression through influences, a story of the successive shedding of

3 John Chamberlain. 1934. Books of the Times: Who Paid the Bills? New York Times, June 7. Unpaginated clipping, Malcolm Cowley Papers, Newberry Library Chicago (hereafter MCP).

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skins.”4 He respected Cowley’s choice of the workers’ side, but warned against “harshness, narrowness and fanaticism” (ibid.). The book’s reception reflected both a clash of generations and the political quarrels on the left, in particular those between Stalinists and Trotskyites. In the Hound & Horn, the young R.P. Blackmur considered Exile’s Return side by side with T.S. Eliot’s After Strange Gods and found it easier to follow Cowley’s path of literary salvation: rather than to an outmoded orthodox Christianity, Cowley looked to “an honest recognition of the class-struggle and all its implication in economic and political life” (Blackmur 1934, 172). The young (27) Bernard Smith, writing for the Communist New Masses , sympathetically read Cowley’s revisionist reading of the past through Marxist spectacles, but adjured the “lost generation” to stop playing, and acknowledge its historical responsibility as envisioned by Marxist ideology (1934, 38–40). International Literature, a Soviet monthly published by the International Association of Revolutionary Writers, evinced that, in Stalinist Russia, Cowley was one of the “approved” foreign authors. His book depicted his generation’s “process of adaptation to capitalist America, its hardships and humiliating compromises” with “exceptional freshness and thoughtfulness.” If he had become “a target for rude and stupid attacks” by American Trotskyites, the Soviet magazine took their “hatred” as “an honor to Malcolm Cowley.”5 One American Trotskyite who attacked Exile’s Return was James T. Farrell, who faulted “the fundamental inconsistency” of Cowley’s thinking, which he believed violated the premises of revolutionary materialist criticism (1936, 171). Cowley’s “thesis” of the bankruptcy of the subjectivist “religion of art” was “empty of content” because he first dismissed, then subterraneously smuggled back in, the “familiar old spook” of Idealistic Philosophy (ibid., 159, 166). Cowley, Farrell charged, was a subjectivist critic posing under revolutionary false colors (ibid., 173–74). Most older reviewers, writing for large-circulation publications, were equally merciless, if for different reasons. J. Donald Adams was “frankly 4 John Chamberlain, Books of the Times. 1934. New York Times, May 28. Unpaginated clipping, MCP. 5 Anon., The Anti-Fascist Writers of the World: Malcolm Cowley. Undated and unpaginated clipping, in Russian, from the Soviet edition of International Literature. MCP. Translated by Andrei Nekrasov.

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sceptical” of Cowley’s claims for his generation’s importance, and dismissed the “phantom” vision of salvation through radical commitment: “Come out of your dream, Mr. Cowley” (1934, 2). Lewis Gannett found himself “snorting like a greybeard” as he read of Cowley’s “little group of serious thinking drunkards,” who seemed merely “to have repeated the alcoholic Bohemian vagaries of every generation of young artists, to have lost their roots in Europe, to have lived off parents […] and to have emerged into a form of literary Communism as rootless and as romantic as the Dadaism of their Paris days” (Gannett 1934).6 Wasn’t it time for Cowley to grow up? “It is all so sweet and amiable and unreal and inexcusably young for a man of Malcolm Cowley’s age.”7 Equally trivializing, Ludwig Lewisohn in The Nation suggested that Cowley and his cohort suffered from “arrested emotional development” and “lost” itself in “perpetual adolescence” (1934, 23–24). William Soskin in the New York American declared boldly: “Nobody wrote great books in the past decade. Mr. Hemingway is growing dim. So are his colleagues” (1934).8 In the Saturday Review of Literature, finally, Bernard DeVoto took Cowley’s thesis of the “lostness” of his generation as “an easy exercise for Freudians” (1934, 315). It displayed symptoms of “emasculation,” “the castration complex,” “infantile dread,” “fear of impotence,” “fugue,” and “vocational narcism”—literature, DeVoto concluded, was “an exhibitionist phenomenon” (ibid., 316). The book, he charged, unjustly neglected many writers who “show[ed] none of the stigmata of the lost generation” and was the “apologia” of “a coterie, a fraternity, a literary clique” (ibid, 317, 316, 323). Cowley’s judgment was “flagrantly subjective” and his history “extremely dubious” (ibid., 317, 321).9 Exile’s Return elicited a mix of eulogy and dismissal, but Cowley was dismayed by what he felt was the overwhelmingly hostile response. In late May 1934, he ironically reflected to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “I’m getting a swell run-around from the critics. I wish some of them had read [the 6 Lewis Gannett. 1934. Books and Things. New York Herald-Tribune, May 28. Unpaginated clipping, MCP. 7 Ibid. 8 William Soskin. 1934. Reading & Writing: An Autobiography of the “Lost Genera-

tion.” New York American, May 29. Unpaginated clipping, MCP. 9 Criticism like DeVoto’s, of Cowley’s narrowing of the canon of modern American literature to the writers of “his” Lost Generation, would resurface more emphatically, and abrasively, from the 1970s on.

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book]” (Bak 2014, 198). On June 1, writing to his friend, the poet (and Marxist sympathizer) John Brooks Wheelwright, he was more emphatic: “What a ton of brickbats my book has been receiving this week. […] The book was assigned almost entirely to White Guard critics and editors, including our old friend Bernard DeVoto, who wrote the worst review of all. I’m beginning to think that the class war really extends to the literary business” (qtd. in Bak 2014, 198–99). As Cowley recalled many decades later, at the time he was “shattered” by the “fusillade of hostile reviews,” and felt “exposed and helpless, a criminal chained and taunted in the marketplace” (1980, 230). Cowley had ambitious plans for sequel projects, but discouragement at the book’s reception, enhanced by its disappointing sales (a total sale in the first year of 983 copies grew to a mere 1118 by 1940, when the book went out of print),10 deprived him of the incentive to undertake another book for almost two decades.

Exile ’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1951) The dramatic reception of Exile’s Return in 1934 did not dampen Cowley’s revolutionary ardor. In 1935, he assumed a leading role in the League of American Writers, became a fervent supporter of the Popular Front, and in 1938, donated the manuscript of Exile’s Return to the League to help raise money for Civil War-ravaged Spain (Bak 2014, 200, 202). He was embroiled in the factional quarrels between Stalinists and Trotskyites, and often personally fanned the flames of political discord (ibid., 200). Despite private doubts about the Communists, he allowed himself to be courted by the Party and controversially shied away from unambiguous criticism of the Moscow Trials, as a result of which he found himself publicly arraigned in the Trotskyite press as a Stalinist stooge (ibid., 201–02). By the late 1930s, he found himself in a position of duplicity. The Russo-German Pact of August 1939 initiated a period of dismayed self-questioning, but it took the Fall of France in June 1940 for Cowley to publicly break with radicalism, resign from the League of American Writers, and commit himself firmly to American interventionism in the war (ibid., 236–38).

10 Cowley gives the sales figure for the first year in Dream of the Golden Mountains, 231. Sales figures for Exile’s Return (1934): royalty statements W.W. Norton in MCP.

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In late 1941, ousted from his New Republic editorship, Cowley accepted a position with the Office of Facts and Figures in Washington, D.C. But he fell under FBI surveillance, was denounced on the floor of Congress for his past Communist affiliations, and in early 1942, was forced to resign, an early victim of the anti-communist purge. Suffering a profound sense of defeat, and, as he later acknowledged, feeling “politically amputated, emasculated,” he renounced public politics and, “with a sense of release and opportunity,” returned to literature (Cowley 1978, 158). Looking back on the late 1930s with merciless self-criticism, he confessed that the “various sins of silence, self-protectiveness, inadequacy, and something close to moral cowardice” left him with “a sense of guilt” (ibid., 139). From 1942 on, Cowley concertedly set out to advance his reputation as a chronicler of “his” Lost Generation. By 1949, the latter’s literary stature had risen: Cowley’s earlier contention, controversial in 1934, that the generation had helped to diminish American literary inferiority toward Europe and fostered international recognition of American literature was now widely accepted.11 Cowley himself had been instrumental in effecting this changed perception. In the mid-1940s, he spoke up recurrently “in defense of the 1920s” and helped to secure a place of canonical centrality for what he regarded as the major writers of his generation (Cowley 1944b). His 1944 Viking Portable Hemingway influentially reinterpreted Hemingway as not a naturalist but a “haunted and nocturnal” symbolic writer (Cowley 1944a, 190). In 1949, with Hemingway’s reluctant cooperation, Cowley wrote the first biographical “Portrait of Mr. Papa,” for mass magazine Life. His influential Portable Faulkner (1946) lifted Faulkner from oblivion and paved the way for his 1949 Nobel Prize. After Fitzgerald’s early death in 1940, Cowley helped to launch the “Fitzgerald Revival” by editing an influential collection of his stories, and—controversially—preparing a revised edition of Tender Is the Night (1951). Conjointly, such critical interventions helped to put these Lost 11 For appraisals of the Lost Generation in the 1940s, see Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942), Maxwell Geismar, Writers in Crisis: The American Novel, 1925–1940 (1947) and Robert E. Spiller, ed., Literary History of the United States (1948). For the generation’s international reputation, see Cowley, “American Books Abroad,” in: Literary History of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 1374–91. A negative assessment of the writers of the 1920s appeared in Bernard DeVoto’s The Literary Fallacy (1944), the subject of Cowley’s “In Defense of the 1920s” mentioned below.

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Generation writers at the center of modern American literature, as it was then understood, boosting Cowley’s own critical stature in the process. Recognized as an authoritative literary critic and cultural historian, Cowley was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1949. But his endeavors on behalf of the making of American literature took place in a reactionary political climate of Cold War threat and anti-communist witch-hunting, and his fellow-traveling past kept coming back like a boomerang: in June and December 1949, he was summoned to testify in the widely publicized Alger Hiss trials, and in the winter of that year, he became the subject of public political controversy when his appointment to guest lecturer at the University of Washington in Seattle was fought by local reactionary forces. Though his radicalism had subsided, he held strong (mostly left liberal) political opinions, and felt effectively gagged, forced as he was to operate in a conservative public climate where criticism of American society or politics was easily branded as disloyal, “un-American,” or, worse, “Communist.” Uncomfortable at remaining silent, yet hesitant to speak out unequivocally, he moved with caution and diplomacy, but could not always avoid ambiguity (Bak 2014, 396–463).12 Cowley’s decision to revise and reissue Exile’s Return occurred in this complex and multifaceted context of a public revival of interest in the literary 1920s and a Cold War cultural mood of anti-Communism, in which his former radical politics easily raised public suspicion as well as private guilt and unease, and threatened to put his reputation at risk. Indeed, the reissue of Exile’s Return in revised form in 1951 is best understood against the complex background of the turbulent changes— in politics, the literary situation, and Cowley’s professional career—that took place between the mid-1930s and early 1950s. Culturally, the moment was propitious; politically, Cowley was eager to put his Marxist past to rest; economically, the prospects of commercial success were bright. In November 1949, Cowley, recently appointed part-time literary advisor to Viking Press, outlined to Viking editor Marshall Best why he thought reissuing a revised Exile’s Return would be a feasible publisher’s undertaking:

12 Cf. Bak, Long Voyage, 396–463 passim.

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Long out of print, the book has a sort of subterranean public in the universities and outside of them. I keep running into people who recite stories out of it and get angry at me for having changed some of my ideas since I wrote it. There is a steady unsatisfied demand for it and several book dealers have told me that it sells at a premium when and if a copy can be found; they also say that it is one of the hardest titles to find. I have seen college-library copies rebound, mended and remended with Scotch tape and practically fingered to pieces. With this backlog of demand—and with enough new material to get it reviewed as a new book—I think the publishers of a new edition could count on a good advance sale for it and a continuing sale for many years. (Bak 2014, 426–27)

Cowley’s intention to revise the book so as to give it “permanent form,” as he wrote to Best, was induced by more than just literary or commercial considerations. A guilty unease over a now discarded political vision also played its part, perhaps more than was suggested in the book’s new prologue, in which Cowley explained the nature and extent of his revisions, and downplayed the importance and pervasiveness of the original book’s political dimension: I hate to write and love to revise, and the first edition of Exile’s Return gave me plenty of scope for practicing my favorite trade of revisionist. […] The whole conclusion of the book was out of scale with the beginning; and there were also the political opinions that intruded into the narrative. I had to explain to myself, before explaining to the reader, that the book was written in the trough of the depression, when there seemed to be an economic or political explanation for everything that happened to human beings. […] There were not many [political opinions] in the book I wrote in 1934, but there were too many for a narrative that dealt with the 1920s, when writers were trying to be unconcerned with politics, and I have omitted most of them from the new edition. […] I have left most of the narrative untouched, out of a feeling that myself in 1934 had as good a right to be heard as myself today; where he went wrong I would rather have others correct him. (1951, 11–12)

Cowley’s justification that in revising he had “left most of the narrative untouched” seems disingenuous. In effect, as John D. Hazlett was early in noticing, Cowley almost completely eliminated his past radical self’s “ideological pilgrimage” (1983, 179). Cowley’s most drastic step in politically sanitizing his earlier narrative was to remove its most overtly political sections: “The Other Side of the

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Tracks,” the bulk of “Political Interlude,” and the original “Epilogue: Yesterday and Tomorrow.” Cowley also made minor textual changes throughout, going through the original as if with a lice comb to excise or tone down the Marxist framework. Thus, “homeless citizens, not so much of the world as of international capitalism” became “homeless citizens of the world” (1934, 29; 1951, 27). A more revealing example of his practice as a “revisionist” was Cowley’s adaptation of the concluding sentence to the book’s original prologue, which had resonated with the revolutionary fervor of a conversion narrative: “So, the story of the Lost Generation and its return from exile is something else besides: it is partly the story of a whole social class, how it became aware of itself and how it went marching toward the end of an era” (1934, 13; emphasis added). In the revised version, the elements of class analysis, radical awakening, and collectively marching toward the end of an era of capitalism and the beginning of a revolutionary future were subsumed in a non-political historical frame with resonance for only “some” of the generation: “So, the story of the lost generation and its return from exile would be something else besides; it would help to suggest the story of the American educated classes, what some of them thought about in the boom days and how they reached the end of an era” (1951, 10; emphasis added). As these examples show, Cowley’s revisions served to make his book more palatable to readers in the conformist 1950s, who might have found echoes of a “radical” perspective abrasive, offensive, or alienating. In addition, such echoes might have been professionally damaging to a critic who for his symbolic and economic capital, to use Bourdieu’s terms, remained dependent on a commercially viable relationship with his audience. In truth, Cowley’s revisions went far beyond the elimination of a Marxist perspective: they were also to a significant degree aimed at making Exile’s Return a fuller and richer and, from the perspective of 1951, a better, more definitive, and dispassionate work of cultural and literary history focused more sharply on the 1920s. Throughout the book, Cowley added literary, historical, and autobiographical detail, inserted poetic touches of color and character, and tightened the narrative, to enrich the historical narrative, reinforce his personal participation, and make his story more novel-like. Thus, “Readings from the Lives of the Saints” was expanded with a memoirist portrait of Ezra Pound; “Case Record” with the anecdotal account of a Dadaist book-burning prank at his home in Giverny; and “No Escape” (retitled “The Age of Islands”) with a long memoir of Hart Crane, “The Roaring Boy,” to compensate

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for his earlier inability to write about a close friend’s suicide (instead, he had vicariously—and controversially—written about Harry Crosby, an account expanded into a separate chapter, “Echoes of a Suicide,” in the revised edition). The analysis of writers’ political opinions in the 1920s (the bulk of “Political Interlude”) was replaced by “Charlestown Prison,” an account of the impact of the Sacco and Vanzetti case on writers in the 1920s. The case had featured only minimally in the 1934 edition, perhaps because Cowley had not been personally involved in the protests at the time, but had mostly observed the cause célèbre from a distance.13 In the 1951 revised edition, rather than highlighting the radicalizing effect of the case on artists and intellectuals, his account of it was now prefaced by an analysis (partly revised from “Political Interlude”) of the feelings of alienation, “discomfort,” and “oppression” by a hypocritical consumerist society, which made writers “strangers in their own land” (1951, 214, 217). Whereas Exile’s Return (1934) had been written in reaction to the 1920s, its revised version emerged from a postwar cultural climate hostile to the politics of the 1930s. Cowley’s new epilogue no longer depicted his literary coevals as potential revolutionaries fighting a defunct capitalism, but as rebel writers—“exiles in spirit” (1951, 290)—alienated from the consumerist ethos of a standardized society. No longer an indispensable end stage in a teleological narrative, their “homecoming” during the Depression was now stripped of any impulse toward revolutionary change, their “return” from exile becoming an uneasy accommodation to American society: “They had acquired friends and enemies and purposes in the midst of society, and thus, wherever they lived in America, they had found a home” (1951, 291). Most writers of “his” lost generation, he now advanced, had “played only a secondary part” in the movement of writers to the left: “Most of the intellectuals who joined the Communist Party during the 1930s […] belonged to a somewhat younger group; they were the brilliant college graduates of the years after 1925” (1951, 294). He

13 Besides the composition of a poem, “For St. Batholomew’s Day,” which was published in The Nation of August 22, 1928, there is little public sign that the Sacco and Vanzetti case had had any significantly radicalizing impact on Cowley. See Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years, 413–15, for a more extensive discussion.

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himself, he admitted in a footnote, had been “more involved in the political movements of the time than were many of the others” (1951, 295).14 As such, the reader could only conclude, he had been less representative of his age group in the 1930s than in the previous decade, when his coevals, as he now noted, had been “rebels rather than revolutionists” and “refractory to social or political discipline.” Their rebelliousness was “individual and unpolitical” and “essentially conservative”: their “social ideal […] was the more self-dependent, less organized America they had known in their boyhoods” (Cowley 1951, 295–96). Had James T. Farrell been right, after all, when, in 1936, he had noted the “subjectivist” and essentially conservative nature underlying Cowley’s “revolutionary” colors (1936, 173–74)? Cowley’s revisionist decision to recast Exile’s Return as a book about the 1920s relieved him of the precarious, as yet too painful obligation to face his radical past in public print. Writing in a cultural and political climate hostile to Communism, in his new epilogue, Cowley uneasily walked a tightrope. On the one hand, he pleaded for an honest and straightforward account of the 1930s: “The 1930s are becoming the great unknown era in American history. The public wants to forget them, the politicians distort them and they have not yet been re-created by novelists or historians; yet we cannot form a true picture of the present while trying to abolish the past” (1951, 293). On the other hand, he spoke about the 1930s in metaphorical terms that, for all their eloquence and irony, tended to obscure and obfuscate, for instance: the “1930s were the Pentecostal years when it seemed that everyone had the gift of tongues and used it to prophesy the millennium” (1951, 293). His succinct account of the decade—how the radical “crusade” of the 1930s started with highminded idealism, “generosity and public spirit,” but was “corrupted by individual pride and thirst for power,” and ended in a feeling of betrayal by Stalin in the Nazi–Soviet Pact—was clothed in generalized terms that concealed, even as they obliquely and evasively hinted at, his personal complicity: “Some day the story will be told in full, but it should wait for

14 The fact that he acknowledged his embroilment in radical politics in a mere footnote, in which he rather disingenuously referred to himself as “a junior editor of a liberal weekly,” bears further testimony to Cowley’s Cold War impulse to downplay the full extent of his radical commitment in the 1930s.

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calmer years; as long as the hurt bitterness remains it cannot be a true story” (1951, 294).15 Cowley’s 1951 revisions transformed Exile’s Return from a teleological conversion “narrative of ideas” into a historical chronicle of a “literary odyssey of the 1920s,” the book’s new subtitle. The new epilogue, retitled “New Year’s Eve,” explicitly reviewed the generational experience of exile and return as the recapitulation of a timeless, universal pattern found in myths and fairy tales: the generation had been re-enacting “the old pattern of alienation and reintegration, or departure and return, that is repeated in scores of European myths and continually re-embodied in life. A generation of American writers went out into the world like the children in Grimm’s fairy tales who ran away from a cruel stepmother. They wandered for years in search of treasure and then came back like the grown children to dig for it at home” (1951, 289). But now, rather than finding a “cure” from the “disease” of alienation and isolation in conversion to the revolutionary cause, as he had put it in 1934, they found a new reality of social compromise and reintegration into American society: in Cowley’s 1951 words, instead of a treasure “in their father’s garden,” they found “work to do as best they could and families to support and educate” (1951, 289). Coming home, they “once more” became “part of the common life” (ibid.). Cowley’s mythic revisioning of his generation’s experience must be understood in the context of the postwar literary intellectual climate, which saw a shift from a political-ideological reading of reality to a metaphysical or even religious one: whereas many writers in the 1930s had located wrongs in a faulty organization of society and sought remedies through political action, in the postwar years they tended to focus on what Faulkner in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech termed “the problems

15 In 1951, writing in the midst of the political tensions of Cold War anti-Communism, with widespread “bitterness” about the recent past still lingering, Cowley felt unable to present a straightforward and open account of his embroilment in the political quarrels of the1930s, let alone face up in public print to his own share in fanning the embers of political discord. It was not until the mid-1960s that he began to publicize parts of his memoirs of the 1930s. The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s, his account of the first half of the decade, was not published until 1980; at his death in 1989 his account of the later 1930s, the real years of “hurt bitterness,” remained unfinished.

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of the human heart in conflict with itself,” a theme both contemporary, and often echoed in timeless myths and fables (Faulkner 1954, 3).16 Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1948) emphasized the writer’s “moral” imagination as an alternative to the political criteria dominant in the 1930s (Bender 1990, 324–47). Melville and James were rediscovered, and Faulkner reappraised, as myth-making authors with contemporary resonance for the postwar years. Joseph Campbell’s bestselling The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) traced permanent mythical patterns in countless cultural narratives.17 Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) was a foundational text for the Myth-and-Symbol School in American Studies, part of a broader effort to understand “the American character” through its defining myths and folklore, an impulse that also informed the Literary History of the United States (1948), to which Cowley contributed.18 In the late 1940s, Cowley explored the significance of “myths” in American literature as a leitmotif for a projected history of American literature. Writing to Kenneth Burke in late 1948, he revealed how in his thinking the 1934 Marxian frame of understanding had been replaced by the depoliticized concept of myth: “Myths,” he wrote to Burke, “provide a pattern for our emotions; they are variously shaped windows through which we look at the world. […] A central concern of American writers from the very beginning has been to create or give final form to myths that would make this new country our 16 This shift in emphasis from the 1930s into the 1950s was noted by many critics, including Cowley in The Literary Situation (New York: Viking Press, 1954), in particular Chapter 3, “The ‘New’ Fiction: A Tidy Room in Bedlam.” Later, critics who elaborated on Cowley’s analysis included Malcolm Bradbury, who, in The Modern American Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), likewise noted a shift away from political and social concerns to “a growing preoccupation with form and moral and metaphysical complexity” (130). In his analysis of the 1950s in Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977), Morris Dickstein also noted an “increasing disengagement from politics” in 1950s fiction in favor of “minute personal concerns and abstract mythic ones,” problems of “private moral will” and “metaphysical necessity” (15). 17 Marc Dolan has suggested that the generational journey outlined in Exile’s Return echoes the quest motif of Campbell’s prototypical mythical hero. Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-reading of ‘The Lost Generation.” 1996. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 100–01. 18 For the Myth—and Symbol School, which became dominant in American Studies from the late 1940s through the 1960s, see Henry Nash Smith’s defining 1957 essay, Can American Studies Develop a Method? American Quarterly 9, 197–208; and Bruce Kuklick’s critique in his 1972 seminal Myth and Symbol in American Studies. American Quarterly 24, 435–50.

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home” (Bak 2014, 390–91).19 Such insights also informed the revision of Exile’s Return: they inspired Cowley’s view of the Lost Generation as having “lived” an ancient mythical pattern in modern dress. Part of the ongoing appeal of the revised Exile’s Return comes from its reading of the historical experience of a specific generation in the light of a timeless fable. Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s was as lyrically acclaimed as its original version had been abusively reviled. The critical somersault was partly due to Cowley’s revisions, but the altered zeitgeist worked much in its favor: by 1951, the left-wing politics of the 1930s were in disrepute, and the 1920s had morphed from the “mad” into the “Golden” Twenties, coated with a patina of glamor, myth, and legend. With the dismantling of its Marxist scaffolding, the book basked in the decade’s burnishing glow and its literary strengths shone more brightly: the pertinence of Cowley’s critical-historical analysis of his generation’s “odyssey” was enhanced by the literary eloquence, anecdotal richness, self-irony, and wistful nostalgia with which he viewed his and his coevals’ younger selves.20 The book received wide notice, and critics were almost unanimously euphoric. Cowley was now unambiguously acknowledged as a critic of eminence and authority, and a vast majority judged his analysis to be compelling and convincing. For the young John W. Aldridge, Cowley was not only “one of our best known and most distinguished critics of modern literature,” but “a man who seemed to have been always at the center of literary legend” (1951).21 Weighing Cowley’s revisions, most reviewers lauded him for eliminating his Depression-inspired politics. Lewis Gannett expressed relief that Cowley’s “naïve discovery of the class war” had given way to “mature perspectives” (1951)22 and Arthur Mizener agreed that “Cowley has revised out of it what was merely

19 Cowley’s thoughts on myths in American literature were elaborated in his “Three Cycles of Myth in American Writing,” A Many-Windowed House. 1970. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 229–43. 20 For a discussion of the legacy and enduring appeal of Exile’s Return, see Bak, Formative Years, 470–72. 21 John W. Aldridge. 1934. Books: The Exile’s Return. New York World-Telegram, July 17. Unpaginated clipping, MCP. 22 Lewis Gannett. 1951. Books and Things. New York Herald-Tribune, June 12. Unpaginated clipping, MCP.

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temporary or ill-considered” (1951, 5). F.W. Dupee—one-time editor of Partisan Review and The New Masses —judged that Cowley had “toned down the revolutionary optimism of the original” without “seriously falsifying the past” (1951, 480). Maxwell Geismar, sensitive to “the amusing ironies of our period,” noted that, like many, Cowley was forced to “unsay” with “even more diligence” in the 1950s what he had proclaimed with “moral fervor” and “utmost conviction” in the 1930s.23 In all, acclaim for the revised Exile’s Return was overwhelming. Lloyd Morris spoke for many when he called it “the most vivacious of all accounts of literary life during the fabulous 1920s” (1951, 1)—Cowley had “painted the classic picture,” one “not likely to be surpassed in authenticity, eloquence or beauty” (ibid., 10). On the book’s cover, Van Wyck Brooks pronounced Exile’s Return “the irreplaceable account of the most dramatic episode in American literary history.”24 The 1951 revision successfully eclipsed the original 1934. For at least three decades, it would set the dominant image of the Lost Generation and confirm its place of centrality in the American literary canon. Over time, critical appreciations of Exile’s Return fluctuated with literary and political fashions, as critics ranging from Neo-Marxists to Neo-Conservatives, from feminists to cultural revisionists, from autobiographical theorists to scholars of multiculturalism and transnationalism, challenged Cowley’s generationalist paradigm, exposed the limits of his “canon,” or re-appreciated the book’s original version for “virtually invent[ing] a new autobiographical genre” (Hazlett 1998, 14).25 Even its most fervent detractors, however, have granted its influence and authority as, in Robert Spiller’s phrase, a “milestone” of American literary history (1977, 39). In John W. Aldridge’s 1980 appreciation, it was “the book 23 Maxwell Geismar. 1951. Cowley and the Lost Generation. New York Post, June 9. Unpaginated clipping. 24 Blurb on dustjacket of Exile’s Return. 1951. New York: Viking. 25 For critical or revisionist interpretations of Exile’s Return, see Hazlett (1983), 179–

88; Kenneth S. Lynn, The Air-line to Seattle (1984); Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank – Paris 1900–1940 (1986); Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995); Marc Dolan, Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-reading of ‘The Lost Generation’ (1996); Craig Monk, Writing the Lost Generation: Expatriate Autobiography and American Modernism (2008); Susan Winnett, Writing Back: American Expatriates’ Narratives of Return (2012); and Nancy F. Cott, “Revisiting the Transatlantic 1920s: Vincent Sheean vs Malcolm Cowley.” 2013. American Historical Review (February), 46– 75.

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that did more than any other to popularize [the legend of the lost generation] even as it was among the first to validate the great importance of the literature which made the legend possible” (1980, 481). Thirty years after the appearance of the revised edition, Exile’s Return was enshrined in a de-luxe edition by the Limited Editions Club, with a preface by Leon Edel that granted the book “considerable authority” at the end of the century (1981, xi). In 1992 Morris Dickstein felt Exile’s Return “remains our most revealing portrait of the Lost Generation.” “As cultural history,” he granted, the book had “enduring value,” Cowley’s “finely wrought pattern of exile and return” being “axiomatic for any understanding of the cultural history between the wars” (130–32). In 1994, Donald W. Faulkner rated Exile’s Return not just “a document on American literature,” but “a part of American literature itself” (xvi). The enduring appeal of the revised edition was born out by its sales, which must have met Viking’s stoutest expectations. Whereas its original version had sold an embarrassing 983 copies for the first year, the new edition sold close to 3200 (3186) copies in its first three months. One of the first titles in Viking’s new paperback reprint series Compass books, Exile’s Return profited from the new postwar college market sales: between 1956 and 1985, it sold some 75,000 paperback copies, averaging about 2500 per year over a thirty-year period.26 Cowley’s early prediction, in a letter of November 16, 1949, to Viking’s Marshall Best, that a new revised edition “would go on selling for a long time” thus proved uncannily correct (Bak 2014, 427).27 In 1994, Exile’s Return, sixty years after its first appearance, was re-issued as a “Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic”—an appendix reprinted the book’s original 1934 Epilogue.28 It remains in print to this day.

26 Royalty statements indicate a run of 5749 copies sold by the end of 1956, to 81,369 by mid-1985. Malcolm Cowley Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago. 27 Cowley to Marshall A. Best [Viking Press], November 16, 1949, The Long Voyage,

427. 28 In A Note on the Text, editor Donald W. Faulkner correctly identified the omissions, additions and reshufflings of particular sections between the 1934 and 1951 editions of Exile’s Return, but his concluding statement—“In the main, Cowley’s (1951) revisions were those of writer honing his prose to sharpness” (xxxviii)—underestimated the full extent of the cultural politics of Cowley’s revisions.

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References Adams, J. Donald. 1934. The Lost Generation’s Sad Story: Malcolm Cowley, in “Exile’s Return,” Chronicles the Ideas and Other Influences That Set the Expatriates Adrift. The New York Times Book Review, May 27. Aldridge, John W. 1951. Books: The Exile’s Return. New York World-Telegram, July 17. ———. 1980. Malcolm Cowley at Eighty. Michigan Quarterly Review 18, Summer: 481–90. Bak, Hans. 1993. Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years. Athens & London: University of Georgia Press. Bak, Hans, ed. 2014. The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915– 1987 . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bender, Thomas. 1990. Lionel Trilling and American Culture. American Quarterly 42 (2), June: 324–47. Blackmur, R.P. 1934. The Dangers of Authorship. Hound & Horn 7: 719– 26. Rpt in Blackmur, R.P. 1935. The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation. New York: Arrow Editions: 172–183. Chamberlain, John. 1934. Books of the Times: Who Paid the Bills? New York Times, June 7. ———. 1934. Books of the Times. New York Times, May 28. Cowley, Malcolm. 1934. Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 1944a. Hemingway at Midnight. New Republic, August 14, 190–95. ———. 1944b. In Defense of the 1920s. New Republic, April 24, 564–65. ———. 1951. Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. New York: Viking Press. ———. 1967. Think Back on Us: A Contemporary Chronicle of the 1930s. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1978. --And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade: Chapters of Literary History, 1918–1978. New York: Viking Press. ———. 1980. The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s. New York: Viking Press. DeVoto, Bernard. 1934. Exiles from Reality. Saturday Review of Literature X (46), June 2: 721–22. Rpt in DeVoto, Bernard. 1936. Forays and Rebuttals. Boston: Little, Brown: 315–23. Dickstein, Morris. 1992. Double Agent: The Critic and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Dupee, F.W. 1951. Still a Good Book. The American Scholar XX, Autumn: 480, 482. Edel, Leon. 1981. Introduction to Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. New York: The Limited Editions Club: xi–xx. Farrell, James T. 1936. A Note on Literary Criticism. New York: Vanguard Press.

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Faulkner, Donald W. 1994. Introduction to Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. New York: Penguin Books: ix–xxix. Faulkner, William. 1954. Nobel Prize Address. In The Faulkner Reader, 3–4. New York: Random House. Gannett, Lewis. 1934. Books and Things. New York Herald-Tribune, May 28. ———. 1951. Books and Things. New York Herald-Tribune, June 12. Geismar, Maxwell. 1951. Cowley and the Lost Generation. New York Post, June 9. Hazlett, John D. 1983. Conversion, Revisionism, and Revision in Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return. South Atlantic Quarterly 82 (2), Spring: 179–188. ———. 1998. My Generation: Collective Autobiography and Identity Politics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lewisohn, Ludwig. 1934. Perpetual Adolescence. The Nation 139, July 4: 23– 24. Mizener, Arthur. 1951. Home Was the Stranger. New York Times Book Review, June 10. Morris, Lloyd. 1951. Most Vivacious Account of Literary Life in the Twenties. New York Herald-Tribune Book Review, July 8, 1, 10. Pells, Richard H. 1973. Radical Visions and Social Dreams. New York: Harper & Row. Smith, Bernard. 1934. The Lost Generation. New Masses, July 3: 38–40. Soskin, William. 1934. Reading & Writing: An Autobiography of the ‘Lost Generation’. New York American, May 29. Spiller, Robert E. 1977. Milestones in American Literary History. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Revision, Change, and the Native American Oral Tradition in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine(s) Mathilde Roza

There is no reason to think of publication as a final process. I think of it as a temporary storage. (Erdrich, qtd in Chavkin & Chavkin 1994, 232) Raised in the English language, I partake of a mongrel feast. (Erdrich 2000)

Louise Erdrich (b. 1954) is one of North America’s most significant and most acclaimed North American authors writing today. A highly prolific writer, she has authored numerous novels and short stories, as well as several memoirs, children’s books, and collections of poetry. Erdrich is of mixed cultural heritage—German-American on her father’s side, and French-Chippewa on her mother’s—and is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Band of Indians in North Dakota, a community that includes people of Chippewa, Cree, and mixed descent,

M. Roza (B) Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_6

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including Canadian Métis.1 The success of her debut novel Love Medicine (1984) brought immediate fame as well as critical success to its author. The novel won several literary prizes, among them the National Books Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best novel, and was the starting shot of a highly successful literary career.2 In 1993, Erdrich decided to publish a revised and expanded version of her first novel and revised it for a second time in 2009. According to critic Allen Chavkin, who wrote on the revisions in Love Medicine before the third edition appeared, “there have been very few instances in which a major modern novel has been so substantially revised and expanded as Love Medicine was” (Chavkin 2000, 211). Two other instances of North American Indigenous rewriting that are instructive to mention here are Gerald Vizenor’s extensive revision of his 1978 debut novel Darkness in Saint Louis: Bearheart (1978) as Bearheart: The Heirship Chonicles (1999), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s revision of her multimodal work Storyteller (1981) in 2012. In addition, Louise Erdrich herself very substantially revised another novel from her oeuvre: The Antelope Wife (1998). She revised and expanded the work in 2012 and republished it as Antelope Woman in 2016. This chapter first provides a brief background to contemporary Native American literature and Louise Erdrich in particular, and will continue to analyze the revisions that Erdrich made in Love Medicine against the background of the development of Native American writing; the allegiance to the oral tradition as a vehicle for cultural preservation; and finally, the motivations that the author herself has provided for the revisions of both Love Medicine and The Antelope Wife, and that are part of her overall writing practice. I conclude that her revisionary practices can be situated in the complex interplay between the purposes and rich possibilities of oral storytelling on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations of literary (re)writing on the other. 1 Chippewa is the legal term for an Indigenous group also known as Ojibwe (alternatively spelled Ojibway or Objibwa). It is one of several Indigenous groups that belongs to the Anishinaabeg. The preferred practice to refer to individual people of Indigenous descent is by using their Native nation affiliation. For more general usage, Native American, Native or Indigenous are all used interchangeably, a practice that I follow in this chapter. 2 Erdrich’s popularity has led to recurring anxieties over the effects of her work on existing views of Native American life and culture. For a critical discussion of these questions, see Stirrup (2010, Chapter 1).

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The Native American Renaissance Soon after Love Medicine appeared in 1984, Erdrich was hailed as part of what Kenneth Lincoln, in 1983, had termed “The Native American Renaissance.” This flowering of literary works by Native American authors, after decades of relatively low production, followed upon the publication of Kiowa author Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968). The authors associated with this renaissance—e.g., Joy Harjo (Muscogee), Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma), James Welch (Blackfeet and A’aninin), Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo)—share a number of recurring issues and themes. These include the impact of settler colonialism and control of Indigenous life, culture, and identity; the definition of personal and tribal identity; cultural hybridity; intercultural frictions and connections; living between worlds; (forced) assimilation; relocation; home and belonging; reservation life; loss of (home)lands; and the importance of land and landscapes (see for instance Lincoln 1983; Wiget 2012; Velie and Lee 2013). With the benefit of hindsight, as Velie and Lee also argue in their 2013 follow-up on Lincoln’s groundbreaking text, it is now clear that the literary renaissance had been “only one aspect” of much larger cultural, economic, social, and political developments, including a resurgence of Native pride and increased prosperity (2013, 4). Indeed, the search for political and cultural empowerment—whether through revisionist rewriting of dominant histories from an Indigenous perspective; providing a corrective to misrepresentations and stereotypes; or addressing injustices and asserting voice and selfhood—firmly extends to the realm of Native American literature as well. It is in this sense that Indigenous writers, in the words of author Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo), can be thought of as “word warriors” (1986, 51). Erdrich’s work “draws heavily from her Native inheritance” in terms of her “characters, geographical setting, themes, imagery, plots, and stories” (Madsen 2011, 2). Most of her fictional work is set on and near a fictional reservation situated on the border between what is now Canada and the United States, and she has populated that fictional world with characters that, with only a few exceptions, are fully or partially of Indigenous descent. Her thematic emphases, similar to the themes mentioned above, gave her work an aura of cultural mission from the start. As she explained in the mid-1980s: “Contemporary Native American writers have … a task quite different from that of other writers […]. In the light of enormous

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loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe” (1985, 1). In terms of literary form and style, the works produced by renaissance writers are characterized by a dual allegiance to Euro-American formal literary elements as well as Native American oral narrative techniques. Throughout the past and present history of settler colonialism, the oral tradition has faced, and continues to face, many challenges and disruptions. Its continuation in Native American written literature is of great importance as a way to ensure cultural survival (QuehenbergerDobbs 1996; Sergi 1992)—or rather, in the words of intellectual Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), survivance.3 Because Native American literary styles occupy “in-between” spaces, practices of revision and rewriting require a different approach from those used to analyze Western literature. In Western traditions, where the author’s role—despite the growing realization of its plurality and instability—is often associated with a position of singular authority, the question of rewriting can lead to debates over which version is the most authoritative, definitive, or even “real” one. Oral narratives, by contrast, are performative and accretive by nature. They are no “static record of an authority’s singular recounting,” but a “collective enterprise” instead (Hanson 2009, n.p.). Although their accuracy is essential and guarded by elders and/or the community, they have no fixed form and are capable of “adapting to the flow of the present while never relinquishing [their] connection to the past” (Allen 1986, 45). Oral stories change and grow depending on the narrator, their delivery of the tale—involving such facets as variation in gestures, or voice manipulation—the occasion, performance conditions, and audience.4 In addition, they “often take on their meaning through repeated retellings over a series of sittings” (Schultz 1991, 83). Oral literature’s essential aspects of fluidity, adaptability, and repetition clash with the published work’s single, definitive “performance,” although readers may of course

3 First launched by Vizenor in his book Manifest Manners (1993), this neologism sought to improve upon the bleak image of bare survival by teaming it up with perseverance, endurance or resistance; in order to live and thrive, the violence of settler colonial hegemonic systems and representations must be overcome and cultural sovereignty be restored. 4 For an extensive discussion of Native American oral literatures, see Wiget (2012, 3–18).

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choose to revisit and re-experience the written book as often as they like. In Native American literature, this coexistence of literary traditions and systems of knowledge transfer is paralleled by the extensive negotiations that take place in these works between Western and Indigenous epistemologies and social, cultural, and political values.

Love Medicine (1984): From “Revised and Expanded” (1993) to “Newly Revised” (2009) Any discussion of Erdrich’s revisions of her first novel in 1993 and 2009, and the significance of storytelling therein, much first take note of the deep and extensive interrelatedness of her works. In her novels, Erdrich— much like William Faulkner—has created a multilayered fictional world and complex geographical landscape. Her continuously evolving world is constructed through recurring geographical settings and events, and especially through the voices of a large and interconnected cast of characters shaped by their sense of place and (tribal) history, their relations to each other, and to American society at large. Indeed, Erdrich’s first eight novels are habitually grouped together as the “Love Medicine Series,” comprising Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986),5 Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), Tales of Burning Love (1997), The Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse (2001), Four Souls (2004), and The Painted Drum (2005).6 Erdrich’s particular writing practice, in the words of David Stirrup, “constructs community”:

5 In the back matter to the 2009 edition of Love Medicine, Erdrich provided an “Author’s Note.” In it, she sums up the books that she feels belong to the Love Medicine series but excludes The Beet Queen from the list. Since she gets the chronology wrong, this exclusion may be an error: “Since writing Love Medicine, I have understood that I am writing one long book in which the main chapters are also books titled Tracks, Four Souls, The Bingo Palace, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and The Painted Drum. … If you read on in the other books, you will find that the people in Love Medicine live out destinies invisible to me as I wrote this first book. … That they keep returning, insistent and surprising, is a strange gift. Indeed, they have not finished with me yet” (Erdrich 2009a, 6). 6 In scholarly criticism, the cluster of the first four novels is often treated as a tetratology (see, for instance, Stirrup 2010). A second series that has been identified in Erdrich’s oeuvre is the so-called “Justice Trilogy,” comprising The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016).

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Few other authors have so convincingly, so intricately, constructed a community of characters rooted in a geophysical landscape that is at once stable and unsettling, and that is regularly expanded through repetition and relocation. It constructs community, creates familiarity with scenery, characters, and even events, whereby one text modifies or informs another, enhances our understanding of occurrences, and fleshes out the fuller ‘picture’ of life on the plains that Erdrich is depicting.” (2010, 20)

As in the case of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Erdrich’s fictional world has triggered the publications of maps, histories, chronologies of events, genealogical charts, and studies of internal inconsistencies in timelines and character relations within Erdrich’s canon (see, for instance, Beidler and Barton 2006). When the revised and expanded edition of Love Medicine appeared in 1993, it turned out that Erdrich had added four new chapters to the original fourteen, as well as one new section to an already existing chapter. The first of these new chapters, “The Island,” details the isolated place inhabited by Moses Pillager, a recurring character in Erdrich’s canon who carries several of her themes forward, especially the importance of tradition, including traditional medicine. The chapter narrates the conception of the trickster-like character Gerry by Moses and one of the main characters, Lulu Lamartine, and provides an origin to Lulu’s fiery desire for men (“I want to grind men’s bones to drink in my night’s tea” [1993, 82]). The reader also learns more about Lulu’s youth; she ran away from the government school so often that she was forced to wear “the hot-orange shame dress” and was frequently punished (1994, 68). At the school, she “lived by bells, orders, flat voices, rough English [and] missed the old language in my mother’s mouth” (1994, 68). The second new chapter, “Resurrection,” offers an ending to the life story of June’s widower Gordie Kashpaw that was left off in the first edition with “Crown of Thorns.” It describes how Marie Kashpaw, mourning her husband Nector, confronts her son Gordie’s further and fatal deterioration as he mourns June. Her responses further consolidate the already firmly established view of Marie as one of Erdrich’s capable, strong, and balanced female characters. Similarly, the new section of the chapter “The Beads” emphasizes the importance of female bonding through rituals of care as Lulu Lamartine gives birth to one of her many children, with the crucially important help of two women, Rushes Bear and Fleur Pillager. The other two new chapters—both centered on Lyman, another

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of Lulu’s many sons—considerably augmented this originally minor character’s voice (who had earlier featured only in “The Red Convertible”) and personal history. “The Tomahawk Factory” and “Lyman’s Luck” detail the commercial plans that he develops on the reservation, first “to set into motion a tribal souvenir factory, a facility that would produce fake arrows and plastic bows, dyed-chicken-feather headdresses for children, dress-up stuff” (1993, 303), and then for a bingo hall. For the “newly revised” 2009 edition of Love Medicine, Erdrich held on to the chapters “The Island” and “Resurrection.” The two chapters that were centered on Lyman, however, were both removed from the main body of the novel, with one of the two chapters, “The Tomahawk Factory,” surviving in the book’s back matter. The new section to “The Beads” had undergone several minor revisions, without impacting the essence of the chapter. One of the critical questions that garnered discussion as a result of Love Medicine’s second edition was the question of genre: did Erdrich change a novel when she expanded this work, or did she merely add a few short stories to a collection? The question seemed especially valid because Erdrich had published several materials that were to become part of Love Medicine as short stories, which appeared in such outlets as The Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, The Best Short Stories of 1983, and O. Henry Prize Stories (Purdy 2012, 423). Although the matter has not been settled conclusively for all literary scholars (see for instance Wong 2000), both Erdrich and Erdrich’s late husband Michael Dorris have repeatedly indicated that Love Medicine should be thought of as a novel (see, for instance, Chavkin and Chavkin 1994). Dorris, who was greatly involved with Erdrich’s writing processes and often collaborated with her on her work, described the compositional work that turned the work into a novel as follows: “We went through the entire manuscript. We wove in all the changes and resolutions and threads to tie them [the stories] all together. By the time readers get halfway through the book, it should be clear to them that this is not an unrelated, or even a related, set of short stories, but parts of a larger scheme” (cited in Chavkin 2000, 212). As we saw, this “larger scheme” continued to expand and came to encompass a large number of novels—or possibly, as Erdrich put it, “chapters” (2009a, 6). Given this accretive expansion, along with the authorial flexibility that was revealed by Erdrich’s removal of two chapters from the third edition, it is instructive to approach Erdrich’s canon, with its

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kaleidoscope of multiple narrators and shifting perspectives, in terms of the oral tradition and Erdrich’s own understanding of her (re)writing processes. First, however, a brief critical review of the revisions is in order.

Revision and the Question of Authorial Intention The French literary scholar Didier Coste has pointed out that “rewriting … provides one of the most visible sites of intentionality” (2004, 9). The one existing critical treatment of Erdrich’s first round of revisions, by literary scholar Allan Chavkin, approached the matter through exactly this lens, holding that “the two versions of [Love Medicine] present different versions because of different authorial intentions” (217). Chavkin grounds his analysis in Jack Stillinger’s work Coleridge and Textual Instability (1994) in which the latter argues in favor of what he calls “textual plurality” or “textual instability.” Rather than elevating one version of a text to the status of the final or authoritative product, Stillinger concludes that “a work is constituted by all known versions” (213). Although Chavkin does not mention it, Stillinger developed his views on authorship and authorial intention some years earlier in his Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary Genius (1991), where he focused on the practices of joint or collaborative production—for instance, with a “friend, a spouse, a ghost, an agent, an editor, a translator, a publisher, a censor” (1991, iii)—and also presented the phenomenon of an author revising their work as a “variety” of “multiple authorship” (Stillinger 1991, 72). This premise returns in his 1994 study of Coleridge as a theory of textual pluralism which, as Chavkin puts it, allows for “the uniqueness of aesthetic character and authorial intention of each version” (213). Chavkin next situates Erdrich’s addition of four new chapters in the broader context of the widespread cultural, social, economic, and political change and development that informed the literary renaissance, as well as in the critical reception of her debut novel, and concludes that “the premise of the 1993 edition” was “the need for a Love Medicine that more effectively than the 1984 book conveys its political ideology” (Chavkin 2000, 215). According to Chavkin, the new chapters served to amplify four political concerns, viz. preserve Native American culture and resist assimilation into the dominant white culture; undermine existing stereotypes; promulgate a feminism that is in accord with traditional American Indian culture and has links to activism; and to present a more affirmative and hopeful vision of the future (216). Although these

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concerns can certainly be found in the new materials, they were by no means absent in the 1984 edition: the fact that Nector chokes to death on a bodged version of traditional medicine in “Love Medicine”; Lulu’s refusal to participate in the US census because “every time they counted us they knew the precise number to get rid of” (1984, 221); Marie’s personal triumphs over the Catholic nun Leopolda; Gerry’s miraculous prison-breaks; or Lipsha’s discovery of his ancestry and return to the reservation at the end of the novel are but a few examples of the ways in which political concerns impact the characters’ experiences, thoughts and actions. Also, the question of Erdrich’s treatment of political issues in the new chapters as “more effective,” or the result of a “different authorial intention” is a matter of debate. For one thing, none of the four political concerns mentioned above is straightforward or unambiguous, either in reality or in fiction. Take Lyman’s portrayal of his elderly mother Lulu Lamartine in “The Tomahawk Factory”: Lulu chooses to wear her own style of clothing despite community pressure from the “strong and hotheaded followings that Lulu and Marie [developed] among our local agitating group of hard-eyes, a determined bunch who grew out their hair in braids and ponytails and dressed in ribbon shirts and calico to make their point” as Lyman described them (1993, 303). Here, rather than providing a straight affirmation of the importance of cultural preservation, Erdrich taps into the internal divisions among Indigenous people over the desired degrees of cultural adaptation versus an allegiance to tradition, revealing Lyman’s low opinion of what he calls “back-to-the-buffalo types” (ibid.). Lulu, in Lyman’s assessment, likewise “sniffed down her nose at the length and bagginess of old-time skirts. She led her gang of radicals in black spike heels and tight, low-cut dresses blooming with red flowers” (ibid.). The failure of the Tomahawk Factory—designed to benefit commercially from the much-maligned appropriation of Indigenous culture—is perhaps less multifaceted, but the crisis that destroys it is the escalation of a long-brewing rivalry between Marie and Lulu. Lyman sees it coming (“Marie was a parked truck idling in low gear, and I couldn’t believe my mother wouldn’t have the sense to step aside”), but cannot prevent mayhem from developing. Throughout, the narrative focus lies on the characters’ developments and interrelationships, and this is where Erdrich’s allegiance appears to lie first and foremost. As a result, the less fundamental view of Erdrich’s revisions in the 1993 edition as decisions that “significantly alter emphasis in the novel,” as Stirrup put it (2010, 167) seems most fitting.

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With the addition of “Lyman’s Luck,”—which sketches the titular character’s developing plans to participate in tribal gaming schemes— Erdrich did indeed tap into ongoing political developments in Indigenous America of the 1980s. Tribal gaming—an industry that produced over $39 billion in 2021—emerged in the 1970s “as a means of raising revenue to fund tribal government operations” (National Indian Gaming Commission, n.p.). In that same time period, several state governments were likewise exploring ways to increase state revenues and soon, tribal and state governments were embroiled in the question “whether tribal governments possessed the authority to conduct gaming independently of state regulation” (ibid.). In 1987, the US Supreme Court confirmed that tribal governments could indeed act independently, leading to the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. In the 1993 world of Love Medicine, Erdrich allows Lyman—who had already been introduced in the 1984 edition as a character with “money sense” (1984, 221)— central stage as he develops entrepreneurial plans in 1983, first for a small factory and next a bingo hall. Nevertheless, because tribal gaming is an important part of her fourth novel, The Bingo Palace, which was published one year after the expanded edition of Love Medicine appeared, the addition of the three-page chapter seems less the result of a different political intention, than a way to ensure thematic coherence within the emerging “Love Medicine” series. Her consequent removal of the chapter in 2009, however, invites another approach. I suggest that Erdrich’s revisions are best seen as part of her ongoing negotiation between an allegiance to the spirit, purposes, and possibilities of the oral storytelling tradition, and her commitment to the possibilities (and limitations) of literary writing, remaining faithful to both—a thesis that I will explore below through Erdrich’s own thoughts on (re)writing.

Louise Erdrich, (Re)writing, and the Native American Oral Tradition In an interview about the rationale behind the 1993 expanded edition, and asked whether the 1993 edition had now replaced the original version, Erdrich said, “I have no great plan for the reader here—some may prefer the first version without the additions, others the next. I don’t think of the books as definitive, finished, or correct, and leave them for the reader to experience” (Chavkin and Chavkin 1994, 247). Similarly, Erdrich has voiced the opinion that “a book is a temporary fix

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on the world, a set of words, and words can change” (Erdrich 2016b). Elaborating on what it feels like to finish a novel, Erdrich noted, “I rarely sense completeness” (2016a). Erdrich’s additions and revisions to already-published work, I suggest, are inspired and enabled by the capacity of oral storytelling to sustain flux and resist fixity, to expand and adapt to circumstance, and to change emphasis. The author can add new points of comparison to allow audiences to determine multiperspectival truths, identities, or appropriate ethical, social, or political behavior. In this ongoing creative process, publishing, to Erdrich, is above all a useful vehicle, “a way,” as she herself put it, “of forcing myself to leave off” (2016a). In this way, publication functions as a form of “temporary storage” (Chavkin and Chavkin, 232). Nevertheless, the demands of the written work as a (at least temporarily) fixed work of art, clearly play an essential role in the processes of composition, especially in a novel as structurally complex as Love Medicine. As Dorris outlined, the various chapters cohere and connect in important ways to create a community of characters, events, and stories. Interestingly, it was the formal literary aspect of internal balance and cohesion that motivated Erdrich to compose her third edition: in 2009, she revealed that, at hindsight, the effect of the two chapters on Lyman had taken her by surprise. Upon re-reading the 1994 edition, she said, “I was surprised to find how thoroughly ‘The Tomahawk Factory’ and ‘Lyman’s Luck’ interrupted the flow of the final quarter” (2009a, 5). While the addition of these two chapters was enabled by the greater flexibility of storytelling, their removal was caused by the author’s dedication to the novel as a literary construction with formal demands of its own. Erdrich’s revision of another already-published work, The Antelope Wife (1998), reveals a similar ambiguity of allegiance. Upon revisiting that novel, she was “astonished” that she had abandoned the “powerful characters” of the older generation which feature in the novel’s impressive opening pages (2016b). In The Antelope Wife, Erdrich explored the potential of the traditional indigenous mythological figure of the “Antelope woman” against the background of her deep interest in family and community bonds, and the shaping forces of shared histories and cultural heritage. Upon her realization that she had left ancestral figures dangling, Erdrich so thoroughly revised the book that it became “a completely different novel” (Erdrich 2010, n.p.) and had to be renamed: Antelope Woman. As Erdrich put it: “I gave my Antelope Woman her wise wildness, her unowned heart. That is why she became an Antelope Woman,

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not an Antelope Wife” (Birchbark Books, n.p.). In contrast to the indeterminacy that Erdrich continued to feel about Love Medicine—expressed, for instance, in the statement that she removed “The Tomahawk Factory” but kept it “rather loosely attached” in the book’s back matter (Erdrich 2009a, 5–6)—Antelope Woman struck the author as a definitive outcome: “Revising this book was like repairing an old piece of beadwork. … It has taken me twenty years to understand where I was going when I first started The Antelope Wife. I think this was how the book was supposed to be written all along” (2016b, 11)—a remark that echoed her earlier statement that Antelope Woman “is the true novel that was hidden in the first version” (Erdrich 2010, n.p.). Thus, The Antelope Wife indeed was “in temporary storage,” awaiting a gestation (and reparation) process that ultimately led to what she felt was the “true” work. Another way in which orality and writing team up and influence Erdrich’s literary decisions is the combined role of community-cohering voices and the audience or, the reader. To create a community, as we saw, Erdrich employs multiple narrators, who narrate their life stories, memories, anecdotes, and gossip7 against the background of tribal and US histories and family relations. To capture the interconnected nature of her work, critics often draw comparisons between her writing and the practice of weaving. Writer Louis Owens (Choctaw and Cherokee), for instance, writes that Love Medicine’s “seven narrators weave their many stories into a single cloth that becomes very gradually, a coherent fabric of community—a recovered center” (Owens, in Wong, 55). In like manner, critic John Purdy sees the novel as “a complex woven fabric in which no single character possesses the knowledge necessary to understand all the connections and therefore to accurately interpret all events” (Purdy 2012, 426). Similarly, in The Antelope Wife, Erdrich herself uses the practice of stitching beads into patterns as a constitutive metaphor that we might also apply to her own writing practice: the novel opens with a brief note that describes the work of two mythological twins creating and recreating the narratives of human living: “Ever since the beginning these twins are sewing. One sews with light and one with dark. … They sew with a single sinew thread, in, out, fast and furious, each trying to set one more bead into the pattern than her sister, each trying to upset the balance

7 For Erdrich’s use of gossip as a literary device, see Sands (1985).

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of the world” (1998, 1).8 Although there is, of course, no intention to elevate Erdrich to a supernatural position of “creator” in this same way, the conception of storytelling and narrative as a literally creative process involving multiple voices and requiring constant adaptation and change corresponds to the author’s own understanding of a creative practice that, novel by novel, created her North Dakotan fictional universe. Because of the complex accretive processes that characterize Erdrich’s works, the reader is drawn into an active, participatory role. The novels’ form demands that they continually construct and reconstruct the connections between the characters, decide between versions of events, explore points of comparison in conflicting interpretations, weigh the truthfulness of stories, and keep track of the cumulative effect of the tales as they unfold. This, as John Purdy has written, “reflect[s] qualities of traditional verbal arts in which audience involvement if equally active and mandatory” (Purdy 2012, 427). Simultaneously, from the perspective of Western literature, these “individual perspective-led constructions” of the past and present align with modernist and postmodernist techniques that convey fragmentation, subjectivity, and complexity and “emphasize the true (post)modernism of Erdrich’s art” (Stirrup 2010, 20). Erdrich, we might say, treads ground that the oral tradition and twentieth-century Western literary writing (especially its development towards postmodernism) have in common—a thesis indeed explored in the 1980s by, among others, Brian McHale (1987), Linda Hutcheon (1988), and more recently, by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2016). Writing on the familiarity of postmodernism’s critique of history to Indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing, Smith (Ng¯ati Awa and Ng¯ati Porou, M¯aori) writes: “The idea of contested stories and multiple discussions about the past … is very much a part of the fabric of communities that value oral ways of knowing. These contested accounts are stored within genealogies, within the landscape, within weavings and carvings, even within the personal names that many people carried” (2016, 33, emphases mine). Smith’s identification of genealogies, the landscape, and practices of weaving as containers of multiple truths and versions strongly resonate with Erdrich’s work. As we saw, the metaphors of weaving, sewing, or beading emphasize the view that worlds are constituted by the many 8 In the 2016 edition, the two opening sentences appear as follows: “The niizhoodenhyag [Objiwemowin for ‘twin’] are very old when they decide to sew this world into being. One twin uses light and the other dark” (1).

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stories that different people tell, and shaped by the continuous processes of change, loss, and renewal that occur on the level of both personal and world history. The history of Erdrich’s landscape and the people’s relationship to it, impacted by removal, federal policies of allotment, and loss of homelands, along with Erdrich’s treatment of the complex genealogies of her characters likewise illustrate these processes. They capture the many ironies within genealogies and family relations as her intertwined characters, White, Native and in-between, meet, mingle, procreate, inspire, love, or destroy each other throughout North America’s (settler colonial) history. Erdrich’s work thus captures and contains the multiple processes of constant flux, adaptation, and change that Cally Roy, a main character in the Antelope Wife, describes as a history in which people “are scattered like beads off a necklace and put back together again in new patterns, new strings” (1998, 220). I end this section on a brief reflection on language—an issue likewise entangled in the culturally hybrid nature of Native American writing— that is also part of Erdrich’s revisions. The materials that Erdrich added to Love Medicine (and also The Antelope Wife) contained more Ojibwe words and expressions than had been used in the original version. Erdrich, aided by language revitalization projects that began in the 1970s and 1980s and impressed by the semantic power of Ojibwemowin,9 actively started to learn the language. As she wrote in 2000, the language also started to find its way into her fiction: “Slowly the language has crept into my writing, replacing a word here, a concept there, beginning to carry weight. I’ve thought of course of writing stories in Ojibwe, like a reverse Nabokov. With my Ojibwe at the level of a dreamy 4-year-old child’s, I probably won’t” (n.p.). The relationship that Erdrich and other Native American authors maintain with the English language is fraught and deeply ambiguous. In the words of Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, English is “the enemy’s language,” the language of colonization that devoured Native languages, and “successfully severed the link between the Native language and the production of culture (1997, 24). The double relationship is clearly expressed in Erdrich’s essay “Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart”:

9 Ojibwemowin is the official term of the Ojibwe language, meaning “language of the Ojibwe.”

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This desire to deepen my alternate language [Ojibwemowin] puts me in an odd relationship to my first love, English. It is, after all, the language stuffed into my mother’s ancestors’ mouths. English is the reason she didn’t speak her native language and the reason I can barely limp along in mine. English is an all-devouring language that has moved across North America like the fabulous plagues of locusts that darkened the sky and devoured even the handles of rakes and hoes. Yet the omnivorous nature of a colonial language is a writer’s gift. Raised in the English language, I partake of a mongrel feast. (Erdrich 2000)

Writing in English to express an indigenous worldview is in itself a form of rewriting. Because English is “not a new native language in spite of its predominant use as a vehicle for native literary production,” the struggle is to “reinvent” it (Harjo and Bird, 25). As Bird puts it: “there is hope that in ‘reinventing’ the English language we will turn the process of colonization around, and that our literature will be viewed and read as a process of decolonization” (ibid., emphasis in original). Like written literature, the English language serves crucial needs, but the process of decolonization demands that the language be opened up, formally and semantically, to contain Native epistemologies and ontologies. By opening up her literary work to revisiting and rewriting, and by allowing for the power of storytelling to animate and infuse her writing, Erdrich may be said to contribute to exactly that.

Conclusion Although Erdrich’s work unambiguously belongs to the canon of written literature and is characterized by a devotion to literary expression, the oral storytelling tradition represents a powerful impetus for Erdrich’s particular creative practice. It has inspired Erdrich to explore possibilities of change and renewal, and allows her to focus on the multifaceted and multiperspectival nature of human experience, interrelationships, communities, and human history. Her revisions, as I have argued, are part of the accretive process of storytelling that resembles practices of weaving or beading, revealing patterns, connections, stories, and truths within genealogies, landscapes, and the experiences of her wide multigenerational cast of characters. This creative practice extends across multiple novels and is ongoing. As Erdrich said when asked what she was currently writing: “[I’m writing] the same story I’ve been working on my whole life” (2009b, 4).

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References Allen, Paula Gunn. 1986. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon. Beidler, Peter G., and Gay Barton. 2006. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Revised and Expanded Edition. Columbia; London: University of Missouri Press. Birchbark Books. Antelope Woman. https://birchbarkbooks.com/products/ant elope-woman. Accessed 10 May 2022. Chavkin, Nancy Feyl, and Allan Chavkin. 1994. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Chavkin, Allan. 2000. Vision and revision in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, ed. Wong, 211–219. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coste, Didier. 2004. Rewriting, Literariness, Literary History. LISA e-Journal 2 (5): 8–25. Erdrich, Louise. 1984. Love Medicine. London: Sphere Books Ltd. ———. 1985. Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place. The New York Times, July 28, 1. ———. 1993. Love Medicine. Revised. Hammersmith: Flamingo. ———. 1998. The Antelope Wife. London: Flamingo. ———. 2000. Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart. New York Times on the Web, May 22. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ library/books/052200erdrich-writing.html. Accessed 2 October 2020. ———. 2009a. Author’s Note. In Love Medicine, 5–6. New York and London: Harper Perennial. ———. 2009b. A Discussion with Louise Erdrich. Back Matter to Love Medicine, 4. New York and London: Harper Perennial. ———. 2010. The Art of Fiction No. 208. Interview by Lisa Halliday. The Paris Review. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6055/the-art-of-fictionno-208-louise-erdrich. Accessed 14 May 2022. ———. 2016a. A Note from Louise Erdrich. In Antelope Woman, 1. New York and London: Harper Perennial. ———. 2016b. About the Revision. In Antelope Woman, 11. New York and London: Harper Perennial. Hanson, Erin. 2009. “Oral Traditions.” Indigenous Foundations. http://Indige nousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/oral_traditions. Accessed 2 May 2022. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge. Lincoln, Kenneth. 1983. The Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Madsen, Deborah L, ed. 2011. Louise Erdrich: Tracks, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The Plague of Doves. London and New York: Continuum. McHale. Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Routledge. National Indian Gaming Commission. https://www.nigc.gov/commission/his tory. Accessed 24 April 2023. Purdy, John Lloyd. 2012. (Karen) Louise Erdrich. In Handbook of Native American Literature, ed. Andrew Wiget, 423–430. New York; London: Routledge. Quehenberger-Dobbs, Linda. 1996. Literature, the Imagination and Survival: Louise Erdrich’s ‘Love Medicine’ Tetralogy. AAA: Arbeiten Aus Anglistik Und Amerikanistik 21 (2), 255–265. http://www.jstor.org/stable/430 25506. Sands, Kathleen M. 1985. Love Medicine: Voices and Margins. Studies in American Indian Literature, 9 (1): 12–24. Schultz, Lydia A. 1991. Fragments and Ojibwe Stories: Narrative Strategies in Louise Erdrich’s ‘Love Medicine’. College Literature, 18 (3): 80–95. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/25111920 Sergi, Jennifer. 1992. Storytelling: Tradition and Preservation in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks. World Literature Today 66: 279–282. Stillinger, Jack. 1991. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary Genius. York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2016. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Stirrup, David. 2010. Louise Erdrich. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Velie, Alan R., and A. Robert Lee, eds. 2013. The Native American Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 1993. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Wiget, Andrew, ed. 2012. Handbook of Native American Literature. New York and London: Routledge. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, ed. 2000. Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: Narrative Communities and the Short Story Cycle. In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, ed. Hertha D. Wong, 85–106. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

An Old Man Looking from the Window: Camille Pissarro, the Tuileries Garden Paintings, and Turning Points in His Career Lieske Tibbe

On February 21, 1899, neo-impressionist artists Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce visited their older colleague Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) at his winter residence 204 Rue de Rivoli in Paris. Signac noted in his diary: With Luce at Pissarro’s in his apartment in the Rue de Rivoli from where, still in his window, he paints the Tuileries. On the wall, his former canvases show how inferior are his last ones. Really, in these muddy, dirty, and flat tones, none of the qualities of the beautiful colorist he once was remain. […] One feels quite saddened when, leaving the reality of the window, one returns to the gloomy interpretation by the old artist.1

1 “Avec Luce chez Pissarro dans son appartement de la rue de Rivoli d’où, toujours dans sa fenêtre, il peint les Tuileries. Au mur, d´anciens toiles de lui montrent combien ses dernières sont inférieures. Vraiment, dans ces tons boueux, sales et plats, il n´y a plus aucune des qualités du beau coloriste qu’il était. […] On est tout attristé quand, quittant la réalité de la fenêtre, on retombe dans l’ interprétation lugubre du vieil artiste.” Quoted in Rewald (1953, 47).

L. Tibbe (B) Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_7

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Which of the earlier works were actually hanging in Pissarro’s apartment is hard to trace; probably, among others, the large neo-impressionist canvas he had given to his wife, which was still in her possession when she died in 1928: La Causette (Two Young Peasant Women, 1891/1892; Fig. 1) (Auction Catalogue 1928, No. 25). No wonder Signac disapproved of Pissarro’s recently created works: they were painted in a style that seemed to go back to that of the earlier, realist phase in the painter’s career. The works belong to the series of 11 canvases showing various views from Pissarro’s window that the artist was to offer to his dealer Durand-Ruel three months later (Fig. 2) (Brettell/ Pissarro 1992, 213– 214).2 He had lived in the Rue de Rivoli apartment since January 1899, so these paintings were probably still in progress. Pissarro worked on several canvases simultaneously, switching between them with changes of weather (Pissarro 1992). He was to paint a total of 31 such views. This chapter considers whether Pissarro’s Tuileries Garden paintings, examples of the partial return to his earlier style after his breaking away from neo-impressionism, can be interpreted as related to the artist’s old age—as an instance of what has been called “late style.” It also investigates other factors that may have led to the increased realism of the late works, including political and economic concerns.

Late Style? When the Tuileries works were on show in 1901, reviews were flattering. According to the critics, old age had not corroded Pissarro’s talent (Mellério 1900, 5; Verhaeren 1901, 547). Pissarro himself, however, confessed to Claude Monet on January 7, 1900: “The friends who told you that I had made beautiful canvases of the Tuileries are very indulgent. I’m not quite satisfied. I worked only little. I fight against old

2 Letter Camille Pissarro to Durand-Ruel, May 17, 1899. Pissarro (1991) (V), 26 (no. 1637). See also the list of Pissarro’s Tuileries paintings in Brettell/Pissarro (1992, 213–214). Camille Pissarro’s correspondence is published as: Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, edited by Janine Baily-Herzog: Tome I (1865–1885), Paris: Éditions du Valhermeil, 1980; Tome II (1886–1888), Paris: Éditions du Valhermeil, 1986; Tome III (1891–1894), Paris: Éditions du Valhermeil, 1988; Tome IV (1895–1898), Paris: Éditions du Valhermeil, 1989; Tome V (1899–1903), Saint-Ouen: l’Aumône 1991. Hereafter: Pissarro 1980 (I); Pissarro 1986 (II); Pissarro 1988 (III); Pissarro 1989 (IV); Pissarro 1991 (V).

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Fig. 1 Camille Pissarro, La Causette (Two Young Peasant Women), 1891–1892, oil on canvas, 89.5 × 116.5 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain

age.”3 “I worked only little” should be taken with a grain of salt. Lionello Venturi, one of the first chroniclers of impressionism, described Pissarro’s artistic production between 1890 and his death in 1903 as “abundant” and “feverish” (Venturi 1939, 89, 100). In his last ten years, Pissarro produced 556 oil paintings—including over 300 cityscapes—out of a total of nearly 1500 works.4 Was this productivity an indication of a sense of nearing the end? Some authors regard Pablo Picasso’s extraordinary production of the last twenty 3 “Les amis qui vous ont appris que j’avais fait de belles toiles des Tuileries sont bien indulgents. Je n’en suis pas bien satisfait. J’ai peu travaillé. Je lutte contre la vieillesse.” Quoted in Venturi (1939, 103). 4 Estimate based on Pissarro/Durand-Ruel Snollaerts (2005), and on Pissarro (1992, XXXVII).

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Fig. 2 Camille Pissarro, Le Jardin des Tuileries un Après-midi d’Hiver (The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon), 1899, oil on canvas, 73.3 × 92.4 cm, 1899, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain

years of his life as a fight with old age and death, or Torschlusspanik (Lewinson 2016, 81–88). Others interpret the more than five hundred paintings Claude Monet made of his garden in the last twenty years of his life as conveying a mood of depression and melancholy, the feeling of a nearing death (Larsen 2016). Instead, Pissarro’s later paintings do not show the assumed feelings of crisis and obsession of Picasso’s late works, nor the long-lasting fixation on a single subject of the paintings Monet made in his seventies and eighties. Moreover, Picasso died at 91 and Monet at 86, so their “late period” began at the age of Pissarro’s death. Pissarro himself has hardly referred explicitly to old age and death, at least not in his published letters. One of his few remarks on advanced age can be found in the letter he wrote to his children the day after his 73rd

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birthday (July 10, 1903): “Thank you for remembering to write me for my birthday; I hope and I will do my best to calmly follow my destiny, by toiling as much as possible because this thread that keeps me here is very close to unraveling entirely.”5 He could not foresee that his life was to end only five months later. Pissarro’s late paintings are related to the works of Monet, in as far as both had eye problems, limiting them in their choice of themes. From 1890 onward, Pissarro repeatedly suffered eye inflammations, and his physician advised him to abstain from open-air painting. He gave up his favored theme of rural society and switched to picturing urban views seen from hotel rooms and apartments with large windows. These works could be considered as late repertoire. In the same period, he also made “indoor” still-life paintings and graphic works with a range of themes. In December 1898, Pissarro found the apartment at the Rue de Rivoli as a new working place and winter residence. He described it to his son Lucien: “[ …] an apartment Rue de Rivoli 204, opposite the Tuileries, with a superb view of the garden, the Louvre on the left, in the distance the houses, the quays behind the trees in the garden, on the right the dome of the Invalides, the steeples of Sainte-Clotilde behind the clumps of chestnut trees, it’s very beautiful. I will have a nice series to make.”6 As the weather was grey and rainy once he had settled in,7 he made views of barren trees against a somewhat misty bluish background and slippery footpaths around the Grand Basin with tiny silhouettes of people with umbrellas. Other paintings, of dry winter days, are speckled with strollers enjoying fresh air. Later springtime views show pale sunlight and trees adorned with fresh green (Fig. 3). Yet later works represent fall mornings with brownish brushstrokes around the trees, snowscapes, and fog effects. In the summertime, Pissarro did not use his Rue de Rivoli residence, so 5 “Je vous remercie d’avoir pensé à m’écrire pour mon anniversaire; j’espère et je ferai mon possible de suivre tranquillement ma destinée en bûchant le plus possible car ce fil qui me retient ici-bàs est bien près de se dérouler entièrement.” Camille Pissarro to his children, July 11, 1903. Pissarro 1991 (V), 358 (no. 2038). 6 “[…] un appartement rue de Rivoli 204, en face des Tuileries, avec une vue superbe du jardin, du Louvre à gauche, au fond des maisons, des quais derrière les arbres du jardin, à droite le dôme des Invalides, les clochers de Sainte-Clotilde derrière les massifs de marroniers, c’est très beau. J’aurai une belle série à faire.” Camille to Lucien Pissarro, December 4, 1898. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 522 (no. 1604). 7 As reported by Camille to Lucien Pissarro, January 22, 1899. Pissarro 1991 (V), 10 (no. 1621).

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all paintings created there have the subdued tones conforming to early and late seasons. While these works were highly esteemed in 1901, later reviews were more reserved. Venturi referred to the Parisian paintings of Pissarro’s later years as “uneven” and mostly unsuccessful: their sketchy style made them look slack, and often their perspectives and scale of volumes did not match. According to Venturi, Pissarro himself, in reference to his late works, had said: “When I start a painting, the first thing I try to register is the chord. […] What interests me less and less in my art is the material side of painting (the lines). The big problem to solve is to bring everything, even the smallest details of the picture, in harmony with the whole

Fig. 3 Camille Pissarro, Le Jardin des Tuileries, Matinée de Printemps, Temps Gris (The Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning ), 1899, oil on canvas, 73.3 × 92.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain

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[…].”8 This is reminiscent of some art historical writings in which the existence of a universal “late style” or Spätstil is assumed, based on the assumption that older artists no longer experiment with new solutions, but rather rethink and evaluate their oeuvre, tending to offer a final vision. They go beyond technical problems, is the argument, as well as artistic “rules” they have long overcome—for instance, by adopting a freer brushstroke and carelessness in perspective, which was true for Pissarro—and strive for mere intensity in painting (Smiles 2016, 21–26; Feldman 1992, 2–3). Pissarro, however, did not so much claim to have overcome technical or theoretical problems, but to have freed himself from them: he had taken off the strait-jacket of neo-impressionism.

Looking Back in Anger In Pissarro’s view, the true art of his era was grounded on the sound realist principle of following Nature; a straight line of tradition could be seen from its founders Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste Corot up to the art of his own time.9 His verdict on colleagues who deviated from this line was harsh: time and again he warned his sons Lucien and Georges, who were also artists, against what he saw as the artistic regression and ideological conservatism of Pre-Raphaelitism and Symbolism (Tibbe 2018, 16–20). When this realist line developed into impressionism in the 1870s, Pissarro was a fierce member of the then-rebellious group. However, he was aware of impressionism’s risk of ending up with purely individual, subjective impressions, which would not correspond to his principle of following Nature in an objective way. In some letters, he alluded to that risk: he described the art of, among other artists, Edgar Degas and Monet as “romantic” and “rancid.”10 In the mid-1880s, when the

8 “Lorsque je commence un tableau, la première chose que je cherche à fixer, c’est l’accord. […] Ce qui m’ intéresse de moins en moins dans mon art, c’est le côté matériel de la peinture (les lignes). Le grand problème à résoudre, c’est de ramener tout, même les plus petits details du tableau, à l ‘harmonie de l’ensemble […].” Quoted in Venturi (1939, 101, 103). 9 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, August 19, 1898. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 504 (no. 1574). 10 Letters Camille to Lucien Pissarro, November 30, 1886, and January 8, 1887.

Pissarro 1986 (II), 77 (no. 360), and 98 (no. 374). See also: Nochlin (1986, 5–6, 7–10).

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group of impressionist avant-gardists was splitting up into symbolists, neo-impressionists, and “old-school” impressionists, he declared: “I want to hold fast to my right to follow my way freely.”11 This route was, for the time being, that of neo-impressionism. Theoretically based on scientific optical laws, neo-impressionism took objective rendering of visual reality to the maximum. Such an apparently solid scientific foundation of art appealed to Pissarro. Another incentive to join the neo-impressionists was the political ideology of the group. Originally, Pissarro’s political attitude, shared by most of the realist avant-garde, was democratic and republican. At the start of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, he had wanted to serve in the national army to defend the French Republic, but due to his original Danish nationality was not admitted. He fled to London when German troops invaded his residence at Louveciennes, and did not witness the siege of Paris, the Commune, and the following massacre. Afterwards, his political outlook radicalized gradually, and from 1880 on he was considered an anarchist (Shikes 1986, 36–40). The neo-impressionist group around Georges Seurat that was shaped in 1884–1885—consisting, besides Pissarro, of Paul Signac, Charles Angrand, Maximilien Luce, Henri-Edmond Cross, and art critic Félix Fénéon—was committed to anarchism, or, more correctly, anarcho-communism. The intellectual source of inspiration for anarchocommunism, Pierre Kropotkin, propagated “mutual aid,” which meant voluntary cooperation of independent individuals in small communities and the abolition of political parties, parliaments, central governments, and national states. This was to be realized through intensive propaganda of anarchist ideals: educating and learning were seen as important strategies. Anarcho-communists did not engage in violent actions (“propaganda by deed”), and certainly not in bomb-throwing. Science and technology were welcomed as emancipating tools to make people independent of governments and rulers. There were several connections between anarchist ideals and neoimpressionist theories. The “scientific” foundation of neo-impressionism was thought to be a contribution to the intellectual education of the public. With their contrasting juxtaposition of pure elements of color and light, neo-impressionists strove to achieve a specific harmony, artistically and politically opposed to the aesthetic values of the bourgeoisie. 11 “[…] je tiendrai ferme mon droit de suivre librement ma voie.” Camille to Lucien Pissarro, December 3, 1886. Pissarro 1986 (II), 80 (no. 361).

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Neo-impressionists also strove to balance their lines of composition, with the same intention of offering harmony (Hutton 1994, 17–45; Roslak 1991). These principles also underlie paintings that lack an explicit political message; the belief in local autonomy and cooperation implicitly underlies many of such works. Many neo-impressionist paintings, moreover, show landscapes that carry the marks of human labor: small ports with fishing vessels and lighthouses, meadows, and ploughed fields, and occasionally industrial installations (Hutton 1994, 149–177; Dymond 2000). Pissarro excelled in the genre: his neo-impressionist landscapes are peopled with peasant women sewing and harvesting, picking fruits, going to market, communicating in harmony with each other and with their natural surroundings (Shikes 1986, 41–45; Smith 1995, 134–137). However, in the early 1890s, Pissarro increasingly felt confined by the strictness of the neo-impressionist method; he felt that his artistic autonomy was threatened. Besides, he was confronted with emerging eye problems; the objections of his dealer; the death of the dean of neo-impressionism, Seurat, in 1891 and the subsequent splitting up of the group; and the fact that Fénéon stopped writing (Hutton 1994, 238–44; Jensen 1996, 266–67). Pissarro distanced himself from neoimpressionism explicitly and not without resentment: he found it unfit for catching the admirably floating effects of nature, and for giving a personal signature to his drawings: “[…] you have to believe that I was not made for this art which gives me the equalization of death”; “Yes, my dear friend … of death: I find no harmony there. I can’t find modern life there.”12 He also feared his own sons would fall into the neo-impressionist trap: “I hope you forgot the dots!!! […] It’s a terrible danger,” he wrote to Georges.13 He was tired of the rigid system of color division; even his own works in that manner bored him, he wrote: “I am so sick of it that all my paintings from the time of systematic division […]

12 “… il faut croire que je n’étais pas fait pour cet art qui me donne du nivellement de la mort!”; “Oui, mon cher ami … de la mort: je n’y trouve pas l’harmonie. Je n’y trouve pas la vie moderne.” Camille Pissarro to Henry van de Velde, March 27, 1896. Pissarro (1989 (IV), 179–181) (Nos. 1223 and 1224). 13 “J’espère que vous avez oublié les points!!! […] C’est un terrible danger […].” Camille to Georges Pissarro, August 21, 1895. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 83 (no. 1147).

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disgust me. I’ve been harboring a grudge about it since 1894!!”14 He sometimes looked at his former works as if made by somebody else.15 He also condemned works by his former comrades, using terms such as “absolutely abominable,” “hideous from every point of view,” “terribly orthodox,” “cold and systematic,” or “sick” and “gangrenous.”16 He even denounced works overtly based on anarchist theories, such as Signac’s large decorative painting Au Temps d’Harmonie. L’Age d’Or n’est pas dans le Passé, il est dans l’Avenir (In Times of Harmony. The Age of Gold is not in the Past, it is in the Future, 1895; Fig. 4), a vision of a coming ideal society.17

Anarchism and the Remnants of Royalty In spite of his verdict on Au Temps d’Harmonie, Pissarro remained an anarcho-communist for the rest of his life. He was an avid reader of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Kropotkin, Augustin Hamon, Jean Grave, and anarchist periodicals like Les Temps Nouveaux and l’Humanité Nouvelle.18 Over the years, Grave—who was a personal friend—could count on him and his sons when he needed illustrations for his publications: “I am at your disposal for the drawing that you ask me […].” Grave was welcome to visit him and discuss which size, technique, or subject matter

14 “J’en suis tellement malade que tous mes tableaux de l’époque de divisions systématiques […] me dégoûtent. J’en ressens l’influence jusqu’à 1894!!” Camille to Lucien Pissarro, April 8, 1895. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 56 (no. 1125). 15 Camille Pissarro to Octave Mirbeau, November 18, 1891. Quoted in Pissarro and Venturi (1939, 67). 16 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, November 9, 1895, April 11, 1895, and April 25, 1896. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 12, 61, 195 (Nos. 1100, 1127, 1238). 17 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, April 11, 1895. Pissarro 1989, IV, 61 (no. 1127). On this painting, see also: Hutton (1994, 139–142), Tibbe (2007, 96–102), Tibbe (2018, 27–28). 18 Camille Pissarro to Jean Grave, March 27, 1896. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 181 (no. 1225). See also: letters Camille Pissarro to Augustin Hamon 1893–1903, Archive Hamon, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (Nos. 459, 468, 471).

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Fig. 4 Paul Signac, Au Temps d’Harmonie. L’Age d’Or n’est pas dans le Passé, il est dans l’Avenir (In Times of Harmony. The Age of Gold is not in the Past, it is in the Future), 1896, oil on canvas, 87.6 × 104.1 cm, Hôtel de Ville, Montreuil. Public domain

he preferred. Pissarro also gave financial support to Grave’s anarchist activities.19 Some authors consider Pissarro’s cityscapes in line with his anarchist thinking: in contrast to the social harmony and cooperation in his paintings of rural life witnessed close by, the scenes of modern cities are consciously observed from a distance, the tiny silhouettes of people looking scattered and anonymous, their fugitive stride contrasting with the calm and purposeful activities of the peasant laborers (House 1993, 84–86; Shikes 1986, 51–52). Others stress Pissarro’s modernity and 19 “Je suis à votre disposition pour le dessin que vous me demandez […].” Camille Pissarro to Jean Grave, March 31, 1897; May 4, 1900; December 11, 1901; and June 9, 1901. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 342 (no. 1385) and 1991 (V), 92, 184, 205 (Nos. 1711, 1830, 1864). For Les Temps Nouveaux, see Darbel (1987, 34–35, 14–16).

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freedom of perception (Nochlin 1986, 13–14; Sagner 2006, 114–15; Deitz 2014, 24–25; Corey 2014, 98–104). But what to think specifically of the images of the Tuileries Gardens? The site they show was full of memories of the past, and politically highly charged. The public garden of the Tuileries had been part of the sixteenth-century royal and imperial residence that stretched between the Rue de Rivoli and the Seine. In 1871, during the Commune, it had been set on fire. Afterward, the blackened ruins stood as a symbol of the downfall of monarchies and empires, but also as an embodiment of the trauma of the Commune. For a long time, it remained undecided what to do: to restore or rebuild them, to recycle the parts that were better preserved, or to demolish them entirely. Many proposals and plans were discussed in the city council. In the end, it was decided to remove the remains. In 1882–1883, they were pulled down (Iandoli 2006). The discussions had been strongly political: supporters of the return of the monarchy were pitched against staunch republicans. As such, the resulting Tuileries Gardens might be considered as a republican victory. Thus, paintings of the Tuileries of that era should not be seen as neutral, but as bearers of political views, such as, for instance, the gloomy Les Ruines du palais des Tuileries (Ruins of the Tuileries Palace) (1877) by Ernest Meissonier, former court painter of Napoleon III and artistically and ideologically conservative. On the other hand, there are the paintings Monet made in 1876, five years after the burning of the palace (Fig. 5). Monet painted the Tuileries from the apartment at 198 Rue de Rivoli, so very near to where Pissarro would do so 25 years later. At that time, the ruins of the palace were still standing, but Monet consciously left them out and covered the garden with an abundance of foliage. In that way, Monet, himself a radical republican and anti-monarchist, erased the monarchical past of the terrain, claiming it for the enjoyment of the citizenry (Call 2015, 3, 46, 80–81, 116–117; Corey 2014, 84, 97). Other impressionist painters merely showed the park as a modern urban recreation area (Corey 2014, 83, 88–96). Only Seurat seems to have represented the demolishing process, in his small wooden panel paintings Ruines des Tuileries (Ruins of the Tuileries ) and Les Casseurs de Pierres (Stonebreakers) (the theme of stonebreaking would later figure in anarchist iconography). They are dated c.1882–1883, and in their handling of taches (brush strokes) forerunners of neo-impressionism (Wright 2018, 84–88, 96–98).

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Fig. 5 Claude Monet, Les Tuileries (The Tuileries Gardens ) (study), 1876, oil on canvas, 54 × 73 cm, Musée Marmottan, Paris. Public domain

As a matter of fact, Pissarro did not sympathize with the monarchist past, but for anarcho-communists the Third Republic, as a centralized system of government, was also objectionable. So for Pissarro, the Tuileries Gardens most probably did not embody a republican victory. As mentioned earlier, Pissarro had not witnessed the Commune, but he of course knew what had happened 30 years earlier. However, he only once referred to the Commune, as mistakenly governed by a Comité central instead of, in an anarchist way, by assemblies of free people.20 Ideologically, for Pissarro, the wide open space of the Tuileries Gardens probably represented a realistic, promising prospect instead of a traumatic defeat to think back to.

20 Camille Pissarro to Esther Isaacson, December 22, 1885. Pissarro 1980 (I), 369 (no. 304).

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Money as a Driving Force It was Pissarro’s dealer Paul Durand-Ruel who encouraged him to work in the series format. Monet’s series of haystacks and of the Rouen cathedral of the 1890s, novelties in the artistic field, had been an artistic as well as commercial success when they were exposed at Durand-Ruel’s. Such serial ensembles were more than a sum of the individual works: the glow of the ensemble imbued each separate version with a shine that made it an even more desirable object to buy. Pissarro, aware of the commercial intention of the series concept but also impressed by the artistic appeal it had, appropriated the series format, which was appealing as well because it responded to his need to paint indoors, and enabled him to produce steadily and swiftly (Klein 1998). A strong incentive for Pissarro to free himself from the time-consuming procedure of neo-impressionism must have been his need for money, which urged him to work at a rapid pace. Although in his later years he could demand good prices for his art, he carried a heavy financial burden: the maintenance of his children, who even in their thirties and forties were not able to support themselves with their art. To ensure their artistic careers through training in the decorative arts, Pissarro had sent three of his sons to Great Britain, because of its good reputation in art and design education: Lucien (who specialized in landscape painting, lithography, printmaking, and book-printing), Georges (who worked as a painter and designer of decorative objects), and Félix (active as a painter, etcher, and caricaturist, until he died of consumption in London at an early age in 1897). During his lifetime, Pissarro had to sustain them all, as well as his fourth son, Rodolphe, who started his career as a painter in Paris. Georges, whose first wife died in childbirth in 1892, left Camille Pissarro a grandson, Tommy, who was raised in England by an aunt, to whom the grandfather also provided an allowance. At home, he had two juvenile children to raise. Through the years, Camille paid monthly grants (between Ffr. 300 and Ffr. 400 to his sons and Ffr. 100 to Tommy). His own household he provided with an average monthly budget of Ffr. 1000. Especially Lucien seems not to have had qualms to ask for extra money for particular projects, even not at the time when Camille Pissarro found the Rue de Rivoli apartment and needed money himself to settle in.21 21 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, October 28, 1898; December 4, 14, and 27, 1898. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 514–515, 522–524 (Nos. 1594, 1604, 1605, 1606, 1608).

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Apparently, his sons took this situation for granted; only their mother Julie, herself of modest origins, objected from time to time, arguing that her sons should find a secure job that would make them independent.22 Where did that continuous cash flow come from? In the period central to this chapter, Pissarro’s dealer Durand-Ruel was providing it. Pissarro had known Durand-Ruel since 1871, when he lived in London during the Franco-Prussian War. There, Durand-Ruel had set up a gallery and organized shows of modern French artists—and so he became Pissarro’s main dealer for a considerable part of his career. In 1892, Durand-Ruel proposed that he acquire the monopoly to sell Pissarro’s paintings. In this way, he could prevent price competition and sell his works at a profit. He had already done this successfully with the works of Monet and Renoir. Durand-Ruel held Pissarro’s work in stock, organized one-man shows for him, bought his earlier works at auction sales in order to keep his prices stable, reassured and encouraged the artist in times when the art market was declining, and gave moral support (Durand-Ruel 2014, 167, 187–188). Accordingly, Pissarro could rely on financial support from the Durand-Ruel firm. The dealer functioned, so to speak, as Pissarro’s bank, not an unusual practice in those years. Durand-Ruel had taken charge of several artists in that way: he paid their living expenses and their debts, while they could feel financially safe and keep on working (Durand-Ruel 2014, 175–186). Pissarro’s correspondence includes multiple short letters to his dealer requesting to send money to his sons or to himself.23 This system, however, had its disadvantages. In his Memoirs, DurandRuel presents himself as more than a merchant: as a servant of art and artists, an altruist patron of modernist art. At the same time, he was a shrewd businessman who used his tactics to make the impressionists more and more marketable. For Pissarro, Durand-Ruel’s selling strategy was quite clear, especially once he had discovered that the dealer received high prices for his work (Jensen 1996, 55–56, 101, 127–28). Durand-Ruel also made artistic demands: Pissarro had to sacrifice trees in some paintings because they were supposedly hard to sell.24 In general, Durand-Ruel 22 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, March 6, 1895, and September 2, 1896. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 41–43, 241–243 (Nos. 1117 and 1285). 23 For instance, Camille Pissarro to Paul Durand-Ruel, October 27, 1901. Pissarro 1991 (V), 199 (no. 1856). Similar letters are printed in Venturi (1939, 44–45). 24 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, Paris September 3, 1896. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 244–245 (no. 1287).

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preferred sunlit pictures, a problem when the weather was grey for a long time.25 When the dealer was not pleased with the results, he could refuse to accept them or lower the price.26 Sometimes, Pissarro felt harassed when his debit account at Durand was nearly used up and he had to keep delivering to be able to pay his sons their allowance.27 Over the years, Pissarro grew increasingly discontented with DurandRuel, who in his opinion did not bother enough to sell his works.28 The artist tried to raise the prices of his work, arguing he had made expenses, or because he had the opportunity to make a better deal.29 In the autumn of 1902, he warned his sons that his relationship with Durand-Ruel was in a critical state and that he might be obliged to break with the firm, which would have financial consequences for them.30 In January 1903, when he had the opportunity to sell some recent paintings en bloc elsewhere, for a good price, the collaboration came to an end: “I don’t accept the prices you offer me,” he announced to Durand-Ruel in a very short letter.31 To others, he wrote that he had decided to escape from the grip of Durand, who for his own profit had imposed on the artist an exclusive agency, paying him low prices in return. Pissarro wanted to be free, even at a loss.32 However, while Pissarro could free himself from Durand-Ruel, he was reliant on the art market at large. In the last year of his life, he had to spend a lot of time finding new dealers and collectors. Unfortunately, 25 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, September 28, 1896. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 259–261 (no. 1304). 26 Camille to Esther Pissarro, October 5, 1897. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 379–380 (no. 1442). 27 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, November 4, 1896, and to Georges Pissarro, October 6, 1897. Pissarro 1989 (IV), 292 (no. 1336) and 381 (no. 1443); Camille to Rodolphe Pissarro, July 23, 1899, and October 19, 1901. Pissarro 1991 (V), 34 (no. 1644), and 197 (no. 1853). 28 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, April 2, 1901. Pissarro 1991 (V), 173–174 (no. 1812). 29 Camille Pissarro to Durand-Ruel, November 4, 1901, and November 11, 1903.

Pissarro 1991 (V), 200 (no. 1858), and 314 (no. 1994). 30 Camille to Georges and Lucien Pissarro, November 3, 1902, and November 4, 1902. Pissarro 1991 (V), 278–280 (nos. 1957, 1958). 31 “Je n’accepte pas les prix que vous me faites.” Camille Pissarro to Durand-Ruel, January 18, 1903. Pissarro 1991 (V), 315 (no. 1997). 32 Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro and to Dr. Elias, January 24, 1903, and January 25, 1903. Pissarro 1991 (V), 315–317 (nos. 1998, 1999).

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his expectations were not met: he was forced to lower his prices and, consequently, to reduce the allowances of his sons.33 He only knew one solution: “I absolutely have to produce […].”34 And so, he was very busy during the last months of his life, not in the face of death (he died rather unexpectedly) but to keep himself and his family alive. To what extent did hard-working Pissarro actually have time to look back, and was he even inclined to retrospection? It is clear that Pissarro did not reflect very much on the end of his long, though business-like relationship with Durand-Ruel, at least not in his letters. Artistically, his return to a style that is closer to that of his pre-neo-impressionist works should not so much be seen as an instance of retrospection, but rather as a liberation from the theory of neo-impressionism, which Pissarro had come to consider restricting. Anarcho-communism was moreover ideologically a philosophy of life not very compatible with musing on the past. Accordingly, the loaded history of the Tuileries had given way to real, contemporary life in his painting.

References Auction Catalogue. 1928. Catalogue des oeuvres importantes de Camille Pissarro et de tableaux, pastels, aquarelles, dessins, gouaches par Mary Cassatt and others, composant la collection de Camille Pissarro [auction catalogue]. Paris: Impr. Georges Petit. Brettell, Richard B., and Joachim Pissarro. 1992. The Impressionist and the City. Pissarro’s Series Paintings. Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art; Philadelphia (PA): Philadelphia Museum of Art; London: Royal Academy of Art. Call, Michael J. 2015. Claude Monet, Free Thinker. Radical Republicanism, Darwin’s Science, and the Evolution of Impressionist Aesthetics. New York: Peter Lang. Corey, Laura D. 2014. Picturing the Tuileries in the Nineteenth Century: The Parc, Its Public, and its Politics. In The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden, 83–104. New Haven: Yale University Press.

33 33 Camille to Georges Pissarro, April 14, 1903. Pissarro 1991 (V), 330–331 (no. 2012); and to Lucien Pissarro, March 30, 1903, and May 26, 1903; June 17, 1903; Pissarro 1991 (V), 329–330, 338–339, 344 (nos. 2011, 2018, 2024). 34 “il faut absolument que je produise […].” Camille to Lucien Pissarro, June 9, 1903. Pissarro 1991 (V), 341 (no. 2021).

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Darbel, Aline. 1987. “Les Temps Nouveaux” 1893–1914. Un hebdomadaire anarchiste et la propagande par l’image. (Les Dossiers du Musée d’Orsay, 17.) Paris: Musée d’Orsay. Deitz, Paula. 2014. Time and Timelessness in the Tuileries Garden. In The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden, 17–81. Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art; Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum; Toledo, OH: The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo; New Haven: Yale University Press. Durand-Ruel, Paul. 2014. Memoirs of the First Impressionist Art Dealer (1831– 1922), ed. Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel. Paris: Flammarion. Dymond, Anne. 2000. A Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France. The Art Bulletin LXXXV (2): 353–369. Feldman, Frances. 1992. “I am still learning”: Late Works by Masters. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art. House, John. 1993. Anarchist or Esthete? Pissarro in the City. Art in America 81 (2): 83–88, 141–143. Hutton, John G. 1994. Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground: Art, Science, and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press. Iandoli, Louis J. 2006. The Palace of the Tuileries and its Demolition: 1871– 1883. The French Review 79 (5): 986–1008. Jensen, Robert. 1996. Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Klein, John. 1998. The Dispersal of the Modernist Series. Oxford Art Journal 1 (21): 124–129. Larsen, Bente. 2016. The Infinity of Water Lilies. On Monet’s Late Paintings. In Late Style and Its Discontents, Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, ed Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, 209–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewinson, Jeremy. 2016. In the Antechamber of Death. Picasso’s Later Paintings. In Late Style and Its Discontents. Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, ed Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, 81–101. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mellério, André. 1900. L’Exposition de 1900 et L’Impressionnisme. Paris: H. Floury. Nochlin, Linda. 1986. Camille Pissarro: The Unassuming Eye. In Studies on Camille Pissarro, ed. Christopher Lloyd, 1–14. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pissarro, Camille, 1980. Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, Tome I (1865– 1885), ed. Janine Baily-Herzog. Paris: Éditions du Valhermeil. ———. 1986. Correspondance de Camille Pissarro: Tome II (1886–1888), ed. Janine Bailly-Herzog. Paris: Éditions du Valhermeil. ———. 1988. Correspondance de Camille Pissarro. Tome III (1891–1894), ed. Janine Bailly-Herzog. Paris: Éditions du Valhermeil.

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———. 1989. Correspondance de Camille Pissarro: Tome IV (1895–1898), ed. Janine Bailly-Herzog. Paris: Éditions du Valhermeil. ———. 1991. Correspondance de Camille Pissarro: Tome V (1899–1903), ed. Janine Bailly-Herzog. Saint-Ouen: l’Aumône. Pissarro, Joachim. 1992. Pissarro’s Series. Conception, Realisation and Interpretation. In The Impressionist and the City. Pissarro’s Series Paintings, ed. Richard R. Brettell and Joachim Pissarro. Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art; Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art; London: Royal Academy of Art. Pissarro, Joachim, and Claire Durand-Snollaerts. 2005. Catalogue critique des peintures/Critical Catalogue of Paintings, vol. III. Paris: Skira/Wildenstein Institute. Pissarro, Ludovic Rodo, and Lionello Venturi. 1939. Camille Pissarro. Son art – son oeuvre. Tome I – Textes. Paris: Rosenberg. Rewald, John. 1953. Extraits du Journal inédit de Paul Signac. III, 1898–1899. Gazette des Beaux-Arts 42 (95): 27–57. Roslak, Robyn S. 1991. The Politics of Aesthetic Harmony: Neo-Impressionism, Science, and Anarchism. The Art Bulletin LXXIII (3): 381–390. Sagner, Karin, ed. 2006. Die Erobering der Strasse: Von Monet bis Grosz. Frankfurt: Kunsthalle Schirn. Shikes, Ralph. 1986. Pissarro’s Political Philosophy and his Art. In Studies on Camille Pissarro, ed. Christopher Lloyd, 35–54. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Smiles, Sam. 2016. From Titian to Impressionism. The Genealogy of Late Style. In Late Style and Its Discontents. Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, ed. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, 15–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Paul. 1995. L’Artiste Impressioniste. Paris: Flammarion. Tibbe, Lieske. 2007. Pictorial Harmony and Conceptual Complexity. NeoImpressionist and Symbolist Representations of a New Golden Age. In Visualizing Utopia, ed. Mary G. Kemperink and Willemien H.S. Roenhorst, 91–108. Leuven: Peeters. ———. 2018. Pissarro’s Curtains: A French View on Morris, Ruskin and PreRaphaelitism. The Journal of William Morris Studies XXIII (1): 15-38. Venturi, Lionello. 1939. Les Archives de L’Impressionnisme: Lettres de Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley et autres. Memoires du Durand-Ruel. Documents. Paris/ New York: Durand-Ruel Éditeurs. Verhaeren, Émile. 1901. Revue du Mois—Art moderne. Mercure de France 37, January–March: 547. Wright, Alistair. 2018. On the Origins of Abstraction: Seurat and the Screening of History. Art History 41 (1): 72–103.

Revisiting and Control: The Artist’s Legacy

Retrospective Anticipation: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Efforts at Controlling Her Legacy Sandra Kisters

American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), who lived for almost a century, personally experienced not only the rise of her oeuvre, but also its fall and reappraisal. In the 1970s and 1980s, when her eyesight was failing and painting became difficult, O’Keeffe became increasingly active in safekeeping her legacy, becoming involved in several definitive publications of her art and that of her late husband, supporter, and promoter, Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946). In these decades, she was also attempting to realize both a personal museum in Santa Fe and the opening to the public of her house and studio in Abiquiu, New Mexico. This chapter explores what made O’Keeffe so intent on safeguarding her legacy, and how she looked back on her career and creative output once she reached very old age.

S. Kisters (B) Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_8

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A Woman Artist In the last two decades of her life, O’Keeffe increasingly felt that, if she wanted to get the story straight, she had to tell it herself. In a letter to the president of Viking Press, in which she proposed the publication of what was to become the semi-autobiographical monograph Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), she wrote: “[…] but so many odd things have been written about me that I, myself, am writing about what I have done. It is my intention to use this material in a book with reproductions of the paintings I have written about […] I think I have explained myself more clearly than anyone else could.”1 In O’Keeffe’s early career, both the interpretation of her oeuvre and her public image had been molded by Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz was a renowned photographer and promotor of modern art through his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York, nicknamed 291 for its address on Fifth Avenue. Influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytical writings and ideas about female sexuality expressed in writings by Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, amongst others, Stieglitz felt that there was a connection between the subconscious, creativity, and sexuality of female artists (Pyne 2007: xxxii). As he wrote in his essay Woman in Art (1919): “Woman feels the world differently than Man feels it. […] The Woman receives the World through her Womb. That is the seat of her deepest feeling. Mind comes second.” (Norman 1973: 136–138, 137). The story of Stieglitz’s “discovery” of O’Keeffe’s work in 1915, as that of an important woman artist, still resonates in art history (Kisters 2017: 235–246). After Stieglitz recognized the talents of O’Keeffe—who, at the time, was still working as a drawing teacher—they became friends, lovers, and eventually got married in 1924. He stimulated her to focus on her art alone. In 1917 and 1918, she posed for his camera, sometimes naked, often in front of her own drawings (Fig. 1). The presentation of these photographs in 1921 at the Anderson Galleries in New York had a significant impact on the way her work was interpreted, as did Stieglitz’s promotion of her art. From the early 1920s onward, the interpretation of her art was almost always connected to her sexuality (Buhler Lynes 1989; Chave 1992). Critics saw references to female genitals or

1 Letter from O’Keeffe to Thomas H Guinzburg, President Viking Press, 2 June 1974, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe (AS/GOK) Archive, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.

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Fig. 1 Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918, photograph (gelatin silver print), 23.5 × 15.4 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source Art Resource, NY

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womb-like shapes in mostly abstract artworks (Fig. 2). As Buhler Lynes suggested (Buhler Lynes and Bowman 2001: 60), this led her to turn away from abstraction to an increased naturalism and to withholding work that tended to abstraction from exhibitions. Increasingly, O’Keeffe rejected the label of a woman artist by the way she dressed and posed in front of cameras, and through her responses

Fig. 2 Georgia O’Keeffe, Abstraction White Rose, 1927, oil on canvas, 91.5 × 76 cm, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe (NM). Gift of the Burnett Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (1997.4.2). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe / Art Resource, NY

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in interviews. She never posed naked for Stieglitz again, with one exception, was very reluctant to pose in front of her art for photographers, and in interviews, emphasized that the female label was something others projected upon her work. Above all, she wanted to be seen as an American artist, supposedly free of European influences (although she read publications such as Kandinsky’s The Art of Spiritual Harmony (1914)), eventually posing in 1938 for Life magazine in the American Southwest desert amidst animal bones that had become motifs in her work in the 1930s.2 Interestingly, the self-presentation of O’Keeffe as an American artist corresponded to Stieglitz’s own strategy in presenting his artists—Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, John Marin, Paul Strand, and O’Keeffe—as “Americans” in his subsequent galleries, starting with the exhibition Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans in 1925. O’Keeffe’s discovery of New Mexico in 1929 was even more consonant with the image she was creating of herself as an American painter. Tired of the landscape around Lake George where the Stieglitz family spent their summers, O’Keeffe traveled frequently to New Mexico, where the landscape became a great source of inspiration. In 1940, she bought a house at Ghost Ranch,3 and in 1945, she purchased a ruined adobe complex in Abiquiu, which she developed into a modernist com-pueblo house and studio with a stunning view of the Chama River Valley.4 Although she was criticized by some for the subject change from large flowers, still lives, and cityscapes to the landscape of New Mexico,5 her work—presented by Stieglitz in his subsequent galleries in New York: Intimate Gallery (1925–1929) and An American Place (1929–1946)—sold well and was widely appreciated (Buhler Lynes 1989). From the 1920s onward, O’Keeffe always stressed her American identity and her independence from

2 See for example an interview with Frances O’Brien in The Nation, 12 October 1927, in Buhler Lynes (ed.) 1989, pp. 361–362, and Life (1938) 4, pp. 28–30. 3 She had been spending summers there from 1934 onwards. See Lesley Poling-Kempes, Ghost Ranch, Tuscon (2005: 141). 4 The project was to a great extent overseen by her assistant Maria Chabot. More information about the renovation can be found in their published correspondence, edited by Barbara Buhler Lynes and Ann Paden, Santa Fe 2003, and in Buhler Lynes and Lopez, New York 2012. 5 Ralph Flint in ARTNews (1938) even labelled them as mass production, see Drohojowska-Philp (2004: 380, note 2).

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other (mostly European) influences. Most of all, she did not want to be judged differently from “the men,” as she sometimes referred to the circle of male artists surrounding Stieglitz.6 Looking back in 1977, she said to art critic Mary Lynn Kotz (Kotz 1977: 36–45, 43): “I have always been annoyed at being referred to as a ‘woman artist’ rather than as an ‘artist’.”

Dealing with Stieglitz’s Legacy In several ways, 1946 was a defining year for O’Keeffe. At age 59, she was the subject of a large retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—the first ever devoted to a female artist—but she also received severe criticism. Art critic Clement Greenberg, advocate of the abstract expressionists, considered her work too decorative, labeled it as “pseudomodern art,” and wrote a devastating review in The Nation (Greenberg 1946: 727–728). Not long after the opening of the MoMA show, Stieglitz died, and O’Keeffe had to deal with his vast legacy. Between 1946 and 1949, O’Keeffe donated Stieglitz’s art collection of over 850 paintings to several institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago, and Fisk University, Nashville (TN), while making sure his photographic oeuvre, from which she selected what she deemed his best works, became part of the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. O’Keeffe also donated some of Stieglitz’s photographs to the Metropolitan, the MoMA, the Art Institute, the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Fisk University.7 O’Keeffe donated Stieglitz’s sizeable correspondence and so-called Waste Basket Collection—prints he had discarded—to the Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL), housed since 1963 at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University in New Haven.8

6 See the documentary Georgia O’Keeffe by Perry Miller Adato, 1977 (WNET/ THIRTEEN) as well as Corn (2009: 55–79). 7 O’Keeffe was assisted by James Johnson Sweeney, Daniel Catton Rich and Alfred H. Barr, see O’Keeffe (1949: p. 30). 8 O’Keeffe held the right to refuse permission for publication or access to the archive, a task that was to be continued posthumously by Juan Hamilton, her friend and assistant. Letter from O’Keeffe to Donald Gallup, 18 July 1980, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.

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She co-organized retrospective exhibitions of his art and his art collection for MoMA in 19479 and lobbied for a catalogue raisonné of his photographic oeuvre, which eventually was published by Sarah Greenough for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2002. When she finally completed her task, it was three years later, and she ended the whole process by writing an article for The New York Times , entitled Stieglitz: His Pictures Collected Him (1949), explaining her choices and considerations in dividing the estate. Her role as an artist’s widow made her very much aware of her own legacy. First, however, she had to deal with the decreasing interest in her art in the 1950s. The lack of attention and appreciation in the heyday of new developments in art, including assemblage, happenings, pop art, and minimalism, as well as the fact that Stieglitz was no longer there to present her work in his subsequent galleries, made her less visible in the following two decades, although she did exhibit her work and had New York representatives: first Edith Halpert of Downtown Gallery and from 1963 on Doris Bry.10 O’Keeffe arranged her sales to be made under the condition of the “right of first refusal,” offering her the possibility to repurchase artworks when they resurfaced on the art market (Drohojowska-Philp 2004: 487–489). Moreover, O’Keeffe regularly donated paintings to museums, partly to benefit from tax deductions, but also to ensure the inclusion of her work in esteemed collections (Buhler Lynes and Bowman 2001: 32). As a reaction to the devaluation of her art, O’Keeffe even started to repurchase her own paintings at auctions, so that prices would not drop significantly.11

The Whitney Museum Retrospective In the 1960s, O’Keeffe’s art experienced a revaluation. Her paintings were associated with the work of color field and post-painterly abstraction painters such as Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers, and Kenneth Noland, 9 On 10 June 1947, both Alfred Stieglitz Exhibition: His Photographs (until 21

September) and Alfred Stieglitz: His Collection (until 31 August) opened. See MoMA Archives REG, Exh. #351a, and https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3213, and https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3214 (accessed 11 September 2019). 10 Bry’s tasks were gradually taken over by Juan Hamilton from 1973 onwards. 11 Lynes links this strategy controlling the value of her art to the price structure Stieglitz

had used in his subsequent galleries.

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which was successful at that time (Geldzahler 1965: 189; Goossen 1967: 224). In 1970, her work was the subject of a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art,12 organized by director Lloyd Goodrich and guest curator Doris Bry, who since 1950 had kept an inventory of O’Keeffe’s work.13 The exhibition contained work from several stages of O’Keeffe’s career. At the time of the Whitney show, O’Keeffe was almost 83 years old, and she was closely involved in the hanging of the show. She rejected the initial chronological organization, rearranging the works according to a more thematic installation, based on a series of paintings or paintings with similar compositions. Of the early Evening Star series of watercolors from 1917, for example, numbers IV, V, and VI were grouped together, as were Jack-in-the-Pulpit numbers IV, V, and VI (1930), and the Sky Above Clouds paintings of the 1960s.14 In the late work she included in the show we can distinguish two series. First, paintings inspired by travels overseas to Central America, Europe, and Asia that she had undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. These works led to a series of abstractions of rivers and mountains seen from above, such as From the River—Pale (1959) (Fig. 3) and a series of cloud paintings. These are huge paintings of the magical experience of floating above the clouds, a sensation familiar to everyone who ever flew (Fig. 4). Although overwhelming in their size and subject matter, in terms of compositional methods, they do not substantially differ from other series O’Keeffe made. One could argue that she returned to the method of abstraction she also applied in her earliest work. Inspired by the teachings on composition of Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922), O’Keeffe often selected a theme from live observation and reworked it in a series of paintings. In the series of Jack-in-the-pulpits (1930), pelvises (1943–1947; Fig. 5), or landscapes of the Pedernal mountain (1936–1945), which she 12 Press release Whitney Museum of American Art, 9 October 1970, Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition Archives, 1971, Georgia O’Keeffe Exhibition, October 8— Nov. 29 1970, LL folder 25. 13 Bry continued the work Rosalind Irvine had started in 1944 for the American Art Research Council, housed at the Whitney Museum. Cat. Rais. 1999, Vol. 1, p. 14. O’Keeffe’s record of her oeuvre was compiled in the so-called ‘Abiquiu Notebooks,’ first by Bry, and from 1977 by Juan Hamilton, whom she met in 1973. 14 See the installation shots of the exhibition at the Whitney Museum at the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.

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Fig. 3 Georgia O’Keeffe, From the River—Pale, 1959, oil on canvas, 105.41 × 79.69 cm, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe (NM). Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (2006.5.280). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe / Art Resource, NY

could see from her house at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, a naturalistic motif is used as subject for a process of abstraction. Throughout her career, O’Keeffe worked in series, but in the 1960s and 1970s, the series more explicitly became a study of abstraction again.

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Fig. 4 Georgia O’Keeffe, Sky above Clouds IV , 1965, oil on canvas, 243.8 × 731.5 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago. Restricted gift of the Paul and Gabriella Rosenbaum Foundation; gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1983.821. © The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY

Fig. 5 Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelvis IV , 1944, oil on masonite, 91.4 × 101.6 cm, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe (NM). Gift of The Burnett Foundation. © 1987, Private Collection. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe / Art Resource, NY

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In 1962, O’Keeffe had already commented in her characteristic, slightly ironic manner on her working in series, in an interview with Katherine Kuh for The Artist’s Voice: “I have a single-track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It is like getting acquainted with a person, and I don’t get acquainted easily” (Kuh 1962: 189–202, 191). Moreover, in 1971, O’Keeffe defined her career in an interview with Leo Janos published in The Atlantic Monthly in terms of “my large flower period, my bone period, my cloud period” (Janos 1971: 114–117, 115). The cloud series stands out through the size of some of the paintings, with which O’Keeffe demonstrated that she was a match for the color field painters. Stylistically, they are less detailed and contain fewer shapes with hard edges than earlier abstractions such as Jack-in-the-Pulpit IV (1930). Especially, Above the Clouds I (1962–1963) is atypical for O’Keeffe, with spots of bare canvas surrounding the loosely painted white shapes of the clouds. Also, in Sky Above Clouds IV (1965; Fig. 4), the dense and rhythmical sequence of highly simplified clouds could suggest a dissolving brick wall just as well as an airtight sky. The use of color seems more transparent, with less contrast than in her earlier work. The fact that she selected and presented her oeuvre from the perspective of series, and insisted on hanging the show herself, demonstrates how important it was to O’Keeffe to present herself as a modern painter, who took the American landscape—from the vegetation around Lake George to the mountains and pelvises in the Southwest—as her subject. Perhaps only the clouds stand out, belonging to no country at all, but emphasizing O’Keeffe’s modernity and position as a forerunner for a new generation of American painters. Moreover, by focusing on series, her modernist approach to abstraction became evident in the show.

Looking Back at Her Life and Work In the last two decades of her life, O’Keeffe shifted her focus to what she perceived as definitive projects concerning her and Stieglitz’s legacy. In 1976, she published the illustrated book Georgia O’Keeffe, which she had proposed to Viking Press. It is a combination of a monograph and an autobiography, although details about her private life are mostly absent, including her marriage to Stieglitz. The focus is on her calling to become an artist and on her art. In 1977, she cooperated in the production of a television documentary by Perry Miller Adato, in which she retold the

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same story as she had in Georgia O’Keeffe, and in 1978, she cooperated with the Metropolitan Museum for an exhibition and publication of the photographs Stieglitz had taken of her. O’Keeffe made the selection herself, including photographs of her posing in front of her work and nude photographs, though she left out the more explicit ones. In the introduction, she wrote: “When I look at the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. If the person in the photographs were living in the world today, she would be quite a different person—but it doesn’t matter—Stieglitz photographed her then.” In those same years, she was trying to realize an edited volume of her correspondence with Stieglitz and worked on a catalogue raisonné of her art.15 Her motto seems to have been: if you want to get it right, do it yourself. One of the reasons O’Keeffe may have felt prompted to deliver these definitive products was that in the 1970s, her art had been rediscovered by feminist art historians and artists. Artist Judy Chicago, for example, personified O’Keeffe as a giant vulva in her art installation The Dinner Party (1979), a reference to earlier interpretations of O’Keeffe’s large flower paintings. And Linda Nochlin in 1974 interpreted the close-up flower abstraction Black Iris (1927) as a symbolic reference to female genitals (Nochlin 1974: 46–51, 47 and 48). As Anne Chave has argued (Chave 1992), the appreciation for O’Keeffe’s art had long been condescendingly connected to her sexuality, from a male perspective, but now also women emphasized the femininity and eroticism, albeit from a different angle. All of O’Keeffe’s efforts to present an image of herself as an American modernist painter, one not defined by her sexual identity, seemed to have been in vain. The book and film projects were her last attempt to send her interpretation of her art into the world, and to correct unwanted gendered interpretations.16 In a way, these publications were a continuation of what O’Keeffe had started after Stieglitz died. In preparation for the 1947 exhibition in MoMA of Stieglitz’s photographs and art collection, she had asked curator James Johnson Sweeney to write the catalogue texts and compile 15 For a detailed discussion of the definitive projects, see Kisters (2017). 16 Whether or not the reader will accept the author’s (O’Keeffe’s) authority and inten-

tion, depends on his or her “critical choice of reading” and not on a “truth of writing,” as Seán Burke argued in Burke (1998/1992: 176).

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a catalogue raisonné of Stieglitz’s photographs.17 Neither project was ever completed, which was one of the reasons why O’Keeffe wrote her article for The New York Times in 1949. She did eventually succeed in realizing an exhibition catalogue of his photographs and writings, edited by Sarah Greenough, for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1983. The two-volume catalogue raisonné Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, however, did not appear until 2002. O’Keeffe corresponded about both projects with both Sweeney and Greenough, but she probably underestimated the sheer task of compiling a catalogue raisonné. Initially, Sweeney was to write a monograph of her work as well, for the MoMA retrospective in 1946, but he was never able to complete it, much to O’Keeffe’s dismay.18 Her wish to have an illustrated overview of her artistic work and to tell her story of her life and art resulted in the autobiographical monograph of 1976. Wanda M. Corn brilliantly analyzes the stories O’Keeffe tells in Georgia O’Keeffe, categorizing them as predestination stories, triumph stories—in which she “won” from the male artists—and origin stories, which reveal how certain paintings came into being.19 Comparable to a Bildungsroman, Georgia O’Keeffe tells anecdotes that confirm O’Keeffe’s calling to become an artist and gives little to no information about her life beyond 1929, only about sources of inspiration for specific paintings. The last date that she refers to is 1929, the year she first traveled to New Mexico. The discovery of the Southwest and its significance for her artistic development was enough biographical information for O’Keeffe to share with her readers. Details about her personal life were no longer relevant after this, only the importance of the landscape to her art. But even in the more biographical part of the introduction of Georgia O’Keeffe, she only mentions people who influenced her art. 17 Letter O’Keeffe to Philip Goodwin, 14 May 1947, REG, Exh. #351a, MoMA Archives, New York. Also see the press release, which is available online, where both the book and the catalogue raisonné of Stieglitz’s photographs edited by Sweeney are announced. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3213 (consulted 11 September 2019). 18 Some people have argued that Sweeney’s project—which he had returned to in 1956—was the reason why she eventually withdrew her cooperation with Anita Pollitzer, who was writing about O’Keeffe in 1968, but this is not true. For an elaborate discussion and a detailed comparison between Anita Pollitzer’s biography of O’Keeffe and Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), see: Kisters (2017: 281–289). 19 See Corn (2009: 55–79).

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Besides writing her own story, O’Keeffe more regularly attempted to control what other people wrote about her, asking the right to edit draft versions of articles by journalists such as Kathrine Kuh, Mary Lynn Kotz, and Calvin Tomkins (Buhler Lynes and Bowman 2001: 60;Buhler Lynes and Danly 2008; Kisters 2017: 246–257). These articles were edited by her then-assistant Juan Hamilton, erasing references to Stieglitz’s photographs as erotic, as well as remarks about O’Keeffe as a female artist.20 Telling is also O’Keeffe’s response to reproduction requests of her art for publications such as The Feminine: Spacious as the Sky, which she refused, stating: “I am sorry but I have to be careful of what context my work is used in.”21

A Museum of Her Own Although some of the definitive projects were completed in her lifetime, such as Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), most projects, like the catalogue raisonné of her art and the edited correspondence with Stieglitz, were not realized until (long) after her death. Several of the projects she undertook reached beyond the realm of publications. In the 1970s, O’Keeffe increasingly started to think about the realization of a museum and the opening to the public of her house in Abiquiu. She wrote to art critic Barbara Rose in 1976 about her initial idea to use the Abiquiu house as a location for a museum of her art,22 but she soon realized that this was not very practical and opted for Santa Fe as location. Regarding her art, she wrote to Rose: “I have been making a list of pictures that I think I should keep for it.”23 In making the inventory of her work for a future museum, she noted which works she considered best.24 She was also discussing the possibility

20 The AS/GOK Archive at Beinecke holds several draft versions of texts about O’Keeffe, such as Kotz’s manuscript, and the catalogue text for the Whitney exhibition with remarks by O’Keeffe/Hamilton. 21 Letter from O’Keeffe to Jose and Miriam Arguelles, 23 May 1977, AS/GOK Archive, Beinecke. 22 Letter from O’Keeffe to Barbara Rose, 30 June 1976, AS/GOK Archive, Beinecke. 23 Ibid. 24 See Cat. rais. 1999, vol. 1, p. 14. O’Keeffe used five- and six-pointed stars to mark first–class paintings.

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of a museum affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution.25 O’Keeffe was willing to donate the majority of the works she had kept, and the ones she had repurchased, to the future museum. Given that she owned over a third of her oeuvre at the time of her death—which consisted of over 1,300 artworks in total—this was a significant gesture.26 To Kotz (Kotz 1977: 43) she said that she would be willing to pay for the costs of the museum for 25 years if someone else would match her offer.27 After her death, and after a dispute about her Last Will and Testament was settled, the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation was established in 1989, to realize some of the projects she had started. From the start, the Foundation was meant to be dissolved once its goals had been realized. When the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe did open in 1997, with financial aid from the philanthropists Anne and John Marion and the Burnett Foundation, the Foundation initially donated only 33 paintings by O’Keeffe. Once the museum, which in 2001 added a Research Center, had proven its devotion to her art and that of American modernism, the Foundation made a large donation upon its dissolution in 2006, of over 1000 artworks, 2000 photographs, and the Abiquiu house, making the museum the largest collection of O’Keeffe’s art in the world. As O’Keeffe had intended, not only her own art, but also that of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and of course Stieglitz was included. Barbara Buhler Lynes not only edited the two-volume catalogue raisonné of O’Keeffe’s art published in 1999 but also published extensively about O’Keeffe and her art in her subsequent positions as founding curator and director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center. The Abiquiu house was first used by the Foundation as office space to handle loan and reproduction requests and organize the donation of artworks to several museums. It started collecting photographs of the different stages of the Abiquiu house for a future pictorial timeline, and eventually opened the house for small-group tours in 1995. The house remains as O’Keeffe left it in 1984, when she could no longer live at home. The studio, therefore, is not a workspace or a studio reconstruction but is still in the condition it had in 1984–1986, with a bed for her 25 Letter from O’Keeffe to Adelyn Breeskin, consultant in modern art at the Smithsonian Institution, 5 July 1976, AS/GOK Archive, Beinecke. 26 Cat. rais. 1999, vol. 1, pp. 11–12. In total, she produced 1,300 works on canvas, on paper, sculpture, and ceramics, excluding 730 sketches and studies. 27 No one did.

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nurse, a large table, and the white carpet on the floor. The impressive view of the Chama River Valley and the collection of bones on the window ledge remind the visitor that this room was itself a source of inspiration to the artist. The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation adopted O’Keeffe’s approach and intentions in dealing with her legacy: her attempts to transcend mortality and control posthumous reputation and interpretation (Abiquiu 1993 and 2001). They finished, initiated, and supported projects that O’Keeffe had started, or that would fit into her vision, including the opening of the Abiquiu house to the public, the support of the establishment of a personal museum, and the transfer of the conservation of the Ghost Ranch house to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. They distributed several paintings to public collections, as O’Keeffe had done with Stieglitz’s collection, and cooperated toward numerous exhibitions to promote her work worldwide.

Conclusion Although she was a successful artist and could live independently in New Mexico, in old age, Georgia O’Keeffe felt the need to work on what she hoped would be definitive projects related to her and Stieglitz’s art. As an artist’s widow, she was aware what it meant to deal with an artist’s estate, and she knew that a good catalogue raisonné or published correspondence would be a valuable tool to ensure future research into both their oeuvres, as was a museum devoted to the art of their circle. Another important motivation was to correct, once more, unwanted interpretations of her art. Although she had cooperated with Stieglitz in his initial presentation of her as a woman artist to a certain extent, she had tried to free herself from this image ever since, stressing that she was an artist in her own right. By omitting photographs Stieglitz entitled Interpretations from both the exhibition and catalogue of Stieglitz’s photographs at the Metropolitan in 1978—such as the photo Interpretation (1919) in which Stieglitz positioned a memento mori sculpture she made for her deceased mother, Abstraction (1916), in front of an abstraction she made while listening to music, Music, Pink, and Blue No. 1 (1918), in such a way that it resembles a phallus in the act of penetration—she revealed that these photos present his rather than her point of view. O’Keeffe could not control—or at least not entirely—what people would write about her, but she most certainly could control what she wrote and contributed herself.

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The definitive projects have several points in common: they demonstrate that, in looking back at her and Stieglitz’s work, O’Keeffe safeguarded her and Stieglitz’s estate for posterity, that she lived for her art, and wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, not as a female artist, but, as she told Kotz, as an artist, an American pioneer painter, equal to “the men.”

References Buhler Lynes, Barbara, ed. 1989. O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916–1929. London: UMI Research Press. Buhler Lynes, Barbara, ed. 1999. Georgia O’Keeffe. Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art. Buhler Lynes, Barbara and Russel Bowman, eds. 2001. O’Keeffe’s O’Keeffes: The Artist’s Collection. Santa Fe, NM: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum. Buhler Lynes, Barbara and Ann Paden, eds. 2003. Maria Chabot-Georgia O’Keeffe: Correspondence 1941–1949. Santa Fe, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Buhler Lynes, Barbara and Susan Danly. 2008. Georgia O’Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity. Santa Fe, NM: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; Portland, ME: Portland Museum of Art. Buhler Lynes, Barbara and Agapita Judy Lopez. 2012. Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Houses. Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu. New York: Abrams books. Burke, Seán. 1992. The Death and Return of the Author. Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Chave, Anna C. 1990. Georgia O’Keeffe and the Masculine Gaze. Art in America 78 (1), January: 114–124, 177, 179. Corn, Wanda W. 2009. Telling Tales: Georgia O’Keeffe on Georgia O’Keeffe. American Art 23: 55–79. Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. 2004. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Geldzahler, Henry. 1965. American Painting in the Twentieth Century. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Goossen, Eugene C. 1967. O’Keeffe—Her Extraordinary Contribution to Twentieth-Century Art … Obscured By Her Fame. Vogue 149, March 1: 174–179, 221–224. Greenberg, Clement. 1946. Art. The Nation, June 15: 727–728. Greenough, S., ed. 2002. Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of photographs. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art.

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Janos, Leo. 1971. Georgia O’Keeffe at 84. The Atlantic Monthly 228, December: 114–117. Kisters, Sandra. 2017. The Lure of the Biographical. On the (Self-) Representation of Modern Artists. Amsterdam: Valiz. Kotz, Mary Lynn. 1977. Georgia O’Keeffe at 90: Filling a Space in a Beautiful Way. That’s What Arts Means to Me. ARTnews, December: 36–45. Katherine Kuh. 1962. Georgia O’Keeffe in The Artist’s Voice. Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists: 189–202. New York: Harper & Row. O’Keeffe, Georgia. 1949. Stieglitz: His Pictures Collected Him. The New York Times, December 11: 24, 26, 28–30. O’Keeffe, Georgia. 1976. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Viking Press. O’Keeffe, Georgia. 1978. Introduction, in Georgia O’Keeffe: A portrait by Alfred Stieglitz. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nochlin, Linda. 1974. Some Women Realists: Part I. Arts Magazine 48, February: 46–51. Norman, Dorothy. 1973. Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer. New York: Aperture. Pyne, Kathleen. 2007. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: Georgia O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation 1989–1993. 1993. Abiquiu, NM: The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation 1994–2000. 2001. Abiquiu, NM: The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation

Replaying the Past: Belgian Pop Band dEUS’s Return to Early Work Helleke van den Braber

In 1999, the Belgian band dEUS released their third album, The Ideal Crash. Two decades later, the album is widely considered a classic among critics and fans. Twenty years after the album’s release, dEUS are still active, but instead of creating new work, the band spent 2019 successfully touring their performance of The Ideal Crash, playing their landmark album in full to large audiences across Europe. In this respect, dEUS are not alone: over the last 10 years, full performances of classic albums have become increasingly prevalent in popular music. For example, in 2014 alone, Linkin Park reperformed their Hybrid Theory (2000), The Offspring played their third album Smash (1994) in full, Nas again performed Illmatic (1994), Jane’s Addiction recycled Nothing’s Shocking (1988), and Manic Street Preachers replayed Holy Bible (1994). In 2019, bands celebrating landmark albums included The Cure (replaying Disintegration from 1989), Green Day (celebrating Dookie, also from 1989), and The Eagles (performing Hotel California, first released in 1976).

H. van den Braber (B) RICH (Radboud Institute for Culture and History), Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_9

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We live in an age in which popular music is obsessed with its own history (Reynolds 2014, xiii). Bands and fans alike seem to prefer investing in recreating (a modern version of) the past to investing in creating or enjoying new music. Taking dEUS’s Ideal crash tour as its case study, this paper investigates the interest pop bands exhibit in their own past work. Is drawing on (or reverting to) a classic album like The Ideal Crash an exercise in nostalgia? Is it a form of self-organized heritage management? Or is this cultural practice a welcome attempt to bring a new form of proximity and involvement back into a pop culture that has become increasingly fragmented and distant through globalization and technology? In pop music, the practice of replaying old work is not without controversy. For bands and their audiences, there is a lot at stake in the decision to get involved in reperformances of classic albums. It presents them with a number of interesting and complex cultural dilemmas and tensions, especially around issues of value, identity, credibility, and legitimacy. This chapter explores these dilemmas and tensions by investigating the interests of bands and their audiences in the (re-)creation of (a contemporary version of) the past. I will examine this issue by conceptualizing performances of landmark albums as an expression of “late style” or “late work” in the careers of pop bands. I will work from three basic assumptions. My first assumption is that it is useful to classify the course taken by pop careers into a three-part division of early, high, and late (Painter 2006, 1–2).1 In pop music, bands typically form when the band members are in their late teens or twenties. Keunen has argued extensively that, according to critics and other gatekeepers in the pop field, it is a given that most bands reach their artistic peak over the first four of five albums they record, gradually losing their creative edge (and, in some cases, their label deals and most of their audience) in their later years (2014, 295– 306). Keunen argues that the volatility and competitiveness of the pop field is such that many “middle aged” bands—i.e., bands that have been around for ten or fifteen years—buckle under the pressure of what he calls “internal competitive struggle [between bands] and external pressure [of critics and fans]” (296). In the situation of “oversupply and overstock” of bands that characterizes the pop field, some aging bands 1 Or rise, culmination, and decline—a trichotomy that pop critics and pop academics often refer to when discussing the career trajectories of bands and musicians (see, for instance, Keunen 2014, in his chapter “Dropping out of the rat race,” 345–346).

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keep going, but many of them quit (Keunen, 314). This means that in pop music, bands that have been going for twenty or more years, with band members reaching their forties and fifties, are relatively thin on the ground, and are often considered seasoned survivors by critics and fans. For these “dinosaurs of rock,” Reynolds claims, replaying earlier albums in the later stages of their career often is tantamount to “reanimation” and “reignition” of a career in decline: “when a band has been around long enough, there is always going to be more demand from the fanbase for a career-peak classic than for the latest musical effort” (2014, 35, 36–37). It is, however, important to note that this connotation of “later career stage” with “decline” does not immediately imply that veteran rock bands automatically lose all cultural relevance: the music sociologist Andy Bennett (2008) persuasively addresses the continuing appeal of aging rock icons for contemporary youth audiences. He claims that “much of the attraction of such artists for young audiences stems from the way in which they [the bands] are used to position the development—and cultural resonance—of a late-twentieth-century rock history of which young fans have no direct memory or experience” (259). The music historian Karen Painter (2006) emphasizes the historical connection between creativity and “late style” in music, referring to the “special aura” that was felt to surround an artist’s final work (2). In the nineteenth century, critics connected this aura to a sense of “mature artistic vision” in the later stages of artists’ careers, with artists experiencing a wider and more profound awareness of their own identity and the value of their work. It was felt in this period that this “aura” led attention away from the focus on “early style” and the “genius of youth” (2).2 This is relevant to modern pop music, where, as I have argued elsewhere, twenty-first-century bands have a strong tendency to espouse Romantic visions of authenticity, autonomy, identity, and (the nature of) career development (Van den Braber and Hueting 2020; see also Abbing 2019, 117; Keunen 2014, 65). With bands romanticizing the sincerity and authenticity of their early work (Reynolds 2014, 32); critics emphasizing the importance of the first, youthful stage of pop bands’ careers; and fans demanding the performance of earlier, “career-peak classics” rather than

2 Abbing argues that in modern pop music, bands and musicians tend to espouse nineteenth century, Romantic visions of authenticity, autonomy, and (the nature of) professionalism (Abbing 2019, 61–117).

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later work, the pop practice of replaying classic albums seems simultaneously to lead away from, and refocus on this Romantic sense of youthful genius. In this chapter, I suggest that this practice paradoxically creates, in the words of pop critic Simon Reynolds, both a “surging-into-the-future feel” and a sense of surging-into-the-past (2014, x). Landmark albums are usually created in the early or middle stages of bands’ careers; the wish to replay and celebrate this past work mostly develops in the later stages.3 This desire to replay the past in itself points toward the increased cultural status, authority, and maturity of the pop field as a whole. Pop music, as a discipline, now has a lineage stretching back over sixty years, and this maturity is reflected in the increasing longevity and cultural legitimacy of pop bands (Frith 1996, 11). Especially in rock, many bands succeed in keeping a credible creative career going through middle age, and in reaching a genuine “late” style or period in their work—a period of “lateness” that is increasingly defined, I argue, by a creative orientation toward their own past work. Reperforming an earlier album stakes several claims at once: It seeks to re-establish a band’s cultural value, reaffirm their identity, manage their legacy, “buy in” without seeming to sell out, and improve both their own awareness of their place in history and that of their fans and critics. It is important to note that for some bands, this creates a major tension: their public commitment to reaching those goals raises expectations that they may be unable to meet. My second assumption is that, over the last ten years, as more and more bands have seen their most successful early albums reach twenty, or in some cases thirty, years of age, the music industry itself has become increasingly geared toward profitably celebrating these landmarks. Bookers, promoters, pop venues, and festivals have succeeded in creating an efficient new infrastructure, with special club nights, tours, and festivals devoted to celebrating classic albums and facilitating bands to reperform those albums in full. In his seminal work Rockonomics, the economist Alan Krueger argues that new infrastructures such as these

3 It is interesting to note, however, that the accelerating cycles of pop have led

to an interval between creating and reperforming albums that seems to be getting shorter and shorter. The Dutch band Moss organized special shows to reperform their seminal album Never Be Scared/Don’t Be A Hero (2009) only ten years after it was first released (https://fr-nt.nl/2019/09/22/a-long-way-back-moss-over-hun-magische-laatsteplaat-never-be-scared-dont-be-a-hero/, last accessed 24 December 2019).

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have formed part of a “radical transformation of the music industry in recent decades” (2019, 11). Krueger argues that survival and success in the music industry increasingly rely on the ability to respond to these transformations, especially given the fact that bands (even bands in the early and middle stages of their careers) increasingly earn most of their income from live performances, not from sales of recorded music. Established artists no longer just “tour to promote [new] record albums,” they have to find a way to credibly tour the world “without having new music to hawk” (ibid.). If done well, replaying landmark albums can be very lucrative, and can also serve to widen the band’s scope. It often sees bands perform at much larger venues than they were able to when their album first came out—and, crucially, also much larger than they would be able to play at if they performed new work. “No longer is the focus just on the music,” Krueger claims: “Concerts and festivals sell experiences” (2019, 11). The interest audiences have in attending such performances is closely connected to this notion of “experience,” and can best be understood by conceptualizing their commitment as an expression of what Simon Reynolds has called “retromania” (2014, x). Reynolds claims that in the 2000s, “the pop present” became increasingly dominated by the past: “The first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the Re-decade:... revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments” (xi). Pop culture, he claims, “is obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past” (xiii). Thus, my third assumption is that one way for audiences to celebrate their affinity with these cultural artifacts is to see them reperformed. Cultural gerontologist Andy Bennett has pointed out that aging pop fans, too, have their “later years,” in which they look back upon their “early” and “middle” cultural choices and predilections (2015). For them, “the culture of their youth remains core to understanding themselves in the present” (Bennett 2015, 353). Reynolds (2014) argues that the urge of audiences and bands to come together to collectively remember and mythologize earlier albums is part of “a mutually beneficial arrangement between the musicians and their audience. The ageing audience gets dependability (they know what the music is going to be) and a chance to relive their youth. The band gets to bask in their legend and reconnect with their fans” (31). It is important to note here that sharing this experience may also be a way—both for the band and the audience—to explore or express their cultural or personal identity, and to consider if and how this identity has evolved and developed in the twenty or thirty years that have passed.

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This reciprocal investigation of identity and value may serve to deepen the bond between the band and their (old and new) fans. However, this is a fragile process, without any guarantee of success. Interestingly, media scholar Shane Homan (2019) highlights this vulnerability by arguing that heritage bands try to cash in on their cultural value “as an act that benefits from different assessments over time, often at some length to their original period of creation (and creating)” (89). Performing this “act of transfer” may put bands in the uncomfortable position of having to compete with earlier versions of themselves. In this way, Homan explains, “heritage becomes the index of the [music performed in the present], rather than the other way around” (95). This chapter considers the implications of the three assumptions presented above by discussing the forty-four Ideal Crash-legacy shows dEUS played in 2019 across Europe. Given the popularity dEUS enjoy with Dutch audiences, my focus will be on the Dutch leg of the tour.4 I will examine reviews of the Dutch shows, articles, and interviews published in the Dutch press, and interviews with lead singer Tom Barman on Dutch radio. I will also analyze informal audience reactions on Twitter, especially regarding the three Ideal Crash shows dEUS played in Utrecht on May 15, 16, and 17, 2019. In the first section, The Ideal Crash shows will be discussed from the perspective of the band and the music industry, while in the second section, I concentrate on the audience—specifically their interest in attending these late-career retrospectives. Both perspectives will help me to explore how and why dEUS and their fans chose to engage in the powerful yet precarious cultural practice of recreating The Ideal Crash, and how, despite their best efforts, this joint attempt to revive the past eventually failed to impress the pop critics.

4 According to the official dEUS website (http://www.deus.be/), the band played 44 Ideal Crash shows in 18 European countries; the only two countries in which the band played their show more than twice are their native Belgium (16 shows) and The Netherlands (7 shows).

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“Let’s Be Done with the Old Stuff”: The Band’s Perspective In 1991, in the very early stages of their career, dEUS described themselves as a “heavily damaged, alternaive [sic],5 stage-happy rock group, a cross between Nirvana, Leonard Cohen, Velvet Underground, Neil Young, Sonic Youth, Tom Waits, J. J. Cale, Dinosaur Jr” (cited in Zonderman 2019).6 By citing these influences, dEUS positioned themselves firmly in the alternative mainstream, a cultural domain situated between the (commercially powerful, but, as pop sociologist Gert Keunen describes it, culturally “less legitimate”) mainstream and the (anti-commercial, culturally “fully legitimate”) underground (2014, 71– 74).7 Keunen describes this domain as wholly hybrid. Bands operating in the alternative mainstream like to project notions of authenticity, integrity, innovation, and uncompromising originality—cultural markers usually associated with the pop underground. Yet, crucially, bands functioning in this domain also have the artistic and economic potential of crossing over into the mainstream. Bands such as dEUS work in a way that is fundamentally double-coded: they make innovative and idiosyncratic music that does not immediately aim to please, but somehow still has the potential to attract and engage large audiences. Consequently, Keunen argues that in the careers of such bands, there may be multiple occasions of crossing over to the mainstream, alternating with phases in which they disappear from view or are pushed back into the underground. This certainly applies to dEUS. The band is known for their high turnover of band members, their seemingly chaotic approach to recording and

5 The quote indicates that the band is proud of the adjective “naive” often used to characterize their music, and deliberately makes use of the neologism “alter-naive” here. The term refers to the lo-fi movement in alternative music that also includes John Cale, which maintains that naivety for musicians is a trait that should be embraced and celebrated (Harper 2014). 6 “Een zwaar gehavende, alternaïeve [sic], stagegrage rockgroep, kruising van Nirvana, Leonard Cohen, Velvet Underground, Neil Young, Sonic Youth, Tom Waits, JJ Cale, Dinosaur Jr.” 7 Keunen describes the outcome of the “power struggle” between underground and mainstream in terms of being perceived as having “more” or “less” legitimacy—following Bourdieu (1983), who uses the notion of cultural legitimacy in much the same way (i.e., to describe the moment-specific outcome of an unrelenting power struggle in the cultural field).

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performing music, and the varying appeal and popularity of their records. Over their career, especially in their middle years, dEUS seem to have elusively moved into and out of the mainstream, never gaining a stable position, and never really taking any consistent commercial advantage of their excellent reputation. An important turning point came with the release of their third album, The Ideal Crash (1999). The record marked the end of the chaotic and experimental early phase of their career, and the beginning of a new and commercially more promising chapter. Looking back twenty years later, lead singer Tom Barman recalls that with the release of The Ideal Crash, the band felt they were on the cusp of fulfilling both their creative and their commercial potential (Van der Hoeven 2018). Barman believed that the record succeeded in showcasing both the youthful genius of their early years and a new, marketable maturity. In 1999, the record was destined to not only cross over to the mainstream but to also lead to a new, fertile middle period of their career (Keunen 2014, 134). Irrespective of whether these hopes were actually fulfilled (and they were not),8 it is an interesting question why in 2019, in their “late work” phase, the band chose to return to The Ideal Crash, as this was in no way an obvious direction to take. Their allegiance to the values of the alternative mainstream (especially to its emphasis on innovation and originality) meant that reverting to the past could lead to distrust regarding their credibility, and potentially have a very unwelcome delegitimizing effect. Therefore, it makes sense that Barman felt the need to mitigate this danger by explaining in the media the band’s “ambiguous relationship with the past” before launching the tour: “I think it’s in the nature of artists to think: let’s be done with the old stuff, it’s only the new that counts. Still, there’s also your legacy, your footprint. If you don’t feed that, it will die. And if you keep completely silent about it, it will die a second time” (Ilegems 2019).9

8 Journalist Derek Robertson (2019) has succinctly summed up what happened after The Ideal Crash: “This softer, more mature sound was supposed to help dEUS break the mainstream but, exhausted and on edge from years on the road and internal strife, the stress of the subsequent tour broke the band instead. All five retreated to normal life, and by the time they properly reconvened five years later, their sound—and lineup—had changed once again”. 9 “Ik denk dat het eigen is aan artiesten om te denken: oude brol buiten, alleen het nu telt. Anderzijds bestaat er zoiets als je legacy, je voetafdruk. Als je die niet blijft voeden,

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For Barman, it was essential to frame the decision to take The Ideal Crash on tour again as an attempt to link the past to the future, not just with a view to celebrating the early years, but also to help the band move toward new creativity and innovation. Indeed, by 2019, it had been seven years since dEUS had released any new music. Despite repeatedly announcing new songs, the band had fallen silent. Replaying the album would help them, not only to refocus on their early work, but also to write new and original songs. Barman states in a tour announcement: “If there was one moment where we should celebrate an album and take it on tour, it’s this one. It was a very important record for us, it’s twenty years old, and it’ll set high standards for the new songs.”10 And: “[After performing The Ideal Crash,] we want to put everything into a new record.... We will sound different again. We will have to re-invent dEUS once again” (cited in Ilegems).11 For dEUS, it was important to present this period of “lateness” in their career as a time of creative orientation toward their own past work. Barman promised that the old would inspire the new, and that the representation of the past would be connected fully to the band’s future: their new work would develop easier and sound better because of this reprisal of old songs. By the same token, playing the old songs would help the band reinvent their identity and make better sense of their own early years. The emphasis dEUS place on the restorative aspects of the practice of remembering is striking. Media scholar Arno van der Hoeven, who has written extensively on popular music heritage, points out that “remembering always creates gaps, distortions, contradictions, and other incoherences, [this is why it is] also reconfiguring: by closing or ignoring gaps or omissions, it arranges new orders and creates new coherences” (2015, 209, emphasis added). For Barman, this concept of “new orders and new coherences” seems to have a particular resonance: in interviews, he is careful to tell his fans and critics that to him the album The Ideal Crash now represents a perfect, unassailable unity (Pek 2019). By replaying it no fewer than 44 times in 18 countries, note for note, “every sterft hij af. En als je er dan ook nog eens in alle talen over zwijgt, sterf je een tweede keer.” 10 Tour announcement, October 2018 (https://www.goldenplec.com/deus-announceirish-leg-of-the-ideal-crash-20th-anniversary-tour/, last accessed 29 December 2019). 11 “... willen we alles op een nieuwe plaat zetten... het zal weer anders klinken. We zullen dEUS nóg maar eens moeten heruitvinden” (Ilegems 2019).

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night the same, the exact same,” the band took time to approach the album in a new and Zen-like way, managing to reconnect with even those songs on The Ideal Crash that they had forgotten (van der Hoeven 2018). However, Barman needs to tread very carefully. For a band such as dEUS, making a seemingly regressive move like this can only be symbolically and economically effective under specific conditions.12 In this domain, it is fundamental for bands to protect the credibility they have built up over the years, and to hold on to the authenticity and individuality their fans have come to love and expect (Keunen 2014, 90). This means that Barman needs to avoid the impression that this is just the story of a middle-aged musician, tied down by routine, looking to restart his engines by harking back to when they ran at their most powerful. The last thing he needs is to burst the bubble of what Keunen calls the “rockism ideology (90),” by causing fans to worry that the act of repeating will somehow sully the memory of The Ideal Crash, by destroying or defusing what was once new and disruptive. To remain credible, he also has to make sure that fans understand that playing the shows is in no way an opportunistic bid for their revaluation or simply to garner attention—or indeed, their money. This means that it was very much in Barman’s interests to publicly downplay his band’s longing for (symbolic) consecration, and to conceal any overt (commercial) interests dEUS may have had (see also van den Braber 2018). One very effective way to do this is to deny agency. “Well, it wasn’t my idea,” Barman claims repeatedly in interviews, “we were invited”—and in fact, they were. The first eight shows of The Ideal Crash tour were played at the courtesy of the pop venue Ancienne Belgique (AB) in Brussels, as part of the venue’s long-running REWIND concert series. Ancienne Belgique launched this series in 2007, and has used it as a vehicle to schedule and market shows by renowned Belgian artists reperforming their classic albums—albums, claimed the venue, that could be seen as “milestones in their career,... key albums in Belgian pop music,... etched into collective memory.”13 Hence, the organizational logic behind the start of The Ideal Crash tour is a perfect example of the emergence of a new, retro-oriented, 12 For the symbolic and economic “effectiveness” of cultural practices, see English (2008, 220). 13 Mission statement on the Ancienne Belgique website: https://www.abconcerts.be/ en/agenda/series/rewind/12/ (last accessed on 1 January 2020).

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and very lucrative “industry within the music industry,” catering to a nostalgic, affluent, aging audience eager to reexperience the music of their youth. The series proved a huge commercial success, not only for the venue, but also for the bands that agreed to perform REWIND shows.14 In 1999, when The Ideal Crash first came out, dEUS managed to fill the AB three times over, while in 2019, as part of REWIND, the venue was packed no less than eight times in a row. This success, and the fifty-two sold-out shows that followed all over Europe, finally allowed the band to reap the financial rewards that had eluded them 20 years earlier. As Alan Krueger argues, new infrastructures like these are part of the “radical transformation of the music industry in recent decades” (2019, 11). Still, Barman is quick to explain that the band was never very interested in the money: So this album was very well-received [in 1999], but did not exactly bring the big commercial break [the record label] had in mind. We didn’t care because the tour was lovely and we played all over Europe—in small venues, midsize venues and eventually big venues. But yes, it’s true, there are people who found it a [commercial] disappointment, and that it should have been more [remunerative]. And in my darker moments, I tend to think that as well. But bon.15 (cited in van der Hoeven 2018)

A second way to defuse the situation and reclaim credibility is by reminding fans and critics of underground icons—those entirely above suspicion of selling out—who have done more or less the same thing (in this case, selling out pop venue Ancienne Belgique eight times in a row): “Many of my heroes did exactly the same thing. JJ Cale let people travel

14 Even a relatively obscure band like The Scabs managed to sell out three REWIND shows (https://www.standaard.be/cnt/ud1f8ca9, last accessed on 1 January 2020). 15 “Dus die plaat werd uitstekend ontvangen [in 1999] maar daar zat niet echt grote commerciële doorbraak in die zij [het platenlabel] in gedachten hadden. Wij hebben er niet om gemaald want die toer was heerlijk en die hebben we uiteindelijk drie keer in Europa gedaan, kleine zalen, middelgrote zalen en uiteindelijk grote zalen op ‘t einde. Maar ja inderdaad, er zijn mensen die dan zeggen dat is een [financiele] ontgoocheling en dat had meer [winstgevend] moeten zijn. En ik denk dat op een kwaad moment ook wel es, maar bon.”

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to his shows ten times in a row... Or Springsteen playing Broadway lots of times. I think that’s kind of nice” (Pek 2019).16 It is clear that replaying The Ideal Crash encouraged dEUS to try and strike two challenging types of balance at once: first, a balance between the concepts of symbolic value (or credibility) on the one hand and economic value (or commercialism) on the other; and second, a balance between regression (with its overtones of harking back, stagnation, and outdatedness), and progression—in pop music traditionally linked to notions of energy, risk, and novelty.

“An Excellent Way to Feel Old”: The Fans’ Perspective One very effective way for bands like dEUS to strike this balance— between credibility and commercialism, and between regression and progression—is by playing the heritage card. If they succeed in highlighting the historical significance of their album, they are able to frame replaying it as instrumental to the preservation of the band’s legacy. However, as the cultural sociologists Lauren Istvandity and Zelmarie Cantillon argue, making this type of attempt at pop preservation is far from straightforward or self-evident (2019). Specifically in the field of pop music, these histories are in a precarious position, at risk of being lost if not recognized as significant and adequately protected. . . . What constitutes ‘heritage’ is not pre-given, but rather is ‘invented’ or constructed. Therefore, issues can arise surrounding what is deemed worthy (or not) of being collected, preserved, displayed and celebrated. Such decisions can ultimately shape what is remembered and valued into the future. (Istvandity and Cantillon 2019, 5)

Here, I argue that playing The Ideal Crash tour was partly aimed at putting the celebration of their legacy into practice. Performing the album may be seen as an attempt to contribute to shaping the canon, and to the process of deciding what does (and does not) constitute heritage in pop.

16 “Veel van m’n helden deden het zo. JJ Cale liet mensen zo’n tien keer naar hem reizen in plaats van omgekeerd. Of Springsteen die heel vaak Broadway doet. Ik vind dat wel wat hebben.”

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As Homan suggests, a heritage discourse contributes to “naturalizing” older rock bands as “possessing certain qualities worthy of heritage status, and demonstrates, in turn, how [older rock bands] work to transpose these intangible qualities into contemporary economic and cultural value” (2019, 87). In addition, this ongoing practice of heritage construction should be seen as a joint effort, in which the band and their audience are both actively involved. Indeed, sharing this responsibility can be a way to deepen their bond, explore or express their identity, and consider if and how their (shared) contribution to the band’s legacy has evolved and developed over the years. In the case of The Ideal Crash tour, it is easy to see how both parties took up this responsibility, firstly, by showing up and experiencing the performances together, and secondly, by engaging in various forms of mythmaking and storytelling. Tom Barman himself strengthened the myth of the album’s legendary status and exceptionality by expounding on the unique and reciprocal sense of affinity with The Ideal Crash that was palpable at the shows: “and with this tour: the love that is directed at us. If you have been writing for a while, or you have been spending time at home, and then you go and play that record again and you don’t really expect all that much, and then to be receiving all that we’ve been getting, then yes fuck man, that’s incredible” (cited in van der Hoeven 2018).17 Full performances of classic albums typically attract two types of audience: an aging group of music lovers who were there from the beginning and wish to re-engage with the music of their youth, and a younger audience enjoying the chance to see reperformances of classic albums they did not get to experience first time around. Whereas the younger generation is happy to be able to gain access to a missed golden age of pop, the older generation welcomes the opportunity to mythologize (and thereby legitimize) its own personal and musical past (Reynolds 2014, 31). In pop contexts, nostalgia is a powerful “affective trigger” (van der Hoeven 2018, 242) and, as Reynolds claims, “one of the great pop emotions. Sometimes that nostalgia can be the bittersweet longing pop feels for its own lost golden age” (2014, xxiii). 17 “. . . en nu met die laatste tour: de liefde die je ook krijgt. Als je dan een tijdje heb zitten schrijven aan iets of je bent thuis geweest en je gaat die plaat terug spelen en je verwacht niet al te veel, en je krijgt wat wij hebben gekregen, dan ja fuck man, da’s heerlijk.”

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Aspects of this nostalgia-fueled storytelling practice are visible in the written audience reactions to the three Ideal Crash shows dEUS played in Utrecht. Of the 38 messages posted on Twitter in anticipation of, or in reaction to, the shows, a total of 15 communicate a sense of nostalgia and affect.18 In 8 of those 15 messages, dEUS fans use the legacy show as an opportunity to nostalgically look back upon their own life or their own past cultural choices. As fan, Erik Stronks writes on Twitter: “Going to see dEUS tonight—the Ideal Crash Tour. Excellent way of feeling old. The most important album of one of the bands that have shaped one’s adolescence gets played in its entirety, during a nostalgic anniversary.”19 A day later, he added: “The Ideal Crash was played in full, and that was lovely. For me the magic only really started with the encores. A terrifically maniacal version of ‘Fell Off The Floor, Man,’ and goosebumps and choking up at hearing ‘Roses.’ Ever deeper into my youth.”20 Other Twitter users, too, describe having a magical sense of sudden proximity and connection to the band, the music, and to their own youth. Time seemed frozen: “it was like seeing them play for the very first time.”21 Still, others further expounded the myth of the album or the band on Twitter, for instance, by calling the performance “classic” or “time honored,” by drawing attention to the 20-year gap between original and its repetition, or (conversely) by highlighting the timeless energy or innovative power of the band.22

18 To return these results, I used the search string “dEUS OR tivoli lang:nl since:2019– 05-15 until:2019–05-20” on Twitter. Of the 38 messages posted in anticipation of, or reaction to, the three shows, 8 reflected on the personal nostalgia the Twitter user felt at (the prospect of) experiencing the shows; 7 reflected on nostalgic views of dEUS’s past career or musical development. Eleven messages considered the quality of the performance (without any bearing on nostalgia), and 3 reflected on the quality of the album. Eight messages simply announced the fact of the user’s (intended) presence at the shows. 19 “Prima manier om je oud te voelen. De belangrijkste plaat van een van de bands die je adolescentie mede vorm gaven, wordt tijdens een nostalgisch jubileum integraal gespeeld.” (Erik Stronks, twitter post, May 17, 2019). 20 “The Ideal Crash werd integraal gespeeld, en dat was fijn. Voor mij begon de magie pas echt bij de toegiften. Een heerlijk maniakale versie van “Fell Off The Floor, Man” en kippenvel en brok in mijn keel bij “Roses.“ Nog dieper mijn jeugd in…” (Erik Stronks, twitter post, May 18, 2019). 21 “... was het alsof ik ze voor het eerst zag” (Kasper van Royen, twitter post, May 17, 2019. 22 “Lekker ouderwets” (Wilco Verhagen, twitter post, May 15, 2019); “classic dEUS” (Marcel Steeman, twitter post, May 15, 2019); “Het was verrassend” (Erik Stronks, twitter

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As will become clear below, the emphasis on power, energy, and connection in the Twitter messages contrasts markedly with the views of the newspaper critics who were present at the shows: they reported a curious absence of real force and momentum. It is significant that, despite the emphasis on their own restorative and future-oriented motivation behind replaying The Ideal Crash, dEUS actively encouraged the backward-looking and nostalgic orientation of their fans. To encourage mythmaking and storytelling, each night the band organized special backstage sessions before and after the show, to which they invited thirty to forty members of the audience and asked them to step forward and share their life stories. Interestingly, these sessions were filmed at the initiative of the band and will be part of a forthcoming documentary.23 Barman: And then I had the idea . . . to not talk about us in this documentary but to talk about the people who were there twenty years ago and who have come back now. This because this album really gives substance to—can I put it this way?—the big themes. Those are all in the album and so… we like to call it confessions, really. So every night, between 30 and 40 people come up and tell us about whatever they want. It has to be about love or death or sadness, or yes, the facts of life. And I haven’t seen it yet but there has been an avalanche of reactions by people who participated. And we’ll make a documentary out of it, together with the music of course. It will hopefully become a beautiful portrait, also of the passage of time. Who they were.24 (cited in van der Hoeven 2018)

post May 15, 2019); “Vandaag de ware dEUS present in de Ronda. Scherp en dynamisch” (Jeroen Grueter, twitter post, May 17, 2019). 23 The documentary, called Only because of Love: Confessions To dEUS, is made by filmmaker Fleur Boonman and was released in November 2020 and made publicly available in October 2021 (Robertson 2019; https://vimeo.com/ondemand/confessionstodeus2). 24 “En ik had toen het idee, en dat idee is gekomen letterlijk een dag voor we vertrokken, om het niet over ons te hebben in die documentaire maar over de mensen die daar twintig jaar geleden bijwaren en nu dus terug komen kijken. Omdat die plaat geeft echt wel voer voor—kan ik het zo zeggen—de grote thema’s. Die zitten allemaal in de plaat en dus mensen… we noemen het confessions eigenlijk. Dus elke avond tussen de 30 en de 40 mensen komen vertellen over hetgeen ze ook maar willen. Het moet te maken hebben over liefde of de dood of verdriet, of ja de dingen des levens. En ik heb nog niks gezien maar er is echt een stortvloed gekomen van reacties van mensen die dat hebben gedaan. En daar gaan we een documentaire over draaien samen met muziek natuurlijk. Het wordt hopelijk een mooi portret, ook van de passage of time, het verloop van de tijd. Wie zij waren.”

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Both the band and the audience were eager to embrace these confessional sessions. Making the documentary reduced the risk of what the music sociologist Deena Weinstein (2014) calls one of the major pitfalls of neonostalgic performances: the danger that representations of the past gradually lose their connection to the original events. For dEUS, these sessions facilitated the act of transfer that is needed to constructively link the past to the present, and may also, for the band, have mitigated the danger of having to compete unfairly with earlier and better versions of themselves. This competition with past selves is inherent to all reperformances of classic albums. Every band “must contend with the weight of their prior work judged against new work” (Homan 2019, 86). This is particularly relevant to bands that have reached their “late work” phase and have to face judgment of their current show in the context of earlier, often better performances. However, as Homan argues, the audience also has reason to feel anxious, not least as the heritage rock band “can provoke feelings of loss for a past when “bands were better,” crowding out the possibilities of a new present. This makes it difficult to view them as working bands that have to deal with very real and practical issues of (lost) time and (different) space, and changing narratives and band members” (2019, 88). The successful confessionals dEUS organized before and after each show may have helped fans to align their own “changing narrative” to that of the band. Still, the reviews of the performances in Utrecht show that the band apparently could not altogether prevent their fans from experiencing Homan’s “feelings of loss.” In marked contrast to the Twitter responses, audience reaction to the three shows was, reviewers reported, decidedly listless. National newspaper De Volkskrant described the performances in Utrecht as “slow off the mark” (Kamer 2019). In the Dutch national newspaper Trouw, the reviewer noted that dEUS played a dull show and seemed bored, with the band working through the songs without much conviction (Knooihuizen 2019). The audience did not feel much like participating either, wrote national newspaper NRC, and even “slowly fell asleep” during the show (Provoost 2019). Music magazine OOR also reports that the audience in Utrecht “did not immediately participate euphorically” and “tended to be a little lukewarm in its response” (Rotteveel 2019). The reviewer also observed that the band seemed out of practice and made some unfortunate mistakes (like using wrong chords and forgetting to strike up an intro). The

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show did have its high points, but “seems to lack the punch of earlier performances” (Rotteveel 2019). Predictably, all four reviews, whether implicitly or explicitly, tried to pitch the dEUS of 2019 against the dEUS of 1999, with all 4 concluding that either the band or the audience (or both) seemed to have lost a bit of their edge over the last 20 years.

Concluding Remarks For those interested in the challenges and complexities of the modern pop field, legacy tours are a fascinating phenomenon—chiefly because such tours, for bands and audiences alike, put so much at stake. As the example of The Ideal Crash tour has made clear, this is especially true for bands operating in the cultural domain of the alternative mainstream. For bands like dEUS, deciding to replay the past can be a daring choice. Their commitment to the (explicitly non-regressive) values of their domain— innovation, originality, and anti-commercialism—puts them under great pressure. The cultural practice of replaying classic albums is very revealing of the forces that shape the dynamics of pop. It uncovers both the (new) opportunities open to bands in the later stages of their career, and the uncertainties and tensions that arise when they actually seize them. It also neatly exposes the strategies these bands feel encouraged to use in order to legitimize such actions. To validate their choice—reverting to the past instead of creating something new—dEUS had to strike an acceptable balance between commercial profit and symbolic validation on the one hand, and between a sense of regression and a sense of progression on the other. The first legitimizing strategy dEUS used, was the strategy of framing. For them, it was crucial to present the period of “lateness” in their career, not as a time of backsliding and regression, but as a period of creative orientation toward their own past work, in which the old would serve to inspire the new. The second strategy was that of presenting their Ideal Crash tour as a way of protecting their legacy and constructing a (valid and credible) heritage discourse. For their fans, this approach had the benefit of giving them the opportunity to mythologize (and thereby legitimize) their own personal and musical past. In a joint effort, and at dEUS’s initiative, the band and their fans turned each performance into a display and celebration of both (the band’s) legacy and (the fans’) nostalgic memory. This approach seems to have rekindled love and

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remembrance—but not, it seems, much active commitment and response to the present-day, actual, performing dEUS. Replaying early work will always simultaneously lead away from, and refocus on, the past. If successful, it may constructively link a band’s early years to the later stages of their career. If unsuccessful, it can, as we have seen, place both the bands and their fans in the situation of having to compete unfairly with earlier and better versions of themselves. Examples like The Ideal Crash-tour show us a twenty-first-century music industry in the throes of transition—increasingly geared towards credibly selling (emotional) experiences rather than music, but still in the delicate process of finding out how.

References Abbing, Hans. 2019. The Changing Social Economy of Art. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Andy, Bennett. 2008. Towards a Cultural Sociology of Popular Music. Journal of Sociology 44 (4): 419–432. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783308097130. Baker, Sarah, Catherine Strong, Lauren Istvandity, and Zelmarie Cantillon, eds. 2018. The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage. London: Routledge. Bennett, Andy. 2015. Youth Culture, Ageing and Identity. In Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, ed. Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin, 53–60. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1983. The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed. Poetics 12: 311–356. Van den Braber, Helleke and Hueting, Rocco. 2020. Popmecenaat is er nog niet, maar kan er komen. De Volkskrant, May 12. Van den Braber, Helleke. 2018. Les avantages de la vantardise: Les rapports ambigus du Wu-Tang Clan avec le mécénat privé. Proteus. Cahiers des Théories de L’Art 13: 45–55. Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites. On the Value of Popular Music. Harvard: Harvard University Press. English, James. 2008. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Harper, Adam. 2014. Lo-Fi Aesthetics in Popular Music Discourse. PhD. diss, University of Oxford. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cc84039c-3d30484e-84b4-8535ba4a54f8.

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Van der Hoeven, Arno. 2015. Narratives of Popular Music Heritage and Cultural Identity: The Affordances and Constraints of Popular Music Memories. European Journal of Cultural Studies 21 (2): 207–222. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1367549415609328. ———. 2018. Songs That Resonate: The Uses of Popular Music Nostalgia. In Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, ed. Sarah Baker and Wendy Martin, 238–246. London: Routledge. Van der Hoeven, Pieter. 2019. Interview with Tom Barman in “Nooit meer slapen.” NPO Radio 1, September 4 https://www.vpro.nl/nooitmeerslapen/ luister/afleveringen/2019/September/3.html Accessed 29 December 2019. Homan, Shane. 2019. Mark II: Reworking the Heritage B(r)and. In Remembering Popular Music’s Past. Memory-Heritage-History, ed. Lauren Istvandity, Sarah Baker, and Zelmarie Cantillon, 85–99. London/New York: Anthem Press. Ilegems, Michael. 2019. Onze man ging op jublileumtournee met dEUS. Knack, May 15. Istvandity, Lauren, and Zelmarie Cantillon. 2019. The Precarity of Memory, Heritage and History in Remembering Popular Music’s Past. In Remembering Popular Music’s Past. Memory-Heritage-History, ed. Lauren Istvandity, Sarah Baker, and Zelmarie Cantillon, 1–10. London/New York: Anthem Press. Kamer, Gijsbert. 2019. The Ideal Crash is nog altijd een geliefd album, maar ook live wordt het na het zesde nummer wat minder. De Volkskrant, May 16. Keunen, Gert. 2014. Alternative Mainstream: Making Choices in Pop Music. Amsterdam: Valiz. Krueger, Alan. 2019. Rockonomics. A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us about Economics and Life. New York: Currency/Penguin Knooihuizen, Klaas. 2019. Live komt ‘The ideal crash’ van dEUS maar langzaam op gang. Trouw, May 16. Painter, Karen. 2006. On Creativity and Lateness. In Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work, ed. Karen Painter and Thomas Crow, 1–11. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute. Pek, Norbert. 2019. Barman en Janzoons blikken terug op het roerige ontstaan van de dEUS-derde. https://3voor12.vpro.nl/artikelen/overzicht/ 2019/mei/dEUS-Ideal-Crash-Interview.html. Accessed 30 December 2019. Provoost, Frank. 2019. dEUS weet de ‘Ollanders’ stil te krijgen. NRC, May 16. Reynolds, Simon. 2014. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber & Faber. Robertson, Derek. 2019. A Different Kind of Weird: dEUS on The Ideal Crash. http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4152306-a-different-kind-ofweird—deus-on-the-ideal-crash. Accessed 30 December 2019. Rotteveel, Raymond. 2019. De dEUS-motor ronkt als een formule 1-wagen van Mercedes. Oor, May 16.

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Weinstein, Deena. 2014. Constructed nostalgia for rock’s golden age: ‘I Believe in Yesterday’. Volume! 11 (1): 20–36. Zonderman, Tom. 2019. Ideaal crashen met dEUS. https://www.bruzz.be/uit/ music/ideaal-crashen-met-deus-2019-05-15. Accessed 29 December 2019.

Confessin’ the Blues: The Rolling Stones’s Revisit of Their Musical Roots Frank Mehring

O my God, let me, with thanksgiving, remember, and confess unto Thee Thy mercies on me. The Confessions of Saint Augustine confession, n. The disclosing of something the knowledge of which by others is considered humiliating or prejudicial to the person confessing; a making known or acknowledging of one’s fault, wrong, crime, weakness, etc. Oxford English Dictionary

Introduction During their first American tour in 1964, the Rolling Stones met one of their childhood heroes in Chicago: blues legend Muddy Waters, whose song “Rollin’ Stone” had been the inspiration for the name of the young aspiring British band. Almost thirty years later, Rolling

F. Mehring (B) Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_10

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Stones guitarist Keith Richards confessed his embarrassment at witnessing Waters’s humiliation during the encounter at the legendary Chess Studio in Chicago. The weirdest [story] is when we went into Chess Studios in [19]64, the first time we came here. Went to Chicago to record most of the second or third album at Chess, and we walked in. There’s Phil Chess and there’s Ron Mahler, the engineer, and this guy in white overalls painting the ceiling. As we walk by into the studio, somebody said, “Oh, by the way, this is Muddy Waters,” and he’s painting the ceiling. He wasn’t selling records at the time, and this is the way he got treated. My first meeting with Muddy Waters is over the paintbrush, dripping, covered in white paint. “This is Muddy Waters.” I’m dying right? I get to meet the man. He’s my f**king God, right? – and he’s painting the ceiling! And I’m gonna work in his studio. Ouch! Oh, this is the record business, right? Mmmmm. The highs with the lows! Ooh, boy. In that one little meeting, in those few seconds, Muddy taught me more ... [Imitates Muddy speaking in a gentle voice] “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” And the look in his eye was saying, “Well, you can be painting the ceiling next year!” Because he had no idea that we revered him or anything. We were just another bunch of creeps. (Obrecht 1993, unpaginated)

By the time Richards was telling the story in 1993, the Rolling Stones were filling stadiums with more than 100,000 fans. The band members belonged to some of the most highly paid musicians in the industry. Their previous record-breaking Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour from August 1989 to August 1990 had a stunning box office of $202 million.1 By contrast, the last recorded concert by Muddy Waters in 1981 happened in a small blues venue in Chicago with room for little more than 100 people. Richards’s trip down memory lane resembles a confession about a situation that simply seemed wrong: “he’s painting the ceiling! And I’m gonna work in his studio. Ouch!” (Obrecht 1993, unpaginated, my emphasis). Is this statement a confession about a painful situation—the white British Rolling Stones as blues apprentices being much more successful than their black American musical masters—that can also be traced in the band’s musical development and their revisit of their musical roots? This question leads us to the crossroads of the transdisciplinary fields of American Studies and Media Studies. The conjunction has been opening 1 For an overview, see Margotin and Guesdon (2016, 574–576).

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up new transnational approaches to the functions and uses of American culture outside of the United States. In particular, scholars of American Studies and Media Studies have produced a number of new theoretical and methodological projects that emphasize how music easily crosses borders and language barriers, and creates new cultural contact zones (e.g., Garrett, Mehring and Redling, Raussert and Jones, Street, and Wagnleitner). Turning to the field of popular music in the second half of the twentieth century, I take my departure from musical recordings, live performances, and album cover design as a gateway to reflect on the intersection of autobiographic narratives and music.2 I call this approach sonic life writing. The musical history of the Rolling Stones represents a paradigmatic example of a band that appropriated the American blues in the early 1960s and gave the genre central stage in their albums in the late phase of their career, in the first decades of the new millennium. With 200 million records sold worldwide, almost 400 released songs, and more than 50 years of performing on sold-out tours, the Rolling Stones have boastfully claimed, with some justification, to be the “greatest rock-and-roll band ever” (Lee-Wright 2010, 263). In the following, I will trace the function of the blues in the career of the Rolling Stones and examine the concept of “confession” as a means to both pay respect to African American pioneers of the genre and self-inscription in the blues canon. With an eye to the explicit focus on the blues roots of the Rolling Stones, I am interested in exploring how the band revisits their origins in the late phase of their career when the band members are in their seventies. Is the “confession” of the blues roots a kind of “summation of their life’s work and a radical vision of the essence of their craft” as is often referred to as “late style” in art, literature, and music?3

2 As Erik Redling and I have argued in a different context, in “comparison to communication theorists, we, as transnational American Studies scholars, are particularly interested in the interplay between music and other art forms such as literature, painting, photography, video, film, television, graphic novels, and performance cultures” (Mehring and Redling 2017, unpaginated). 3 Recent studies such as Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and

Music, Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles questioned the traditional view of a style developed in the late phase of an artist’s career: “In their confrontation with death, creative artists, critics claim, produce work that is by turns a determination to continue while strength remains, a summation of their life’s work and a radical vision of the essence of their craft. And because this creative phenomenon is understood as primarily

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British Sonic Roots When the Rolling Stones toured the United States in October 1964, they were invited to play two songs on the Ed Sullivan Show, the most important TV show for bands hoping to break into the American market. Together with the Beatles, who had appeared on the same program eight months earlier, the Stones became part of the so-called British Invasion— the spectacular popularity of British rock bands such as the Animals, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, or the Who among others in 1960s America4 — and laid the groundwork for a remarkable career as one of the most popular rock’n roll bands spanning more than 60 years. While the Beatles performed two of their own songs on the show—the upbeat, winningly naive, and catchy “I Want to Hold your Hand” and the rock’n roller “I Saw Her Standing There”—the Rolling Stones took a different route. Their earliest hits were covers of African American blues and rock’n roll songs. On the Ed Sullivan show, the Stones played “Around and Around,” and twenty minutes later, their new single “Time is On My Side.” Both songs had been recorded just a few months earlier during their first trip to the United States in the legendary Chess Studio on 2120 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago. The street had been made famous by the Rolling Stones who named one of their instrumental compositions “2120 South Michigan Avenue” on their album 12 × 5 (1964). For British blues aficionados, the street address and the studio spaces invoked a special place for African American blues and rock musicians who functioned as musical mentors, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, or Chuck Berry. Earlier, on Clay Cole’s TV Show, the Stones performed, amongst other blues covers, “Confessin’ the Blues”—one of the great blues standards by pianist and singer Jay McShann from 1941. Rather than following the lead on McShann’s recording or the more aggressive interpretation by Chuck Berry from 1960, the British band slowed down the tempo, turning it into a relaxed blues number. an existential response to a common fate, so late style is understood as something that transcends the particularities of place, time and medium” (McMullan and Smiles 2016, flap). 4 The British Invasion did not only bring “a flood of recordings by British band on the American market” as Starr and Waterman explain, it also stimulated American bands to embrace the then new “British” styles including fashion, haircuts, and even accents (Starr and Waterman 2010, 256).

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In the following years, the Stones would increasingly write their own songs, exploring a variety of genres from rock’n roll, folk, Mississippi Delta, to Latin-jazz, psychedelic rock, R&B, soul, or even disco (see Covach 2019a and b, 3 and 40; Coelho 2019, 68; Beller-McKenna 2019, 121). At the end of Murry Nelson’s band biography on the Rolling Stones from 2010, the author muses on the outstanding accomplishments of the band as the most accomplished and longest lasting rock band, despite a long history of drug abuse, alcoholism, and accidents. Since 2008, they had not played together and at that time, no album was in sight. Nelson therefore concluded his Rolling Stones biography in 2010 by asking: “what now?” (Nelson 2010, 144). The answer came six years later. In 2016, eleven years after their last studio album, A Bigger Bang (2005), the Stones came up with a new concept: their latest albums function as a kind of confession regarding their indebtedness to African American music: the studio album with famous blues covers called Lonesome and Blue (2016), and the educational blues compilation Confessin’ the Blues (2018). Lead guitarist Ron Wood and musicians of his Ronnie Wood Band offered musical tributes to those blues and rock’n roll artists that shaped their international break-through both in the United Kingdom and the United States in the early 1960s: Mad Lad: A Live Tribute to Chuck Berry (2019) and Mr. Luck–A Tribute to Jimmy Reed: Live at the Royal Albert Hall (2021). In the following, I will critically analyze and conceptualize the way the Rolling Stones provided a “confession” regarding their musical beginnings. The Rolling Stones use the term “confession” in different ways. First, it functions as a code to reference one of their early recordings at Chicago’s Chess studio; by naming the compilation of influential blues songs Confessin’ the Blues , the Stones refer to their personal musical heroes and early beginnings as a blues cover band. The term “confession” also connotes the religious sphere of confessing one’s sins to a priest and the autobiographical tradition, which can be traced to The Confessions of Saint Augustine of the late fourth century A.D. In the context of the Rolling Stones’s sonic life writing, the confession addresses the paradoxical situation that the Stones themselves, the apprentices, have become richer and more famous than their masters, to whom they owe so much.

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Canonizing the Blues Confession The release of the educational compilation Confessin’ the Blues in 2018 shows that the Rolling Stones envision themselves as an institutionalized force in the world of music, which shapes, controls, and curates the blues canon along the lines of their own musical development. The album brings together forty-two blues songs by artists including Chuck Berry, Big Bill Broonzy, Bo Diddley, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf, among many others. With the compilation, the Rolling Stones shape the American canon of blues music along the lines of those artists who inspired them to write their own songs. The first song on the compilation Confessin’ the Blues is already a kind of “confession” the Rolling Stones offer about the origins of their band’s name. Muddy Waters’s “Rollin’ Stone” functioned as a musical naissance for the Rolling Stones in the early 1960s in more than one way. It provided the structural blueprint for their appropriations of American blues and also gave birth to the band’s name: like Muddy Waters, they defined themselves as “Rolling Stones.” The narrator of the song identifies himself as Muddy thereby offering a sense of authenticity to the audience: “I went to my baby’s house/ And I sit down oh, on her steps/ She said, ‘Come on in now, Muddy/ You know my husband just now left/ Sure ’nough, he just now left.”5 The woman he is in love with has a child and asks Muddy to take on the role of a father after her husband has left her. He then tells his own story emphasizing his mother’s prediction regarding his future: he’s “gonna be a rollin’ stone,” implying that he will be a restless traveler who will never find a home or settle down. Waters’s hit “Mannish Boy” features the line “I’m a rollin’ stone.” As this is the last song on the compilation, the Rolling Stones find an additional way to inscribe themselves metaphorically in the long history of the blues. The band appears to be a part and parcel of the blues canon. The liner notes of the blues compilation album written by the British music specialist Colin Larkin recount how blues became a “minor sport” in the 1950s, before experiencing what the author described as a “cult renaissance in the early 1960s” (Larkin 2018, 3). The text also addresses a cultural gap, which needed to be filled: “British and American Teenagers wanted something that was anathema to their parents. The Americans 5 See https://genius.com/Muddy-waters-rollin-stone-lyrics. Accessed 18 November 2022.

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had milkshake pop stuffed down their straw with Bobby Vinton, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vee, and Bobby Whatevah. The British had Craig Douglas, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, and a plethora of pop flavored Trad Jazz. It was dire. Something edgy, radical, dirty, and different was required” (Larkin 2018, 3). The gaping hole, so the traditional story that is mentioned in the liner notes goes, could not be properly filled by American creative artists at the time. It seemed as if American artists were lacking the power and energy to push musical developments to a new stage. The introduction by Larkin of the comprehensive 36-page liner notes to the Rolling Stones’s blues collection claims that “it was left to the young British scallywags who formed countless beat groups to influence and passively educate the ears of the youth that had formerly been assaulted by the turgid pop songs of the day” (Larkin 2018, 3). Considering that the collection of blues songs on the “Confession” compilation had been curated by the Rolling Stones, it comes as no surprise that the liner notes emphasize the special role of the band played in the British Invasion of 1964: “they took the blues revival to its homeland and woke everybody up that morning” (ibid.). In the United States, the Rolling Stones enjoyed tremendous success with their blues-inspired repertoire. For example, the Rolling Stones’s American Tour of 1969 culminated in a triumphant show in New York City’s Madison Square Garden which was later released as a live album under the title Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out (1970) (Margotin and Guesdon 2016, 317). At the same time, however, the popularity of African American blues artists such as Big Bill Broonzy, Willie Dixon, and many other musical heroes of the Stones was in decline. A good example of the asymmetrical situation can be found by looking at the different venues in which the Rolling Stones and traditional blues artists performed.6 While the Rolling Stones occasionally invited their blues heroes, such as John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, or Chuck Berry, to join them for a song in their stadium concerts before tens of thousands of people, the famous 1981 concert by Muddy Waters was strikingly different. Here, 6 The financial aspect of the asymmetrical relationship between original blues artists and the white appropriators from Great Britain is also part of the economic “confessin” narrative: the back of the CD/vinyl edition states that 10% of the album publisher Bertelsmann Music Group’s (BMG) net receipts from the sale of this album with a minimum of three UK pounds sterling will be donated to Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven Foundation. This arrangement may have been made to make up for the asymmetrical financial revenues of masters and apprentices.

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the Rolling Stones were in the audience attending their hero’s performance, and the following scene ensued. The Chicago blues man invited Jagger to come onto his stage thereby setting the record of “master” and “apprentice” straight. When Jagger joined Waters on “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Baby Please Don’t Go,” the audience was electrified. Waters was clearly in command of the comparatively small venue and the audience, while Jagger assumed the role of a student who gave his best to enter the tradition of blues performances. As the self-assured master of ceremonies, Waters shouted toward the audience, calling the other band members to join him. The taped show offers a remarkable example of a visual and sonic “dark mirror” in the sense of Eric Lott: “Marketed to white consumers, black culture invites whites to view themselves in a mirror of racial difference while at the same time offering the illusory reassurance that they remain ‘wholly’ white” (Lott 2017, flap). The United States pop culture is full of examples that show “how racial fantasy, structured through the mirroring of identification and appropriation so visible in blackface performance, still thrives in American culture despite intervening decades of civil rights activism, multiculturalism, and the alleged post-racialism of the twenty-first century” (Lott 2017, 6) (Fig. 1). While Waters performed his song with a sense of calm and command over the material, Mick Jagger began his dance-like performance characterized by unrestrained wildness, bending his body in grotesque fashion, with wide open eyes and mouth, making frenzy-like gestures. In the presence of his idol, Jagger was overperforming, suggesting that he learned all the “right” blues moves from the African American master. Ultimately, the performance seems more in line with white fantasies of African American culture and the Jim Crow dance than with the kind of performance culture that Waters and other blues icons have cultivated. Early performances of the Rolling Stones at the Ed Sullivan Show of “Around and Around” in 1964 and “Little Red Rooster” in the following year likewise revealed the hidden “black mirror” dynamics of self-and-other mirroring of racial symbolic capital. This becomes visible when, for example, Mick Jagger imitates sexually charged growls while trying to move like African American performers such as Chuck Berry, Otis Redding, James Brown, and others. When Waters, in the 1981 concert, called blues legend and club owner Buddy Guy to the stage, who was likewise present when the Stones visited the Chess Studios for the first time in 1964 to record five blues covers (Nelson 2010, 29), both artists take Jagger into their midst and embrace

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Fig. 1. a Mick Jagger and Muddy Waters performing “Please Don’t Go” (17:40 min.) (Source Video Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago, Sunday, 22 November 1981. Recorded on 22 November 1981 by David Hewitt on the Record Plant Black Truck, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and released on 10 July 2012. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=32YQYJuxyn0. Accessed 24 April 2023). b Mick Jagger and Muddy Waters performing “Mannish Boy” with guitarist Keith Richards in the background (right) (30:45 min) (Source Video Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago, Sunday, 22 November 1981. Recorded on 22 November 1981 by David Hewitt on the Record Plant Black Truck, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and released on 10 July 2012. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=32YQYJuxyn0. Accessed 24 April 2023)

him in a fatherly fashion. Jagger’s big smile during the concert at the Checkerboard Lounge says a lot about the kind of satisfaction he must have felt on the stage in 1981 being honored to perform in the midst of the heroes of his early years as an aspiring young blues performer. Jagger seems so overwhelmed by the presence of his blues heroes that he cannot help but chew on his nails in excitement like a child (Fig. 2).

The Sonic “Confession” of The Rolling Stones The sound of the blues depends not only on the artist’s individual musical talents but also on the recording equipment and the expertise of the producer in the recording studio. Critics agree that, compared to the sound of the first Rolling Stones album, The Rolling Stones / England’s Newest Hit Makers (1964), it was the expertise of the sound engineers at Chess Studios in Chicago on 12 × 5 (1964) that gave the band a sonic

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Fig. 2. a Mick Jagger on stage in-between Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy performing “Mannish Boy”, with guitarist Ronnie Wood in the background (35:24) (Source Video Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago, Sunday, 22 November 1981. Recorded on 22 November 1981 by David Hewitt on the Record Plant Black Truck, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and released on 10 July 2012. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=32YQYJuxyn0. Accessed 24 April 2023). b Mick Jagger on stage chewing on his nails next to his blues heroes Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, and Lefty Dizz (Source Video Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago, Sunday, 22 November 1981. Recorded on 22 November 1981 by David Hewitt on the Record Plant Black Truck, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and released on 10 July 2012. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=32YQYJuxyn0. Accessed 24 April 2023)

boost in clarity and a more professional sound (Margotin and Guesdon 2016, 58). One of the songs on this album is “Confessin‘ the Blues” which would become the touchstone for the Stones when they revisited their musical roots in the new millennium. The Rolling Stones had been playing “Confessin’ the Blues,” one of the great blues standards, since their early days and recorded the song on June 11, 1964, in the Chess Studios in Chicago. It was originally composed by African American pianist and singer Jay McShann, whose band consisted of jazz icons such as the inaugurator of the bebop aesthetic Charlie Parker, tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and the archetypal blues shouter Walter Brown. The version by the Rolling Stones is decidedly different from earlier versions by McShann or even Chuck Berry from 1958. The Rolling Stones version is considerably slowed down, harking back to old-fashioned blues standards. At the center of the song is Jagger’s harmonica, played over two guitars and a boogie-woogie piano. The song

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was included in the EP 12 × 5, released in August 1964 in the United Kingdom. The album also features covers of “If you need me” by Wilson Pickett, “Empty Heart,” and “2120 South Michigan Avenue” by Nanker Phelge, and “Around and Around” by Chuck Berry. In 2016, the Rolling Stones returned to their blues roots in a remarkable fashion. The new Blue and Lonesome record consisted entirely of blues covers. It marked a return to their first album from 1964. Here, all but two songs were interpretations of African American songs of the 1950s and 60s, which they admired as teenagers, including “Commit a Crime” (Howlin’ Wolf 1966), “Blue and Lonesome” (Memphis Slim 1949), “I Gotta Go” (Little Walter 1955), or “I Can’t Quit You Baby” (Willie Dixon 1956) among others. The new album opens with a sound reminiscent of the Chicago blues of the 1960s. Jagger plays a hoarse harmonica, moaning and wailing over a soundscape that is energized by a strong pulsating backbeat by Charlie Watts. Distorted riffs from Richard’s and Wood’s electric guitars give the songs a crude drive. The sonic atmosphere is reminiscent of a small blues club. Stones fans might associate the sound with a famous performance by Muddy Waters in Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago in 1981. The title track, “Lonesome and Blue,” was first recorded by blues pianist, singer, and composer Memphis Slim. The Rolling Stones version, however, pays homage to the recording by Little Walter. Walter substituted the piano and horns with a more bluesy guitar sound. The sound on the Rolling Stones album is much fuller with two electric guitars and a similarly wailing harmonica. Jagger’s growls and rough intonations are in line with his typical impulsive vocal interpretations. At the same time, the version reveals to what degree he had been inspired by the kind of African American performers that the album pays tribute to. With Blue and Lonesome, the Stones have come full circle, explicitly paying tribute to their early beginnings. It is the culmination of a process that started with the release of Voodoo Lounge in 1994. Sonically, this album was designed to evoke the essence of the Chess Studio sound of the early years without additional support of synthesizers, horns, or samples that had become a staple in the previous Stones productions. The compilation Confessin’ the Blues only contains covers of songs composed by male blues artists. If it was designed in part to educate twenty-first-century listeners about the importance of the blues, the compilation misses the point. When the Stones recount their sonic

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coming-of-age as rock stars via blues musicians of the 1950s, the influential female blues artists of the 1910s, 1920s, and beyond are being erased. Eminent figures such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ica Cox, Bessie Smith, Queen Victoria Spivey, Ethel Waters, “Ma” Rainy, and Big Mama Thornton are conspicuously absent.7 When Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” became a best-selling hit in 1920, it established the blues as a popular art form in the United States. It paved the way for Black expression and musical forms of self-empowerment (see Southern 1997, 511). The coded language of a woman resisting both male exploitation and white supremacy in the 1920s frames the song as a protest song—a musical statement of resistance to any form of violent authority. By erasing the female origins from American blues and the golden era of the Black female blues singer, the Stones’s “confession” can be read as a painful oversight or unwillingness to recognize an important part of American blues history. Could it be that during their early beginnings, their understanding of the blues was quite limited, partly due to the problem of having had to access a broad repertoire of blues records growing up in Great Britain?

The Visual “Confession” of The Rolling Stones Another confession that can be found in the recent Stones albums is related to the visual history of advertising and framing blues musicians. One way to identify patterns in image production, usage, (re)mediation, and dissemination is to search for interpictorial clusters, a term I borrow from the German American studies scholar Udo Hebel. He argues that we need to consider the contexts and politics of images, the frequently hidden agendas of image production, the inter-medial contexts of image distribution, and the cultural dimensions of looking at images. To understand what Hebel describes as the “implicit or explicit interplay between pictures”—particularly in political photography but also in other visual media—a clear conception of the semiotic structure of interpictorially charged pictures becomes necessary (Hebel 2014, 404). Photographs and album covers need to be approached as hybrid systems that have

7 Daphne Duval Harrison calls them “uncrowned queens” in her book on Black Pearls (1988, 5).

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not only referential but also symbolic functions.8 As W. J. T. Mitchell and Gabriele Rippl have argued, there are no pure media, but only and always mixed media—album covers and photographic liner notes combine image and text to frame the sonic experience. Hebel claims that the concept of interpictoriality is particularly suited to the agendas of American studies (related to the analysis of contexts, functions, and national narratives as well as sociopolitical and cultural implications) to “interact with the concerns of Art History, Bildwissenschaft, and visual culture studies with iconographic conventions, traditions, and repertoires” (2014, 414). I argue that this approach can also be productive to engage with my approach to sonic life writing. The visual “confession” of the Rolling Stones follows a dual strategy based on the accompanying book and the album cover. First, the vinyl edition of Confessin’ the Blues comes with a coffee table book including photographic reproductions of all the blues artists featured in the compilation. The collection of press shots offers a quasi-documentary approach to the history of blues. The photographs show blues artists with their guitars in a moment of soul searching, eyes closed, giving musical expression to what appears a heartfelt expression of powerful feelings. Or the artists are captured in a joyful mood, smiling exuberantly, showcasing their deep satisfaction derived from their performances. Second, the cover of Confessin’ the Blues visualizes the confession artistically. The hand-drawn cover is reminiscent of race records—78-rpm phonograph records marketed to African Americans between the 1920s and 1940s— and the visual tradition of the minstrelsy advertisement. The ads for blues artists such as Ethel Waters, Mamie Smith, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith or bluesmen such Henry Thomas, Papa Charlie Jackson, Jim Jackson, Blind Blake, or Barbecue Bob spoke through minstrel stereotypes such as the coon, the mammy, the tragic mulatto, and the jezebel (Bogle 2001, 9). The image for the Confessin’ the Blues cover was drawn by the Stones guitar player Ronnie Wood to depict, as the liner notes explain, “the raw passion and emotion the blues artists channeled into their music” (Fig. 3). The drawing shows an unidentified African American guitar player rendered in crayons in black and red in front of a beige background. It is interesting to note that the drawing on the cover of the blues compilation is cropped. The complete drawing, which Ronnie Wood offered

8 Along with Hebel, see Winfried Nöth, “Bildsemiotic” (2009, 243–44).

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Fig. 3 Ronnie Wood, album cover of Confessin’ the Blues (2018). © Ronnie Wood

for sale as a print in his online art shop, showed the singer/player in full body. In addition, Wood added the source of inspiration. On the lower right corner, he identified the performer as Big Bill Broonzy (1903– 1958), the internationally well-known American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist who in the 1950s became a leading figure in the American folk music revival. Instead of “Confessin’ the Blues,” the lines on the upper left–right corner of the original drawing refer to another famous song called “One Hand Loose.” Wood added the line of the chorus:

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“Give me one hand loose and I’ll be satisfied.”9 Wood has captured a moment that is part of the photographic blues memory—a player with eyes closed expressing his powerful feelings with words and guitar sounds. In reference to the lapping tongue logo of The Rolling Stones, we see a protruding tongue emerging from exaggerated lips. The lips can also be read against a racist history of blackface minstrel performances which were popular in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. For example, the cover of the sheet song Dandy Jim from Caroline shows an African American banjo player with exaggerated visual expressions and protruding lips that resonates with the drawing by Wood. Similarly, exaggerations of lips and tongues mark, for example, the cover of the popular edition of songs entitled. The Celebrated Minstrel Melodies of 1843 and 1844.10 One crucial element of Wood’s iconographic drawing is a splatter of what looks like white acrylic paint on the guitar, right arm, and middle finger of the player. The white color brings an additional layer to the crayon drawing, giving rise to a number of allusions. What does the color white refer to? Given the narrative of the Rolling Stones’s appropriation of the African American blues vernacular and their consequent global success story of a multi-million-dollar musical enterprise, the color white can be read as part of a confession that refers to the asymmetrical economic situation of African American blues artists and the Rolling Stones as beneficiaries of a white-washed appropriation. It also ties in literally with Keith Richards’s confession of embarrassment during his first encounter with Muddy Waters in Chicago in 1964: “Muddy Waters is over the paintbrush, dripping, covered in white paint” (Obrecht, unpaginated). The rough outlines of the player’s clothes suggest a rather simple outfit. The guitar also seems to be a rather plain Robert Johnson-style acoustic guitar. The visualization is in line with the album’s introduction “The Blues” in the booklet. Here, the music specialist and writer Colin Larking references the “cheap Mexican guitars,” which many sharecroppers and workers from the cotton fields of the Dockery Plantation near Cleveland, Mississippi, played to frame and refine the hollers that emerged during their 9 See the Official Ronnie Wood Online Art Shop. https://shop.ronniewood.com/. Accessed 17 August 2022. 10 See, e.g., the cover from The Celebrated Minstrel Melodies, Lester S. Levy sheet Music Collection, John Hopkins University (1843), or Dandy Jim from Caroline by Dan Emmett (c. 1844).

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work in the cotton fields (Larkin 2018, 1). Finally, Ron Wood’s artwork is in interpictorial dialogue with GRRR! , the preceding album that offered a retrospective overview of five decades of band’s musical output. There too, the image of the red lips with the tongue sticking out shows up in a racially complex visual field. It echoes two visual traditions often associated with African American culture: jungle fantasies and sexuality. The design features the head of a gorilla whose mouth is shaped in the emblematic Rolling Stones logo of the lapping tongue which also figures prominently on the album cover, Blue and Lonesome. The animalistic growl GRRR! brings the band into close contact with white imaginations of the kind of primitivist modernism that the cover of the famous 1933 King Kong movie poster evoked; a gigantic black ape emerging in front of the “urban jungle” of New York City, his mouth shaped to break out into a load roar, clutching a half-naked White woman in his left paw—a thinly veiled metaphor for both the anti-jazz crusade in white media that connected jazz with the invasion of allegedly savage jungle elements in modern metropolitan life, and an emerging influence of black culture in the United States that shifted between attraction and repulsion.11 The fascination with Black culture in “primitivist modernism” (Lemke 1998, 4), which has been traced in American literature, art, and performance culture of the modernist period, also informs the iconic visual marketing of the Rolling Stones.12 The visual design of the Rolling Stones album cover GRRR! connects a feeling of unconstrained wildness to white fantasies about African American culture and music.

Conclusion With the release of Grrr! (2012), Blue and Lonesome (2016), and Confessin’ the Blues (2018), the Rolling Stones have come full circle revisiting their blues roots and first encounters with blues legends such as Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, or Buddy Guy during the early years of their career. By focusing on the implications of the term “confession,” 11 See e.g., the overview of American newspaper articles to the emergence of jazz in the 1920s in Sieglinde Lemke’s Primitivist Modernism (1998, 63–66). 12 I have argued elsewhere that in the 1920s the geographical region of “Harlem” functions as a signifier for a new perspective on African American creativity and culture that informed white fantasy constructions of primitivist modernism (Mehring 2014, unpaginated).

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this chapter looked at sonic, textual, and visual layers to reveal different strategies by which the Rolling Stones honor the African American blues tradition. By creating interpictorial clusters, it became apparent that the racial imaginary of album covers draws on a long history of stereotypical visualizations of African American music and musicians from minstrelsy in performance culture to representations of primitivist modernism. The Rolling Stones’s return to their roots functions as a kind of selfassertion and self-empowerment. It leads to a “confession” about their roots in and love for African American blues music that is two-faced: on the one hand, they cherish and dedicate their work to the original blues masters and credit the blues form as the key to their great commercial success and fame. On the other hand, an analysis of their sonic life writing reveals that they utilize the African American blues tradition sonically and visually for commercial reasons and that these tap into the White imaginations of blackness and Black culture. The kind of sonic life writing I presented in this article can help to shed light on how the musical roots of the Rolling Stones continue to shape their efforts in the new millennium to come to terms with their conflicting indebtedness to the blues.

Coda During the Obama era, the Rolling Stones were institutionalized in the National Blues Museum in St. Louis. The exhibition in the first display room opens with a video of the 2012 White House celebration of the blues. We see and hear Mick Jagger singing Robert Johnson’s blues standard “Sweet Home Chicago.” In the middle of the song, Jagger hands the microphone to Barack Obama who joins in. The symbolic surplus of meaning produced by the Rolling Stones frontman between the All-Star-Blues Band in the White House and the first African American President suggested that at the political center of American power, the Rolling Stones have been accepted into the American blues community. In that sense, the 2018 album’s explicit reference to “confessin,” their blues roots in the late phase of their career is not only about the first meaning of the term according to the Oxford English Dictionary, namely, “making known or acknowledging of one’s fault, wrong, crime, weakness.” Another connotation of “confession” is related to the religious sphere: “an authoritative declaration of the articles of belief; a creed” (OED). At the White House concert, the Rolling Stones, the President, and African American musicians are united by one confession—their faith in the blues. Seen in this way, the White House concert becomes a quasireligious communion. In such a reading of “confessin’ the blues,”

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Fig. 4 Mick Jagger hands the microphone to Barack Obama to join the band singing “Sweet Home Chicago” at the White House during the concert “In Performance in the White House: Red, White and Blues” in 2012. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7x4ZS7ZZWc&t=7s. Accessed 24 April 2023

does President Obama’s invitation of Jagger (and in a metaphorical way the Rolling Stones) to the White House celebration of the blues urge us to believe that all “sins” are forgiven? (Fig. 4).

References Primary Sources The Rolling Stones. 1964. 12x5. Chess. ———. 1970. Get Yer Ya Ya‘s Out. Decca. ———. 2012. Grrr! ABKCO Music and Records. ———. 2016. Blue and Lonesome. London: British Grove Studios; Henson Recording Studios. ———. 2018. Confessin’ the Blues, Handpicked and Curated in Collaboration with the Rolling Stones. BMG. Wood, Ron. 2019. Mad Lad: A Live Tribute to Chuck Berry. BMG. ———. 2021. Mr. Luck – A Tribute to Jimmy Reed: Live at the Royal Albert Hall. BMG.

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Secondary Literature Beller-McKenna, Daniel. 2019. Driving Stones Country in Five Songs. In The Cambridge Companion to The Rolling Stones, ed. Victor Coelho and John Covach, 121–141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bogle, Donald. 2001. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York and London: Continuum. Covach, John. 2019a. The Rolling Stones: Albums and Singles, 1963–1974. In The Cambridge Companion to The Rolling Stones, ed. Victor Coelho and John Covach, 3–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2019b. The Rolling Stones in 1968: In Defense of Lingering Psychedelia. In The Cambridge Companion to The Rolling Stones, ed. Victor Coelho and John Covach, 40–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coelho, Victor. 2019. Exile, America, and the Theater of The Rolling Stones, 1968–1972. In The Cambridge Companion to The Rolling Stones, ed. Victor Coelho and John Covach, 57–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dolan, Mark K. 2007. Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar. Southern Cultures 13 (3), Fall: 106–124. Garrat, James. 2019. Music and Politics. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldwater, Robert John. 1938. Primitivism in Modern Painting. New York and London: Harper and Brothers. Harrison, Daphne Duval. 1988. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hebel, Udo. 2014. American Pictures and (Trans-)National Iconographies: Mapping Interpictorial Clusters in American Studies. In American Studies Today: New Research Agendas, ed. Winfried Fluck, Erik Redling, Sabine Sielke, and Hubert Zapf, 401–431. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Kroes, Rob. 2015. Prison Area, Independence Valley: American Paradoxes in Political Life and Popular Culture. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press. Larkin, Colin. 2018. The Blues: An Introduction. In Confessin’ the Blues, 1–15. BMG. Lemke, Sieglinde. 1998. Primitivist Modernism. Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Lee-Wright, Peter. 2010. The Documentary Handbook. London and New York: Routledge. Lott, Eric. 1992. Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy. Representations 39, Summer: 23–50. ———. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and The American Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. Black Mirror. The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Maier, Ralph. 2019. The Rolling Stones’ Sound: At the Crossroads of Roots and Technology. In The Cambridge Companion to The Rolling Stones, ed. Victor Coelho and John Covach, 101–121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Margotin, Philippe, and Jean-Michel. Guesdon. 2016. The Rolling Stones All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers. McMullan, Gordon, and Sam Smiles, eds. 2016. Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mehring, Frank. 2014. Mediating Mexico: Winold Reiss and the Transcultural Dimension of “Harlem” in the 1920s. fiar. Journal of the International Association of Inter-American Studies 7 (2), July: 10–35. http://interamerica.de/ current-issue/mehring/. Accessed 20 April 2020. Mehring, Frank and Eric Redling. 2017. Introduction. Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music. European Journal of American Studies 12 (4). http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/12384. Accessed 20 April 2020. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2015. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The Chicago University Press. Nelson, Murry R. 2010. The Rolling Stones: A Musical Biography (The Story of the Band). Santa Barbara: Greenwood. Nöth, Winfried. 2009. Bildsemiotic, Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, ed. Klaus Sachs-Hombach, 235–254. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Obrecht, Jas. 1993. Muddy, Wolf & Me. Guitar Player (Sep). https://www.que stia.com/read/1G1-13247405/muddy-wolf-me. Accessed 20 April 2020. Raussert, Wilfried, and John Miller Jones, eds. 2008. Traveling Sounds. Music, Migration, and Identity in the U.S. and Beyond. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Richards, Keith and James Fox. 2010. Life. New York. Southern, Eileen. 1997. The Music of Black Americans. A History, 3rd ed. New York and London: Norton & Company. Starr, Larry, and Christopher Waterman, eds. 2010. American Popular Music. From Minstrelsy to MP3, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Street, John. 2012. Music and Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wagnleitner, Reinhold. 1994. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War. The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. Wenner, Jann. 1978. Love in Vain: Dylan and the Stones in the 70s. Rolling Stone, 21 September, 1978.

Artists’ Haunts: Late Artists Revisiting Their Work Beyond Their Time Rudie van Leeuwen Story

There are countless examples of ghost stories about deceased artists posthumously visiting the beloved or accursed locales they frequented during their lifetime. Many artists who take over another artist’s studio will sense the residual presence of a previous user, but sometimes, there is more to it than paint splatters on the floor. A certain “Claire Sz.,” tentatively identified here as Klára Bálint (1913–1992), widow of the novelist and literary historian Antal Szerb (1901–1945), recounted a story in 1978 that she had heard from her brother Andy, putatively the painter Endre Bálint (1914–1986), who, together with other artists, had moved into an empty house with a large studio after Budapest’s liberation from the Nazis: One bright day, the ghost showed up, it knocked on the pictures they hung up. […] Then it walked up and down in the large studio […] It was not a hallucination, they both heard it. […] It roamed around, knocked on the wall but usually knocked on the pictures. […] Andy was unable to

R. van Leeuwen Story (B) Karel van Mander Academy, Arnhem, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_11

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leave the studio because if he did, he could not go back to sleep and that exhausted him completely. They had to move out. (Dégh 2001, 272)

Is there such a thing as a revenant artist? Although many artists do not let their death stand in the way of a good business plan, only the odd artist works from beyond the grave. Such is the case of the late “Selfic” painter Oberto Airaudi (1950–2013), whose artistic activities are still being continued by the hands of mediums supposedly controlled by his spirit (Zoccatelli 2016). Selfic Painting, a self-coined term based on the spiritual discipline of “selfica” that Airaudi used for his personal “method of alchemical painting,” is described as “an art technique” through which “intelligent energies are conveyed through two-dimensional shapes based on symbols and colors” (Coriandolo and Pesco 2016; Tarassaco 2020). Before dying, Airaudi instructed his students to act as mediums and paint together under his spiritual guidance after his death and sign these works “Oberto Airaudi through his mediums” (Introvigne 2017).

Varieties of Spirit Art Although artists who themselves take the lead in their posthumous production are scarce, there are many artist-mediums who claim they paint automatically under the influence of dead artists (Pessoa 2004; Introvigne 2017; Gruber CoMA). This is called “spirit art,” a container concept (cf. Deveney 2010, 525). The aim of this contribution is not to assess whether the phenomenon of spirit art is real or pretend, but to identify the origins, different forms, and their cultural contexts. The roots of spirit art date back at least to the mid-nineteenth century, when the practice of table-turning became a favorite pastime of many an artist, including the renowned romancier Victor Hugo (1802–1885) and his son Charles (1826–1871) (Brower 2010, 15–17; Audinet et al. 2012). During an exile on the Isle of Jersey, the table parlante dictated eloquent phrases of Romantic sensibility to father and son Hugo, which also exerted a major influence on the French writer’s own creative thinking. Under the hands of Charles, who acted as a medium, Victor tried to break the seal of the beyond in order to confirm the truth of a preexisting source of philosophical ideas. With the aid of a threelegged planchette with one leg ending in a pencil, intricate designs were drawn (Fig. 1), allegedly by the alchemist Nicolas Flamel (c. 1340–1418) (Chambers 2008, 178).

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Fig. 1 Nicholas Flamel via Victor Hugo, A Mercurian, July 26, 1854, 9:25 PM, from Chambers (1998, 153) (Source www.gavroche.org/vhugo/flamel. shtml)

Spirit art, also known as mediumistic or psychic art, is often regarded as a variety of Outsider Art or Art Brut (Wojcik 2016; Gruber 2019). It occurs when individuals who often have little or no artistic training suddenly feel overcome by an inner impulse to draw or paint in professional or unconventional styles. These self-taught artists usually claim that they create their works automatically without the intervention of their own consciousness. They consider their works of art not as their own workmanship, but as the results of interventions by some supernatural agency, often the spirit of a deceased person (Gruber 1980). André Breton (1896–1966), who defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism,” gave a great stimulus to spirit art in the surrealist magazine Minotaure (1933) by promoting spiritualist practices (Conley 2013; Bauduin 2014, 35–62). A distinction must be made between mediumistic art (Pytlik 2003, 35–68), such as auragraphs and portraits of spirits painted by mediums during seances; automatic art by medium artists who claim their hands are guided by spirits, and precipitated works of art (Nagy 2006). The latter term has been coined for those works that arise spontaneously, like eikones acheiropoieta—pictures ostensibly made

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without the use of human hands (Spanke 2000). Besides these three categories, there are works inspired by spiritualist theories, which are not considered spirit art by spiritualists (Introvigne 2017).

Phantom Artists and Frauds During the Belle Époque Regrettably, mediumistic painting became inextricably linked with Ann O’Delia Diss Debar (c. 1849–1909). Also known as the Swami Laura Horos, she purported to be under the spiritual guidance of several old masters. Debar, who also ventured into the misty domain of occultism, ended up in jail in 1901 after having been sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for fraud and immoral sexual behavior at her London Temple (Deveney 2010, 529; Buescher 2014). Debar was labeled by Harry Houdini as “one of the most extraordinary fake mediums and mystery swindlers the world has ever known,” which also made spirit art highly suspect (Houdini 1924, 66). Another example of a spirit artist was the Glasgow cabinet-maker David Duguid (1832–1907). He was one of the first who claimed that he could precipitate spirit paintings without the aid of his hands, but “was caught cheating over and over again” (Price 1936, 168). One time, at a séance in Manchester in 1905, they searched him and found small oil paintings hidden in his trousers (Tabori 1966, 27). Although Duguid often created art manually, supposedly under the influence of Jan Steen (1626– 1679) and Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/1629–1682), Duguid’s spirit guides were also held responsible for producing images instantly during his séances, including several for his 1876 occult novel Hafed Prince of Persia. Unfortunately for Duguid, deceased artists could not be held liable for plagiarism, and several illustrations of Hafed, which proved suspiciously similar to ones in Cassell’s Family Bible, had to be removed from the second edition (Deveney 2010, 529) (Fig. 2a, b). Sociologist Massimo Introvigne, somewhat playing the devil’s advocate, notes that “[f]or the believers, however, similarities with the Cassell’s Family Bible, in both direct and guided spirit paintings of Hafed, were not conclusive evidence of fraud. If one believed that the spirits were at work, they could well have operated with material they found in the medium’s mind, including reminiscences of Cassell’s Family Bible” (Introvigne 2017). In an appendix to his novel, Duguid recorded the lively “communications from the Spirit Painters Jacob Ruisdal [sic] and Jan Steen” he received through a

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medium. At a séance which Duguid held in 1867, the late Jacob van Ruisdael told him that spirit materialization was “similar to a skeleton being covered anew with flesh and sinew” (Duguid 1876, 528). In 1873, Jan Steen expounded at another session that “spirit language is something else than the perception of thought” (Duguid 1876, 533). As he revealed that Jan Lievens had made a picture of him eating half-cooked fowls and that the two had paid a landlady’s bill by painting a black bull, Duguid literally conjured a cock-and-bull story in the mind’s eye (Duguid 1876, 545– 547). In the spring of 1867, under Steen’s direction, the medium painted “a full-length portrait of Ruisdal, who is represented passing judgment on a picture he is holding in his hands” (Duguid 1876, 548). A much-debated case is that of the English actor Mr. Edward Askew Sothern (1826–1881) who was acclaimed as a “magnetizer, or wonderworker” in spite of himself (New York Times 1865). As promotor of the

Fig. 2 a Hafed’s Initiation into the Order of the Magi, engraving from Duguid (1876, 81). b Moses Consecrating Eleazer as Aaron’s Successor, engraving (detail), from Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, 1860, 244

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New York Miracle Circle—supposedly composed of gentlemen of “high position” but actually consisting of actors at Barnum’s Museum—he had organized meetings at Benjamins Woolf’s house on Elm Street: “The walls were hung with the pictures, which Sothern and Woolf assured their visitors had been painted by the spirits of Rembrandt, Guido, and others” (Coleman 1866, 52). Sothern wrote a manifesto against spiritualists, exposing their presumed “self-delusion” and publicly denouncing mediums as “swindlers and imposters” in the Glasgow Citizen (Coleman 1866, 49). While touring America under his stage name Douglas Stuart, Sothern also performed as a magician and “joined in a thorough and exhaustive investigation of phenomena of ‘spiritualism’” (Coleman 1866, 50; Pemberton 1888, 115). His interests and abilities included (mimicking or mocking) spirit-rapping to the tune Yankee Doodle, making tables dance “in a genuine can-can,” and producing ghosts of “several departed people” (De Fontaine 1878, 175–180). He admitted that, while performing as a medium, he “did produce all manifestations, and did exhibit them, [but that] they were not spiritual” (Coleman 1866, 50; Pemberton 1888, 116). Born on April Fool’s Day, Sothern was such a notorious practical joker, that allegedly many of his closest friends did not attend his funeral, thinking it was a hoax; once, Sothern—then still very much alive—had fooled an undertaker by inquiring “when he [the undertaker] could count on possession of the body” (Pemberton 1889, 265–266). Sothern claimed that the history of spiritualism was nothing but “a chronicle of imbecility, cowardly terror of the supernatural, willful self-delusion, irreligion, fraud, impudent chicanery, and blasphemous indecency” (Coleman 1866, 51). This was picked up by The New York Times on December 31, 1865. The newspaper also mentioned “Andrews, the actor, [who] was an ‘outside medium’ in the same ‘circle,’ and used to paint some very fine landscapes which he asserted were produced under the immediate inspiration of the spirits of Raphael, Guido, Michael Angelo [sic], and so on” (Coleman 1866, 54). Although Sothern distanced himself from spiritism, he was denounced as a willful liar who had abused a mesmerized actress (Queen v. Coleman, 6, 32, 36). If the next case is to be believed, dead painters could also posthumously postulate art theory. Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) was a British artist and spiritualist medium, who became involved with the fraudulent spirit photographer Frederick Hudson (Ball 2015, 73). She claimed that the painter Peter Lely (1618–1680) was her spirit artist.

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In her Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance (1882), she relates how she mesmerized a certain Mrs. T. who channeled the spirit of Môtee, General Ramsay’s daughter. Mrs. T. “made a movement of the hand, as if desirous of writing, so I again gave her paper and pencil, and Môtee wrote the following, ‘I will try to do a direct drawing for Mamma, if your spirit artist will help’.” Hereupon, Houghton asked Môtee [‘Do you mean Sir Peter Lely?’] ‘Yes.’ [‘Does he see you?’] ‘I think so.’ [‘Do you see him?’] ‘Yes.’” (Houghton 1882, 135; Houghton, 2014, 131). At another séance, Mrs. T. passed under the direct influence of Lely, and while addressing Houghton, the dead painter urged her to write a book “on the relation between mind and matter, with illustrations from my own [i.e. Lely’s] experience,” adding: “If you have an hour to-day, I will help with the preface.” Under the impression that she recognized the hitherto undisclosed speaker, Georgiana asked, “Who are you, dear friend?” The only answer she received was, “I see I must go away. I thought I could introduce colour, but it does not do in this book; it must be mind and matter, and she [sic] will be helped by another.” When Georgiana informed, “Is it Sir Peter Lely?” a laughing response affirmed her feeling but recalled the offer previously made: “I thought I should not be found out: but I must not help with the book” (Houghton 1882, 298; Houghton 2014, 264).

Spirit Art and Sanity in the Age of the Avant-Garde In the course of the twentieth century, automatic art was associated more with mental health and personality disorders and less with intentional fraud, as the following cases prove. Despite being placed in a bad light early on, automatic art was practiced by eminent, highly educated people, such as the French mathematician Count Gustave de Le Goarant de Tromelin (1850–1920), who made mediumistic drawings in a semisomnambulic state (Richet 1923, 81, 376). Another case is that of the Italian thinker Gustavo Adolfo Rol (1903–1994), whose brushes reportedly moved through telekinesis on white sheets of paper that had been previously inspected to exclude fraud (Rol 2014, 228–234). Rol’s wondrous works were acheiropoietically autographed by, among others, Georges Braque and El Greco (Lugli 2008, 75–77, 119–121). Rol, a law graduate who moved in aristocratic and political circles, did not identify with any existing spiritualist tradition and was unsure to what extent his

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art was indebted to an “intelligent spirit” (Rol 2014, 14–16, 299–318, 388–399; Introvigne 2017). After pursuing deeper spiritual studies in the mid-1920s, Rol became distraught with fear and, while in Paris in 1927, he had a mental breakdown and wrote frantically in his diary: “I discovered an incredible law that connects [the colour] green, the musical fifth and heat. I lost my will to live. Power frightens me. I will write no more!” (Bonfiglio 2003, 54–55; Rol 2014, 11, 481). Automatic writing or drawing has often been explained as a symptom of mental illness (Reitman 1954, 80–82; Earle and Theye 1968; Koutstaal 1992). Dr. Anita Mühl, a physician at the St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington in the 1920s and 1930s, used artistic automaticity as therapy for patients suffering from neurotic and psychic disorders (Mühl 1922; Mühl 1930). She suspended the arm of her patients in a sling above the table so they could draw (Fig. 3). Some of her patients wrote reversely or upside down, similar to the Brazilian medium Luiz Antonio Gasparetto (1949–2018), who made Old Master paintings in that manner (Van Cauwelaert 2013, 419–423). It is therefore not surprising that these “alienated artists” (patients) were often clustered together with “automatic mediums” (Bauduin 2014, 97). While from a medical point of view, automatic art seems nothing more than an involuntary convulsion, it is also found as a pattern of obsessive behavior in unsung, wronged, and failed professional artists who turned to spirit art. Had it not been for the idiosyncrasy of their art and its supernatural explanation, the trumpet of fame would probably have remained silent to them. Heinrich Nüsslein (1879–1947), for example, had to give up his studies at the Nuremberg Kunstgewerbeschule due to visual and monetary limitations. After having made his fortune as an antique dealer, he discovered his ability to draw automatically at a séance session. The self-proclaimed Bilderschreiber (image-writer) painted over 2000 paintings in a dimly lit room, believing that artists such as Dürer guided his hand (Price 1928; Müller 2003). However, his speedy method of brushing thin-layered glazes and working wet-on-wet with his fingertips or cloth does not seem to be even remotely connected to Dürer’s style—unlike works by the mediumistic Dürer adept Eberhard Exel (1926–2014) (Gruber CoMa). Nina Karasek (1883–1952), also known as Joële, studied at the Viennese Kunstschule für Frauen und Mädchen. Although her conventional landscapes and genre paintings had been shown at exhibitions, her fame was solely based on her spirit art, which, she claimed, was created by masters like Leonardo, Dürer, Goya,

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Fig. 3 The British magician William S. Marriott simulates automatic writing, inspired by a ghostly guide. Double exposed photograph, Pearson’s Magazine, 1910. The sling technique is similar to that used by Mühl in the treatment of her patients (Source https://thamesandhudson.com/productattachme nts/index/download?id=37)

and Klimt (Roda 2007; Bonet Julve 2019; Gruber 2019). The Geistermalerin even signed drawings as the artist who had instilled the images into her mind, for instance in a 1928 drawing inscribed “Angelockt— Rembrandt” (Rieger and Zanetti 2018, 71, 114). Similarly, Jane Roberts

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(1929–1984), the American channeler of the entity Seth, felt guided by Rembrandt and Cézanne (Guiley, 1994, 24). Luiz Gasparetto claimed that Botticelli, Modigliani, and Degas actively worked through him while painting and sculpting automatically (Long 1986; Stoll 2004). Another spirit painter who gained recognition was Augustin Lesage (1876–1954) from Saint-Pierre-lez-Auchel (Osty 1928; Deroeux et al. 1989; Boulanger and Faupin 2019) (Fig. 4). In 1911, aged 35, while working as a miner, he heard a voice from the bottom of the mine predestining him to paint: In January, 1912, powerful Spirits came and revealed themselves to me, ordering me to draw and paint, something which I had never done before. Having never seen a tube of paint, consider my surprise upon this new revelation: “But,” said I, “I know nothing about painting.” “Do not worry about insignificant details,” was their response. “We are the ones working through your hands.” I then received, while writing, the colors of paint and types of brushes I needed and I began to paint under the influence of planetary artists, as soon as I would get back from the mine, completely worn out from work. (Lesage [1925], in Peiry 2001, 16)

Here, there seems to be a relationship between automatic art and poltergeist activity (cf. Tucker 2020). Some miners believed the pits in which they worked to be haunted by ghosts of former victims of mine accidents, caused by cave-ins and firedamps, and that the residual sounds of the pickaxe in abandoned pitheads could still be heard (Sautman 1995, 23–24). Hearing clanging sounds, disembodied voices, and stones being thrown are also part of a widespread popular belief around the world that gnome-like entities reside in the mines, either protecting or tormenting the miners (Heilfurth 1967; Petzoldt 2003, 37–38). In English, these dwarfs are often called tommyknockers, and in French montagnards, frappeurs or, with double entendre, démons mineurs (James 1992). Such folklore might explain Lesage’s receptivity to such (auditory) hallucinations, but his hearing sense may also have been reinforced by the debilitation of other senses, such as visual adaptation to the dark, or the loss of smell by coal dust. The simultaneous need for careful listening to stay alive, detecting cracks in the rock surface, called “roof talk” in miners’ jargon, may enhance susceptibility to a mine’s soundscape, while repetitive chopping sounds may lead to hearing impairment and pseudoperception in which tinnitus is confused with phantom sound (Jastreboff

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Fig. 4 Augustin Lesage painting in public at the Institut Métaphysique International, Paris, April–May, 1927. © Nicolas Dewitte/LaM © Adagp, Paris, 2020 (Source https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/vivez-une-experi ence-hypnotique-grace-aux-oeuvres-d-augustin-lesage-peintre-spirite-5718442)

1990). The relationship between mountain dwarfs and planetary artists seems less far-fetched than expected: from time immemorial, dwarfish beings (e.g., Daktyloi and Kabeiroi) were associated with certain crafts, including forging and goldsmithing, and with the arts in general (Dasen 1993, 4, 92, 121, 194–200; Bremmer 2014, 37–48).

Artist’s Haunts in the Thompson Case Then, there is the well-documented case of the goldsmith Frederic L. Thompson, who claimed to be under the influence of the late American landscapist Robert Swain Gifford (1840–1905). Thompson developed an irrepressible urge to paint coastal and forest landscapes which he himself had never visited or seen (Guiley 1994, 333–334; Braude 2003, 207–215;

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Tymn 2015). Although in 1905 he first began to suffer from hallucinations in which such landscapes figured, the actual delusion (or haunting) that engendered this artistic compulsion seems to have begun with a visit to an exhibition of Gifford’s work, which was held the following year in the American Art Galleries in New York City. There, Thompson heard a hallucinatory voice that spoke to him: “You see what I have done. Can you take up and finish my work?” (Hyslop 1919, 204). Specific scenes were imprinted on Thompson’s mind in such a manner that the artistic renderings of these scenes closely resembled places recorded by Gifford (Fig. 11.5a, b). Among the recurring visions of landscapes with wind-ridden trees on rocky shores was a particular one of knotty oaks on a headland plagued by ferocious waves. He felt compelled to locate the promontory and made several sketches of this windy naze, and a painting titled The Battle of the Elements. When engrossed in painting, his mental state varied from light lethargic detachment to complete automatism. If sources are to believed, the resemblance between Gifford’s scenes and Thompson’s works was so striking that they seemed to be based on the actual pictures. Due to his obsession (or possession), Thompson began to neglect his own professional occupation and got into financial problems. His artistic impulses slowly but surely developed into a dissociative disorder taking over his life. At times, he would say to his wife, “Gifford wants to sketch” (Hyslop 1919, 204). He often felt he was Robert Swain Gifford, to such an extent that the goldsmith-turned-painter took over the deceased painter’s mannerisms, with which he was supposedly unfamiliar. It should be noted, however, that Thompson had encountered Gifford a couple of times, though fleetingly, in the New Bedford marshes, where Thompson was hunting while Gifford was absorbed in his study of nature, and once in New York, to show him some jewelry. Both Thompson and his wife Carrie feared that he was losing his mind. On January 16th, 1907, Thompson sought help from the psychologist James Hervey Hyslop (1854–1920), a professor of ethics and logic at Columbia University (Guiley 1994, 95, 173–174). The strange case aroused Hyslop’s curiosity, and although Thompson claimed to be skeptical of spiritism, he was persuaded to pursue the matter through psychical research. On January 18th, they went to see the medium known as Mrs. Rathbun, who, without introduction, started talking about a man behind Thompson with a penchant for painting, matching Gifford’s description. Thompson told her about his struggle to visualize the coastal scene, upon which Rathbun

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Fig. 5 a Robert Swain Gifford, Landscape with gnarled, windblown trees, oil on canvas, whereabouts unknown (Source Hyslop (1919, 208, Fig. I). b Frederic L. Thompson, Two trees, sketch drawn while he felt overwhelmed by Robert Swain Gifford, left with Professor Hyslop (Source Hyslop (1919, 208, Fig. II)

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described this location, adding that the headland was only accessible by boat. Prompted by the success of this session, Hyslop arranged further anonymous sittings with other psychics. One such meeting took place on March 16th, 1907, at the house of Mrs. Chenoweth (Minnie Meserve Soule). She described Gifford’s habits, his unfinished canvases, the color schemes he preferred, his fondness for carpets, the tarpaulin he wore when he was boating, his predilection for foggy scenes, and the fact that he owned two houses (Hyslop 1919, 117–130, in Braude 2003, 209). Chenowith channeled a message from Gifford: “I will help you, because I want someone who can catch the inspiration of these things as I did, to carry on my work” (Hyslop 1919, 125, in Braude 2003, 209). Thompson decided to map out the locations of his visions by traveling to them. He kept a diary of the scenes that appeared before his mind’s eye, and before he set out on July 2nd, 1907, he entrusted Hyslop with the sketches from 1905, so as to keep them under lock and key. The first place Thompson visited was Nonquitt, Massachusetts, where Gifford’s summer house was located. Sure enough, he recognized several familiar locations. He also called upon the widow Gifford who gave him permission to inspect her late husband’s studio, where he discovered three paintings that were almost identical to those he had sketched during his episodes. Thompson’s next destination was the Elizabeth Islands, since Mrs. Gifford told him that one of these islands, Nashawena, had been her husband’s favorite haunt. There, lo and behold, he found the promontory with gnarled oak trees and he painted the scene forthwith. On this visit, he also traced down several other locations from his mental projections. While surveying one such scene, he had another auditory hallucination, instructing him to “Go and look on the other side of the tree” (Hyslop 1919, 210). Carved in the bark of a beech tree, he discovered Gifford’s initials and the date 1902. When Thompson revisited the location two months later, he was accompanied by Hyslop, who deemed the initials too old and weathered to have been recently carved by Thompson by way of deception. Even so, the reliability and role of the medium remain at issue: anyone would have been able to guess that Gifford had two workshops, one in the city, the other in the country, or that he used a bunch of driedout brushes to paint rough surfaces. It is not surprising that Gifford’s ghost reportedly stopped haunting Thompson after the press had gotten wind of the wondrous history in 1909. Now famous, the goldsmith left

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his metalworking career to become a full-time painter, joining the Salmagundi Club for professional artists in 1912 (Rogo 1987, 50–51; Guiley 1994, 344).

The Twilight Between Fact and Fiction In the above accounts of revenant artists, it is difficult to distinguish documentary fact from fiction. There is only a very fine line between true belief in the afterlife on the one hand and your average believe-itor-not urban legend on the other; between scam and joke, and between magic trick and hypnotic séance. Because of the sensational nature of the subject matter, even scholarly contributions are often prone to entertain. Contrariwise, a serious belief in the reality of a phenomenon may arise from a made-up story that was originally but a joke. The Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, London, for instance, is supposedly haunted by William Hogarth (1697–1764), who was baptized there in 1697. The artist is said to roam St. Bart’s premises wearing a cocked hat, looking for models for his popular scenes (Collins 2017). In the case of Hogarth, the sheer notion of him returning as a ghost is absurd, as the pictorial satirist himself mocked the belief in such phenomena in his engraving Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism of 1761. A possible source (or paradigm) for the ghost story might be William Hogarth’s Own Joe Miller: Or Quips, Cranks, Jokes and Squibs of Everyday Clime and Every Time (1854). In this modern pastiche of John Motley’s Joe Miller’s Jests (1739), a then immensely popular collection of witticisms, the painter and his canine companion Toby “revisit the pale glimpses of the moon” as ghosts to heckle the invention of photography. The dog whines: “Those daguerrotypes, kalotype, and deviltypes (I beg your pardon) have done for art. (Gives a melancholy howl.). It’s no use our staying here, Master” (Toby 1854). This concurrence of spectral imagery is no coincidence, as the rise of spiritualism is closely related to the invention of photography around 1850, and in its wake, to spirit photography through which “spiritualists tried to save religion by using science” (Firenze 2004). The “ghost in the machine” that produced instant art and other technological achievements previously considered impossible gave rise to a growing willingness to review the parameters of spirit, matter, and art (Nead 2007, 82–104). But the broadening belief in the possibilities of technology does not explain why it is believed that deceased artists return to manifest themselves through the living as an artistic force.

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Conclusion: Revisiting as Aesthetic Vampirism Artists, so it is believed, can become immortal through their art as it may outlive them in the sense of the adage “ars longa vita brevis .” Perhaps, practitioners of mediumistic art—often failed artists of sorts—beseech late great masters to become immortal themselves. Unlike surrealists, whose automaticity was guided by their own subconsciousness of the Self (Massicotte 2018), spiritualist artists put their faith in the Other/Death (cf. Das 2010, 73–104). Most spirit artists subconsciously make a safe choice to revisit the well-trodden grounds of already famous (dead) artists, Old Masters, and Modern Classics alike. Thus, their second sight served as a (re)visionary but unoriginal guideline to revise their own reputation in the art world. Some artists seem to have involuntarily followed in the footsteps of their spiritually impressed examples, like Thompson who re-embodied Gifford as a revenant entity by both artistically and physically revisiting the artist’s haunts, while others, like Lesage, Nüsslein, and Airaudi, probed the repressed side of modernity through the Sublime and possessed their own signature style steeped in mysticism. The question therefore is whether spirit art is a means of “lifting the veil” through inspiration or a kind of artistic resuscitation through which dead artists are being revived—or possibly both. In literary studies, a relationship between the undead, art, and obsessed artists has firmly been established following Walter Pater’s comparison of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with “the vampire” on the grounds that “she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave” (Pater 1873, 118; Twitchell 1981; Wallen, 1999; Eastham 2008). This phenomenon is called aesthetic vampirism, according to which art is understood as ironically parasitic on life/nature even though it immortalizes its fleeting beauty (cf. Eastham 2011). While the haunted portrait, which replaces life with lifelikeness, is a typical ingredient of classic texts of aesthetic vampirism—for example, Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890)—the trope of the revenant artist is similar in that the dead artist takes the place of the living one. In such cases, it is not the artwork or the person portrayed that is haunted and deprived of vital powers (or the other way round as in Wilde’s example), but the spirit artist. Like the vampire, who revitalizes itself by feeding upon its victim, the revenant artist works through the spirit artist by draining his life energy. Simultaneously, it is also the spirit artist who feeds upon the revenant artist—for whoever is bitten by the vampire

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becomes one themselves. The special feature of revision or revisitation through aesthetic vampirism is that it dehumanizes the artistic process, as it leaves the actual artist (and sometimes even manual craftsmanship) out of the equation, and denies artistry by claiming that there is another (unnatural) force at work instead. This vampiric relationship is also a palimpsestic process of artistic revisitation (of one artist in another) which revises what inspiration entails. The subordination of their own craft to genius forces those artists who believe they themselves are not endowed with genius of their own to lay claim to an actual genius, one that has survived physical death and takes them over as a predatory spirit guide.

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Rieger, Hannah, and Carmen Zanetti. 2018. Leben in Art Brut: Werke aus der Sammlung Hannah Rieger. Bregenz: Bildraum Bodensee. https://livingina rtbrut.com/images/Publikationen/Hannah-Rieger_LEBEN-IN-ART-BRUT. pdf. Accessed 18 January 2022. Roda, Roberto. 2007. Il simbolismo magico e muliebre di Nina Karasek. In Eredità del simbolismo: Mitologie, etnografie, esoterismi, ed. Roberto Roda, 250–259. Cento: Pinacoteca Civica; Mantova: Sometti. Rogo, D. Scott. 1987. The Infinite Boundary. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. Rol, Franco. 2014. The Unbelievable Gustavo Adolfo Rol: Experiments, Wonders and Miracles by the Most Enigmatic Spiritual Teacher of the Twentieth Century. Transl. Jennifer Lynn Baker. Morrisville, NC: Lulu. Reprint, 2018. Originally published as: L’Uomo dell’Impossibile, 2014. Sautman, Francesca Canadé. 1995. La Religion du Quotidien: Rites et Croyances Populaires de la Fin du Moyen Age. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Spanke, Daniel. 2000. Das Mandylion: Ikonographie, Legenden und Bildtheorie der “Nicht-von-Menschenhand-gemachten Christusbilder.” Monographien des Ikonen-Museums Recklinghausen, vol. 5. Recklinghausen: Museen der Stadt. Stoll, Sandra Jacqueline. 2004. Narrativas biográficas: A construção da identidade espírita no Brasil e suafragmentação. Estudos Avançados 52 (18): 181–199. Tabori, Paul. 1966. Harry Price: The Biography of a Ghost-Hunter. Preface by Eileen J. Garrett. New York: Living Books. First edition: London: Athenaeum Press, 1950. Tarassaco, Falco (Oberto Airaudi). 2020. Stories of an Alchemist: The Extraordinary Childhood Years of the Founder of Damanhur in 33 Tales. Vidracco, TO: Dhora srl. Toby [pseudonym]. 1854. William Hogarth’s Own Joe Miller; or, Quips, Cranks, Jokes and Squibs of Every Clime and Every Time Collected and Digested by Toby (Hogarth’s Own Dog). London: Ward and Lock. Tucker, S.D. 2020. Blithe Spirits: An Imaginative History of the Poltergeist. Stroud: Amberley Publishing. Twitchell, James B. 1981. The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. Tymn, Michael. 2015. Thompson Gifford Case. Psi Encyclopedia. London: The Society for Psychical Research. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/ thompson-gifford-case. Accessed 18 January 2022. Van Cauwelaert, Didier. 2013. Dictionnaire de l’impossible. Paris: J’Ai Lu. Wallen, Jeffrey. 1999. Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater’s Renaissance. English Literary History 66 (4): 1033–1051. Wojcik, Daniel. 2016. Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

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Zoccatelli, PierLuigi. 2016. “All the Heavens in Your Hands”: Oberto Airaudi and the Art of Damanhur. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19: 145–162.

Transformation and Change in Late Work

Space, Time, and Change in Claude Monet’s Late Paintings Thomas Baumeister with Mette Gieskes

Claude Monet’s (1840–1926) reflections on earlier work tend to be devoid of comments on aesthetic and theoretical issues. Instead, practical, everyday experiences and problems characteristically prevail.1 The artist’s incessant doubts concerning the quality of his artistic output, which persisted even as the success of his work grew, are well known.2 Little is known, however, about Monet’s motivations behind and perception of the radical change that took place when he started creating his late, large-scale canvases (Fig. 1). The huge waterlily (nymphéa) paintings Monet painted in his garden in Giverny, especially those created from 1 In 1926, not long before his death, the author wrote in a letter to Evan Charteris: “I have always had a horror of theories […]” (House 1998, 2). Translated from the French original: “J’ai toujours eu horreur des theories […].” (From letter W2626 to Charteris, Giverny, June 21, 1926.) Thomas Baumeister would like to thank Monique van Haasteren for her helpful feedback on an early version of this chapter. 2 See, for instance, Monet’s remarks about his Venice paintings, which he considered bad (Patry 2013, 23).

T. Baumeister · M. Gieskes (B) Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_12

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Fig. 1 Claude Monet, Les Nuages (The Clouds ), 1914–1926, oil on canvas, three panels, fixed to the wall, 200 × 1275 cm, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. Public domain

1914 onward, indeed appear to represent a revolutionary break from his preceding works, firstly with respect to the remarkable canvas proportions, some being almost 17 meters wide and 2 meters in height. Also new are the rough brushwork, the large color areas, and the absence of well-defined objects and horizons. Finally, the proximity of the viewer’s position to the represented space in these works is strikingly novel. In all these respects, the enormous, improvisational works differ strongly from the preceding paintings, like the haystacks (1890–1891) and the Rouen cathedral series (1892–1894).3 In spite of these notable changes, a comparison of the artist’s late canvases to the preceding works—including the cathedral and haystack series and the river landscapes—brings to light not only innovation, but also continuity. The later works can in fact be understood as an elaboration of what the artist had set out to do earlier, rather than as a break. First of all, the serial character of the late paintings, all of which treat more or less identical phenomena under different light and weather conditions, can be seen as a furtherance of the earlier work. Secondly, the predominance of water is consistent: seascapes—situated in the coastal regions of the Côte d’Azur and, especially, Normandy—as well as river views belong to the core of Monet’s oeuvre (Patry 2013, 23). Another important feature that is constant, especially present in the Seine-paintings of the 1890s and recurring in the late works, is the appearance and disappearance of objects at dusk and dawn (later in darkness), their emergence, their resolution into nothingness, and their return. In her contribution on Monet in Letzte Bilder. Von Manet bis Kippenberger (2013), Sylvie Patry has argued that the artist´s late work should be 3 For an overview of the various radical characteristics of Monet’s late work (created between 1914 and 1923), see the catalog accompanying the 2019 exhibition Monet: Late Work at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum (Shackelford 2019).

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understood as an extension of rather than rift with the earlier paintings, especially the water-landscapes. Seemingly underestimating the radicalism of the late paintings, she characterizes the large nymphéas as “logical continuation” of the 1890s series and of the earlier waterlilies the artist had painted since 1895 (Patry 2013, 23). Patry importantly reveals that Monet painted the large, late works with a retrospective eye on the past, observing that in 1914, the artist found in his basement “older attempts” at rendering impressions of water, water lilies, and plants on large surfaces (Patry 23). One of her appealing arguments in support of her thesis that the newer works cannot be seen as separate from the early paintings is that the old Monet in 1920 displayed earlier works along with the more recent, highly successful ones in his studio, likely, Patry argues, using the success of the later work to raise interest in and sales of the earlier paintings (Patry 23–24). Patry further traces the late works featuring waterlilies on a pond to the paintings of broken ice on the surface of the Seine that Monet had created in Vétheuil in the winter of 1879–1890. She also links the late waterlily works to the artist’s renderings between 1872 and 1877 of his flower gardens in Argenteuil (Patry 2013, 23). Paul Hayes Tucker has also connected the Giverny works to the earlier Vétheuil and Argenteuil paintings. Tucker, however, maintains that Monet’s paintings of his own water lily pond in Giverny should not be seen as an extension of “previous discoveries,” though he does see the Argenteuil and Giverny garden works as related in the sense that these products of Monet’s “communion” with nature were both made in historically restless times—the Giverny works right when the Dreyfus affair led to political division in France and the Argenteuil works in a decade that was marked by increased industrialization and urbanization (Tucker 1989, 276). Monet’s withdrawal in his lush gardens in the picturesque towns of Giverny and Argenteuil, Tucker compellingly suggests, may well have been a way of removing himself from political scandal and modernization: he refers to the artist’s gardens in Giverny as the artist’s “self-styled Eden” (Tucker 1989, 276). This chapter demonstrates through visual analysis that Monet’s late paintings differ significantly from the artist’s earlier creations, in spite of the fact that they do not form an all-encompassing break with the earlier work and in some cases revisit earlier motives, themes, and modes of painting. Based mostly on close observation, the chapter argues that the all-embracing theme of Monet’s late work is change and transition

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understood in the most radical sense possible. While change is also thematized in the earlier work and expressed in paintings like the cathedral and haystack series of the early 1890s, to which the late work is compared on the following pages, the form it takes in the late nymphéa paintings is decidedly distinct: change and transformation become absolute in the late work and dominate, besides subject matter, both the structure of the whole and paint application (Weijers 2008, 269–293). Acknowledging, in other words, that Monet in the late works returned to earlier themes and modes of paintings, and recognizing in addition that the new direction of the late work also reflects a widespread tendency among artists in the early twentieth century to undermine the limits of the medium of painting,4 the chapter presents the differences between the earlier and later works as at least in part an expression of Monet’s old age and as consequence of the artist’s constant and penetrating observation of his immediate surroundings in Giverny—in line with the artist’s retrospective remark in 1926 that his “only virtue” had been “to have painted directly in front of nature, while trying to depict the impressions made on [him] by the most fleeting effects […].”5

Cathedrals and Haystacks While in the haystack (1890–1891) and cathedral (1892–1894) series, the different phases of the process of change are distributed over different paintings, in the Nymphéa canvases, change is often presented as ensemble within a single, huge work. Some of these paintings, like the Musée de l’Orangerie’s Les Nuages (The Clouds, 1914–1926; Fig. 1), are marked by an explosion of light in the central section, combined with an invasion of darkness from the right. As will be noted, change and transition are not only the subject matter of the late Monet paintings. Rather, they are also deeply entrenched in the way those works are painted: on the very large canvases, Monet’s handling of both brush and pigment gives the 4 This view of Monet’s late work being part of larger artistic developments in art of the first quarter of the twentieth century rather than being introverted and a-historical, did not emerge until the 1940s, when abstract expressionists and art critics like Clement Greenberg noted the radicality of Monet’s Nymphéas. See Weijers (2008, 271–275). 5 House (1998, 2). Translated from the French original: “Je n’ai eu que le mérite d’avoir peint directement devant la nature, en cherchant à rendre mes impressions devant les effets les plus fugitifs […].” (From letter W2626 to Charteris, Giverny, June 21, 1926.)

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impression that change is not only represented, but that it is enacted— that it is taking place.6 Change clearly also plays a major role in the earlier haystack series and Rouen cathedral paintings (Fig. 2). In the latter, the facade of the Rouen cathedral is more than just a motif: it allowed Monet to establish miraculous light shows. Although the building’s religious meaning may well have been irrelevant to the painter, churches undeniably have a special meaning in relation to light. The cathedral facade imperiously occupies almost the whole canvas in the series, leaving only a small portion of the sky visible. It is seen from one of two slightly different angles in the canvases. In each of over thirty paintings, the position of the viewer is, however, located at the height of the circular window above the portal. The verticality of these church exteriors, their elevation, gives authority to these rock-like, yet friable structures. It is as if wind, weather, and erosion have hollowed the cathedral’s portals. The presence of these buildings is reinforced by Monet’s use of light and color. The facades are not just illuminated by the sun; they have a light of their own, seeming to glow from within.7 To shine, to give off light, is an active quality. While on the one hand, the building’s luminescence and verticality lend the works the character of deceleration, of the slowing down of the rapid passing of time (Tempel 2019, 48), the works also contain the promise of change. The shadows will become longer and the morning light will get more intense, though drastic change is not imminent. All of these qualities are due to Monet’s way of painting, which has created a texture of color consisting mostly of one basic tone that is modified slightly by other, nearby tones, achieving what might be described in musical terms as a fullness of sound, similar to a musical chord played by various instruments. Because the works’ radiation—their glowing—bears a certain agency, they become beings in their own right. The paintings are no longer windows opening the view into a section of reality; they rather manifest their own aura—their own weight and value. To some extent, this also applies to the haystack series. Haystacks are humble objects, but in Monet’s hands, they have become more than representations of simple 6 To a lesser degree, this is also true of Monet’s earlier paintings. John House talks of the “mobile surface” of Monet’s paintings, referring specifically to the relatively early The Red Boats, Argenteuil (Les Bateaux Rouges, 1875). House, 14. 7 John House notes that Monet sought “luminosity in his light-effects” as early as 1863. House, 6.

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Fig. 2 Claude Monet, Cathédrale de Rouen, Façade Ouest, au Soleil (Rouen Cathedral , West Façade, Sunlight ), oil on canvas, 100.1 × 65.9 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Public domain

haystacks or variations on light and color studies. They have their own nature, with their quality of perseverance withstanding cold and heat, in some ways similar to Monet himself.

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“Late Style” and the Nymphéa Paintings With the huge Nymphéa paintings, the approach seems to have radically changed. The traditional concept of a painting—that of a tableau—has been relinquished. The intelligible, orderly separation of foreground and background, of above and below; the distinction of important and less important objects; the idea of the painting as a section of reality caught in a frame, organized into a balanced composition, surveying more or less complex situations—all of this is abandoned. What brought the old painter to the production of these vast paintings, which concentrate, paradoxically, on one small facet of reality: one fragment of his garden, of his pond? Clearly, getting older, and with his eyesight severely deteriorating from 1912 onward, it became more difficult for Monet to explore new realms of reality. From an artistic point of view, aging, for Monet, did not coincide with limitation, however. Quite the contrary, this natural process led the artist, who had stated in 1909 that his sensitivity had “sharpened with age” (Stuckey 1986, 267), to the disclosure of a new conception of what painting could be. This conception bears affinity to what has been labeled Altersstil , the style of aging artists.8 The main features that have been deemed characteristic of the late manner are the rejection of harmonious perfection in favor of what is “unfinished” and only suggested; the dismissal of balance; the primacy of color over drawing; the “reckless freedom of facture,” as Kenneth Clark, in reference to the old Titian, has called it (2006, 86); and the dissolution of form in color and light.9 Rembrandt and Titian, and to some degree also Goya, tend to be considered paradigmatic. These characteristics recurringly ascribed to Altersstil can also easily be recognized in Monet’s late paintings, yet some of them were already present in the 8 Altersstil is usually distinguished from Spätstil (late style). When Hölderlin, Mozart,

and Schubert produced what are considered their “late style” works, characterized by a revolutionary change of mood and of syntax, they were not at all old. Rather, the men were in their thirties, dying, or, like Hölderlin, suffering from mental health problems before their 40th birthdays. Mahler was 49 when he composed the 9th symphony, which is seen as a paradigmatic Spätstil composition, disclosing a radically new, “non-architectural” conception of musical form, especially in the first movement. 9 The pessimism Clark (2006) ascribed to old artists’ works, however, seems absent from Monet. Also, Adorno’s notion of an “irreconcilable dissonance” does not fully apply to Monet’s late painting (Adorno 1987 [1937], 13). Adorno himself noted that the abstract opposition of “affirmation” and “negativity” does not do justice to the complexity of great works of art (see also Busch 2009; Feldmann 1992).

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earlier work and another, more fundamental, element that is new is also at play.

A New Conception of Painting The old Monet explored in novel ways the fact that paintings traditionally represent only one section of reality, arrested in time. He seems to have felt the need to move beyond the imprisonment of the scene in a frame, and also to challenge the illusionistic qualities of traditional paintings. Monet had always been attracted to the coast, in later years especially to that of Normandy, including Varangeville, where the views from steep cliffs lead the eye into vertiginous depths and to the sea in restless movement: scenes that do not lend themselves to the limits of a traditional tableau (Lewinson 2012, 44). It seems that Monet’s search for a new, more embracing vision, which he first realized in his haystack and cathedral series, ultimately found its fulfillment in his immediate surroundings in Giverny. Instead of expanding scenes to panoramic views, which will always remain partial, like Japanese artists, he tried to evoke the whole by means of a fragment (Rewald 1946, 177), limiting himself to what seems at first sight a particularly small region of reality: the pond with the surrounding plants in his garden. Here, he found what in his work serve as essentials of an everchanging reality: water, the mirrored sky, reflected clouds, water lilies—all of these phenomena in Monet’s paintings give the impression of movement, as do the reflected bushes and trees, the wisterias hanging from above into the open space, and, finally, light, color, shadows, and darkness in all possible gradations. Instead of enlarging the field of vision, he found ever-changing nature at large, a more encompassing meaning, in this limited section of reality.

Water Mirrors “The most essential feature of the motif is the mirror of the water” (not the water lilies), Monet wrote, “whose aspect changes at each moment due to the part of the sky that gets reflected and which extends life and movement there. The cloud that passes, the breeze that refreshes, the hailstone that threatens and falls down, the wind that blows and stops suddenly, the light that weakens and revives—so many causes, not caught

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by the profane eye, that transform the shades of color and disturb the water surface” (Monet, cited in Guillaud and Guillaud 1983, 162).10 In order to capture all of this in his paintings, Monet positioned himself close to the water mirror beneath him. He dismissed the surroundings, all the elements that were relatively stable, but which increasingly featured in the paintings as fragile mirror images.11 He concentrated predominantly on transition, on that which has no remaining, definite form. The forms of entities as reflected in the mirror of ponds are highly subject to change. They are blurred or even destroyed by the slightest movement of the air, or by a soft touch of the pond’s surface. At times when the surface of water bodies is not moved, immobility is temporary and fragile. What is mirrored, including the skies and clouds, has no stable existence. The poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in his 1859 essay on artist Eugène Boudin that clouds and waves “are in form and color the most inconstant and most impalpable” phenomena (Baudelaire 1962, 372).12 This is even more true for reflections of clouds in water. Because the water mirror has limited dimensions, it shows only a part of the sky. Hence, clouds seem to surge unexpectedly; they appear to grow miraculously out of the depths of the water, which itself reflects the depths of the sky. Monet’s views of his pond evoke an agreeable feeling of weightlessness . The reversal of above and below in the mirror images gives the impression that gravity is suspended, and the burden of reality lifted. According to Westheider, Monet, significantly, sometimes compared his canvas with the surface of his pond (2017, 190). Like water surfaces, mirrors also bear a resemblance to the art of painting, of producing likenesses that can sometimes be confounded with reality. Because phenomena mirrored 10 Translated by the author from the French: “L’essentiel du motif est le miroir d’eau dont l’aspect, à tout instant, se modifie grâce aux pans de ciel qui s’y reflètent, et qui y répandent la vie et le mouvement. Le nuage qui passe, la brise qui fraîchit, le grain qui menace et qui tombe, le vent qui souffle et s’abat brusquement, la lumière qui décroit et qui renaît, autant de causes, insaisissables pour l’œil des profanes, qui transforment la teinte et défigurent les plans d’eau.” 11 In fact, this removal of the surroundings is one of the main features that distinguishes the late painted reflections from the earlier ones. Though Monet was interested in water reflections as early as the 1860s, the surroundings of the reflected water are still very much present in paintings like La Grenouillère (1869). 12 Translated from the French: “[…] ce qu’il y a de plus inconstant, de plus insaisissable dans sa forme et dans sa couleur […].”

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in bodies of water are taken out of their common context, they assume, also when we experience them in nature rather than in painting, a seductive, unfamiliar aspect. Colors usually become more vivid in the water mirror. When the surface is calm, everything is inverted and unattainable, although reflected in detail. Often, there is a sense of magic in such reflections, as in a cloud rising out of the blue from a puddle of rainwater at a pedestrian’s feet, snow-white and rapidly growing. In front of Monet’s large paintings, the beholder, who has to move along them in order to discern the entire work, can focus only on one part of the whole, depending on their distance to the usually very wide pictures, some, as mentioned before, having a width of 17 meters and a height of 2 meters, such as Musée de l’Orangerie’s Les Deux Saules (The Two Willows, 1914–1926). Viewers might see an outburst of light near the center of the work, while simultaneously noticing from a corner of their eye a shape that is not clearly defined—a reflection of a cloud or trees dissolving into darkness, into dusk or half-light. What takes place is presented indistinctly and can give the impression of something coming into existence or ceasing to exist (Weijers 2008, 285–287). The different phases of the changes in light and atmosphere throughout the day, which in the cathedral and haystack series were distributed over different paintings, are now presented in a single, large painting, as in Musée de l’Orangerie’s Les Nuages (The Clouds, 1914– 1926; Fig. 1). The multiple zones of scales of darkness and light in one large picture are not phases following each other; rather, they are simultaneous. Nonetheless, like the earlier works, the nymphéa paintings still make change visible. Change is no longer separated in different phases; rather, change occurs continuously. Monet’s Way of Painting The impression that change takes place in Monet’s late paintings is due to the manner in which the elderly artist applied paint, very different from his approach in the Rouen cathedral series, which calls attention to patches of thickly laid-on, now dried paint, a technique that would have been unsuited to very large paintings, and which, because of the prevailing sense of “dryness,” would not correspond to Monet’s subject matter: a pond with clouds reflected in the water mirror. The luminosity, or slow glowing, of the earlier series is also present in the late works, but the rough, sketchy manner of the old Monet is

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different. It imparts a different kind of non-finito quality to the work, of something not fully evolved, suspended between being and non-being (Fig. 3).13 As a result of the interweaving of various hues and the mutual echoing of colors of neighboring sections (Weijers 2008, 277), an almost imperceptible shifting of tonality—a transition—is performed before the eyes of the beholder. Monet’s brush strokes also have the appearance of being in action. Placing layer over layer, the painter was able to bring about the impression of growth or transformation, of light breaking through, or of light being suffocated by darkness. Through this technique, Monet’s late paintings confront us with processes and their traces. “Afterglow,” “foreshadowing,” and “anticipation” are notions that come to mind when the viewer looks at the results of Monet’s technical proceedings. In painting a blue sky, he usually avoided uniformity: the sky is in most paintings composed of small (especially in comparison to the scale of the canvas) brushstrokes of different, more or less intense tones of blue, giving the impression of great spatial depth, of an almost orientallooking splendor, and of a dynamic mass deploying itself. Monet’s work never confronts us with a fait accompli, but always with something living. A cloud is not just there, but seems to grow, to dissolve, or to move. As French author Michel Butor has observed, these late Monet works were based on memory (1967, 45–47), yet the Nymphéa paintings are also rooted in perception. Monet sat for hours in front of his chosen subject to arrive at a full understanding of it and to imprint it in his mind. He wrote: “I waited until the idea took shape, until the arrangement and composition of the motifs had little by little inscribed themselves in my brain, and on the day when I felt enough skill in my hand to try my luck with real hope of success, I decided to act and I acted” (Monet, cited in

13 Discussing Monet’s way of painting, Richard Shiff refers to Wölfflin’s characterization of modern, post-renaissance painting in terms of “the alienation of the sign from thing” (Shiff 2017, 60–61). Indeed, the blotches of black representing people in a Monet street scene do not resemble them. Yet we should add (and it is clear that Shiff would agree) that, in spite of the lack of close resemblance, these brush touches render very well the impression of people moving around on the boulevard, seen at a certain distance beneath the viewer. Also, in Monet’s landscapes, the liberation of color from the object usually does not destroy its representational meaning. Shiff suggests that the vigorous markings on the canvas by Monet and his contemporaries can be seen as distinct from the photographic image (Shiff 2017, 64).

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Fig. 3 Claude Monet, Nymphéas (The Water Lily Pond), 1917–1919, Albertina Museum, Vienna. Public domain

Gordon and Forge 1989, 228).14 Of course, Monet never intended to “copy” what was before his eyes, but he did try to come to a conception of how to translate what he saw convincingly into the language of painting.

Monet’s Conception of Space Foremost among the features of the old Monet’s conception of painting was his radical abandonment of the classical rules of the construction of pictorial space. As viewers look at the painted pond, no center is indicated. There is “no planar succession,” as Larsen puts it; “nothing catches the eye as a focal point” (2016, 217). Also, the edges of the pond are not visible, which gives the viewer the impression that the whole is without a basis. This absence of a fundament corresponds to the lack of horizons. In some works, the pond appears as a vast ocean, in which groups of water lilies are dispersed like islands. Some of these islands are closer to the viewer, who looks at them from above, while others are seen obliquely

14 Translated from the French: “Attendu que l’idée a pris forme, l’arrangement et la composition des raisons est d’imprimer progressivement dans mon esprit, puis, quand le jour est venu où je me sentais d’avoir assez de cartes pour jouer à tâtons sa chance avec un réel espoir le succès, j’ai décidé d’agir et ont agi.”

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from a distance, as in Musée de l’Orangerie’s The Water Lilies—Morning (Nymphéas—Le Matin, 1914–1926). The fact that the nymphéa paintings are often viewed from different angles can intensify the sense of instability of the spatial disposition (Weijers 2008, 291, note 12). The depth of the reflected sky is in stunning contrast with the islandlike, horizontally—situated groups of water lilies on the pond’s surface. The water mirror discloses the reflected space above, but also allows the viewer to sense the pond’s depth beneath. Often in Monet’s paintings, the water’s surface does not look like a surface at all. Rather, in the paintings representing daylight, it appears as a kind of luminous void of radiating blue azure. In the evening paintings, it looks as if a kind of vertical darkness has opened beneath the plants, which seem to float atop a dark abyss. This contrast between the vertical, bottomless zones and their horizontal, floating counterparts, as well as different viewing angles, can give the viewer the impression that reality is unfinished—still in the making.

Contrasts In many of his late works, Monet emphasized heavy contrasts. In the areas that represent reflection, he used a recurring scheme: a bright zone near the center of the canvas, where the light of the sun—which itself is invisible—appears as a cascade of fire, situated between the dark reflections of the trees on both sides. Sometimes this motif, which in some paintings is rendered in a less dramatic way, stands on its own. Usually, the left side is less dark than the right side, with the reflection of a huge tree extending into the darkness of the water surface, as in the earlier-mentioned The Clouds (Les Nuages ; Fig. 1), painted between 1914 and 1926. The substantial center section, as always in reflection, shows patches of blue sky and dissolving clouds, which have the appearance of being painted vivaciously by light itself. A stretch of water lilies, a small archipelago, remains stable in the ever-moving scenery of the reflected clouds. In the darkness to the right, we see almost imperceptible allusions to the water flowers.

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“Bad-Light” Situations Monet did not consistently use strong contrasts between dazzling light and dark regions in his late works, however. Besides the dynamic daylight views, he also felt attracted to more monotonous light and color scenes— to what we may call “bad light” situations, where either an excess or a drastic lack of light obstructs visibility. This is discernible already in the painting discussed above: Clouds, in which the section to the right sinks into darkness. In the even more radical, larger works, this tendency dominates the whole canvas. While traditionally, paintings and drawings are meant to make things visible and to deliver their likeness to posterity, the old Monet tended—although not always, of course—to do the opposite, withdrawing things from the realm of the perceptible in more or less large areas of either light or darkness. In a large painting in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Water Lilies (1914–1926; Fig. 4), which contains the previously described glowing cataract in its center, the entire scene is filled with a diffuse, pale light, more intense near the middle than in its lateral, shadowy sections. While there may have been some humidity in the air of the represented scene, the luminous mistiness seems mainly due to the fact that everything is seen against the light. This softens the large forms, blinds the viewer, and extinguishes the details of the objects—shapes become simplified. The picture reminds us of an overexposed photograph, in which dazzling light undermines the visibility of the scene. If the vertical strokes on the right indicate the reflection of a tree, it melts seamlessly into the surface of the pond. While some sections of such paintings suggest verticality, other zones appear to be stretched out horizontally, a change of direction that, again, gives a feeling of instability. In Musée de l’Orangerie’s Reflets d’Arbres (Reflection of Trees, 1914– 1926; Fig. 5), the dark counterpart of the work just discussed, almost no objects are distinguishable. There are some representations of water lilies: at the left, two to three small, pale flotillas enter the scene, appearing as lights on a nocturnal lake. On the right, the nymphéas almost disappear into darkness; only the scarce pink-orange flowers are more pronounced. Toward the left, darkness seems to overgrow almost everything. It is unclear whether a tree’s branches are hanging as a curtain before the pond, whether mist has arisen, covering the scene, or if growing darkness has started. In each scenario, the beholder’s sight is seriously limited.

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Fig. 4 Claude Monet, Nymphéas (Water Lilies ), 1914–1926, oil on canvas, three panels, 200 × 1276 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York (Centrum voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie Radboud University, Nijmegen)

Fig. 5 Claude Monet, Reflets d’Arbres (Reflection of Trees ), 1914–1926, oil on canvas, three panels, fixed to the wall, 200 × 850 cm, Musée de l’Orangerie. Public domain

Processes Involving the Viewer In most nymphéa works, darkening, glowing, shining, and radiating are represented as processes, as taking place. The experience of the viewer is, importantly, also involved: the viewing subject is part of the content. Although mirrored skies, clouds, and vegetation in reality usually do not appear to us as they do in a late Monet painting, the artist’s translation of these appearances in actions of his brush never seems artificial. If viewers watch the actual sky above them and try to translate it into Monet’s painterly idiom, they realize that Monet’s rendering provides an energetic emphasis, a sense of activity to the forms. It seems that what normally passes rapidly or slowly, and what often goes unnoticed, gets pronounced in some way—is spelled out —in these paintings. A darkening or brightening occurs; either something is brewing, or is fading away.

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Another important feature here is that often the viewer of these paintings becomes involved. Viewers find themselves in a “bad-light situation,” trying in vain to discern something that cannot be grasped. They do not seem to stand in front of the scene, but are somehow placed into it, in a position wherein they may lose their orientation by being exposed to appearances that cannot be clearly defined. The heavy contrast between light and dark in many of the large works may also express the experience of a person blinded by strong light, the surroundings disappearing into darkness. Again, it seems that Monet’s works do not so much render an objective state of affairs, but certainly implicate the experience of the subject involved.

Existential Meanings Light and mirror images play a significant role in the work of Monet, who tried to catch every nuance of the continuous flux of appearances in our world. However, Monet’s work should clearly not be reduced to an attempt at providing an objective, precise account of such changes at a given day or hour. There is more at work here. First, each moment of life, because of its fugitive character, can seem important to people, perhaps especially to an aging painter. Second, water—including the mirror of water reflecting the sky, light, dusk, and dawn—is not just an element of the physical world. Rather, from a human point of view, it is especially meaningful. Water is connected deeply with the notion of giving life, of quenching thirst, of refreshing and purification, of growth, but also of unfathomable depths. Correspondingly, the concepts “morning,” “noon,” “evening,” “dusk,” and “night” indicate the rhythm of nature, but also the rhythm of human life with its different times and stages. Light is not only a manifestation of physical reality, but is also connected, for some, with eternal life. Its changes may indicate birth, rebirth, fulfillment, and death. A sunset does not only mark a recurring natural phenomenon or have aesthetic value, but can also assume an existential meaning: a farewell, a leaving, a death, but also a peace and a coming to rest. In Monet’s work, the very dark, almost black sections, for instance in the Museum of Modern Art’s Water Lilies (1914–1926), are especially captivating due to the sublime contrast of the impenetrable darkness with the bright and luminous sections.

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When Monet’s late paintings were revalued after the Second World War (the first great retrospective of Monet’s late oeuvre took place in 1952 in The Hague, in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich), they were seen as predecessors of the large canvases of American abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis, and Mark Rothko.15 However, unlike these non-figurative American painters, Monet always remained close to the reality that surrounds us all, which all of us perceive through the senses. This relationship of Monet’s work to what Edmund Husserl has called Lebenswelt (lifeworld), “the common ground of humans” (Husserl 176)—in contrast with the world of the sciences or with purely imaginative worlds—gives Monet’s paintings a particular kind of existential significance that moves the viewer differently than abstract expressionist work.16 The desolate grey beginning of a day or its festive and joyous start—such themes are largely foreclosed from abstract art, in spite of its immense expressive potential (Baumeister 2017).17 The transitions in Monet’s work bear resemblance to the transitory, the fragile character of human existence. Monet certainly did not symbolize this by pictorial means. Rather, by making present such transitions, for instance from light to dark, existential meanings are evoked, in a way similar to music, which may be perceived as an expression of situations of human life, without necessarily being a direct representation or symbol for them.

15 See, for instance: Clement Greenberg, “American-Type Painting,” Partisan Review, vol. 22, no. 2, Spring, 1955, pp. 179–196. 16 Husserl writes: “The lifeworld is a realm of original self-evidences. That which is selfevidently given is, in perception, experienced as ‘the thing itself,’ in immediate presence, or, in memory, remembered as the thing itself … [It is] the world of straightforward intersubjective experiences … all the built-up levels of validity acquired by men for the world of their common life. [It is experienced] … primarily though seeing, hearing etc., … Thus we are concretely in the field of perception … [W]e, each ‘I-the-man’ and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this ‘living together’” (Husserl 1970 [1954], 127–128). 17 Monet’s paintings of the pond’s surroundings—the alley of rosebushes, the willow tree, the Japanese bridge, which often look as if they are set on fire—can be considered closer to abstraction than the views of the pond. In some of these works, the thicket of forms becomes so dense that it becomes impossible to identify any object in their twisted configurations.

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Closing Remarks Monet’s late nymphéa works revisit and continue some themes and aesthetic features of the artist’s earlier work, including the representation of gardens, water bodies, and reflections; the rendering of phenomena under varying light and weather conditions; luminescence; and, most persistently and significantly: the representation and evocation by painterly means of flux. While transformation was already very much present in the haystack and cathedral series of the 1890s, it takes on different form in the large-scale paintings Monet created from 1914 onward. In these, change is presented simultaneously, on one single canvas that is marked by rough brushwork, large color areas, undefined objects and horizons, a sense of weightlessness as a result of the dissolution of foreground and background and above and below, and the close proximity to the viewer. The later work is also distinct from the earlier work in that it moves beyond the frame, evoking a dynamic whole through fragments of ever-changing nature, including the mobile surface of water and reflections of moving clouds, plants, and trees. Most importantly, perhaps, in his post-1914 work, Monet applied paint in such a way that both the artwork and the natural phenomena it represents appear unfinished and active, conveying a sense of process and incompleteness. The paintings’ luminescence and dynamic brushmarks create the sense that the works are still in the making. Monet’s use of texture, light, and color, as well as the visibility of the traces of process, have activated the paintings in such a way that they present themselves to the viewer as alive. This sense of aliveness and incompleteness, we have seen, on the one hand reflect Monet’s close observations of his immediate surroundings in Giverny, but are likely also related to the old artist’s awareness, at the physical and existential level, of the fleetingness of life.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1987 [1937]. Spätstil Beethovens. In Musikalische Schriften IV, 13–17. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Baudelaire, Charles. 1962. Curiosités esthétiques: L’Art romantique, et autres œuvres critiques. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères. Baumeister, Thomas. 2017. Luce e ‘grande forma’ nei paesaggi urbani di Staude, Firenze e Venezia. In: Hans Joachim Staude (1904–1973): Un pittore europeo in Italia, 80–97. Florence: Centro Di.

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Busch, Werner. 2009. Das unklassische Bild: Von Tizian bis Constable und Turner. München: C. H. Beck. Butor, Michel. 1967. Monet or the World Turned Upside-Down. In AvantGarde Art, ed. Thomas B. Hess and John Ashbery, 25–50. London: Collier Books/Art News Series. Clark, Kenneth. 2006. The Artist Grows Old. Daedalus 135: 77–90. Feldman, Frances T. 1992. “I am Still Learning”: Late Works by Masters. Washington: National Gallery of Art. Gordon, Robert, and Andrew Forge. 1989. Monet. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. Guillaud, Jacqueline, and Maurice Guillaud. 1983. Claude Monet au temps de Giverny. Paris: Centre Culturel du Marais. House, John. 1998. ‘Monet: The Last Impressionist?’ Monet in the 20th Century. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts; London: Royal Academy. Husserl, Edmund. 1970 [1954]. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston, WY: Northwestern University Press. Larsen, Bente. 2016. The Infinity of Water Lilies: On Monet’s Late Paintings. In Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, ed. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, 209–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewinson, Jeremy. 2012. Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings. London: Tate Publishing. Patry, Sylvie. 2013. Monets Seerosen im Angesicht der Ewigkeit. In Letzte Bilder. Von Manet bis Kippenberger, ed. Esther Schlicht and Max Hollein, 22–32. Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle; München: Hirmer Verlag. Rewald, John. 1946. The History of Impressionism. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Shackelford, George T.M., ed. 2019. Monet: The Late Years. Fort Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum. Shiff, Richard. 2017. Paraph Painter. In Monet: The Early Years, ed. George T.M. Shackelford, 58–67. Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum. Stuckey, Charles F., ed. 1986. Monet: A Retrospective. New York: Park Lane. Tempel, Bruno. 2019. De tuin als ervaring van ruimte en tijd. In Monet: Tuinen van verbeelding, ed. Frouke van Dijke, 44–71. Den Haag: Kunstmuseum Den Haag; Veurne: Hannibal. Tucker, Paul Hayes. 1989. Monet in the ’90s. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts. Weijers, Wouter. 2008. Here Everything Is Still Floating. In Tweegesprek: Opstellen voor Dörte Nicolaisen, ed. Bram de Klerck, Ernst van Raaij, and Willem Warnaars, 269–293. Aardenhout: Willem Warnaars. Westheider, Ortrud. 2017. Interplay with Nature: Water Lilies. In Impressionism, The Art of Landscape, ed. Ortrud Westheider and Michael Philipp, 186–197. Potsdam: Museum Barberini; New York and London: Prestel Publishing.

Winter Is Coming: The Voice of Spring by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1910) Jan Dirk Baetens

In 1910, two years before his death at the age of 76, the celebrated Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) painted The Voice of Spring , one of the last large-format pictures he produced during his long and prolific career (Fig. 1). In The Voice of Spring, Tadema returned to a theme that had inspired him many times: the return of spring after winter. The mood in the painting, however, seems markedly different from that in the artist’s earlier treatments of the subject—elegiac and melancholy rather than festive and joyful. The earlier works are usually read as celebrations of the birth of new life in the spring season. The Voice of Spring hardly lends itself to such a reading. Rather, it can be “viewed as a presentiment of transience by an aging artist,” as Rosemary Barrow has suggested (Barrow 2001, 192).1 The voice of spring seems faint at best here, and winter not far away.

1 See also: Swanson (1990, 273) and Prettejohn and Trippi (2016, 136).

J. D. Baetens (B) Department of History, Art History and Classics, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_13

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Fig. 1 Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Voice of Spring, 1910, oil on panel, 48.8 × 115 cm, private collection (Source Photo: © Sotheby’s)

Elegy may have been the proper register for Tadema’s work at the time. The artist had recently lost his long-time and much beloved wife when he painted The Voice of Spring . In addition, his art was quickly becoming outdated, as calls for a truly modern art came to dominate the art world even in Edwardian England and left little room for Tadema’s allegedly academic and anemic reconstructions of classical antiquity. While with The Voice of Spring , Tadema revisited, at old age, a theme that had been close to his heart throughout his career, the painting should be read in a very different way than his earlier treatments of the theme. This chapter proposes an autumnal reading of The Voice of Spring, not as a jubilant display of nature’s reawakening but as a thoughtful personal reflection on remembrance, solitude, death, and artistic creation.

The Seasonal (Re)cycle Tadema was born in 1836 in the Dutch village of Dronryp, in the province of Friesland, and grew up in its capital, Leeuwarden. He studied and spent most of his early career in Belgium, first in Antwerp and then in Brussels. In 1870, after the death of his first wife, he and his two daughters moved to London, where he fell in love and married the much younger Laura Epps. Under Tadema’s guidance, Laura herself became a painter. The pair led a happy life, united in their shared love for each other, for Tadema’s daughters, and for art and music.

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Tadema’s star rose quickly in London, where his technically brilliant, fanciful representations of classical antiquity met with great success. In the decades after his move to the British capital, the artist produced hundreds of highly finished paintings, mostly scenes from everyday life set in classical times, which were collected at ever higher prices by the aspiring classes of bankers and industrialists, both in Britain and abroad (Sachko Macleod 1996, 91–98). By the end of the century, Tadema had become one of the most famous artists of his time, lavishly rich and critically acclaimed. A knighthood bestowed on him in 1899 and the highly prestigious Order of Merit awarded to him in 1905 marked the apogee of one of the most successful artistic careers in late-Victorian England (Prettejohn and Trippi 2016; Swanson 1990). Throughout his long and industrious career, Tadema regularly revisited subjects and themes from earlier paintings. Like many commercially successful artists of his day—whether in Britain, Belgium, or the rest of Western Europe—he produced a substantial number of variations and smaller reductions of earlier compositions (Mainardi 2000, 62–73; Kelly 2007, 53–81; Baetens 2020, 110–121). Such “repetitions” (répétitions ) allowed him to reduce the time and cost of production and, thus, to feed the growing market for his work in an efficient way. However, repetitions were not always mere potboilers. In some instances, they were meant to improve on earlier work and entailed a thorough rethinking of the original composition or subject. Such was the case, for instance, with the three very different versions that Tadema painted between 1867 and 1880 of a scene in which Claudius is proclaimed emperor by the praetorian guard (Swanson 1990, 144, 161, and 211). When he addressed the practice of repetition in a speech given in 1906 at the Royal Institute of British Architects, the artist explained that every new version had been intended to remedy a defect or deficiency in the preceding one. Taking up a subject again could also lead to more unexpected results, according to Tadema. In his speech, as reported by The Journal of the Royal Institute, he observed (Anon. 1906, 444–445): A painter worked himself out, and when he had finished work on which he had been employed for a long time he forgot what had actually stirred him in the beginning, and felt no longer attracted in the same way by the subject; he had seen in the meantime other things.

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The quotation—even if it coyly ignores the possible commercial motivations behind repetition—allows not only for a creative revisiting of an earlier idea or subject but also specifically recognizes the changing vision of an artist who has “seen in the meantime other things” and is moved for that reason to return to the subject of an older painting. It takes into account, in other words, the impact of experience and the passing of time on an artist’s views of an earlier subject and on the way he has treated that subject on an earlier occasion. The turning of the seasons and the religious ceremonies that accompanied them in ancient Greece and Rome were among Tadema’s favorite subjects, and he painted such scenes on a regular basis. Dealing with seasonal rituals and ceremonies allowed him to display his historical and archaeological erudition, demonstrate his wide botanical knowledge and, especially, entertain his audience and clients with attractive and festive scenes, generally full of music and dance. The theme of spring alone appears sixteen times in his oeuvre before The Voice of Spring in 1910 (Swanson 1990, 273). A typical example is On the Road to the Temple of Ceres, also known as A Spring Festival, from 1879 (Fig. 2). Inspired by Virgil’s Georgics , it shows young men and women dancing and making music on their way to a temple through sun-drenched meadows littered with flowers (Barrow 2001, 95). A young man, the last in a small group of musicians playing the aulos in the bottom left corner, looks up at the dancing girls on the right, suggesting perhaps that the coming of spring may also bring new love. A later example is “The Year’s at the Spring, All’s Right with the World” from 1902, in which a young poetess, resembling the central figure in The Voice of Spring , makes a note in her notebook, presumably the cheerful lines by Robert Browning that give the painting its title (Swanson 1990, 95). Here, the mood is less elated but still unambiguously optimistic, as the title of the painting itself indicates (Fig. 3). The Voice of Spring offers most of the typical stock-in-trade elements of Tadema’s earlier treatments of the theme: an idyllic landscape that seems to belong to a long-lost, golden classical age, the early and fresh blossoming of flowers and trees, and, in the background, dance, music, and celebration inspired by the rejuvenated spirit of the season. The scene as a whole, however, is set in a decidedly different key. There is as much shadow in the picture as sun, and the large stone pines look bleaker than we would expect. The young woman central in the painting, reclining in the marble exedra, seems untouched by the vision of Arcadian happiness,

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Fig. 2 Lawrence Alma-Tadema, On the Road to the Temple of Ceres, 1879, oil on canvas, 89 × 53.1 cm, private collection (Source Photo: © Sotheby’s)

let alone by the festive exuberance behind her. She sits next to a small altar with a burning offering of pine cones—autumnal fruit consumed by fire—staring dreamily outside the picture, oblivious of the bouquet of spring flowers next to her and musing, it would seem, of things past. Her mood is reminiscent of the inward-looking, contemplative figure central in Tadema’s Autumn from 1874 rather than of any of the revelers in the background in The Voice of Spring (Fig. 4).

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Fig. 3 Lawrence Alma-Tadema, “The Year’s at the Spring, All’s Right with the World,” 1902, oil on panel, 34.2 × 24.1 cm, private collection (Source Photo: © Sotheby’s)

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Fig. 4 Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Autumn, ca. 1874, graphite on paper, 16.5 × 54.6 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Friends of Drawings and Prints Gifts and Ian Woodner Family Collection Fund, 2018

The initial interpretation by viewers of Tadema’s works is often guided, twisted, or subverted by pictures within the picture, in the form of objects, statues, sculpted reliefs, or paintings in the background, most of them based on surviving objects from classical antiquity or archaeological discoveries. In The Voice of Spring , the statue of a sitting man on the left plays this role. The statue is easily recognizable as the sitting gladiator from the Palazzo Altemps in Rome, of which Tadema owned a photograph (Barrow 2001, 192). The artist had already used the statue in Unconscious Rivals , painted in 1893. There, the statue suggests that a gladiator is the object of the shared amorous attention of the two elegant women depicted in the painting, which immediately calls to mind the scandalous love lives of some notable rich women in imperial Rome, which nineteenth-century audiences relished (Barrow 2001, 150–151). In The Voice of Spring , however, contact between the young woman, lost in reverie, and the solitary gladiator seems impossible. The similar position of their hands and arms (only one arm visible, merely touched by the hand of the other arm), their crossed feet, and their staring looks all suggest a shared state of mind or a connection between the pair, even as we realize that such a connection is entirely impossible. The gladiator looks away from the young woman, gazing, it seems, at the reflection in the pond, brooding as if lost in thought himself, while the coolness of his sculpted marble body emphasizes the unbridgeable distance between him and the woman of flesh and blood. The sitting gladiator does not suggest the possibility of new love here; if there is love at all, it is a love long lost.

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Life and Death Fin-de-siècle symbolism is not far away, both in the painting’s poetic suggestion of an impossible connection between the sculpted gladiator and the musing young woman and in its overall emphasis on mood and psychological inwardness. In general, Tadema’s output throughout his long career, even as it moved into the twentieth century, is characterized by a notable stylistic continuity. Some of his later work, however, though it does not quite justify the label of spätstil or late style, is marked by a moderate symbolist streak: it privileges mood and suggestion over anecdote and narrative, which are central to most of his earlier paintings (Becker 1996, 79–88; Fellinger 2016, 154–161). Around the turn of the century, the artist’s work also became a source of inspiration for leading symbolist painters like Gustav Klimt and Fernand Khnopff. Symbolists’ interest in the spiritual and philosophical mysteries of life led them to rediscover originally romanticist themes, such as the renewal of nature, the cycle of life and death, the polar ends of youth and old age, and the passing of the seasons. Many of these themes are already hinted at in some of Tadema’s earlier paintings, which evoke ideas of youth and rebirth by means of flowers and flower symbolism, often in combination with subtle elements that remind the viewer of transience and death, as Edwin Becker has observed (Becker 1996, 84–87). In the elated The Pomona Festival from 1879, an aging man, recognized as a self-portrait of Tadema, quietly watches the wild dance of merrymakers around a tree but no longer participates (Swanson 1990, 206). Even in some paintings showing spring in all its glory, such as the overly abundant Spring of 1894, small elements remind us of the melancholy fact that everything will eventually end in death, which turns these works into evocations of vanitas as much as celebrations of life (Lippincott 1990). In some of the works made in the last decades of Tadema’s career, this hint of melancholy is stronger. In The Voice of Spring , it dominates the mood. By then, melancholy had apparently also nestled in Tadema’s personal state of mind, as is clear from a statement by the aging artist from in the late 1890s: “When at my time of life, the time has come to live in memory of the past” (Swanson 1990, 85). In 1910, when Tadema painted The Voice of Spring , the passing of time and death had once again become more than abstract notions in the artist’s life. A year earlier, in the summer of 1909, his beloved wife and muse Laura had died, making him a widower for the second time. Apart

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from a portrait, The Voice of Spring was the first painting that Tadema made after her death. In fact, work on the picture coincided with preparations for the memorial exhibition of Laura’s paintings, which opened in May 1910 in the rooms of the Fine Art Society and was organized under Tadema’s own supervision (Anon. 10 May 1910, 13). There is little doubt, then, that Laura was much on Tadema’s mind when he painted The Voice of Spring , and it is tempting to read some of the artist’s personal sentiments in the painting. Tadema often allowed his private life to trickle into his paintings, as is clear from The Pomona Festival. Friends and family members regularly appear in his pictures, as do elements from his sumptuous Roman-styled studio house, where his close-knit family lived their happy life. Critics have also observed that many of the women in Tadema’s paintings resemble Laura, whose looks he admired greatly. Some of his favorite models later in life, such as Marion Tattershall, also closely resembled his wife. According to Vern Swanson, Summer Offering , another symbolist painting that deals with the passing of the seasons and was painted only a year after The Voice of Spring , shows Tattershall, in the center of the picture, in the company of Laura, in the lower left-hand corner (Swanson 1990, 92). The Voice of Spring , painted so soon after Laura’s death and undoubtedly marked by the grief the artist felt, suggests her presence perhaps more than any other picture. Yet if we can see the image of Laura in the woman on the exedra, she is absent as much as she is present. The figure on the marble bench may be musing about love, spring, and youth, but she is clearly no longer able to participate, closer to the offering of pine cones consumed by fire than to the abandoned spring flowers on her other side, which will, before long, wither away. While the memory of Laura was indubitably still very much alive with the artist, she was also already in another world.

Creation and Demise Laura Alma-Tadema’s posthumous 1910 retrospective exhibition was reviewed in the press with sympathy, if not with raving enthusiasm. A critic of The Athenaeum expressed his admiration for some of her paintings: “One swallow does not make a summer, but in the present state of art one or two fine pictures suffice to give importance to a show, the more so when, as in this instance, they display a side of an artist’s talent hitherto unrevealed to a general public” (Anon. 1910, 588–589). Times,

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however, were quickly changing, and appreciation for both Lawrence and Laura Alma-Tadema’s art was dwindling. When The Voice of Spring was displayed at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition, which opened just a few days before Laura’s retrospective, the critical reception was lukewarm. As always, reviewers expressed their admiration for Tadema’s technical skill and erudition, but they also accused him of creating superficial art, concerned with the imitation of external appearances solely. More than in earlier reviews, Tadema’s advanced age and traditional approach were also a concern and not always deemed reconcilable with the changing artistic tide. The moderately traditionalist critic Marion Spielmann discussed Tadema’s painting in combination with a picture by the French artist Jean-Paul Laurens. He praised both but also called them “two giants of the elder school” (Spielmann 1910, 2). The reviewer for The Scotsman admired Tadema’s masterly erudition and control of his brush, which “shows no sign of the failure of age,” but also observed that the painting’s qualities could already be “found for two generations past in his best pictures” (Anon. 30 April 1910, 9). Others were more hostile. The reviewer for The Playgoer and Society Illustrated commented on the Royal Academy’s staunch conservatism and its audience, with direct reference to Tadema: “Many a visitor […] will tell you that ‘I may be old-fashioned, but I do like a wellfinished picture,’ and naively confess that he or she ‘knows nothing about Art,’ and will forthwith fall into a state of natural admiration for Alma Tadema” (Crowdy 1910, 85). The Sunday Times simply dismissed the largest and most prestigious gallery of the Academy’s exhibition, where Tadema’s work had been hung, as the least interesting (Anon. 1 May 1910, 17): Here it is that the old guard make their last stand against the younger generation that is slowly but surely displacing them. The public, conservative at the core, still looks here eagerly for the works of its favourites, remembering names which more revolutionary students have almost forgotten. There is no need to assist the public in its search. It will spy out the Alma-Tadema, the Leaders [Benjamin Williams Leader], and the Sants [James Sant] without any assistance.

The reviewer who discussed Tadema’s picture in The Manchester Guardian was perhaps the most quick-witted. He stressed the repetitive character of the painting, calling it “the usual composition, graceful,

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garish and accomplished,” and then ironically referred to its title in an observation that almost mirrors the reference to a summer swallow in The Athenaeum’s review of Laura’s show: “Sir L. Alma-Tadema continues to rest upon laurels that tend now to be sere and yellow of leaf” (Housman 1910, 8). Once again, nature in The Voice of Spring seems to have made a more autumnal impression than its title would have us expect. Such harsh criticism—justified or not—would not have been unexpected to contemporary audiences. Calls for artistic change had become increasingly loud in the first decade of the twentieth century, and only a few months after the first public display of The Voice of Spring , they culminated in Roger Fry’s famous exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists in the Grafton Galleries in London. The exhibition was a milestone in the history of the arts in England, as it introduced English audiences to advanced art by French painters such as Edouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse (The Burlington Magazine December 2010). Fry, a leading art historian and critic, was no friend of Tadema’s work. Shortly after Tadema’s death in 1912, the artist famously became a direct target of one of Fry’s most vitriolic pieces of writing. In “The Case of the Late Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, O.M.,” published in The Nation in 1913, Fry rejected Tadema’s work as easy, commercial and unartistic, entirely made of perfumed soap, and wondered how long it would “take to disinfect the Order of Merit [given to the artist in 1905] of Tadema’s scented soap” (Fry 1996 [1913], 147– 149). Fry dismissed Tadema’s paintings as belonging to a time long past, “typical of the purely commercial ideals of the age in which he grew up,” and considered that the painter had, in any event, long outlived his time. At the beginning of his article, he even reported his surprise when someone had spoken of the “late Sir Alma Tadema,” which had provoked him to ask whether Tadema was really dead: “So little had he [Tadema] been alive to me [Fry] that though I had undoubtedly seen his death in the papers, I had completely forgotten it” (147). Tadema did not live to read Fry’s damning verdict, but he was surely aware of the changing artistic tide. For him, 1910 was a year of looking back and drawing up the balance in any case. Besides organizing the exhibition of Laura’s work, Tadema also assisted the author Rudolf Dircks with a long monograph on his “later work,” published together with a complete catalog of his oeuvre (Dirckx 1910, note 1). At the age of 74, looking back inevitably also meant taking stock of what had changed and would probably never come back. Even the introduction to Dircks’s

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laudatory monograph implicitly confirmed that Tadema’s position was no longer uncontested. It started with a defense of The Voice of Spring , apparently necessary in the eyes of the author because of the growing wave of innovation by young, experimenting artists “who will turn somersaults for your penny.” Dircks related how he had visited the 1910 exhibition and finally happened upon The Voice of Spring , which came as a welcome treat after galleries full of unhappy pictorial experiments: “[I]t was not without relief that our eyes rested on the exquisite Tadema painting—an oasis, so it seemed, in a desert of restless endeavour, of uncertain effort, of hurry and impatience” (Dirckx 1910, s.p.). We know little of Tadema’s own exact ideas or sentiments about the changing artistic mores, but there are clear indications that he had little faith in the art and views of the modernist innovators. An anonymous critic reminisced after the artist’s death in 1912: “I think Tadema himself realised that his greatness was a little dimmed in the eyes of the world before he died. He could sometimes be so bitter that it was clear he heard with apprehension the younger generation of critics and artists knocking at the door” (Swanson 1990, 94). Comments made slightly later by Tadema’s student and friend John Collier may very well echo the older artist’s artistic beliefs. In a text written at the occasion of Tadema’s posthumous retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1913, Collier remarked that it was “impossible to reconcile the art of Alma-Tadema with that of Matisse, Gauguin and Picasso.” He also vehemently attacked modern art critics, “desperately afraid of being considered old-fashioned,” rushing “blindly into praise of all the newest movements” in a “distinct advance in the direction of absolute nonsense” and unable to make anything of works “painted in such an old-fashioned way that flesh looks like flesh, draperies like draperies, marble like marble, and nothing looks like paint; in which human beings […] bear no resemblance whatever to criminal lunatics, and in which all details are so painted that there is no difficulty at all in finding out what they are meant for” (Collier 1913, 597–599). Collier’s defense of his former teacher, although undoubtedly reactionary in the eyes of many, raises interesting points with regard to the progressist and “jeunist” bias of modernist art discourse. Nevertheless, it was clear that Collier’s cause was already lost, and he must have realized this, as Tadema surely did in the last years of his life. If The Voice of Spring called to mind laurels “sere and yellow of leaf,” according to The Manchester Guardian critic, one may wonder whether we can also find

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in the picture’s sense of isolation something of the artist’s own experiences of old age, marked by the waves of modern art that were making his work unfashionable and obsolete even before his death. The autumnal metaphor used by the critic was cleverly chosen in this regard. Artistic creation has historically been linked to nature and its creative forces (Kris and Kurz 1979, 34 and 114–119). In romanticist thought, it is the creative force of nature itself that operates through the artist and results in the artistic act. Starting with the romantics, artists also increasingly identified with youth and spring, and the renewal of nature in springtime thus became a metaphor for the creation of art (Diaz 1993, 148). By the time Tadema painted The Voice of Spring, however, the image of spring as artistic rejuvenation was already firmly in the hands of newer generations of vanguard innovators, who used it to promote their progressive logic of innovation and to discard the work of the old guard. Tadema’s hymn to spring, renewal, and creation could, therefore, perhaps only become its complete opposite: the autumnal elegy of a belated artist lost in a quickly changing world that was no longer his.

Visions of the Past In his 2007 study Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, David W. Galenson distinguishes between two types of artists: conceptual innovators, who make radical breakthroughs early in their careers, and experimental innovators, who develop their ideas throughout their careers and arrive at solutions only later in life (Galenson 2006). Galenson’s theory takes innovation as the ultimate criterion to assess the development of an artist’s legacy and thus leaves little room to accommodate artists like Tadema, who do not fit the modernist, linear narrative or artistic innovation. Regardless of the category to which artists belong (if they belong to any of these categories), the author observes that “most artists have considered the relation between age and the quality of work […] within the specific context of their own careers, in anticipating their future greatness, looking back on the improvement over time in their skills, or worrying about the deterioration of their abilities” (Galenson 2006, 1). In the early twentieth century, such retrospection may have been a depressing activity for an artist like the aging Tadema, ostensibly a mere remnant of older times, in the face of the gathering storm called modernism. Yet he must have looked back and reflected on

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his art and place within the history of art, and revisiting older paintings may very well have played a role in this. In his defense of Tadema, Collier described how the artist, even in old age, saw each new painting as a new challenge and unremittingly tried to do better than before (Collier 1913, 599–600): Tadema was his own severest critic: every picture was a new problem and involved a desperate struggle with difficulties which a lesser man would have shirked. [...] This continual striving after perfection, this almost excessive self-criticism kept his art from that gradual weakening that overtakes so many painters after middle-life. They think that they have learnt their lesson and that the struggle is over. Tadema knew well that the struggle is never over. As he grew older, he became more fastidious, until at last one feared that his pictures would never get finished.

Collier’s comments tie in neatly with Tadema’s own observations about artists who repeat a subject having seen “in the meantime other things” and wanting “always to improve” on earlier work (Anon. 1906, 444– 445). Fry, Collier’s chief opponent, did not explicitly address Tadema’s practice of repeating and revisiting subjects. He did, however, suggest a parallel between Kodak photography and Tadema’s art, thus placing the “wares” of the latter, that “industrious and capable commercialist,” firmly within the realm of commercial, unartistic, mechanical reproduction (Fry 1996 [1913], 148). There can be little doubt that the many repetitions and variations in Tadema’s oeuvre were proof, for Fry, of the artist’s vulgar commercialism. Such an understanding seems unwarranted, or at least an unnuanced generalization, in light of Collier’s and Tadema’s own comments. There is little in The Voice of Spring , so markedly different from most of the artist’s earlier treatments of the theme of spring, to suggest that it was an easily made product of, in Fry’s words, “purely commercial ideals.” Rather, The Voice of Spring seems a complex meditation on things past; it is not just a vision of an antique past, as most of Tadema’s paintings are, but it also constitutes a melancholic vision of Tadema’s own long, personal, and artistic journey, which had brought him to where he was, having outlived his time and now lost in a changed world. There may well be an autobiographical note in the pervasive sense of melancholy solitude in The Voice of Spring . Yet the centrality of the theme

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of spring for many decades in Tadema’s oeuvre suggests that this late-age return to the subject also transcends such a simple reading. More than just a work of personal mourning, the painting presents itself as a profound reflection on the cyclical essence of human existence, alternating between love and death, spring and fall, creation and demise, both in the act of artistic creation that had given rhythm to Tadema’s life and in life itself.

References Anon. 1906. Chronicle. The Royal Gold Medallist and His Pictures. Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 13: 444–445. Anon. 1910. The Work of the Late Lady Alma Tadema. The Athenaeum: 588– 589. Anon. 1910. The Royal Academy: A First Look Round. The Scotsman, April 30. Anon. 1910. The Academy. Sunday Times, May 1. Anon. 1910. Lady Alma-Tadema. The Times, May 10. Baetens, Jan Dirk. 2020. Du pastiche à l’avant-garde: Répétition et innovation. In Adjugé ! - Les artistes et le marché de l’art en Belgique (1850–1900), ed. Emilie Berger and Noémie Goldman, 110–121. Paris: Mare & Martin. Barrow, Rosemary. 2001. Lawrence Alma-Tadema. New York: Phaidon. Becker, Edwin. 1996. Der dingen ziel. Alma-Tadema en het symbolisme. In Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ed. Edwin Becker, Edward Morris, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Julian Treuherz, 79–88. Zwolle: Waanders. Collier, John. 1913. The Art of Alma Tadema. The Nineteenth Century and After 73: 597–607. Crowdy, Wallace L. 1910. A Connoisseur’s Notebook. The Playgoer and Society Illustrated 2: 84–87. Diaz, José-Luis. 1993. L’Enfant sublime. In Le Printemps des génies. Les enfants prodiges, ed. Michèle Saquin, 133–153. Paris: Robert Laffont. Dirckx, Rudolf. 1910. The Later Work of Sir L. Alma-Tadema, O.M., R.A., R.W.S. (The Christmas number of The Art Journal ). London: Virtue & co. Fellinger, Markus. 2016. Alma-Tadema’s invloed op de jonge Gustav Klimt. In Alma-Tadema. Klassieke verleiding, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn and Peter Trippi, 154–161. Zwolle: WBooks. Fry, Roger. 1996 [1913]. The Case of the Late Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, O.M. In A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed, 147–149. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Galenson, David W. 2006. Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Housman, Laurence. 1910. The Royal Academy. The Manchester Guardian, April 30.

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Kelly, Simon. 2007. Strategies of Repetition: Millet/Corot. In The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse, ed. Eik Kahng, 53–81. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kris, Ernst, and Otto Kurz. 1979. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Lippincott, Louise. 1990. Lawrence Alma Tadema: Spring. Malibu: The J. Paul Getty Museum. Mainardi, Patricia. 2000. The 19th-Century Art Trade: Copies, Variations, Replicas. Van Gogh Museum Journal 6: 62–73. Prettejohn, Elizabeth, and Peter Trippi, eds. 2016. Alma-Tadema. Klassieke verleiding. Leeuwarden: Fries Museum; Zwolle: WBooks. Sachko Macleod, Dianne. 1996. De nieuwe centurio’s. Alma-Tadema’s internationale begunstigers. In Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ed. Edwin Becker, Edward Morris, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Julian Treuherz, 91–98. Zwolle: Waanders. Spielmann, M.H. 1910. A Glance Round the Royal Academy. The Graphic (supplement), May 14: 2. Swanson, Vern G. 1990. The Biography and Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. London: Garton.

The Passage of Time: Jasper Johns’s The Seasons (1985–86) and 5 Postcards (2011) Sandra Mackus

The 2016–2017retrospective exhibition Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ offered the first opportunity to see both Jasper Johns’s series of paintings The Seasons (1985–1986; Fig. 1)—a contemplation of the 55-year-old artist on his 30-year artistic career—and the series 5 Postcards (2011; Fig. 2), which Johns (1930) created at the age of 81.1 Albeit in a different way, both series concern the human cycle of life and death. While the four encaustic-on-canvas paintings that constitute The Seasons loosely follow a relatively traditional allegorical scheme of the four seasons and the ages of man, Johns’s iconographic arrangement in the 5 Postcardsseries (encaustic and graphite on canvas) is entirely his own (Bernstein 2017b, 18). The passage of time is a recurring theme in Johns’s oeuvre. While he had already used vanitas symbols in earlier works like Arrive/Depart 1 Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ was on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (September to December, 2017) and at The Broad in Los Angeles (February to May 2018). In 2021–2022, both series were also included in the retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia).

S. Mackus (B) Independent artist and art historian, Weert, The Netherlands

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_14

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Fig. 1 Jasper Johns, The Seasons, 1985–1986. Installation view exhibition Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss, and the Cycle of Life, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, November 12, 2016—February 20, 2017. Photo: David Stover. © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Fig. 2 Jasper Johns, 5 Postcards, 2011, encaustic, oil, and graphite on five canvases. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

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(1963–1964), from the 1970s onward, the theme of human mortality gained more prominence (Bernstein 2017b, 17). Notably, after his fiftieth birthday, the theme seems to increasingly concern his own aging process, as manifested in The Seasons and 5 Postcards , in which Johns literally inscribed himself by incorporating his silhouette (Varnedoe et al. 1996, 50). The imagery of both series alludes to his own (artistic) past, most notably in the embedding of motifs that had emerged in the context of life and death in earlier work, which changes the perception and meaning of these images. Such transformative changes in recurring motifs are characteristic for Johns’s oeuvre (Garrels et al. 2012, 13). Concurrent with the increased prominence of mortality in Johns’s paintings and prints, the artist started keeping records of his own works, suggesting a reflection process from mid-career onward (White 2013).2 While much has been written about The Seasons, the sequence 5 Postcards has received less attention. As the series reveal a number of similarities, this chapter will examine both, conceiving 5 Postcards as a reconsidering, reworking, and revising of The Seasons.3 First, The Seasons will be explored in light of the artist’s continued practice of revisiting earlier work, which involved citing, recycling, and alluding to former motifs and important, inspirational sources. Subsequently, 5 Postcards will be examined as a series that revisits both The Seasons and other earlier works. Both series show Johns’s tendency to create intricate, never completely solvable puzzles, in the case of The Seasons and 5 Postcards consisting of recontextualizations of motifs from his own, earlier work and art historical sources within the context of the passage of time and the aging of man.

The Seasons The theme of the four seasons and its corresponding stages of life has hardly been adopted by artists in the twentieth century, in spite of its long-standing tradition in art and literature (Rosenthal 1988, 6). Of 2 Although Johns left South Carolina for New York as a young man, Barbara Rose connects Johns’s “orientation towards the past” with his southern origins, comparing him with southern writers as William Faulkner, who wrote about “a society in decline, looking back rather than forwards” (Rose 2017). 3 Barbara Rose states: “in the course of Johns’s work, there is no progress but there is evolution, change, redefinition, dissolution […]” (2017).

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the paintings now collectively known as The Seasons, Johns first painted Summer (1985), now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art but initially conceived as frontispiece-illustration for Wallace Stevens’s collection of poetry Poems, in which seasons play a major role. Summer was followed by Winter (1986, private collection), Fall (1986, collection of the artist and on long-term loan at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Fig. 4), and Spring (1986, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection; Fig. 3). Interestingly, Fall is the only work from the series that is still in the personal collection of the artist, who was in the fall of his own life when he painted these canvases. As Bernstein notes, Johns probably identified most with this period (2016, 239). Picasso’s Minotaur Moving His House (1936) served as source of inspiration for The Seasons (Rosenthal 1988, 6). Johns is likely to have seen Picasso’s painting in David Douglas Duncan’s book Picasso’s Picassos (1961), which states that Picasso painted the work when “his personal life was in turmoil” because of his move to the Hôtel de Savoie on the Rue des Augustins (Varnedoe et al. 1996, 57). Johns may well have identified with Picasso in this regard, as he had recently acquired a studio in the Caribbean and contemplated moving to a studio in New York (Bernstein 2016, 219).4 Judith Goldman interprets Johns’s “move to a new studio […] [as] a metaphor for other changes” (1987). She emphasizes the autobiographical character of The Seasons as new for Johns (Goldman 1987). Although the artist had used casts and traces of himself before, in The Seasons, he included a complete representation of his body, using a template of his shadow drawn by a friend (Goldman 1987). Rosenthal calls it a “decoy,” because “no facial features are present to provide conclusive, visual proof” (1988, 94). While the semi-transparent shadow undeniably maintains a degree of anonymity, the four paintings do have multiple oblique references to Johns that distinguish these paintings from his earlier work, which has been described as detached and impersonal (Bernstein 2016, 236). A year before he started painting The Seasons, the artist stated: “In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. […] I sort of stuck to my guns for a while, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally, one must simply drop the reserve” (Johns quoted in Bernstein 2016, 219). Still, The Seasons must not be 4 Striking is also the resemblance in age: both artists painted their works at the age of fifty-five.

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Fig. 3 Jasper Johns, The Seasons: Spring, 1986, encaustic on canvas, 190.5 × 127 cm, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

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Fig. 4 Jasper Johns, The Seasons: Fall, 1986, encaustic on canvas, 190.5 × 127 cm, collection of the artist. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

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conceived as an undisguised record of Johns’s life. Despite the incorporation of personal motifs, the artist has stated: “in a sense none of it represents me. And, in a sense, all of it represents me. It’s like any other painting in that respect” (Johns quoted in Kammen 2004, 248– 49). These words are indeed fitting for an artist who has become known for his ambiguous, puzzling works.

Passage of Time Although the cyclical structuring of The Seasons (Fig. 2) may suggest a narrative, the artist did not conceive it as such: “I don’t see that it tells of any development. […] I don’t really see that it’s a narrative, in that I don’t see what it narrates—unless you think that the representation of the seasons is in itself a narrative” (Johns quoted in Kammen 2004, 248). Instead, the framework of the four canvases serves as site in which Johns’s motifs—originating from his earlier works and inspiration sources—can appear, disappear, and reappear, gaining different meanings along the way, as will be discussed below. In the sequential arrangement, the allegorical framework of the four seasons is symbolized by the shifting weather conditions. Starting with Spring (Fig. 3) and ending with Winter, rain showers, sunlight, a cloudy sky, and snow can consecutively be discerned (Bernstein 2016, 235). Correspondingly, the light changes from bright—especially in Summer—to muted, and eventually dark. A tree branch at the top of each of the four paintings underscores the cyclical changes of nature: the branch is budding, blooming, broken, and eventually almost perished (Bernstein 2016, 235). Finally, a duck/ rabbit (Spring ), a hummingbird with a nest (Summer), a seahorse (also Summer), and a snowman (Winter), emphasize these transformations. The ages of man are evoked by a (half-)circular motif containing an arrow and an outstretched arm that functions as a mechanical hand indicating time. Although the arrows move in a counterclockwise direction, a countdown process is suggested: the arm points upward in Spring , has a nine-o’clock position in Summer, and dangles further down in Fall (Fig. 4) and Winter (Rosenthal 1988, 94–97). Rosenthal states that the clock device “is […] a record of the current state of the human being, and is an omen as well, suggesting the inevitable cycle in which man is subjected to the changing conditions of time” (1988, 94). While the twelve-o’clock position hints to Johns’s childhood, the dangling arm

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intimates his imminent death. The arrow in Winter, however, curiously suggests a clockwise rotation, perhaps turning back time. The motif of an arm painted in a circle originates from Johns’s Device Circle (1959), in which a wooden strip functions as a ruler, a device facilitating the drawing of a circular arc. Rose states that these rulers document past actions (Rose 2017). In later works, including Periscope (Hart Crane) (1962) and Diver (1962–63), the wooden device is replaced by an outstretched hand. This motif first functioned as reference to the suicidal death of the American poet Hart Crane. A reaching hand above the waves was apparently the last sign of him after he jumped off a boat in the Gulf of Mexico (Rosenthal 1988, 94). The outstretched hand can also be seen as an imprint of Johns’s body, a motif he used regularly from the 1960s onward. The artist made the imprint by pressing his oil-covered body against a sheet of paper, on which he then sprinkled and rubbed powdered graphite (Stoichita 2003, 47). In The Seasons, the arm alludes to this imprint motif, as an index for his own presence, literally keeping himself present even after his own death. In the context of the passage of time, the imprint is a metaphor, in which Johns inscribes himself and his actions as trapped in time. Besides the clock device, additional motifs also connote the passage of time. The outline of a child—possibly Andrew Monk (the son of a friend)—in front of Johns’s shadow in Spring shows the transition from childhood to maturity (Goldman 1987). Death seems around the corner in Fall , as announced by the Swiss warning sign for avalanches (recognizable by the symbol of a skull and crossbones), in combination with the broken ladder and objects that lie around the ground (Rosenthal 1988, 96). Eventually, the grey color in Winter, along with the unrepairable ladder, suggests that death is even closer, if it hasn’t yet arrived (Rosenthal 1988, 97). The childlike drawing of a snowman seems to serve as a memory of childhood, though it may also refer to Stevens’ poem The Snowman (Bernstein 2016, 239).

Art Historical Motifs From the early 1980s onward, Johns has focused more on art history and frequently borrowed motifs from other artists (Varnedoe et al. 1996, 359). The composition of the four paintings that comprise The Seasons roughly follows that of Picasso’s earlier-mentioned Minotaur Moving his

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House (1936). Although Johns has stated that “he was attracted to Picasso’s painting more for its subject matter than for its structure,” the slightly slanted pose of the human figure toward the left and the positioning of the starry sky, the previously mentioned tree branch, and the motif of a painting tied to a ladder with a rope all correspond to the placement of similar elements in Picasso’s work (Varnedoe et al. 1996, 57–58). Also, the wheel of the Minotaur’s cart in Picasso’s painting seems to be echoed in the previously discussed clock motif, and the seahorse in Summer recalls Picasso’s horse. The Minotaur himself—who functioned as Picasso’s stand-in—is missing yet substituted by Johns’s shadow (Varnedoe et al. 1996, 58). The ambiguous rabbit-duck motif and the optical illusion of the vases that are showing outlines of a portrait in The Seasons seem to hint to the two-sidedness of the Minotaur. These perceptual illusions are also a recurring motif in Johns’s work and show his attraction to the instabilities of visual perception (Bernstein 1991, 11). By incorporating The Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Vase, W.E. Hill’s print My Wife and My Mother-in-law (1915), and the Rabbit-Duck illusion (1892), the artist has underscored the versatile interpretations of his own works. These perceptual illustrations are mainly visible in Spring, in which they are located on a canvas tied to a ladder with a rope, alluding to Picasso’s Minotaur’s cart (Bernstein 2016, 237). Additionally, the artist created a perceptual puzzle by using inconsistent modes of representation, such as the floating Jubilee vase in front of the canvas (Varnedoe et al. 1996, 55). Johns’s interest in optical illusions can also be seen in Summer, besides references to his major sources of inspiration. The tied canvas on the ladder has slightly dropped down in Summer. The composition of the canvas, comprised of multiple images, recalls several paintings that directly precede The Seasons, like Ventriloquist (1983) and Racing Thoughts (1983) (Bernstein 1991, 11). A large hatching pattern, which is already present in Spring , dominates the canvas in Summer. It is a frequentlyrecurring motif in the artist’s oeuvre since he painted the pattern adorning a car that had passed him in his 1972 work Untitled. According to Rosenthal, it shows Johns placing himself within the “primary tradition of modernism” (1988, 14). Rose traces it back to multiple sources, including the lines that are used in etchings and engravings to create volume (Rose 2017). In Ventriloquist, the hatching is based on Barry Moser’s 1979 illustration for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, another recurring motif in

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Johns’s oeuvre. For Summer, Johns used a small fragment of a reproduction of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–1516): the demon. This motif was first introduced in the left panel of Untitled (1983) and also appears in Racing Thoughts (1983), in both of which it is accompanied by a skull-and-crossbones sign, showing Johns’s preoccupation with mortality (Bernstein 2016, 53–54). This concern with death also seems to be manifested in Summer, despite the absence of the skull-andcrossbones sign in that work. This reading may well be corroborated by the motif of a pair of yellow pants, which also features in Racing Thoughts and appears, obliquely, between the legs of the shadow in Summer. According to Rose, this shape recalls Michelangelo’s flayed skin on the main Sistine Chapel mural, which has been interpreted as the Italian artist’s self-portrait (2017). The image of the taped Mona Lisa-print in Summer also originates from Johns’s Racing Thoughts , with which it furthermore shares a representation of the Queen Elizabeth II jubilee vase. According to Bernstein, the Mona Lisa reproduction—which does not feature the original painting’s background and is complemented by her name—functions both as artistic homage (to Da Vinci, Duchamp, and Warhol) and as maternal archetype (Bernstein 2016, 58). The floating seahorse may question Mona Lisa’s presumed female sexuality, which Duchamp had already done in 1916 with his readymade L.H.O.O.Q . The seahorse is also likely a substitute for the horse that is giving birth in the Minotaur’s cart in Picasso’s 1936 painting (Rose). In Picasso’s work, the horse likely refers to Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had recently given birth to a daughter. Johns, who was gay and never had children but was a godfather, may have identified with seahorses, given that seahorses are the only species in which the male gives birth (Rosenthal 1988, 96). Bernstein interprets the paintings behind the animal in Summer as the artist’s offspring (2016, 237). Another element that is found in both Summer and Ventriloquist is the reference to Johns’s own Two Flags (1962). Whereas in Summer, it has the original red-and-white colors and contains the forty-eight stars that marked the US flag until 1959, the lower green-and-black flag in Ventriloquist (1983) contains the current fifty stars. By using the old flag

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in Summer, the artist seems to situate the canvas in a specific period in his life (Bernstein 2016, 237).5 While in Spring and Summer, canvases are tied to a ladder, in Fall and Winter, the fictional canvas tumbles down from the broken ladder and its loosened rope.6 In Fall , several Ohr Pots and a Rubin’s Vase have also fallen down (or float freely). For the Rubin’s Vase, the artist used the contours of Picasso’s face, a visual motif that can be traced to the early 1970s, when Johns honored the older artist’s ninetieth birthday, as in Cups 4 Picasso (1972) and Cup 2 Picasso (1973) (Varnedoe et al. 1996, 49). The Rubin’s Vase is not only a reference to Picasso, but also to Duchamp, as the motif was based on Duchamp’s Self-Portrait in Profile (1958), a mirrored reproduction of which is included in Johns’s Fall , right next to the avalanche warning sign. The Swiss warning sign in Fall is yet another reference to Duchamp, the words “CHUTE DE GLACE” (which punningly translate to both avalanche and fall of glass) possibly hinting to Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–1923). Johns had already alluded to Duchamp’s work in his painting Arrive/Depart (1964), his first work in which death appears, with the “Handle with Care” sign (Bernstein 2016, 43). The third and final link to Duchamp is the floating spoon, which most likely refers to the older artist’s Locking Spoon (1957) (Bernstein 2016, 239). While until the 1970s, Duchamp was an important dialogue partner in Johns’s work, Picasso became his main interlocutor after that. In his 1972 collage study for the lithograph Cup 2 Picasso (1972), Johns literally substituted Duchamp’s facial outlines for Picasso’s (Rose 1993, 59). Johns’s strategy of generating new meanings through borrowings from art history—“Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it” (Bernstein 2017b, 26–27)—has also materialized in the painting with Grünewald-hatching in Summer, which is again echoed in the painting that has the appearance of being in front of the avalanche warning in Fall , though the pattern’s colors have been rearranged and the direction has been rotated. Winter seems to include reference to yet another fragment from Grünewald’s altarpiece, although it remains somewhat unclear: only a grey, abstract hatching pattern is visible. The wooden stretcher reveals that the canvas in front is turned backward. The grey hatching is also reminiscent of Tantric detail III

5 Until 1960, the American Flag contained forty-eight stars. 6 It is arguable if the rope already hints to Johns’s Catenary-series.

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(1981), in which the hatching patterns fade away and gradually disappear. Because of the evocation with snow, Rose connects the work with Johns’s series on the theme of Usuyuki; “a Japanese story of love and loss whose title, ‘thin snow,’ refers to the melancholy relationship of an aging man and a beautiful young geisha, whom he can desire but not possess” (1993, 51).

Recurring Motifs Several elements recur within the four paintings of The Seasons themselves. In each of the canvases, groupings of circles, triangles, and squares that are symmetrically arranged in all four paintings allude to two of Johns’s favored sources of inspiration. The geometric shapes, which for Johns are the elements “that make up the whole world” (White 2013), refer both to the nineteenth-century abstract depiction of the universe by Japanese Zen master Sengai Gibon and to Cézanne, who advised: “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone” (Bernstein 1991, 10). A hardly noticeable, narrow strip with a striped pattern recurs in three out of four paintings. While the white-red striped motif is positioned vertically at the left side of the painting in Summer, the same motif appears horizontally at the bottom of Fall and Winter. Moreover, the white and red stripes have transformed into green and black ones in Fall . Again, Johns seems to hint to Ventriloquist (1983), although several illusionary devices that appear in the latter, such as the paper framework and pieces of tape, are missing. In all probability, the recurring flag motif can be related to Johns’s ongoing evocation of new meanings, of which the flag serves as prime example. By changing the same motif over and over again, Johns tries to liberate the viewer from “things the mind already knows” (Bernstein 2017b, 15). By using the slightest distinguishable section possible of his flag motif, he examines if viewers will still recognize this familiar icon, or interpret it differently. In all four paintings of The Seasons, a greyish cast shadow—the surrogate presence of the artist—appears, which shifts position between the works (Bernstein 1991, 10). As Victor I. Stoichita observes, “like the seasons, the body exists in time, and therefore […] changes and passes” (2003, 45). The shadow tracing the actual outlines of the artist seems to function as an index, leaving an everlasting presence. As Stoichita points out, the shadows recall Johns’s Skin pieces, though functioning as an inbetween of Johns’s real body and these imprints (2003, 48). While the

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contours of the shadow remain the same, its level of luminosity and location differ. The shadow moves from the middle of the work in Spring to the right in Summer, and while it is broken into two pieces in Fall , it reemerges as complete—at the left side of the painting—in Winter. Kirk Varnedoe describes the “splitting of Johns’s shadow” as “another of the artist’s codes for a changing point of view, and for time passing” (1996, 337). While Varnedoe characterizes the splitting as a visual instrument, Bernstein and Rosenthal connect substantive significance to it. According to Bernstein, the consistent outlines of the shadow imply “a permanent core of the self that remains intact as life’s circumstances change and time passes” (1991, 58). Rosenthal, on the other hand, conceives of the shadow figure as “a victim […] to his own transitions [….] [who] seems unable to strive beyond the preordained situation” (1988, 102). The shadow indeed seems (visually) affected: whereas the shadow cast has a clear presence in Summer, it can hardly be distinguished from its background in Winter. The conception of the shadow as victim corresponds to Ben Davis’s argument that the shape of Johns’s shadow resembles that of Munch’s late self-portrait in his Between the Clock and the Bed (1940– 1943), in which the artist portrayed himself as an old man inevitably facing death, symbolized by both a clock and a (death)bed (Davis 2019). Some art historians have argued that Johns was not familiar with the cross-hatching motif on Munch’s bedspread until, as the legend goes, a friend pointed at the similarities by sending him a postcard of Munch’s work (Kennedy 2016). After that, Johns used the hatching on Munch’s bedspread in several works, including his 1981 painting Between the Clock and the Bed. Whether or not this account is correct—John B. Ravenal suspects Johns already saw Munch’s work in 1950 (Kennedy 2016)—the similarities between Munch’s work and The Seasons are striking. The pose and stiffness of the figures match, as does the quotation of artworks from the past amidst which both artists portray themselves. Following Munch, Johns seems to show himself as subject to the workings of time. Besides mortality, the theme of sexuality also plays a role in both Munch’s Between the Clock and the Bed and Johns’s The Seasons (Kennedy 2016). While Munch’s work explicitly shows a painting of a nude girl hanging near his bed, the sexual connotations in Johns’s works are more hidden. Stoichita connects Johns’ shadow to the highly sexualized shadow in Picasso’s The Shadow (1953) (2003, 46). While the outline is not based on a true cast from the body, as it is in Johns’s The Seasons, the Spanish

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artist confirmed that it is his own shadow that enters the bedroom of his ex-wife Françoise Gilot (Varnedoe et al. 1996, 57). The shadows in The Seasons are cast on four different surfaces—either floors or walls—made from tile, brick, and wood, which can be related to four different residences of Johns. Summer is often linked to his new studio in Saint Martin because of the seahorse and the hummingbird, which evoke a Caribbean setting (Bernstein 2016, 237).7 As the different studio floors or walls can be conceived of as a metaphor for Johns’s transitions in life, Edith Devaney emphasizes that, because of his parents’ divorce and his subsequent relocations, “[Johns] never really felt as if he was in his own place” (Bernstein 2017a). This sense of displacement is also evoked by the different spaces that simultaneously exist in one painting: each freely seems to combine studio settings with an outside location. Such displacements contribute to the confusing nature of the works, which is strengthened by the painted motifs that sometimes seem to float in their own, undetermined space. Art historian Wouter Weijers has pointed out that the instability in Johns’s work is similar to memory processes (2009, 42). Though Johns’s motifs are often based on memories of his own, they tend not so much to be connected to internal emotions, but are rather based on the artist’s experiences or encounters with the visual world surrounding him. Like memories, these motifs gain significance within a particular context. While Johns repeatedly builds on a number of specific encounters in his works, the context in which his motifs occur changes in each work, as a result of which his motifs are in a permanent state of change and their meaning is constantly shifting and evolving (Weijers 2009, 42). This is what makes these puzzling works impossible to solve.

Change and Renewal In his graphic work with the theme seasons that followed the painting series, Johns experimented with the sequential arrangement of the four different works.8 Bernstein describes the intaglio print The Seasons 7 In showing the artist’s studios, Johns’s work falls into the rich, art historical tradition of representations of the artist’s studio, to which the work of artists like Velázquez, Courbet, and Picasso can also be counted (Rothfuss et al. 2003, 10–11). 8 Even within current exhibitions, the order of the works is often changed (Bernstein 2017).

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(1990), in which the sequence has been transformed into a cruciform shape, as one that “force[s] a circular reading that definitively precludes the concept of a fixed beginning or an end” (1991, 12). While an arrangement from Spring to Winter implies a “linear reading of the seasons, following nature’s cycle of birth, maturation, decline and death,” a sequence from Summer to Spring suggests regeneration (Bernstein 1991, 11). Alluding to the ongoing cycle of life and death in his intaglio print, Johns implies that nothing is fixed, that—like his works of art—everything remains open to change and renewal, though the continuity within these changes should also be acknowledged (Bernstein 1991, 11–12). As the artist ages and moves from one place to another, he remains—as demonstrated by the recurring motifs—interested in processes of perception and transformation, and continues to be inspired by a constant suite of artistic predecessors.

5 Postcards More than two decades after the creation of the painted version of The Seasons, Johns painted his series 5 Postcards (2011, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Fig. 1). He was inspired by drawings of his own—based on the Seasons-cycle—that he encountered while cleaning his studio in Saint Martin (Bernstein 2016, 302). Although there are barely any compositional similarities, The Seasons was the main source of inspiration. The title 5 Postcards, Johns has stated, refers to the idea of different postcards that “one might send […] to different friends while away on a trip” (Joselit 2012, 58). The five, rather than four, paintings made with encaustic, oil, and graphite on canvas are significantly smaller, and their composition seems more rigid and stylized. As in real life the artist was symbolically moving from fall to winter, his artistic perspective and vocabulary seem to have transformed synchronously (Bernstein 2017a). Varnedoe states that in the 1990s, Johns was upset by the fact that he seemed to have conceived his recent works rationally: “knowing often replaces looking” (Varnedoe et al. 1996, 359). Johns tried to overcome this by treating his motif “as an image in its own right, independent of its original source” (Varnedoe et al. 1996, 359). While Johns still drew motifs from earlier artworks and sources of inspiration, he did so in a more concealed way.

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Cycle To guarantee a specific order, Johns numbered the five paintings, very different from the varying permutation to which he had subjected the Seasons-cycle. While the theme of the four seasons and stages of life had suggested a (linear) narrative in the earlier series, this framework is, perhaps paradoxically, absent in 5 Postcards. Still, a sequential arrangement is suggested, not only through the numbering, but also through the paintings’ visual progression from flat to heavily textured, and from colorful to dark.9 Again, these visually evolving backgrounds serve as contexts in which Johns situates his motifs. By blurring, reversing, or recombining his motifs, or by making them disappear, Johns has provoked different meanings. The five paintings must, significantly, be regarded as one work of art, corresponding to Johns’s description of them as “five accounts of a single situation (or set of motifs)” (Joselit 2012, 58). The most recognizable analogy between 5 Postcards and The Seasons is probably manifested by the silhouette in the later series, which is reminiscent of Johns’s shadow in The Seasons.10 However, the greyish shadow has changed into a luminous and more stylized silhouette that can be found in the first three works of the later series and which is much less distinctly visible in the fourth (Fig. 5) and fifth paintings. In 5 Postcards, the silhouette remains in the same place, just left of the middle, and can best be conceived of as a negative form reminiscent of (the principle of) the Rubin’s Vase. Only half of a man’s profile is shown, which, because of its white color, seems to dissolve into the background. The dissolution has reached its peak in the fourth and fifth canvases, in which the outlines of the figure have disappeared as a result of the thick impasto (Joselit 2012, 56). It is the disappearing of the silhouette that suggests passage of time, heightened by the inscription of Johns’s eighty-first birthday (15 May 2011) on the third panel, in which the silhouette can be clearly seen one last time (Bernstein 2016, 302). Notable is the black dot of (dripping) paint in the fifth canvas of 5 Postcards, positioned at the location of the silhouette in the first three paintings (Bernstein 2016, 303). Johns had also painted stains on limbs 9 The third painting, however, seems to function as a turning point, because of its plain setting in black-and-white. 10 The silhouette in 5 Postcards may not be based on the same tracing that Johns used for The Seasons, since some (minor) differences seem to occur between the outlines.

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Fig. 5 Jasper Johns, 5 Postcards (#4), 2011, oil and pencil on canvas, 91 × 69 cm. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

in earlier works, as in Perilous Night (1982), in which, according to Rosenthal, they refer to the arm wounds of the fallen Christ in the Entombment-panel of Grünewald’s altarpiece (1988, 65). Another black dot of paint can be found in Johns’ work Untitled (1992–1994), in which it is painted on a cross, again seeming to link the motif to Christ’s stigmata. While its meaning remains unclear, the ordinary blotch of paint has

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become even more loaded. It seems as if death has already struck in the fifth panel. The silhouette also seems to point to one of the three “academic” ideas Johns considered key in his oeuvre: the notion, attributed to Da Vinci, that “the boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere” (Stoichita 2003, 40). According to Da Vinci, a contour is a medium that functions as an inbetween of the body and the surroundings. Therefore, the silhouette can be conceived of as a (second) skin and as a boundary of a space. In this way, the silhouette also seems to act as a device that connects different, unrelated spaces, linking an inside and outside. Similar to Duchamp’s SelfPortrait in Profile and the illusionistic Rubin’s Vases, which are again cited in 5 Postcards, Johns has created his own, puzzling figure-ground relation with his silhouette. With the multiplicity of meanings of these illusions, Johns’s interest in the transformative power of perception seems to be highlighted again (Joselit 2012, 54). Different from The Seasons, the tracing of the child appears not only in one but in each of the five paintings of the sequence. While in the first three canvases, the child faces left, toward the adult man, it faces right in the last two canvases, in which the man’s silhouette has disappeared. Bernstein wonders whether the juvenile shadows in 5 Postcards should be interpreted as symbol of childhood, as it should in Spring. Without giving answers, she wonders whether they symbolize two life stages of the artist or express William Wordsworth’s poetic sentence “the child is father of the man” (2017, 30). Joselit, rather, regards the silhouettes as visual instrument. He points to the “elaborate field of oppositions [and] reverberations” in Johns’s work, and conceives of the “father(?)/child(?)” motif as an example of the many doublings in the paintings (2012, 57). By using doublings, the artist seems to literally highlight the absence of a fixed meaning. According to Joselit, the doubling of the man and the child in 5 Postcards echoes the two circles in the back (2012, 57). Although the imprint of the arm is absent, the circles recall the clock motif of The Seasons, in addition to the circles that appear in earlier graphic work and paintings Johns made between 1986 and 2011. The circles could also allude to the small circles in The Seasons, referring to the basic elements that shape our world. Possibly, Johns treated the circles as new, independent motif to avoid a rational reading. Bernstein, however, suggests that the circles “signify the passage of time and its cyclical recurrence” (2016, 302).

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The vases that appear in each of the five paintings in the 5 Postcards series, which were also present in The Seasons, are another instance of doubling. The Silver Jubilee Vase is portrayed on the right of the canvases and a Rubin’s Vase on the left, although in the fourth canvas the Silver Jubilee Vase is doubled and the Rubin’s Vase has disappeared in the fifth canvas. This time the Rubin’s Vases do not show Picasso’s outline, but Johns’s profile (Bernstein 2016, 302). Perhaps they serve as yet another of the artist’s surrogates, the outlines being clearer than the silhouette. Though the Rubin’s Vase changes in color and texture throughout the series, like the silhouette, it remains in place, with the exception of the last canvas, in which it evaporates along with the silhouette (Bernstein 2016, 302). The Silver Jubilee Vase, on the other hand, tumbles down in the third and fourth canvas, in which the artist also added a second tilting vase, while in the final canvas, everything seems to be back to normal, with the exception of its changed color. While these vases show Johns’s continued interest in the ambiguity of perception, they also seem to show a cycle of flowering, decline, and resurrection that matches The Seasons (Bernstein 2016, 302). Another motif that appears in both 5 Postcards and Johns’s allegorical cycle is the ladder. Instead of being depicted horizontally, it is shown vertically in the later series, following the graphic work based on The Seasons and the paintings Mirror’s Edge (1992) and Mirror’s Edge 2 (1993). In these latter works, the motif of the ladder is combined with an image of a spiraling cosmos, suggesting a connection between earth and heaven, though the image of the cosmos is located at the bottom of the ladder. In this way, the motif of the ladder seems to visualize the steps of humans between birth and death, possibly replacing the clock device of The Seasons. The ladder in Johns’s 5 Postcards breaks in the second painting, and—in contrast to the seasons-cycle—becomes whole again in the other paintings. Bernstein interprets the yellow brushstrokes below the ladder in the fourth canvas as flames, and the dark, indistinct tower of Jubilee vases— shown behind the ladder in the fifth canvas—correspondingly as smoke (2016, 303). Smoke can also be seen in an earlier work: Johns’s watercolor and pencil drawing Cicada (1979), of which Rose identified the motif as a Hindu cremation pyre (1993, 69). Another reference to death by cremation in Cicada can be found in a citation of a newspaper photograph captioned “Pope Prays at Auschwitz / Only Peace” (Rose 1993, 69). The interpretation of the fire as a cremation in the fourth panel

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of 5 Postcards can be underscored by the Rubin’s Vase blackening on the same canvas, and its disappearing on the fifth panel. The theme of mortality seems distinct and gets a personal note with the cremated Rubin’s Vase bearing Johns’s facial outlines and the disappearance of his stylized silhouette on the fourth and fifth canvases. In the first three canvases, a handkerchief hangs from the ladder. It is pinned down with a nail, which Johns had painted in trompe l’oeil in his earlier works. The handkerchief also appears in works like Perilous Night (1982), alluding on the one hand to Veronica’s veil and on the other to Picasso’s etching Weeping Woman (1937). Riva Castleman states that Johns used the veil as remnant of the human body and relates it to Johns’s earlier castings and imprints of himself, discussing the morbid character of the motif (1986, 20). Functioning as an index, the handkerchief, or veil, suggests the artist is present in the first three canvases, while its absence may already hint to Johns’s inevitable death. The yellow handkerchief also recalls the pair of yellow pants from Racing Thoughts and Summer, alluding to Michelangelo’s flayed self-portrait, reinforcing the interpretation of the works as Johns’s reflection of death. Another motif from The Seasons that is repeated in 5 Postcards is the horizontal row of colored circles at the base of the paintings, which is reminiscent of a paint set for children. While the color charts are neatly displayed in the first painting, they get swept out and become less clear in the three subsequent canvases, as if smeared by a brush. Bernstein suggests that the first spectrum represents childhood and the beginning of (Johns’s) art, while the alterations of the motif symbolize the changes of life. Similar to the motif of the tumbling Silver Jubilee Vase, the colored disks are returned to normal in the final painting, although shown in reverse, which hints to a cycle that is starting over (Bernstein 2017a). As early as 1973, a thin bar with primary colors appeared at the base of the color screen print Untitled (Skull) (1973). There, the bar is combined with the memento mori symbol of a skull with crossbones. In the same print, Johns has crossed out his own signature, which Rose has interpreted as “a curious gesture as self-abnegation” (1993, 64), though it may with hindsight also be seen as early reference to the artist’s own absence in death.

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Ars Longa, Vita Brevis After midlife, Johns seems to have emphasized even more than before the instabilities in meaning of (his) art, by constantly recontextualizing existing motifs. Based on the artist’s earlier description of his work as “either a complaint or an appeasement,” Rosenthal conceives of Johns’s works as a way to “appease his terror of growing old” (Garrels et al. 2012, 129). In the spring of 2019, several new variations on the Seasons and 5 Postcards series were exhibited at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. Especially striking are the two untitled paintings from 2018 showing a grinning skeleton with a boater and a walking stick (Fig. 6). Both paintings hint even more explicitly to Johns’s mortality. The 88year-old artist seems to even represent himself as already dead. The skeletons are painted inside the human shadow of The Seasons, while Spring served as compositional precedent. A snowman from Winter and a leaf from Spring are painted as well. Motifs from 5 Postcards and other works can be recognized in addition. This repeating and recombining of motifs in different mediums and levels of abstraction will never reach a stable explanation. Ben Davis worries that the motifs’ meaning will perish with Johns’s death, as the artist has never truly shared his thoughts (Davis 2019). But isn’t that exactly what both death and cultural legacies are about? Remaining fragments of memories can only be the subject of guesswork. Without nostalgia or wistfulness, John Yau stresses Johns’s ways of continued moving forward: “by applying different processes and techniques to these and other representations, Johns has found a way to continue being candid about aging, mortality, and the dead selves we leave behind” (Yau 2019). Impending death is the only certainty for Johns, as well for the beholder, while Johns’s puzzling works of art, those puzzling indexes of the artist, will always remain open to various interpretations.

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Fig. 6 Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 97 × 65 cm. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

References Bernstein, Roberta. 1991. Jasper Johns: The Seasons. New York: Brooke Alexander Editions.

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Bernstein, Roberta. 2016. Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture, vol. I. New York: The Wildenstein Plattner Institute. Bernstein, Roberta. 2017. Artwork in focus: The Seasons by Jasper Johns. Royal Academy of Arts. Audio podcast. https://player.fm/series/royal-academy-ofarts-1161193/artwork-in-focus-the-seasons-by-jasper-johns. Bernstein, Roberta, ed. 2017. Jasper Johns. London: Royal Academy of Arts. Castleman, Riva. 1986. Jasper Johns, a Print Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Davis, Ben. 2019. What Ghosts Haunt Jasper Johns’s New Skeleton Paintings? We May Never Know (and That’s the Point). Artnet. https://news.art net.com/exhibitions/jasper-johns-skeleton-paintings-1469083. Accessed 10 February 2023. Garrels, Gary et al. 2012. Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye. San Fransisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Goldman, Judith. 1987. The Seasons. New York: Leo Castelli Gallery. Joselit, David. 2012. Jasper Johns: Numbers, 0–9, and 5 Postcards. Los Angeles: Matthew Marks Gallery. Kammen, Michael G. 2004. A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kennedy, Maev. 2016. Strange Bedfellow: ‘How Edward Munch and Jasper Johns Painted Sex and Death’. The Guardian, June 24. https://www.the guardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/24/edvard-munch-jasper-johns-sexdeath-between-the-clock-and-the-bed. Accessed 12 April 2023. Rose, Barbara. 1993. Jasper Johns: ‘The Tantric Details.’ American Art 7 (4), Fall. Rose, Barbara. 2017. Jasper Johns: “Take an Object. Do Something to It. Do Something Else to It.” RA Magazine, Fall. Rosenthal, Mark. 1988. Jasper Johns: Work Since 1974. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art; New York: Thames and Hudson. Rothfuss, Joan et al. 2003. Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns since 1983. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. Stoichita, Victor I. 2003. Three Academic Ideas. In Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns Since 1983, ed. Joan Rothfuss et al, 40-48. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center. Varnedoe, Kirk, et al. 1996. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. White, Edmund. 2013. MoMA’s Boy. Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/ culture/1996/09/jasper-johns-199609. Accessed 11 April 2023. Weijers, Wouter. 2009. Jasper Johns’ Untitled (1972) ontleed en verklaard. Desipientia, April.

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Yau, John. 2019. Jasper Johns’s Messengers of Aging and Mortality. Hyperallergic. Jasper Johns’s Messengers of Aging and Mortality (hyperallergic.com). Accessed 13 April 2023.

Creation, Aging, and the Prospect of Death

Endpapers: Adrienne Rich’s Signature to Her Life Diederik Oostdijk

In the final section of her last published poem called “Endpapers” (2012), the American poet and feminist critic Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) writes that “the signature to a life requires / the search for a method / rejection of posturing” and “trust in the witnesses” (1119). It is a charged and symbolic ending to Rich’s writing career and life in which she sends off one last missive to her readers. In addition to these mental preparations, this metaphorical “signature” at the end of a person’s earthly existence also requires three props: a vial of invisible ink a sheet of paper held steady after the end-stroke above a deciphering flame. (1119)

The final written words of her life exude an emotional firmness, as the words “trust” and “steady” reflect, even if the liminal space between life

D. Oostdijk (B) Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_15

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and death is marked by existential uncertainty. The “deciphering flame” seems to be a candle that allows the speaker to read what has been written, but the light can be extinguished at any moment. These final lines of Rich’s writing career constitute a deliberate reckoning or settlement of her entire oeuvre. Yet they—and the entire poem “Endpapers”—also form an ars poetica of sorts. The poem “Endpapers” is an enactment of the “signature” metaphor she concocts. After all, a signature is not just the proof of signing one’s name or the name of a person written with her own hand. It is also the style that serves to identify something or someone. The title “Endpapers,” too, is a telling metaphor, as the word refers to the double-size sheet at the end of a book, half of which is attached to the bounded quires while the other half is glued to the inside back cover of the book. Rich’s late self-examination is by no means unique among twentiethcentury American poets. In Last Looks, Last Books (2010), Helen Vendler examines how five of Rich’s peers took stock of their lives in the final volumes these poets published. Vendler detects a curious “binocular view” in the last poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens (2010, 6). As if gazing through two small telescopes, these poets gaze simultaneously at their past lives as well as their impending deaths. Unlike earlier poets writing in the English language who could rely on their Christian faith to imbue their last poems with a sense of hope, these twentieth-century poets could not depend on an easily imaginable afterlife when penning down their last look. Despite the common pattern of the “last look,” each of them developed a different style to cope with this and other ontological questions. While Stevens mainly looks with paralytic horror at his own physical demise, Lowell counts his losses “as a set of successive subtractions.” Plath meanwhile veered from “melodrama” to “restraint,” while Bishop aimed to free her mind while her body was caving in (Vendler 2010, 24). Despite the differences in age and circumstance, Rich’s poems in her final volume of poetry—Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2010)—and the nearly dozen “Later Poems” (2010–2012) which were included in her Collected Poems share something with all of these poets. Vendler’s characterization of “Bishop’s oscillations between being caught in the body and being freed into expression,” for example, sounds true of Rich’s final poems, too (24). Yet Rich’s speaker in these late poems may feel free to express herself, but she frequently indicates that she is afraid she will not

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be heard or understood accurately. Like Lowell, Rich also relies on “‘snapshots’ (rather than on a seamless narrative) to convey old age” to quote Vendler on Lowell (73). Yet Rich started writing in “snapshots” back in the 1960s, so that style cannot be linked exclusively to a supposed late style. The explicit way in which Rich takes leave of her readers in “Endpapers” shares something with “Stevens’s ornate murmering farewells” (Vendler 2010, 93). Yet Rich’s late poems are not decorative or overelaborate but rather rudimentary and seemingly unfinished. The analyses that Vendler presents in Last Looks, Last Books nevertheless offer telling models to which we can compare Rich’s last poems. This chapter investigates what thematic, stylistic, and symbolic features Rich uses in Tonight No Poetry Will Serve and the “Later Poems,” and whether they constitute a late style and indeed her own particular “last look” in which she confronts both her past life and imminent death. Rich seems closest to James Merrill who wrote a series of “self-portraits while dying” (2001, 117) in his final volume, A Scattering of Salts. Like Merrill, Rich offers a “plangent coda” to her writing career in these final poems, which are issued “from a voice already failing, able to utter only broken deathbed words,” as Vendler wrote about Merrill (133). It appears that one feature of Rich’s late poems overlaps with Merrill’s late poems, and that two features seem truly her own. Firstly, like Merrill, Rich frequently reflects how a healthy mind deals with a sick and aging body. Secondly, many of Rich’s late poems repeatedly allude to sounds that are voiced or emitted, but that are somehow obstructed or cannot be heard well by others. The third and most dominant feature is that Rich’s final poems persistently allude to the act of writing, as “Endpapers” also shows. They evoke the materiality of writing and reading, refer to earlier themes or poems written by Rich, and to the creative process of writing. The few critics who have tackled some of these poems in reviews are mixed about Rich’s final poems. Darin Jensen suggests in Prairie Schooner that Rich showed no sign of “mellowing” in Later Poems: Selected and New, and that the strongest carry “the power and strength of age” and are “a gift of succor” (150). Stephanie Burt is less enthusiastic. She doubts whether the “spare fragments, scattered memories, and some self-disgust” making up Rich’s “late style” can stand on their own (2012, n.p.). Burt doubts whether they will be of interest to anyone unfamiliar with Rich’s earlier work. She acknowledges that Tonight No Poetry Will Serve is “a book as explicit as late Yeats or late Heaney in its return to the poet’s prior work,” but finds the poems unfinished and repetitive (ibid.). Vendler

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herself had long before given up all hope on Rich. An early admirer of Rich’s, Vendler “set the tone for many of Rich’s detractors in the early 1970s,” as Sylvia Henneberg has argued (2012, 14–15). Vendler bemoaned the “sort of propaganda poetry” that Rich supposedly wrote, and which to her “generated a counterproductive aesthetic result” (380). Of the three, Burt’s critique is most incisive and evenhanded, and she suggests that Rich indeed developed a distinct “late style.” While she suggests that Rich’s last lines may not be her best, Burt offers clues that can make us more appreciative of what Rich set out to convey through these last poems.

Reading Her Own Handwriting The title of Rich’s last collection of poems, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, already reflects Rich’s late fixation on the act of writing and reading. So do the titles of individual poems, such as “Reading the Iliad (as if) for the First Time,” “Quarto,” “Suspended Lines,” and indeed “Endpapers.” One section of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve is, moreover, taken up by five poems dedicated to Axel Avákar, a “fictive poet, counter-muse, brother,” as Rich herself described this character with whom she enters into a dialogue about poetry. In these and other late poems we find sporadic allusions to how Rich discovered poetry in her Baltimorean childhood home, and what were key breakthroughs and hindrances during her writing career. The vicarious return to themes and tropes from Rich’s most anthologized poem “Diving into the Wreck” stands out among these references. What do they signify about Rich’s last look and her supposed late style? The most emblematic return to her earlier writing career occurs in “Domain,” written in 2008 and first published in the Winter issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review in 2009. This poem is reminiscent of the childhood poems of Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) and Bishop’s Geography III (1976), in which the alter egos of these poets’ younger selves are also discovering their identities by teasing out the differences and similarities between their developing characters and those of their relatives. In the first of two snapshots that “Domain” presents, we see “a girl” looking “through a microscope” under the watchful eyes of her father who wants to show her how life exists in a drop of blood (Rich 1051). Rich’s father was a famous pathologist (whose research on jaundice, tuberculosis, and cancer led to several medical breakthroughs), while

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her mother was a musician and composer. “Domain” is highly autobiographical, as the young girl in the poem also hears her mother practicing musical scales. Meanwhile the girl, who despite the literal proximity of her parents, finds herself alone, “reads her own handwriting,” as Rich writes in a line that foreshadows the final trope of the signature of “Endpapers” (Rich 1051). After hinting at her parents’ passions, Rich lets on that her young protagonist is also discovering her vocation: The girl finding her method: you’re going to have to write letters to strangers (Rich 1052)

you want friends

By creating a caesura after the colon through a simple empty space within her line of poetry as well by an enjambment following that line, Rich dramatizes the aha-experience this daughter is having. For the older Rich, writing poetry became essentially an epistolary exchange with others who are not physically there, as young Adrienne is learning. It helps the child to feel less lonely. “Domain” is a rarity among Rich’s poems for offering such a personal glimpse into the family life of her childhood. Yet it is also emblematic for how reflective Rich became about what the act of writing meant to her and her life four years before she died. While her father had medicine and her mother had music to devote their time to, Rich discovered that her vocation was writing. It was her domain, as she could exercise absolute ownership over that territory, if she studied as diligently as her parents did. The second section and reminiscence of “Domain” is harder to date and locate, although it again revolves around writing. The presumably same protagonist finds herself behind a writing desk. Despite the “coffee stain” that is “splashed on a desk,” she is content. After all, she is now living in “her true / country” (Rich 1052). Although she appears to be as solitary as in the first section of the poem, Rich is not alone in the house. She is “instructing young fingers through difficult knots,” as Rich relates in a synecdoche that implies that the young girl from the first section of the poem is now herself a mother. Little has changed in her disposition, however, as writing is still her dominion where she feels safest, and she is still isolated from the town’s people. There is no mention of a husband or a father to these children in this second snapshot, although the poem’s penultimate line—“refuge of missing parts”—indicates that

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someone or something is absent or gone. She and her children are nevertheless “intact,” as the both worrisome and reassuring isolated final word of the poem signifies (Rich 1052). The two sections of “Domain” bear a close resemblance to Rich’s breakthrough poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” (1958–1960). They feature the same quick, third-person perspectives on women’s lives, whose jittery anxieties are only matched by a desire to escape the fixed gendered positions of their existence. “Domain” features a snippet of a snapshot of a congressman’s wife, for instance, who busies herself with raking leaves and calling after their wandering dogs while her husband is away. “What prompted Rich’s turn to self-analysis in poetry, after great public success with more formal and traditional early poems,” as Gail Swiontkowski has said about “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” “was her own experience of motherhood, or more precisely her own great disillusionment of motherhood” (2003, 98). The “milky nipple of stars” that looms overhead for Rich’s protagonist in her late poem also shows that only motherhood appears to be in the cards for women in the twentiethcentury constellation. Yet whereas “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” focuses on those limitations while taking inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir and Emily Dickinson, “Domain” emphasizes that writing has always been Rich’s sanctuary and way out. While not a major revision from her earlier position, it hints that Rich’s last look is milder and less explicitly political. The litmus test of this supposition is “Quarto” (2009). Along with the prose poem “Scenes of Negotiation” (2009) and the sprawling “Powers of Recuperation,” “Quarto” counts among the most political of Rich’s final poems. “Call me Sebastian” is the phrase Rich’s poem starts off with, introducing not only Rich’s speaker, but also conjuring up the opening sentence of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s Great American novel in which one man’s grand goal leads to wanton destruction of human lives and nature. In Rich’s poem, Sebastian is not just the Christian martyr from the third century A.D. who survived the onslaught of multiple arrows being shot at him. Rich’s speaker is instead a veteran of many wars: “Marathon. / Wounded Knee. Vicksburg. Jericho. / Battle of the Overpass” (Rich 1052). By juxtaposing a Greek battle during a Persian invasion about 5000 years B.C.; one by the American cavalry against Native Americans in 1890; the last siege against the Confederacy during the American Civil War; the Old Testament battle in which the Israelites took possession of Canaan; and finally another type of battle altogether in which United

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Auto Workers clashed with Ford Motor Company in Michigan in 1937, Rich sums up in three single lines how the human cost of warfare and the fight against inequality was the overarching theme of her writing career. Yet even in this poem which is so overtly political, Rich’s tone is different from earlier decades. She presents Sebastian as a victim as well as an aggressor, whose androgynous demeanor allows her to identify with him in the poem’s final section. The title “Quarto” refers to the size of a piece of paper cut four from a sheet, once again referencing writing and reading. “Quarto” also has four sections, and in the fourth and decisive part of her poem, Rich unexpectedly circles back to what is probably her most famous poem. Whereas “Domain” invited parallels with “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” “Quarto” evokes “Diving into the Wreck.” “I’ll tell you about the mermaid,” Rich startlingly writes in the final installment of “Quarto.” It appears that Rich here is no longer ventriloquizing through Sebastian, but is speaking in her own voice to the ancient military man. In the equally astonishing denouement of her classic poem from 1972, Rich’s speaker suddenly presented herself as both the mermaid and the merman: This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he (Rich 373)

In this pioneering poem, Rich “explodes the symmetries of any pronominal (he/she) or sexual (men/women) polarization,” as Soshana Felman has written (1993, 135), while at the same time exploring how women ought to search through the wreckage of their and the collective Western past. It is only through a deep-dive exploration that women can understand how the world is organized and change it. At the end of “Quarto,” Rich comes back to that piece of advice, and questions its wisdom anew. “There is a price,” Rich states twice in the conclusion of the poem, finishing it with the lines: “For every gift / And all advice” (1090). The repetition in combination with the simplicity of the endrhyme underscores the unvarnished truth that Rich is beginning to accept. Her feminist poems and essays may have helped women, but have not stopped hurting the Sebastians of the world, past and present.

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“Quarto” is not the only late poem with intertextual references to “Diving into the Wreck.” The first of the Axel Avákar poems also employs the type of imagery that abounds in the earlier poem. Like the merman and the mermaid, Axel and she are “in some sense twinned, then distanced,” as Rich explained to Cat Richardson in 2011, the year before she died (cited in Stein 128). Like in “Quarto,” Rich takes as her point of departure in “Axel Avákar” not the coming together of but the breaking away from her alter ego. Rich and Axel “unhook, dissolve, secrete into islands” (Rich 1071). Whereas the fusing of the mermaid and merman in “Diving into the Wreck” was described with ecstasy and wonderment, the two have in the meantime become so ensnared that the eventual unraveling of their tie is portrayed as an excruciatingly lonely and solitary journey. This splitting of the male and female twins bears a close resemblance to how Zeus and the other gods separated the androgynous kind, as one Greek myth would have it. According to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, there were originally three types of human beings. Besides the categories of male and female, the androgynous sort “was made up of male and female elements.” With “two sets of sexual organs,” they were shaped “completely round, with back and sides in a circle” (Plato 25). Because the gods considered the androgynous type too powerful and ambitious, they cut them in two halves. As a consequence, each half of the androgyne is destined to long for the other half, Aristophanes argues (Plato 27). Several critics, including Clare Keyes and Betty S. Flowers, have expounded how Rich appropriated the androgyne in “Diving into the Wreck” to dissolve the conflict between the sexes. In “Axel Avákar” and “Quarto,” however, we see that the harmonious reunion of the twins does not last. Rich’s separation from Axel is not a punishment by the gods, however. It is the result of a mutual estrangement that occurs with couples over time, which is presented in the poem as an ineluctable inevitability. Rich’s speaker camps out on a far corner of the universe thinking she was over her male doppelgänger, only to realize that in a long poem she is writing she encounters Axel once again. “The struggle” that she depicts in “Axel Avákar,” as Rich admitted to Richardson, is “to understand, be understood, know the other in the self” (Qtd. in Stein 128). In “Quarto,” Rich describes that after the initial coming together, the mermaid did away with her “swimmable tail,” and grew “legs for dancing” (Rich 1089). While she began to sing prodigiously during this triumphant phase of her writing career, she actually sang with a “choked

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throat,” as she admits (Rich 1089). Moreover, she could feel that daggers were piercing her spinal column wherever she walked. So, even though Rich finally found ground underneath her feet for her feminist ideas, she is plagued both by an obstruction to the seat of the voice and by pains to the thick spinal cord of nerves which connects the brain to all parts of the body. These frustrating sensations can be taken literally or figuratively, and both meanings are crucial to understand Rich’s last poetic look. Concern about the aging and disintegrating body is a pronounced theme throughout her final poems, a theme that she shared with James Merrill.

Signified by Sickness Curiously enough, Rich had published her first poem about aging and death as early as 1951, in her debut volume A Change of World. “At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand” is written in deft regular stanzas and poised end-rhymes; markedly different from the more disordered rhythms of her late poetry. Although Rich’s seventy-year-old speaker is contemporaneous to Rich (who was born in 1929), Rich chose a male protagonist to speak to us half a century into the future. The dying man implores the young to “laugh” instead of indulging in “rage and loud despair” (Rich 15). While the old man was a strict disciplinarian and prone to belligerence, he now urges youth “to light that darkening rift” (Rich 16). In retrospect, Rich’s early poem sounds moralistic and weirdly wise beyond her years. Despite the praise of critics, she herself also began to dislike the tone of these early poems. “At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand” is nevertheless revealing, however, especially when comparing it to the poems Rich wrote when she was approaching death almost six decades later. Two poems written four years before she died—“Emergency Clinic” (2008) and “From Sickbed Shores” (2008)— address similar themes, albeit in a more indirect and messy way and with a bleaker tone. In fact, “Emergency Clinic” is written in a style that is diametrically opposed to the one Rich employed in “At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand.” It is written in an even more staccato style than Rich’s other late poems. It has a jerky rhythm, with irregular stanzas that start and end erratically. It also has gaps—empty white spaces—in between the lines that function as caesuras. They are characteristic for Rich’s poetry in the second half of her career, but appear more frequently in this poem. In

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combination with the many enjambments, which create a semantic ambiguity after each line, it makes the syntax of “Emergency Clinic” confusing. In the second stanza, for instance, Rich writes: I do not soothe minor injuries do not offer I require close history of the case apprenticeship in past and fresh catastrophe (Rich 1082)

The logic of the argument is hard to follow, but that may be part of the plan. The phrase “I do / not offer,” for example, may initially seem to belong to the “minor injuries,” but when reading on we gather that it may belong more to the “close history / of the case.” It could also be a sentence that Rich’s speaker starts but never finishes or a phrase used to emphasize the verb “require.” Since the noun “apprenticeship” is also unnecessarily broken up in two lines, “Emergency Clinic” is an unpleasant read. Rich perhaps even admits this in the mystifying opening couplet, when she writes: “Caustic implacable / poem unto and contra” (Rich 1082). Yet the disordered style mirrors the setting and the speaker’s disposition, as the poem takes place at a medical crisis unit. Thematically “Emergency Clinic” is similar to James Merrill’s poems in A Scattering of Salts, in which he presents a series of self-portraits while dying of AIDS. Rich’s poems address a similar kind of “quickness of the sense and the spirit even as the deathly dissolution of the body becomes certain,” as Vendler has written (2010, 117). Yet Rich exhibits none of the formal control that Merrill stuck to until his final days. In “Christmas Tree,” for instance, Merrill’s speaker imagines his decaying and drugged body as resembling an evergreen conifer. All dressed up and decorated, the tree knew it was dying or already dead, and only pretending to be alive to please others. Merrill’s poem also takes the form of a Christmas tree, with an asterisk as its peak, broad in the middle where the needles bear the weight of the holiday decorations, and slimmer at the trunk in which Merrill speaks his final words: Dusk room aglow For the last time With candlelight. Faces love-lit

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Gifts underfoot. Still to be so poised, so Receptive. Still to recall, praise. (Merrill 866)

Merrill shows not only formal control in “Christmas Tree,” but also control of thought, as he is acknowledging his gratitude for the loved ones at his side, but also for being mentally agile even in his dying days. Rich’s late poems cannot boast an original masterpiece such as Merrill’s “Christmas Tree.” Hers are more unpredictable and changeable in tone and form, and less accommodating to her readers about what her final thoughts are. “They account for debilities and advancing years,” as Burt has argued, “which they also fiercely defy” (2012, n.p). This paradox was at the heart of Rich’s approach to both pain and aging throughout her career, however. From “At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand” onward, aging was a topic that she addressed off and on. Although “aging per se does not seem to take center stage in any of the phases of Rich’s literary career,” as Sylvia Henneberg has explained, Rich “began to uncover and explore such topics as physical pain, self-renewal, memory and life review, all of which are significant aspects of age studies” (2012, 16). Two years after the turn of the millennium, Rich was battling “constant discomfort,” as John O’Mahoney wrote in a profile for The Guardian. This was mostly the result of “the arthritis she has endured since her early 20s.” Yet Rich was determined that the physical pain she endured most of her adult life did not become an overbearing topic of her poetry. She was adamant to resist “the temptation to make a career of pain,” as she admitted in “Twenty-One Love Poems” VIII (1974–1976) (469). As a consequence, Rich “made little reference to her physical pain,” as Jeanne Perreault acknowledges in “‘Signified by pain:’ Adrienne Rich’s Body Tracks,” one of the few articles that explores this theme in her work with any profundity. Perreault speculates about another reason why pain is only sporadically visible in Rich’s poetry, besides Rich’s refusal to let her creative output be dominated by pain. Citing Elaine Scarry and Susan Sontag, she suggests that physical pain defies and can even obliterate language, and that when in agonizing pain human beings can no longer detect a self that is separate from the pain they feel (Perreault 90, 91). This may be why in her most outspoken poem about pain, “Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain,” (1983–1985) is a letter addressed to

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herself. It is as if only by summoning back her self, is she able to get access to her own personality that is hiding behind a mist of pain. “Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain” uncharacteristically opens up about the pain Rich endured during her adult life, and which she vowed a decade earlier to keep out of her poetry. She details how the specific pain she feels emanates from her sternum to the joints in her arm, making it impossible for her to write by hand, although she can still type. Aching electric thrusts surge through her body, making her wrists inflamed and light up “like a neon bulb” (644). Rich asks herself how she can continue “to live” with this pain for “the rest of my life” (644). It is a question for which no answer is forthcoming, although she is interested in finding out how the “old poets” tackled this issue of chronic pain in their poems (644). By admitting that her pain starts at her spine and ends in her bones, ligaments, and joints that complicate her ability to write, Rich admits that her chronic arthritis affects the core of who she is, physically and mentally. To tweak an argument Rich makes in “Domain,” the poet has become a stranger to herself because of the physical agony she is undergoing, and she needs to write to herself in other to get reacquainted with who she is. This poem from the mid-1980s is also informative for understanding “From Sickbed Shores” (2008). The latter poem is Rich’s final testament on pain, and a poem that clearly offers the “sustained binocular view” of the last look as it treats “the supervening of death and life” (Vendler 6). Unlike “Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain,” “From Sickbed Shores” is vague about what the patient is suffering from in this late poem. The speaker refers to “sickened skin,” (1065), and there are other hints, such as “wired wrists” (1065), and “fever,” (1067), but not enough to make a composite image of what the illness is for which she is treated, and why she is lying “behind white curtains in an emergency cubicle” (1066). Whereas “Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain” is almost Confessional and reminiscent of Plath’s early poetry, “From Sickbed Shores” offers a more aloof and impersonal perspective. This might appear similar to the poetic transformation that Plath went through toward the end of her life. According to Vendler, Plath found a way to reign in her most autobiographical and violent impulses in for instance “Berck-Plage” by “regarding herself from the outside” (2010, 68) or juxtaposing her own suffering to that of others. While “From Sickbed Shores” shares the hospital and coastal setting of Plath’s “Berck-Plage,” Rich’s poem lacks the “admirable evenness” that Vendler detects in Plath’s poem. Moreover, it remains obscure whether

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the poem at its essence is about social ills, about the miscommunication with a removed lover, or an acknowledgment of how we all die alone. Rich probably tries all of the above, but fails to communicate this lucidly. In the final section of “From Sickbed Shores,” Rich juxtaposes the isolated state of the sick protagonist with the Ancient Greek myth of Charon. This ferryman who transported dead people across the river Styx to the next world is the most explicit reference to dying in Rich’s late poetry. Instead of the mythological journey to the underworld, however, Rich’s addressee is faced with “dun skies” and a “dull / floodplain” which she looks out at. In Last Looks, Last Books, Vendler explored “what may happen when the concept of an afterlife is no longer available to poets taking the last look” (24). Rich indicates that there is not a “legendary, purifying / river of death” (1067). With her body “sheathed in indifference,” Rich faces death with no illusion of an afterlife (1067).

Locked Down by a Hand Halfway through “From Sickbed Shores,” Rich’s protagonist is on the telephone trying to get through to someone. Her “ear [is] tuned to mute vibrations from an occupied zone,” we are told (1066). The sick and dying person at the center of Rich’s poem hopes that speech transmitted through the phone can miraculously be transformed into touch. This is impossible, however. The line also seems to be full of static, so the conversation keeps being interrupted by crying and silent rage. The fourth section of “From Sickbed Shores” ends on a note of despondence: “Hopeless imagination of signals not to be / received” (1066). This phrase in a standalone two-line stanza is characteristic of the second theme that makes up Rich’s particular last look in which she is simultaneously contemplating life while facing death. In her last poems, Rich keeps dropping hints about a sound or message that is emitted but that cannot be received. In nearly all of the late poems discussed above, Rich’s speaker or someone else in the storyworld of the poem expresses an urgent desire to be heard. Yet the protagonists in her poems experience extreme difficulty of getting through to someone, or they feel frustration that they cannot be heard, or that they cannot properly communicate an auditory message. “No sound carries far from here,” Rich writes in the second snapshot of her 2008 poem “Domain” where a young mother writes in splendid isolation from outsiders (1052). After severing ties with her alter ego in “Axel

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Avákar,” Rich’s speaker also finds herself alone, “locked in black ice of a mute lake” (1071). In “Quarto,” the poem that centered on the universal military man Sebastian and which—like “Axel Avákar”—also appropriated imagery from “Diving into the Wreck,” the mermaid sang “like the sea with a choked throat” (1089). This motif of failed communication is continued in the last section of Rich’s Collected Poems , called “Later Poems (2010–2012)” in which these references to blocked sounds culminate. In fact, “Suspended Lines” and “Endpapers” combine two themes that are typical of Rich’s late poems. Her concern about impeded sounds and voices fuses with the repeated allusions to the process of writing; so much so that they appear to offer a meta-perspective on Rich’s life and art. Yet it is not readily apparent what this overarching assessment may signify. What Burt wrote about Tonight No Poetry Will Serve—that the poems at the end of her career are “made up of fragments, careless of finish and of audience”—is, in fact, even more true of Rich’s last poems. “Suspended Lines” consists of arresting images and phrases, but does not cohere as a poem. It ends hauntingly, as if Rich abandoned it in medias res: Today your voice : : you can make from this One-string / blue / speaker / guitar suspended here (1112).

Either addressed to a lover, or loved ones, or to the stranger that she kept addressing in letters through her poems since childhood, these disjointed lines are open invitations to her readers to make of her lines what we will. Knowing that soon her own lines will be “suspended” forever, Rich’s missive is not sanguine, however. The imagery in the opening lines of Rich’s terse poem is violent and bitter, demonstrating that she churned her insights on life through opposition and from pain. Like Lowell, Rich is all of a sudden doubtful whether the lines she composed throughout her career were effective enough to get her message across. Moreover, she suddenly seems to be unsure whether the socio-political ideas she imparted to her readers with such conviction were accurate or worth it. This self-conscious doubt repeats the qualms at the end of “Quarto” where she asserted: “There is a price / There is a price / For every gift / And all advice” (1090). After the publication of

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“Diving into the Wreck,” Rich became the voice of a generation, a “feminist culture-tender,” as Henneberg puts it (2012, 5). Many looked at this poem and “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” for guidance on how to live. Rich took on that role as “an elder who must carry the weight of one millennium safely to the next, who must ensure intergenerational continuity and solidarity, and who must persist in the work of witnessing, elegizing, and finally celebrating the state of our world” (ibid., 6). Yet at the end of “Quarto” she reflects that she and/or others have to pay for her insisting on playing that role. Rich’s last poems are significantly devoid of moral instruction, as we still saw in for instance “At the Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand.” Instead we are presented with the returning motif of an obstructed sound or voice. In the end, anticlimactically, there is no clear meta-perspective in Rich’s late poems. It is as if Rich is on the cusp of saying something edifying or enlightening, but holds herself back. In the last poem of her life, she picks up her “[o]ne-string / blue / speaking / guitar” once more, and plucks that lyre one final time. Before offering “the signature to a life” of “Endpapers” that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Rich extends the image of the “suspended” guitar. If you have come as far in life as Rich has, you have to regard yourself as a fortunate human being. “Consider yourself / a trombone blowing unheard / tones,” Rich writes: “a bass string plucked or locked down by a hand” (1118). Still, neither instrument, both known for emitting low sounds, is functioning properly. The trombone is not heard, while the sound of the bass is obstructed by a hand. Ultimately, we as human beings are not like these musical instruments, as Rich reminds us, since we “can’t flow through / as music or / as air” (1118). Rich asks people to accept that we cannot live our lives as freely as we would wish, either because of outer circumstances or because we ourselves are too inhibited. While not apologizing for her life and her life’s decisions, her last look offers fragmentary glimpses that reveal that she is unafraid of death, but that her final years have been full of physical and mental pain, and that she gazed at her life with some self-doubt, anger, and frustration. Her last poems can collectively be regarded as the endpapers of a book. They are—both thematically and stylistically—different from her earlier poems, as they lack the self-assured conviction of her earlier political ideals and because they are more fragmented, doubtful, and uncertain. Yet in the same way that literal endpapers are intrinsically connected to the spine of a book, Rich’s final poems are fundamentally linked to the rest of her oeuvre.

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Without having signed off like this, the book of her life would simply not have held together.

References Burt, Stephanie. 2012. No Scene Could Be Worse. London Review of Books 34, no. 3, February 9. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n03/stepha nie-burt/no-scene-could-be-worse. Accessed 14 May 2020. Felman, Soshana. 1993. What Women Want: Reading and Sexual Difference. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Flowers, Betty S. 1982. The ‘I’ in Adrienne Rich: Individuation and the Androgyne Type. In Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gabriela Mora and Karen S. Van Hooft, 14–35. Bilingual Press. Henneberg, Sylvia. 2012. The Creative Crone: Aging and the Poetry of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich. University of Missouri Press. Jensen, Darin. 2013. Last Poems: Selected and New Poems, 1971–2012 by Adrienne Rich (review). Prairie Schooner 87 (1): 149–150. Keyes, Clare. 1986. The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. University of Georgia Press. O’Mahoney, John. 2002. Poet and Pioneer. The Guardian, 15 June. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jun/15/featuresreviews.guardianr eview6. Accessed 14 May 2020. Merrill, James. 2001. Collected Poems. Knopf. Perreault, Jeanne. 1995. ‘Signified by Pain:’ Adrienne Rich’s Body Tracks. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 10 (2): 87–103. Plato. 1989. Symposium. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff: Hackett Publishing Company. Rich, Adrienne. 2016. Collected Poems: 1950–2012. Norton. Richardson, Cat. 2011. Q & A with Adrienne Rich, National Book Foundation. Stein, Karen T. 2017. Adrienne Rich: Challenging Authors. Sense Publishers. Swiontkowski, Gail. 2003. Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life with Daddy. Susquehanna University Press. Vendler, Helen. 1988. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets. Critics: Harvard University Press. Vendler, Helen. 2010. Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop. Princeton University Press.

Jean Le Gac: Auto-Reflexive Artist Daan Van Speybroeck

He experienced a strange impression of seeing himself as if transparent in the guise of another. […] Who was the other’s double?1

Didier Blonde, Le figurant, 2018

French visual artist Jean Le Gac (1936) creates reflexive art, in the sense that he reflects in and via his works on both art and the art world in which he and his oeuvre function—in short, a reflection from within. Always attentive, he often reflects in a light-hearted manner, but is sometimes equally sharp and sarcastic. Le Gac’s career can be roughly divided into three distinct periods: the first, in which he created and put to work the character of “le peintre” (the painter); the second, in which he retrospectively reflected on his own oeuvre and his place in the art world; and the third phase, in which he addresses the survival of his work after his death. These phases, following

D. Van Speybroeck (B) Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_16

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one another in parallel with the artist’s aging process, can be distinguished from each other, but are not strictly delineated. They overlap like roof tiles, each phase possessing its own hidden germs and (more visible) precedents that developed into the next phase, assuming a central place there. Correspondingly, elements from some works reappear in a subsequent phase, sometimes leading to certain contradictions—contradictions that will prove fruitful in the course of Le Gac’s oeuvre, since “one of the functions [of painting], perhaps even its most essential function, is to invent representations of the contradictory, […] ‘the image that makes the impossible possible’” (Pontévia 1984, 36).2 This chapter presents the developments in the reflections on art and the art world in Le Gac’s oeuvre made tangible through a discussion of specific artworks that characterize each period. Le Gac’s artistic treatment of his oeuvre entails a continual reflection on it, an introspective consideration of his concerns and engagements with these concerns within the art world. This reflection is not only introspective, but also retrospective: a reviewing that includes a recycling of certain artworks—meditations on earlier creations and the artist’s relationship to them. Le Gac incorporates both forms of reflection as essential component of new artworks. Both introspective and retrospective revisits are inherent to his oeuvre.

First Phase The Painter painter),3

Le peintre (the the central character of Jean Le Gac’s oeuvre, is the source from which many of the aforementioned contradictions arise. With le peintre, Le Gac invokes the well-known literary process in which an author invents a first-person narrator to play the leading role in his novel. This makes it difficult for the reader to distinguish between—and hence not to confuse—the author and the narrator. Le Gac deliberately sets in motion such a mechanism in his drawings and photography. Moreover, he regularly takes himself as the model for le peintre, increasing the confusion. As if this is not yet sufficiently disorienting, the first-person narrator created here is also an artist: le peintre. This method allows Le Gac to observe the actions of le peintre, providing a foundation for the reflection upon the artist, his work, art more generally, and the art world. These reflections concern not only his peintre, who creates art, but also the artistic and non-artistic situations in which he finds himself.

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An early work takes the form of a photo reportage: Le peintre (1973; Fig. 1). Nine of the ten photos are in landscape format and portray le peintre heading into the countryside in order to paint, sitting behind his easel, without showing the viewer what he is painting. We know this because of the story written underneath the photographs—possibly a reflection of Le Gac’s indebtedness to literature. The images are of an art teacher—most likely the one seen from the back on the first and only portrait photograph—who, “like many of his fellow art teachers, painted in his spare time,” “after nature.”4 This text is more than a mere explanation of the photographs. It states that painting natural scenes is a relaxing occupation, and that there is no reason to think that the work is being done in haste. From reflections upon the process of creation, he moves on to considerations of the result of the painting—described as inconsistent with reality. In between, the ambition to become a great artist is mentioned. It seems as if several different people are speaking, one of which is a child who is surprised about “the mistakes” made by the painter. The child thinks he knows nature better. In particular, the boy experiences a great discrepancy between the work of the painter on the one hand and “the work in the mine that all the men he knew did—work they did not do in daylight”—on the other.5 Whether consciously or subconsciously, with Le peintre Le Gac created a programmatic work about his own development as an artist. Many of the questions regarding what it is precisely that he reflects upon in his oeuvre are already touched upon here and developed further later on. One of the ten photographs, showing le peintre in the person of Le Gac painting in nature, frequently returns in later canvases, complementing the artwork in question. In this recurrence, the photograph points toward the origins of his artist’s career, and to its continuation. Short Biography Jean Le Gac was born into a mining family. In his childhood, he was not exposed to the visual arts or museums. Rather, his “visual materials” consisted of illustrations—both those on the covers of popular feuilletons à la Harry Dickson, which were read in his home, and images from the children’s books in his possession, of which there were few, partly as a result of the war that took place during his childhood. Although the text in the 1973 photo reportage Le peintre suggests otherwise, Le Gac could hardly be considered to have been predestined

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Fig. 1 Jean Le Gac, Le Peintre (The Painter), 1973, ten photos, one circa 45 × 34 cm and the other nine 30 × 40 cm. Unsigned version in artist’s collection (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, owns a signed version). (Photo: © Jean Le Gac)

to “become a great artist,”6 words that appear at the bottom of the ninth photograph of Le Peintre. However, he was exceptionally talented at drawing, which did not go unnoticed. This allowed him to slip into the world of art through the back door. He continued to relate to the popular and childlike, yet poignant, visual materials that he was familiar

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with, to bolster his oeuvre. Again and again, he derives details from such illustrations: he imitates them, enlarges them to the extreme, combines them in various ways, and complements them with other images. This is accompanied by text, below, to the side, in, or otherwise accompanying the images, not always corresponding as closely to the image as is the case with Le peintre. This process transforms and elevates the selected visual material from “popular culture”—long before it became “camp”—into art. This unusual way of entering the world of art confronted Le Gac with a series of contradictions that are already touched upon in Le peintre: the world of blue-collar workers on the one hand and the Parisian art scene on the other; the “elevated quality of art” in relation to both popular culture and the world of children. These contradictions are never truly resolved in his work. Quite the contrary: Le Gac cultivates them and consciously raises the tension by involving other contradictions—those between image and word; between le peintre and the actual artist; between illustrations and artworks; between “Sunday painters,” art teachers, and “real” artists. In this context, he states that his art often “comes in twos,”7 pointing also toward the many diptychs he creates (Le Gac 2008, 12). All of this opens up a broad spectrum that is given shape and intensified in his work. The ambiguities “guided [him] towards the unknown traces of the art world” (Le Gac 2008, 19).8 They remain tangible in Le Gac’s work, becoming a driving force. At the same time, however, he never feels completely included in the art world. While Le Gac did manage to penetrate it quite deeply, he remains somewhat of a stranger, an outsider—no matter how diverse that world might be. He oscillates between regretting and actually wanting it to be this way. In his art, he is keen to make variations on this inability and lack of desire to belong, and perhaps even on not being welcome. Vocation This positioning and practice of art struck a chord in the 1970s. Le Gac’s work was exhibited in 1972 at documenta V, in Kassel, in the section “Individual mythologies,” and again in the 1977 edition of documenta. His work was on view multiple times at the Venice Biennale: in the French Pavilion in 1972, and in the International Pavilion in 1976 and 1980. In order to become art and to strengthen Le Gac’s career as an artist, the visual material Le Gac borrowed from the extra-artistic world

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was in need of a strong underlying concept. In the first half of the 1980s, Le Gac drew several large diptychs, which clearly show the use of pastels. In the same period, a box of pastels occasionally appears, either drawn or photographed, in the series Le Délassement du Peintre (The Painter’s Pastime, 1981–1988), Le Délassement du Français (The Frenchman’s Pastime, 1981–1985), and Le Délassement d’un Peintre Parisien (The Parisian Painter’s Pastime 1982–1985; Fig. 2). Le Gac notes in Le Délassement du peintre that he has discovered an almost untouched box of pastels in a drawer, once given to his daughter. This incident immediately evokes in him images from his childhood, which he then begins to draw. All elements combined demonstrate a consistency in their reference to childhood. This forms the foundation for his vocation as an artist: not only does his existence as an artist rest on “the initial confusion that arose in his mind between image and text,”9 he also, “in a beautiful vision, sees the astonishing adventures from his children’s books transformed from their origins into a history of art” (Le Gac 1995, 109).10 Art History While in Le peintre, Le Gac reflected upon the visual arts in photographs and text, in the series Story Art (1981–1992), he elaborated on his reflections in drawings, which had now reached full maturity. Story Art (avec Toits de Paris) (Story Art (with Parisian Roofs), 1986)11 shows how works of art are being stolen via the roof of a museum, while Story Art (avec “À Mort le Peintre” ) (Story Art (with to Death with the Painter), 1986; Fig. 3) depicts how le peintre is besieged by a group of workers, referring to the tense relationship between contemporary art and the working class in which Le Gac has his roots.12 These striking examples demonstrate the imaginative quality of this series well, addressing the fate of artworks and their artists. The series as a whole sheds surprising light on the art of painting— from the persona of the artist to the artworks themselves, and the history that encompasses both. Once again, the verbal commentaries are part of the tableaux—either applied directly to the canvas, on a text board next to them, or typed on sheets of paper in a typewriter placed in front of them. With its rich variety of content, Story Art entails an artistic study of art history of a kind not taught at universities and art academies, nor described in the history books.

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Fig. 2 Jean Le Gac, Le Délassement d’un Peintre Parisien (avec Ripolin) (The Parisian Painter’s Pastime (with Ripolin)), 1985, pastel, photo, and text, 150 × 212 cm, private collection. (Photo: © Jean Le Gac)

Where Le Gac’s work of this first phase clearly shows how he reflects on art in general and his own work, it is considerably harder to discern what he actually thinks about these matters. Such ambiguity is decidedly not a lack or shortcoming! He himself says on the topic: “I am not looking for the truth, but perspicacity is certainly not a bad thing” (Le Gac 2000a, 159).

Second Phase Full-Time Artist During the first period described above, Le Gac continued his job as an art teacher besides his art practice. The second phase began when he retired from that position in 1999 and became a full-time artist. His

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Fig. 3 Jean Le Gac, Story Art (avec À Mort le Peintre) (Story Art (with To Death with the Painter)), 1986–1989, mixed media on canvas, camera tripod, and projector, installation in artist’s studio. (Photo: Roland Favollet © Jean Le Gac)

oeuvre developed further with le peintre at the forefront, following the same process, albeit this time with greater reflection on what he was doing. When leading figures from the art world write about Le Gac’s work, they strikingly tend to dwell particularly on his participation in the documenta (in 1972 and 1977) and Venice Biennial (1972 and 1976)—events that took place in the twentieth century and before his retirement. Their writings on the works Le Gac produced as a full-time artist are notably less substantial and clear. In 1999, Le Gac observed: “Whilst everyone from the art world was in Venice, I was working in my own little lagoon” in the Camargue (Le Gac 2000a, 159),13 taking pictures for Le Peintre à cheval (The Painter on horseback, 1999).14 In response to an interviewer’s remark that Le Gac’s “[…] statements concerning the institute,

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the so-called ‘milieu,’ are becoming increasingly bitter,” even if Le Gac is, the interviewer points out, in fact “an artist recognized by the institute, exhibiting in the most prominent museums,” Le Gac exclaimed: “Well! In the most prominent museums, that is too strong and incorrect! […] I work in the periphery […] in the shadows” (Le Gac 2000a, 153–155, 158).15 Indeed, since the turn of the century, he has not had a solo exhibition in any of France’s major museums. Rather than in Paris, his work was shown in the provinces. “As one is aging […] one gets the sense that one has been the plaything of fate” (Le Gac 2004, 252).16 Against this backdrop, Le Gac’s new work on the one hand emphasizes his distance from the art milieu, while focusing on the other hand on the lofty idea of art, all the while visually reflecting upon his relation to prominent art. Distance from the Art World For Le Gac, expressing critical reservations about art in his work is nothing new. Indeed, Le peintre from 1973 showed early signs of this, for instance in comparing the living conditions of miners with those of artists. Story Art (avec “À mort le peintre” ) bears further witness to this. Le Gac does not stop at simply expressing astonishment and posing questions about art; sometimes he openly and directly seeks out confrontation— not entirely free of resentment, as he himself observes (Le Gac 2004, 272). In the artist’s book Les Adieux (The Farewells, 2000),17 Le Gac takes stock of the many encounters he has had as an artist with colleagues, museum professionals, gallery owners, members of art commissions, art critics, and so on (Le Gac 2000b). The remembrance of some 150 people, sometimes jovial and generous, sometimes with a certain venom, has the appearance of a farewell to the art world. One example concerns the celebrated art critic, curator, and biographer of her own sex life, Catherine Millet: “Goodbye Catherine M. […] The mass ended by swallowing the artist’s blood. She was the first to consume it” (Le Gac 2000b, 37).18 Le Gac does not fail to bid himself farewell, starting the text that addresses himself with “Goodbye Jean L.” and ending with: “This note has been somewhat long, of necessity, I have frequented myself more than others” (Le Gac 2000b, 35).19 In more general terms, Le Gac asks: “Comment ça va la mort de l’art?” (How’s the death of art doing?). The 1999 exhibition in Lyon of his work

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that bore this title concerned “the death of art [as] the actual disappearance of the artist” (Le Gac 2008, 18).20 Deprived of the artist’s activity, the catalog states, the art world has degraded him to the rank of servant to the increasing number of officials, turning him into a “servant of all” (Le Gac 2008, 18).21 From now on, it is the “commissioners of exhibitions, scenographers, designers, cartoonists, filmmakers, theater people who overwhelm the spaces intended for the plastic arts” (Le Gac 2008, 11).22 Le Gac senses that these “officials of contemporary art” see him as “born resistance fighter” who “dreamed of belonging, but remained outside” the art world (Le Gac 2004, 273).23 As he admits: “I went that route myself. I am sure I will pass by there again, forced to do so” (Le Gac 2008, 18).24 Not the Art World, but Art Le Gac’s opinion that not works of art but the art world deserves demise prevents him from slipping into bitterness and dissatisfaction. To the contrary, it transforms his “moodiness, […] his forced laughter” into an “unexpected dynamic of the work” (Le Gac 2004, 277).25 There is still life after le professeur de dessin (the drawing teacher)! From that moment onward, he started to work more consistently— albeit not unambiguously—under his own name. The shift in emphasis occurred with the exhibition Le Peintre X Y Z (2002–2003)—the last three letters of the alphabet behind le peintre’s name an indication that his days were as good as counted. Concretely, it concerned a double exhibition project in Vence: Le Peintre exposition rétrospective 1968–2002 at Le Château de Villeneuve (Le Gac 2002, 4) and, a year later in urban space, Le Peintre X Y Z : la mémoire de Vence: “a spatio-temporal dialogue” (Le Gac 2002, 10)26 with the city via large, stretched canvases hung on exterior walls in the historical part of the city. While up until that moment, Le Gac had tended to distance himself from his work as an artist in favor of le peintre, in order to observe the latter “in action,” he now started to place himself more on the foreground, confronting artists who had stayed in Vence and left their mark there: most famously Henri Matisse in the Chapelle du Rosaire; Raoul Dufy; Marc Chagall; Jean Dubuffet; and Chaïm Soutine; as well as, amongst several others, the writers Witold Gombrowicz and D. H. Lawrence. No longer hidden behind his character, he became someone who wanted to leave his own trace in theirs. Once a mere “plaything

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of fate,”27 taken along paths that were equally inevitable as fascinating, X Y Z allowed le peintre to acquire a name for himself, even if it was not yet his own. Still, it felt like a homecoming: “breathing in the same air as his predecessors, all those great artists who have frequented this environment” (Le Gac 2004, 252;186).28 At that point, Le Gac no longer only tapped into the more or less imaginary world of his (modest) childhood, but also engaged with established art and culture. He himself has spoken of “the discovery of art history, aesthetics, and the concept, […] the second phase” (Le Gac 2004, 179).29 He continued to work according to his strategy of visual quoting: “a complicated fiction: cutting out, changing direction, extracting it essence” (Le Gac 2006, 87).30 Under his own name, he had “access to art, with unbridled emotions,” “recovering” them with “the intensity of [his] first artistic arousals” (Le Gac 2004, 150).31 In the exhibition La Demoiselle d’Avignon et Jean Le Gac (2008),32 Le Gac entered into dialogue with, amongst others, Pablo Picasso. Again, he wove in his own personal history. In his encounter with Pablo Picasso, he typed on one of the sheets constituting the work Le Bâtard d’Avignon (The Bastard of Avignon, 2008; Fig. 4) that he was looking for a father— “(Picasso does not seem such a bad choice!).”33 De facto without a father himself, raised by a single mother, Le Gac added that this also meant he did not have to kill him. While fully exploring his identity as an artist, on a non-artistic level, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon evoked a lot of emotions in him. His mother—une demoiselle—once became a maid in the city of Avignon, where she became pregnant with him. In Le Bâtard d’Avignon 2 (2008; Fig. 4), Le Gac brought together these various trajectories, feeling himself grow as an artist and elevating himself without renouncing his previous artistic trajectory.34

Third Phase Repertoire The third phase of Le Gac’s artistic career started when he crossed the boundary of life expectancy (79.4 years old on average in France). This phase was anticipated during an earlier phase, both reflexively and retrospectively, with two publications—reflections that coincided with reexaminations of his work.

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Fig. 4 Jean Le Gac, Le Bâtard d’Avignon (The Bastard of Avignon), 2008, mixed media on canvas and text, 210 × 314 × 60 cm, photo taken at exhibition Jean Le Gac, Choses peintes-photographiées-écrites (Jean Le Gac, Things Painted-photographed-written), 2016, Centre d’Art Contemporain Acentmetresducentredumonde, Perpignan, France. (© Jean Le Gac)

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In the publication Et le peintre—Tout l’Œuvre roman 1968–2003 (And the Painter—All the Novelesque Œuvre 1968–2003, 2004; Fig. 5), Le Gac brought together all the texts belonging to his oeuvre. Sometimes, these were written on and in the work itself, while at other times, they form a separate part of the work in question (Le Gac 2004). The result is a book comprising over 400 pages, testifying to the fact that text forms a substantial part of the artist’s oeuvre. While Le Gac rejected the publisher’s request to include reproductions in the book, he did meet the request partway by copying some of his works in drawings of a smaller format and including these in the publication. A few years later, Le Gac compiled an overview of visual materials from the popular serials and books of his childhood, from which he had borrowed details for his own artworks. The result was the publication JEAN LE GAC & Robert Bonaccorsi, Villa Tamaris Pacha (2006).35 Its release was accompanied by the exhibition Villa Tamaris Pacha (2006), in which the artist exhibited his work in combination with the visual material in question. Similar to the 2004 novel Et le peintre, which attests to Le Gac’s indebtedness to literature, the poignant works of “little known or unknown illustrators […]” were transformed “[f]rom mere reference” into “another, complicated fiction” (Le Gac 2006, 87).36 Musée Jean Le Gac Both of the above-mentioned retrospective publications, in which the artist takes stock of his oeuvre, are based artistically on Musée Jean Le Gac (2004), created by the artist himself. The museum is explicitly given his own name (rather than that of the nameless peintre) and exhibits his own works. Moreover, it is located next to his house “on the third floor of stairwell C, The ‘Domicile,’ perhaps to be considered as an annex of the Museum, though The Museum can also be seen as an annex of The Domicile—an extension thereof” (Lascault 2005, 6).37 The artist of the Musée Jean Le Gac is still alive, continues his work, and welcomes his visitors himself. Although his works are his primary concern, with the name of his museum, he has explicitly stepped out of the lee and shadow of le peintre. It is still a game—highly serious and artistic—which questions contemporary museums. The almost invisible museum, hidden on the third floor of an apartment building, counters the current museum policy of tailoring its programming to the greatest possible number of visitors. As an artwork in its own right—rather than

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Fig. 5 Jean Le Gac, drawing based on an existing work, made for Jean Le Gac’s book Et le Peintre—Tout l’Œuvre Roman 1968–2003 (And the Painter—All the Novelesque Œuvre 1968–2003), Paris: Galilée, 2004. (© Jean Le Gac)

yet another exhibition by a curator who is only too keen on being an artist himself—the museum “slightly changes our way of looking at, and living in accordance with,” art (Lascault 2005, 20).38

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Escaping Oblivion As the artist grows older, it is no longer either le peintre or Le Gac who is at stake. Rather, it is art itself, the oeuvre, that takes center stage, without the artist disappearing behind the horizon. At this stage of Le Gac’s artistic career, the moment has more or less explicitly arrived to pretend “to be dead in order to see how the world unfolds without him” (Le Gac 2004, 271).39 It is from this perspective that the Musée Jean Le Gac—which continues to exist—transitioned into L’Atelier parallèle, an exhibition at the Musée de Carouge, Geneva, 2015 (Fig. 6). The eighteenth-century building that houses the museum was transformed into Le Gac’s living space, which may just as well have been that of le peintre: “my apartment in Paris […], which I transport to Carouge” (Desjardins 2015).40 Of course, there were factual differences as a result of both the different layout of the space and the style of the apartment, which has grown organically over time while the exhibition was installed in one go. Nevertheless, the visitor to the exhibition found himself entering, in the artist’s

Fig. 6 Exhibition installation view Jean Le Gac, L’Atelier Parallèle, Musée de Carouge, Genève, Switzerland, 2015. (Photo: © Jean Le Gac)

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words, “the intimate space of le peintre: his room, his dining roomstudio, his projection room, […]” (Desjardins 2015).41 The suggestion that le peintre is dead was not lacking, the film Jean Le Gac in memoriam (1999) by Michel Nuridsany running continuously in the home cinema.42 Underlying concept of L ‘Atelier Parallèle was the well-known phenomenon in which an artist’s house and studio become a museum. Neither Le Gac nor le peintre were responsible—at least so to speak—for “bringing to the attention the oeuvre of a forgotten artist who has lived in a peaceful house in Carouge,”43 nor for looking after it (Desjardins 2015). Against the backdrop of this initiative concerning a dead artist whose vacant home was preserved for art and for the exhibition of his life and work, Le Gac was to, at least fictitiously, give over control in some respects. He entrusted control, equally fictitiously, to the Collectif Le Gac—Jean Pleinemer, “consigned with his affairs” (Desjardins 2015).44 The inclusion of Le Gac’s name in the collective offered him the possibility “to always claim that I am at once all members [of the collective]!”45 Moreover, this name satisfied Le Gac’s constant desire to deduplicate himself—to split off characters from his own person, which he then also embodies—a tendency that has been present since the very beginning of his career, with the creation of le peintre (Desjardins 2015). The most important art object of L’atelier parallèle was La Monografie (2015), placed in a showcase. As a “homegrown product,” it contains five hundred original photographs and reproductions, as well as texts (often handwritten) by the artist. It has been realized as a single copy. As a sort of ultimate artwork, it was an essential part of this exhibition and can be seen as the third and final part, while two other parts—Et le peintre—Tout l’Œuvre novel 1968–2003 (And the Painter—All the Novelesque Œuvre 1968–2003, 2004) and JEAN LE GAC & Robert Bonaccorsi, Villa Tamaris Pacha (2006)—announced the third phase of Le Gac’s artistic career. La Monografie—unique—is disseminated in a facsimile edition (Le Gac 2017) and is also available digitally.46 This accessibility is made possible thanks to the “collective, which truly belongs to the present time!” (Desjardins 2015).47 For Le Gac, the project of both the exhibition and the publication as a whole was not merely a question of escaping oblivion. He also experienced it as an act of “freeing his oeuvre from himself, setting it free by entrusting it to chance, which sometimes causes things to go so well.”48 Liberated from a series of problems that confronts an aging artist with an

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extensive oeuvre, Le Gac actively continues to pursue his artistic practice. With the Collectif , which includes his own name, he continues to create art, not only under his own name, not only under the name of le peintre, but under the name of anyone, whether nameless or not, yet always belonging to the Collectif Le Gac—Jean Pleinemer.

Closing Remarks By creating an oeuvre that in its development constantly and immanently reflects, both upon itself and on the art world in which the work intervenes, Le Gac presents a genealogy of art in its contemporary degeneration. He does so in an involved way, based upon the ever-present, somewhat childlike, high expectations he has of art. It all started with le peintre, the character the artist separated from himself, and through whom he “sees himself acting” like an artist.49 He treats the character he himself created to the point of utter confusion, only to let go of it to a certain extent, opening himself up to a great number of embodiments of the artist’s existence within the Collectif Le Gac—Jean Pleinemer. This artistic game, full of contradictions and ambiguities, often comes “in twos”: image and language; children’s drawings and art; images on the covers of popular serial stories and artworks in museums; original and copy; critique on and high expectations of art; “suspicion and fascination” (Le Gac 2008, 18)50 ; fictional character and subject; and, crucially, le peintre and Le Gac, retrospection and affirmation in the present, and, at an existential level, life and death. The continuous succession of deduplication (accentuating both the one and the other) and identification lends the entire oeuvre its dialectic dynamic, in which le peintre takes the lead in both image and word, while Le Gac incites him to observe himself, to constantly reflect, both introspectively and retrospectively, which compels the artist to remain active and alert, to continue developing and renewing himself, keeping the art alive even beyond the artist’s death. Le Gac’s amenability to the character he has created not only sharpens his views on the ins and outs of contemporary art; it also surprises and reveals dimensions of art that would otherwise have escaped both him and the viewers of art. At the same time, his choice for art itself obliges him “to turn his back on art [or, more accurately, on the art world] out of despair and pride,” wondering “whether, as an artist, I, in turn, will know the shadow and light, or rather, first the light and then the shadow” (Le Gac 2004, 249, 287).

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Both in and with his artworks, and from within, Le Gac views contemporary art with great acuity and intelligence, without failing to be critical. In this way, he elevates his art beyond its prevalent contemporary form, leading to the sense that Le Gac is situated outside of the dominant art world.

Notes 1. Il a éprouvé une impression étrange à se voir comme en transparence sous les traits d’un autre. […] Qui était la doublure de l’autre? Didier Blonde, Le figurant, 2018 2. “Une de ses fonctions [de la peinture], peut-être sa fonction essentielle, est d’inventer la représentation du contradictoire, […] ‘l’image qui rend possible l’impossible.’” All translations from the French in this chapter are by the author, editors, and, primarily, translator Nina Bresser. 3. For the sake of clarity, in the context of Jean Le Gac’s oeuvre, “le peintre” will not be translated when the character is concerned. 4. “il faisait de la peinture à temps perdu comme beaucoup de ses collègues professeurs de dessin”; “travailler sur le motif.” 5. “du travail à la mine qui était l’activité de tous les hommes qu’il connait et qu’ils exerçaient pas au grand jour.” 6. “devenir un très grand artiste.” 7. “tout va par deux.” 8. “entraîna dans les voies inconnues du monde de l’art.” 9. “la confusion initiale créée dans son esprit entre image et texte.” Several works in Le Gac’s Le Délassement du peintre include text, including these words. 10. “dans une splendide vision voit les effarantes aventures de ses livres d’enfant se transformer en une histoire de l’art rebondissement.” 11. Story Art (avec Toits de Paris), painted canvas, stand, box of pastels, film projector for canvas, 147 × 175 × 60 cm. 12. Story Art (avec “À Mort le Peintre”), 1986, painted canvas, stand, film projector with case for canvas, 210 × 314 × 60 cm. 13. “pendant que tout le monde de l’art était à Venise, moi j’œuvrais sur ma petite lagune.” 14. This refers to Le Peintre à cheval (1999), a work comprising nine parts, with 54 color photographs measuring 40 × 50 cm and 9 monologues, exhibited in Musée d’Art Roger-Quilliot in Clairmont-Ferrand (2000), and Espace Écureuil in Toulouse (2000–2001).

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15. “vos propos deviennent acides à l’égard de l’institution, du ‘milieu’”; “un artiste reconnu de l’institution, vous exposez dans les plus grands musées”; “euh! Dans les plus grands musées, c’est beaucoup dire et erroné! […] Je travaille à la périphérie […] ce travail réalisé à l’ombre.” 16. “en vieillissant […] on a le sentiment que l’on a été le jouet du destin.” 17. Les Adieux is also the title of an artwork of the same year consisting of 150 texts printed on red, crème, and white paper, glued to PVC, each measuring 29.7 × 42 cm with a photograph on aluminium, 120 × 80 cm. 18. “Adieu à Catherine M. […] La messe se terminait par l’absorption du sang même de l’artiste. Elle fut la première à l’ingérer.” 19. “Adieu à Jean Le Gac […] Cette note est un peu longue, forcément, je me suis fréquenté plus que d’autres.” 20. “la mort de l’art, c’est de la disparition pure et simple de l’artiste qu’il s’agit.” 21. “la petite main.” 22. “commissaires d’exposition, scénographes, designers, dessinateurs de BD, cinéastes, hommes de spectacle envahissent les lieux des arts plastiques.” 23. “les officiels de l’art contemporain”; “un maquisard né”; “rêvait d’être dedans mais qui restait dehors.” 24. “je suis passe moi-même par là. J’y passerai encore, forcé et contraint.” 25. “mouvement d’humeur resterait ici la dynamique fortuite de l’œuvre, dans ce rire jaune.” 26. “un dialogue spatio-temporel avec la ville.” 27. “le jouet du destin.” 28. “il respirerait le même air que ses ainés, tous ces grands artistes qui ont fréquenté les parages.” 29. “la découverte de l’histoire de l’art, de l’esthétique et du concept, […] la deuxième phase.” 30. “le découpe, le détourne, en extirpe l’essence [..] une fiction complexe.” 31. “l ’art m’avait attiré […] retrouve l’intensité de mes premières sensations artistique.” 32. This exhibition was accompanied by the catalogue La Demoiselle d’Avignon et Jean Le Gac, Sète: Galerie Yves Faurie, 2003. 33. “(choisir Picasso ce n’est pas si mal!).” Unnumbered page entitled “Jean Le Gac.” 34. Le Gac’s Le Bâtard d’Avignon (185 × 104 cm) consists of mixed techniques on canvas, including text (53 × 37.5 cm) and a studio photograph. 35. The publication comprises three parts. The first part consists of reproductions of Jean Le Gac’s artworks; the last one concerns reproductions of illustrations and a few photographs, partly copied by Jean Le Gac himself from his own oeuvre. The middle section is a text entitled “Robert

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Bonaccorsi, ‘Les Diertissements du Peintre’” (“Robert Bonaccorsi, ‘The Entertainments of the Painter’”). “de référence, […] devient vecteur d’une fiction différente, complexe.” “au troisième étage de l’escalier C, Le Domicile peut être considéré comme une annexe du Musée. Mais, aussi, Le Musée est l’annexe du Domicile, une dépendance.” “modifie légèrement nos manières de regarder et de vivre.” “il faisait comme s’il était mort pour voir comment va le monde sans lui.” “mon appartement à Paris, et l’idée que je le transporte à Carouge.” “ainsi le visiteur pénètre-t-il dans l’intimité du Peintre: sa chambre, sa salle à manger-atelier, sa salle de projection…” Jean Le Gac in memoriam, short film, 15,’ under the direction of Michel Nuridsany, Service Audiovisuel de la Maison Européennne de la photographie, 1999. “mettre en valeur l’œuvre d’un artiste oublié, qui vécut dans une paisible maison de Carouge.” “chargé de ses affaires.” “je peux toujours dire que j’en suis tous les membres.” See the site of Fondation Auer Ory: www.auerphoto.com. “un collectif bien dans son temps.” “détacher de lui son œuvre, lui donner la liberté en la livrant au hasard qui parfois fait si bien les choses”; En plein vertige, Jean Le Gac, 2017. “il se regarde faire.” These words appear underneath the tenth photo of Le peintre, 1973 (Fig. 1). “la défiance et la fascination.”

References Desjardins, Marie-Laure. 2015. Jean Le Gac en Suisse – Visitez l’appartement du Peintre! ArtsHebdoMédias, August 15. http://www.artshebdomedias. com/article/050815-jean-le-gac-en-suisse-visitez-appartement-du-peintre/. Accessed 13 May 2023. Lascault, Gilbert. 2005. Dans le vingtième arrondissement le Musée Jean Le Gac. In Musée Jean Le Gac, ed. Gilbert Lascault and Jean Le Gac. Rennes: Frac Bretagne. Le Gac, Jean. 1995. La boîte de couleurs. Amines: Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Picardie. Le Gac, Jean. 2017. La Monographie. Genève: Fondation Auer Ory. Electronic edition: https://www.auerphoto.com ———. 1999. Comment ça va la mort de l’art ? Lyon: Le Rectangle—Centre d’art contemporain.

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———. 2000a. Je croix aux possibilités du style méchant – entretiens avec Jean Le Gac. Interview by Anna Guilló and Sandrine Morsillo. La Voix du regard – Revue littéraire sur les arts de l’image 13: 152–159. ———.2000b. Les Adieux. Paris: Onestar Press. ———. 2002. Le Peintre X Y Z . Vence: Le Château de Villeneuve/Fondation Émile Hugues. ———.2004. Et le peintre - Tout l’œuvre roman 1968–2003. Paris: Galilée. ———. 2006. Villa Tamaris Pacha. La Seyne-sur-Mer: Villa Tamaris Centre d’Art; Editions Pérégrines. ———. 2008. La Machinerie le Gac: Entretien avec Kristell Loquet et Jean-Luc Parant. Illiers-Combray: Marcel le Poney. Pontévia, Jean-Marie. 1984. La Peinture, masque et miroir: Écrits sur l’art et pensées détachées. Bordeaux: William Blake & Co. Szeemann, Harald, and Marlis Grüterich. 1972. Documenta 5: Befragung der Realität, Bildwelten Heute. Kassel: Museum Fridericianum.

Yielding to Touch: Simon Hantaï’s Late Reactivations of Pliage Mette Gieskes

At the age of 60, after a surge of recognition for his folding (pliage) works, Hungarian-French artist Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) radically retreated from the art world. Not only did he inhibit the organization of exhibitions, he also made few new works. Hantaï, however, did not abandon all artistic activity, and actively returned to his earlier paintings in the mid-1990s. He cut up a number of pliage works, submitting these fragments to operations like distortion. He buried and unburied some cut-outs and in the early 2000s, collaborated with philosophers JeanLuc Nancy and Jacques Derrida in yet another reinvention of the pliage method. This chapter examines a number of these late returns to earlier pliage paintings, arguing that in these practices, Hantaï in a novel way reinforced tendencies that were already present much earlier, specifically the surrender of control to external forces like materials, chance, and the creations of other people, allowing himself to be touched by agencies outside of himself.

M. Gieskes (B) Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_17

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Hantaï’s oeuvre, the following pages will show, is saturated with converging dualities, which continue to adopt new form in the late work, in many cases enmeshed in a dynamics between processes of individuation and communion. The humble and material meet philosophy and the spiritual in Hantaï’s work; the emphasis on the finite is combined with a flirtation with the infinite; generation and gestation all but exclude degradation and death; and a commitment to the abnegation of the self does not preclude references to personal life. Especially relevant in the context of this book is Hantaï’s commitment to both the past and new modes of art making, as he constantly revisited procedures and themes from his own earlier work and from the history of art, theology, and philosophy. In order to aid understanding of the ways in which Hantaï’s late practices retroactively engage with the earlier work, this chapter will first offer a brief overview of the artist’s work up until the pliages produced at the eve of his withdrawal from the public sphere. The focus in this first part will be on artistic procedures intended to decrease the artist’s control, a set of methodologies the artist would expand in his late work. The chapter will subsequently explore how particular dimensions of the later projects can be considered as revisits to earlier work, starting with the artist’s attempts to influence his legacy and ending with encounters with collaborative partners.

From Surrealism to Pliage Soon after his arrival in Paris in 1948, Hantaï began creating paintings that featured organic shapes, many of which are reminiscent of entrails and subterranean life. In 1952, Hantaï joined the surrealist group, making works that explore the abject, the relation between love and death, animal and human, and painting and sculpture. At that time, he began using the metal casing of an alarm clock to spread and scrape paint (Fourcade et al. 2013, 10), one of a number of experiments with techniques—including also drippings and the use of razor blades—inspired by both surrealism and Jackson Pollock (Fourcade et al. 2013, 6–10). In 1954–1955, Hantaï moved toward an increasingly gestural form of abstraction, examining the relation between painting and writing, as well as “[t]he act of love becoming one with the act of painting” (Qt. in Fourcade et al. 2013, 9; Warnock 2020, 46–56). In 1958–1959, the gestural period was succeeded by all-over canvases covered with more regular shapes. At that time, he created two large

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paintings intended to counter the individualism and anti-religious ideas of the surrealists, deliberately embracing the catholic tradition and denouncing the primacy of the artist. He worked daily on Peinture and À Galla Placidia for a full year, copying the liturgy text from that day’s mass onto the former painting by hand, as well as a number of philosophical, aesthetic, and poetic texts. Though the words were written with black, green, violet, and red Indian ink, corresponding to the liturgical cycle, the painting, which is difficult to read as a result of the superimposed texts, gives off a pink glow, prompting the artist to later entitle the work Écriture Rose. Importantly, the subjective gestures of the mid-1950s were now replaced with writings that were far removed from the surrealist focus on the individual. In 1960, Hantaï’s practice took a new turn when he adopted folding as his exclusive method: pliage comme method, which can be seen as extension of his earlier endeavors to depersonalize surrealist automatism(Warnock 2020, 57) and to invent new techniques that corresponded to his world view. In most of his folding works, the artist started with a canvas humbly placed on the studio floor, submitting it to acts like crumpling, creasing, and folding before applying color with a brush and, finally, unfolding the fabric and flattening it. The parts that had in their folded state been accessible to the paint had assumed color, while the previously folded part remained white after unfolding (Fig. 1). Upon being unfolded, the canvas revealed to the artist the pattern of painted areas and previously hidden reserves unreached by the paint (Berecz 2013, 11). The works, one could say with reference to Hantaï’s later refusal of the word “creator”—“never the word creator” (Hantaï 2013)—were not created but generated (Barnay 2014, 73–74): it was as if not the artist, but the materials of fabric and paint, in addition to chance, had determined the end result (Baldassari 1992, 38), the pliage exposing the peculiarities of the work’s materiality, including the materials’ behavior under certain conditions. Between 1960 and 1974, Hantaï made eight series of pliages, each corresponding to a different folding method. In the first series, the Mariales or, originally, Manteau de la Vièrge (Virgin’s Cloaks, 1960–1962), the canvas was crumpled and creased from edge to edge and the reserves painted after the canvas was opened, creating a completely covered, crusty surface (Hantaï 1998, 26; Fourcade et al. 2013, 27). After the Mariales , Hantaï created his Catamurons series (1963–1964), inspired by the image of a blue towel on a wooden door, followed by the Panses

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Fig. 1 Simon Hantaï in his studio in Meun, France, 1976, photo by Édouard Boubat. © Archives Simon Hantaï/Pictoright Amsterdam 2023

(Paunches, 1964–1965). The latter series was the result of the unfolding and stretching of a canvas that had been painted after having been knotted into a shapeless bag at four corners. The Panses were succeeded by the Meuns , mostly monochrome and relatively flat canvases with empty edges, which were the result of a knotting of the canvas at the four corners and eventually in the center. For the Études (1968–1969), Hantaï crumpled and folded the canvas more regularly, the white reserve zones now at least as prominent as the colored parts. Between 1973 and 1982, Hantaï made the last pliage series, the Tabulas , which are all marked by what Yves Michaud has described as “a wavering and uncertain geometry” (Qtd. in Fourcade et al. 2013, 46). For the Tabulas , Hantaï first made regularly distributed knots and rectangular folds at the underside of the canvas. Upon completion of this knotting procedure, the canvas took on the shape of a pleated table with evenly distributed squares, which was then flattened and covered with paint, stretched, and unfolded. The monochrome color of the resulting regularly-repeated rectangular shapes is interrupted by a

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grid of white and star-like intersections created by the parts of the canvas that had been knotted. From 1980 onward, the scale of the Tabulas increasingly expanded, leading up to huge, 15-meter canvases, to which the artist would later return. The last folded series Hantaï created are white-on-white paintings: the Tabulas Lilas, also reactivated years later.

Retreat from Public In 1982, Hantaï represented France at the 40th Venice Biennial with eighteen Tabulas , the artist’s last appearance in public before retreating from the art world until 1996. Hantaï’s withdrawal had multiple incentives. The successes he had achieved with the biennial, the Grand Prix National des Arts Plastiques (awarded in 1980), two shows at Galerie Jean Fournier (in 1980 and 1982), and a 1981 exhibition at CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain Bordeaux led the artist to feelings of discomfort. He was highly critical of art’s increasing function as object of profit, speculation, and entertainment (Pacquement 1999, 13; Barnay 2014, 74). The only way of avoiding complicity and compromise in this commercial system was to get out. During his 16-year retreat, Hantaï studied many philosophical texts. In the first years of his withdrawal, Hantaï however also engaged in artistic experiments, with works that are more colorful and free than the preceding Tabulas . He spent most time on the Pliages Interminables par Réductions Successives (Endless Folds through Successive Reductions ), for which he returned to earlier paintings, tearing them in half, folding and painting the halves with acrylic, ripping the resulting work in half again, folding and painting the remains, and repeating the process until he wound up with small paintings marked by multiple transparent layers of color—never exhibited during Hantaï’s life. He also made sculptural, folded canvases dipped in glue and gesso, irregular Tabulas of which some sections remain unfolded, and used other inventive forms of pliage (Baldassari 2022, 130–32).

Directing Interpretation From 1994 onward, Hantaï preoccupied himself primarily with work he had created earlier, photographing it, ordering it, archiving it, destroying it, and submitting it to increasingly diverse artistic applications. From the late 1990s onward, the artist’s engagements with earlier work no longer

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only took place in solitude, when he ended his retreat from the public. In those years, he no longer denied collaboration with exhibition makers. In 1997, he donated fifteen canvases to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The catalog accompanying this gift, published a year later, included short texts by the artist (Hantaï 1998). Agnes Berecz has appropriately conceived of the exhibitions Hantaï participated in at this time and the donation and accompanying catalog as instances of the artist’s retroactive engagement with his oeuvre, intended to prevent institutional cooptation by taking the presentation of his work in “his own hands” (Berecz 2013, 9). Hantaï indeed carefully selected the group exhibitions his work would be contextualized in and with his catalog texts guided later interpretations of his oeuvre. Telling in this regard are the art history-informed titles Hantaï gave to some earlier paintings in the 1990s, including À Galla Placidia, which connects the 1958–1959 work to the Ravenna mausoleum, emphasizing not only the importance of the cross in the painting but also the small, relatively regularly-distributed, mosaic-like forms. The text Hantaï wrote for the Donation catalog states that À Galla Placidia “breaks away from me and impresses me” (Hantaï 1998, 24), feeding the interpretation of the work as an important step away from himself. Like the contemporaneous work Écriture Rose, which Hantaï had covered with near-uniform writing copied from existing texts, À Galla Placidia can indeed be seen as having started various processes that would increasingly lead to a renunciation of mastery and gesture. Another art historical reference in the retitling of a work in the 1990s was the retrospective renaming of a 1962 painting from the Marialesseries as … dell’Orto. Mariale M.D.2, after a Tintoretto painting of the Virgin in the Venetian church Madonna dell’Orto. In his catalog entry in Donation Simon Hantaï , Hantaï noted that the canvas had ceased to be a projection screen, having rather “invaginated” itself (Hantaï 1998, 26). This retrospective comment solicits an interpretation of the canvas as having generated—without the artist’s authorial, godlike input—slitshapes on the Mariales, in a revelation of the generally concealed—or shrouded—virginal vulva. Hantaï also retitled a painting from the Meun series after an old painting of Mary, denominating it “Á Enguerrand Quarton.” The similarity of the blue pattern of Hantaï’s works to the Virgin’s folded blue cloak in Quarton’s 1454 Le Couronnement de la Vièrge suggests that Quarton’s Mary is wearing a Meun (Hantaï 1998,

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28). Clearly, images of the Virgin play an important role in Hantaï’s retrospective rebaptizing efforts, also in the retitling of a 1975 Tabula as … Del Parto, after Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto (Pacquement 1999, 16), which will be discussed later. Berecz has argued that Hantaï in this way was “rewriting his life and work” and Georges Didi-Huberman has spoken of a “rethinking” of the artist’s oeuvre and a “rediscovered origin” (2013, 7–8). It was around this time that Hantaï first presented to the public a collage consisting of an overpainted magazine photo of a mummy wrapped in a shroud (1950) and a very early work with a creased support (1951), showing that the folding method had in fact been a return to earlier work rather than an entirely new invention: Hantaï seems to have deliberately presented himself as artist rooted in the history of art and connected to his earlier work.

Cutting, Reframing, and the Abject Many of Hantaï engagements with his earlier work involved collaboration with other people. Beyond conversations with museum professionals about the presentation of his works in exhibitions and catalogs, Hantaï also involved people in artistic production. By working with people like artists Antonio Semeraro and Patrice Vermeille, Berecz has argued, Hantaï now presented his practice as “collaborative activity,” again reducing the artist’s “authority” and “removing his hand from the making” (Berecz 2012, 10). Starting in 1994, Semeraro helped Hantaï in a renewed, very physical, interaction with his earlier paintings. Important outcomes of this return are the Laissées , produced in a process that involved both destruction and generation (Berecz 2012, 9). With the help of Semeraro and a utility knife, Hantaï slashed a number of the huge 1981 Tabulas , works that had dissatisfied the artist. The cut-out fragments the artist did not discard were reframed, sometimes with the addition of white canvas. Some of the rectangular, colored shapes appear in the middle of the new composition, while others are positioned at the edge, in an Barnett Newman-inspired exploration of the paintings’ reserves, edges, and intervals, though also referencing the cut-outs of Matisse (Berecz 2012, 9). The title of the Laissées , usually translated as “leftovers” in Englishlanguage Hantaï literature, in French refers to wild swine droppings when used in the plural (Hantaï, n.d.). With this reference to excrement, Hantaï

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nodded toward the lowly, in one late instance of many manifestations of the Georges Bataille-inspired “base” that had early on appeared in Hantaï’s work from the 1950s in the form of depictions of entrails, bones, and underground life—a denial of art’s aspiration toward the elevated. At the onset of the 1990s, Hantaï had also given new expression to his earlier refusal to “mask” and “embellish” the abject, in experiments with dirt and various kinds of everyday domestic waste materials, leading to the Pliages à usage domestique (Foldings for household use, 1990), created with rags and cloths he had used to wipe the floor (Hantaï 1998, 43; Pacquement 2014, 54).

Mechanical and Digital Reworkings As pointed out by Berecz, the alteration procedures that led to new work like the Laissées challenged the conception of Hantaï’s oeuvre as stable, “closed body of work” (Berecz 2012, 10), turning it, rather, into adjustable work in progress. The mechanical, digital, and photochemical reworkings of Tabulas Hantaï engaged in between 1996 and 2004 can also be seen as reactivations of the earlier work. In 1997, Hantaï started making a series of screenprints (Sérigraphies ), which he also referred to as Laissées (Fig. 2). These works again returned to a Tabula, or—rather— to a photograph of an unstretched 1980–1981 Tabula (Baldassari 2020, 10; 2022, 134). Hantaï cut the photo in pieces, reframed the selected fragments of the original painting into narrow bands, rotated these 90 degrees, and distorted them through stretching procedures that led to several degrees of anamorphosis. The resulting images were enlarged and transposed onto white canvas with black silkscreen ink. A triptych of three silkscreen variations was exhibited in Didi-Huberman’s Centre Pompidou exhibition L’Empreinte (Baldassari 2020, 9–10). With this photo-chemical and mechanical production method, Hantaï had again found a way to revise his earlier practice of ruling out the artist’s hand and painterly proficiency (Berecz 2012, 9). After showing the Serigraphies at L’Empreinte, Hantaï created a fourth silkscreen using a similar process, based on another photo of a Tabula, this time choosing black silkscreen ink with a blue hue. This bluish shine was a reference to the color of the geometrically-ironed apron his mother Anna used to wear (Froment 1981, 6–7; Baldassari 2020, 11). On multiple occasions in earlier years, Hantaï had traced his folding method back to his mother’s indigo-colored apron, which she used to press in such

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Fig. 2 Simon Hantaï, Laissées , 1981–1996, three silkscreens on canvas, each 300 × 98 cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023

a way that the ironed folds formed a gridded pattern, as shown in a photograph taken around 1920 (Ratcliff 2013; Keserü 2014, 95). The impersonal procedures Hantaï devised to remove himself from his works thus contain a reference to his personal life, in a dynamic playing out of one of his work’s many doubles. The allusion to his mother may at the end, however, not so much relate to the artist’s own biography but rather be a reflection on larger themes that have recurred throughout the artist’s oeuvre, including inception, gestation, and death (Cixous 2005, 18). Such large themes are also evoked in another series of late works Hantaï made through impersonal means: the Suaires (Shrouds, 2001;

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Fig. 3), four digital prints of varying sizes made with the assistance of Vermeille. The Suaires were based on a photo of a 1982 Tabula Lilas , which originally consisted of white acrylic paint on unprimed canvas. In well-lit exhibition spaces, the white-on-white work had acquired an optical, seemingly dematerializing effect of lilac glow (Warnock 2020, 210–214). By 2001, sun exposure and oxidation had imbued the canvas with a brownish color, a degradation process that had not yet developed when the photo had registered the new work two decades earlier. With the help of Vermeille, Hantaï scanned the discolored Tabula Lilas , submitted the image to photoshop transformations, and printed the ethereal result on four canvases with an ink-jet printer. While one of the prints remains relatively close to the Tabula Lilas , others are the result of various digital distortion and reframing manipulations, and while some are closer in hue to the Tabulas Lilas in their original state, others are nearer to the current state of the paintings, which bear the imprint of time (Berecz 2013, 10). All Suaire prints, however, remain connected to the original work, even standing in an indexical relation to it, despite the digital means employed. Although the Suaires do not consist of actual fragments of the originals, as is the case with the Laissées , they do exist as imprints of them, likening them to body-enveloping shrouds (suaires ) (Warnock 2020, 213). Indeed, the lines, shapes, and colors of the Suaires still bear the traces of the very physical folding and unfolding process that had marked their conception some two decades earlier, reminiscent of the miraculous, acheiropoetic (“made without hand”) veil of Veronica, which presumably still bears the traces of the now dematerialized body of Christ (Barnay 2014, 74–75). Photography, silkscreens, and digital techniques afforded Hantaï modes of working that were relatively impersonal, mediated by a machine. Though these mediums were new for Hantaï, who had primarily been a painter, they were yet another outcome of his persistent drive to develop artistic techniques that suppressed his own handwriting, joining the lineup that had included the use of razor and alarm clock casing in the 1950s. The earlier use of implements had been inspired by the stick Pollock had used to spatter paint, which Hantaï considered a “prosthesis” and self-effacing mode of painting that got rid of the individual mark of the painter’s “hand.” Hantaï saw not only Pollock’s stick, but also Matisse’s scissors as tools that had precluded artistic gesture and discontinued virtuosity, limiting the artist’s control (Baldassari 1992, 38).

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Fig. 3 Simon Hantaï, Suaire (Shroud), 2001, digital inkjet print on canvas; Suaire (Shroud), 2001, digital inkjet print on canvas; and Tabula Lilas (Lilac Tabula), 1982, acrylic on canvas. Exhibition installation view Fables du Lieu, Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Tourcoing, February–April 2001. © Archives Simon Hantaï/Pictoright Amsterdam 2023

Looked at this way, both the knife used for the cutting up of the Tabulas (McDonough 1999, 97) and the photochemical, mechanical, and digital techniques of the late works are continuations of and returns to the artist’s earlier attempts at deskilling and self-erasure, including also the copying of texts—which Hantaï saw as mechanical activity as well— and the folding from 1960 onward: Hantaï also conceived of the folding procedures as mechanical, generative operations that allowed paintings to make themselves (Fyfe 2010). For Hantaï, it was, as mentioned earlier, not so much he himself but the folding process that brought out the potential of the material, including different degrees of saturation, density, and transparency of paint—particular manifestations of the game of painting that would not have been manifested if Hantaï had not permitted the dialogue between folding and material to do its work (Knobeloch 10; Hantaï 1999, 66). Indeed, referring to his own limited control, Hantaï has written about the Panses : “the non-programmable future was at play

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here in this powerlessness that was accepted and revindicated” (Hantaï 1998, 37). Of all the folding methods, the one behind the Tabulas had been the most disciplined, repetitive, and systematic. In fact, Hantaï has likened the repetitive work of tying all the knots by hand—one after another—in the creation of the Tabulas to assembly line factory work (Meurice 2013). Correspondingly, he has stated that he tried to execute the knotting and folding process “while looking outside and watching the falling snow” or working as if he had gouged out his eyes (“crevé les yeux”), operating with peripheral vision or blindly (Knobeloch 1999, 8), suggesting that this avoidance of the visual appearance of the work in progress limited his control over the work. The artist, that is, went to great efforts to devise artistic processes that avoided subjectivity, did not require talent, and did not stand out from human practices like factory or construction work.

Burying, Unearthing, (Dis)embodiment, Germination The mechanical and digital methods Hantaï used from 1996 onward offered the kind of distance befitting an artist with an especially unremitting desire to remove his authorial mark. The Suaires had moreover welcomed and explored the degradation process of an earlier pliage work, at once acknowledging the eventual deterioration and finite nature of works of art and finding a way to make the degrading works come to life again through a new medium. In 1996, Hantaï had embraced decay and dissolution and allowed external agents to determine the journey of earlier works in an even more radical manner, when he began burying some of his earlier paintings, either in part or in whole, in his garden in Meun, leaving them to decompose in the soil. Hantaï literally left these works, which he considered part of the group Laissées , behind, abandoning them as if they were corpses. While some of the buried works were left to rot, he would dig up the remains of others as they were in the midst of decomposing (Hantaï 2013, 33), in the process of mixing with the surrounding soil and critters (Fig. 4). Upon exhuming, the artist discovered traces of transience, encountering an object that had without his doing been transformed into something new (Hantaï 2014, 64–65; Didi-Huberman 1998, 107–111). He eventually photographed the work, capturing an instant of its disintegration, and archived the pictures for future reference.

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Fig. 4 Simon Hantaï unearthing paintings, Meun, France, 1997. © Archives Simon Hantaï/Pictoright Amsterdam 2023

While this burial practice was novel for Hantaï, like the cutting, photochemical, mechanical, and digital procedures, it can be traced to earlier works and concerns of the artist. First, it can be seen as a new materialization of the artist’s continual examinations of the workings of chance, which can be traced back to his forays into surrealism of the 1940s and 1950s and had taken a Duchampian turn with the mold—breeding experiments the artist had undertaken in the early 1960s. Allowing chance to play a role in the creation of his works was one of the main ways in which Hantaï limited his own control (Hantaï 1999, 65–67). The burial works are also partly rooted in the over-painted photograph of a mummy from 1950, a collage evincing an early interest in death, (dis)embodiment, and textile imprints. The period 1952–1955 had also brought forth several canvases revealing a fascination with death, often in relation to an exploration of desire and erotic communion. In several paintings of 1951, the substratum, that underground site of decomposition, is represented, in some cases along with life-generating features such as egg- and root-like shapes (Berecz 2012, 98–187). Remarkably, the very

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first work in which Hantaï ever experimented with folding, Peinture of 1951, reveals a pattern that is similar to the markings in contemporaneous paintings that also suggest underground life, like roots and worms, while in some morbid collaged paintings of 1952–1953, fishbones and bird and rabbit skulls are used, as in Femelle-Miroir II (1953), an erotic work with morbid connotations (Warnock 2020, 139–141). The burial works of the 1990s can also be seen as returning to Hantaï’s 1964–1965 Panses (Paunch) series, in which erotics, inception, and death similarly come together in manifold ways. Panse was Hantaï’s translation of the Hungarian word bendös, which can denote not only a large belly, including that of a pregnant woman, but also stuffed sausage (Warnock 2012b, 124, 147). The series—originally titled Maman! Maman!, dits : La Saucice (Mama! Mama!, said: The Sausage)—famously refers to a phrase by Michaux: “Everything, truly everything, is to be taken up again from the beginning: from the cellules, of plants, of mollusks, of protoanimals: the alphabet of life […] The cellule might still save the world, it alone, cosmic sausage without which one can no longer defend oneself” (Bonnefoi 1973, 16–17; Warnock 2012b, 135; 2020, 247).1 Though the Panses are not representational, the forms that seem to float against a white background bear the shape of phallic sausages or eggs and also contain vaginal shapes. A comparison of photos of Hantaï’s Panses in their folded state hanging onto a wall like sacs—in a state between sculpture and painting—to the mummy collage from 1950 reveals various similarities, suggesting that the Panses evoke not only digestion, gestation, and birth, but also death. Where a womb contains a fetus in a state of becoming, a mummy contains a dead, decomposed body, the result of an entropic process in which an initially ordered entity, the living body, has disintegrated. It seems that for Hantaï, birth and death had been closely related far before he had reached advanced age. In light of the Michaux quote, the single shape in the Panses revealed upon enfolding may be interpreted as the cell that carries the promise to save the world, and the folded sack as the belly having housed that cell, inviting associations with the Christ-fetus growing in the belly of the Virgin. In 1958, Hantaï had written that the “crucial problem of painting is that of the incarnation” (Warnock 2012a, 130–131; Ghaddab 2012, 1 “Tout, véritablement tout, est à recommencer par la base: par les cellules, de plantes, de moines, de proto-animaux: l’alphabet de la vie. [...] La cellule peut encore sauver le monde, elle seule,saucisse cosmique sans laquelle on ne pourra plus se défendre.”

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33) and in 1975, as noted earlier, Hantaï dedicated a Tabula to della Francesca’s painting La Madonna del Parto (ca. 1459), which depicts two angels opening a canopy in which the pregnant Virgin stands, pointing at her belly. The Madonna is wearing a blue robe, which opens up at the height of her belly, forming a crevice-like shape through which the white garment under her robe appears, a shape that much resembles the vaginal or wound-like white reserves of some Études and Mariales. In other words, the Mariales and the Panses refer to sexuality, childbirth, and death as well as to the Savior and the pregnant Virgin: the base, the humble, and the metaphysical have joined forces, though the Panses seem closer to the base—given their title and the Mariales to the divine. It is as if, after having created the cloaks, Hantaï wanted to paint what was underneath the mantle. The coming together of the banal and the metaphysical also occurs in the Tabulas , which correspond not only to the rectangular pattern of the artist’s mother’s apron, but also to its method of creation. Hantai has reminisced that his mother pressed her clothes, which were made of ordinary cotton, in such a way that the material took on the appearance of velvet, resulting in an “extraordinarily visual delight” (Meurice 2013). His comparison of The Tabulas —not coincidentally the series of which he would later bury parts—to his mother’s apron supports the association of the pliage works with processes of birth and death, bolstering the conception of the pliages as garments that stand in relation to both germinating and decomposing bodies. The interpretation of the Tabulas as setting up a relation between the bodily and the mystical is further supported by the resemblance of the vaginal and wound-like, white shape on the Virgin’s mantle in della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto to the white zones appearing in the colored rectangles of several Tabulas, including … Del Parto. Tabula (1975). This interpretation is backed by the similarity of the rectangular pattern of the Tabulas to the decoration of the inside of the canopy that houses the Virgin in the Madonna del Parto.2 Another dimension of … Del Parto. Tabula (1975) that invites comparison to the late burial works is the employment of a paint made with the earth-colored pigment caput mortuum, which Hantai associated with burnt earth and tuft (Hantaï 1998, 30). Piero’s Madonna del Parto contains a color brown that is similar to that of caput mortuum, in both 2 Interestingly, della Francesca seems to have painted the fresco in memory of his own mother, who died in 1469.

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the canopy and one of the angels’ robes. Interestingly, caput mortuum is the useless residue of chemical operations such as sublimation, standing for decay—represented by alchemists as a human skull—but was also often used for the robes of religious figures: a valueless waste product of a process of sublimation transformed into the extraordinary. Hantaï’s exploration of caput mortuum, disorder, materiality, the subterranean, and the sexual, as well as his domestic Pliage à Usage Domestique (1990), can be seen in light of the artist’s longstanding interest in the writings of Georges Bataille, which focus on the carnal and waste of various kinds, in short: on what’s normally considered lowly and unworthy. Bataille developed the term “formless” in 1928 to develop an esthetics based on scatology and debasement, intended to undermine all hierarchies and categories, which in his eyes do not correspond to the formlessness that characterizes all of matter and to which we will return when we die (Bois and Krauss 1997, 14–18, 31–37). Various surrealist artists, including the early Hantaï, had been fascinated by Bataille’s work (Warnock 2020, 55–58), in part because it denounced the traditional conception of art as elevated. Hantaï’s burial works of the late 1990s, as suggested before, can be perceived as returning to Bataillean subjects he had examined in his surrealist works. By interring his own work, he performed the realization that everything—including his own body and art—will decompose and blend, that what is now distinct and individual will merge with all else, becoming indistinct and one with the surroundings. Hantaï’s burials, in other words, can be interpreted as performances of dedifferentiation and deindividuation. Such disruption through inhumation of not only form and structure but also individuality corresponds to Hantaï’s longtime desire to downplay the artist’s control. Interment now took on part of the role the artist had previously conferred on various prosthetic instruments and pliage. And yet, seemingly opposite to underground entropic decomposition, folding can be seen, after Gilles Deleuze, as bringing about differentiation: the fold, Deleuze has argued, is the site at which something new, something singular, comes into being (Knobeloch 1999, 10). But the fold in Deleuzian thought has a double structure, as it not only differentiates and separates, but also connects, the fold emerging as trace of the exchange process (Knobeloch 1999, 10). To Deleuze, whose thought can be said to revolve around the notion of “becoming,” what has contracted into a fold will at one point, upon unfolding, become the starting point of further folding diversification.

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In his writing on Hantaï in The Fold, Deleuze (1993 [1988], 34, 36, 86), however, does not seem bothered by the fact that, once stretched and framed, Hantaï’s unfolded works are relatively fixed—not so much “the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter” and “continuous development of form” (Deleuze 1993 [1988], 20). This stability of the completed pliages may have bothered Hantaï on some level toward the end of his career, when he no longer created new works from scratch, but reactivated his earlier work by subjecting it to (self-effacing) operations like cutting, distorting, silkscreening, digital manipulation, and burying, as we have seen.

Touching Through the Enfolding of Conversational Partners In the year 2000, Hantaï set out on a project that reactivated his earlier folding method anew. Between 1960 and 1984, pliage had primarily been a dialogue between the artist himself and his materials: canvas and paint.3 In 2000, he expanded the number of conversational partners when he began copying the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida onto a creased canvas. In this way, he folded the work of others into his own while acting as “humble” copier (Hantaï 2013, 95), bringing the potential of the double structure of the fold—separation and connection—to new heights. Previously, folding had been a mode of the artist to depersonalize, as he followed the lead of a procedure and external material, and burying had led to desingularization of his pliages, leading them to gradual dissolution as they merged with the surrounding soil and critters. Hantaï’s collaboration with Nancy and Derrida allowed his own pliage to literally touch the work of two of the philosophers he so appreciated. Reading philosophy had famously been Hantaï’s primary occupation during his retreat, and it continued to be after his return in the late 1990s (Hantaï 2013, 10). In his readings, he had allowed himself to be affected by philosophers’ writing, an openness to external input that had much

3 Hantaï’s encounter with the material was highly sensuous. Asked why he applied paint

to the Tabula with a small brush rather than with a larger one or broom, Hantaï explained that he wanted to “feel every bit of canvas according to its own laws.” He wished to feel the width of the folds, the size of the rectangles, the smoothness and irregularity of the surface, and the thickness of the paint. This very tactile engagement with the material allowed the material to determine Hantaï’s own actions (Meurice 2013).

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earlier also marked his collaborations with Jean Schuster (1954–1955) and Georges Mathieu (1956–1957), more recently his interactions with conversational partners like Didi-Huberman (1997–1998), and would later play a role in conversations with Hélène Cixous (2004–2005).4 Texts by philosophers like Nancy and Derrida, one might say, following Deleuze’s writings on the mutual formation of the subject and the world (Knobeloch 1999, 10), had over years of reading so to speak folded into the artist’s inner being, especially writings by Nancy like Le Corps (1992) and Être Singulier Pluriel (1996). This longstanding process of touching through reading and conversing was materialized in a joint work by Hantaï, Derrida, and Nancy following the latter’s 1999 invitation to Hantaï to create a cover image for a forthcoming book on him by Derrida. The publication is cogently titled Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Touched, Galilée 2000), and honors the relatively unknown philosopher, who, like Hantaï, had preferred to operate in the margins (Devisch 2000, 736). For this project, Hantaï operated at once as reader, copier, painter, and thinker, as he copied onto stiffened and folded fine batiste paper passages from Nancy’s Être Singulier Pluriel (Being Singular Plural, 1996) and Derrida’s Donner le Temps: 1. La Fausse Monnaie (Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, 1991), superimposing the texts with inks in different colors (Fig. 5). In the five ensuing “unreadable manuscripts,” often referred to as Hantaï’s “travaux de lecture” (reading works),5 Nancy and Derrida’s words literally touched one another, as well as Hantaï’s own folding and copying work, a result of both the superimposition of texts and the actual folding (Hayes 2013; Keserü 2014, 93). The three men folded themselves into each other and welcomed the unexpected outcome of that exchange. This late project again connects to much earlier work of Hantaï, not only the pliages, but also the denouncement of gesture and mastery of the writing-painting Écriture Rose (1958–1959; Hayes 2013). For that earlier work, he had similarly copied texts by other people “one over another, to the point of unreadability, where a few words spring out of the chaos” 4 As Katalin Keserü has pointed out, touch was a collective concern of a number of Hantaï’s interlocutors: besides Derrida and Nancy, Didi-Huberman and Cixous also use the words touch (Keserü 2014, 93). 5 As pointed out by Hayes, the word “travaux” for Hantaï referred not to a work of art (chef d’oeuvre) but rather to physical work, like large construction projects (Hayes 2013).

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Fig. 5 Simon Hantaï, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, pages 78–79 of La Connaissance des Textes: Lectures d’un Manuscrit Illisible (The Knowledge of Texts: Readings of an illegible manuscript ), Paris: Galilée, 2001. © Archives Simon Hantaï/Pictoright Amsterdam 2023

(Hantaï et al. 2013, 27), but no folding had been involved.6 Indeed, Écriture Rose lacks the white folding traces that cut through the copied writings on the unfolded paper of the travaux de lecture, of which only a detail was used for the frontispiece of Le Toucher. Besides the travaux de lecture’s rootedness in Écriture Rose, there is also an explicit connection to Hantaï’s more recent burial works, as evinced by the artist’s inclusion in a letter to Nancy from July 1999 of a photograph of an unearthed painting. Nancy compellingly wrote in response to this letter: “folding is making one touch” (Hantaï et al. 2013, 33–39),7 and, a month later: “[…] you definitively bury in those folds the sonority of the voices that would have uttered these words, making the words disappear along with their meaning, their voice […], leaving nothing to touch but their crumpled and pressed traces, stuffed into the 6 “une sur l’autre, jusq’à l’illisibilté, où quelques mots surgissent du chaos.” 7 “plier c’est faire se toucher.”

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cloth that ends up eating the text” (Hantaï et al. 2013, 59). Through his copying and folding process, in other words, Hantaï submerged in the folds the singular, if mutually inflected, voices of the two philosophers, causing them to dissolve and disperse so that they are no more than remnants of what they once were, similar to the disintegration in the soil to which Hantaï had submitted his own canvases, and anticipating the destiny of the aging bodies, and eventually work, of the three men. Both of the books from which Hantaï copied passages in his Travaux—Nancy’s Être Singulier Pluriel and Derrida’s Donner Le Temps —correspond to themes that are at the core of Hantaï’s oeuvre, though this is especially true for Être Singulier Pluriel . Derrida’s book concerns the nature of giving as exchange, asking whether gifts are in essence forms of debt that must be repaid. Nancy’s book continues the philosopher’s longtime conviction that in our God-less society, we need to find ways of being together in a community that does not revolve around individual subjects, nor succumb to the risk of becoming a grand “Us,” yet acknowledges people’s differences (Devisch 2000, 737). Our existence, to Nancy (with reference to Heidegger), is in essence a coexistence, a “being with” in which we are exposed to one another and yet preserve the freedom of our “I.” The structure of “self” is at the end a structure of “with,” a form of singular plurality. In the excerpt Hantaï decided to copy, Nancy presents being as both separation and proximity (Nancy 1996, 118–121; Hayes 2013), consolidating the philosopher’s earlier statement in Corpus (1992) that there is no contact without separation (Hayes 2013). In 2000, the year of Hantaï’s copying, Nancy told an interviewer: “What interest me at the moment in the community, in being in communion, is living with, this preposition that indicates a proximity without […] fusion of identities” (Nancy and Marongiu 2000).8 It is precisely this sense of “being with” and a fusion of connected yet separate identities that Hantaï has enacted in his travaux, implicitly connecting the “with-ness” (Hayes 2013) of his friendship with the philosophers to the type of communal “being with” that in ideal circumstances would predicate society, as described in Nancy’s texts. The political implications of Nancy’s writings undoubtedly also appealed to Hantaï, who, in 1998, in 8 “Ce qui m’intéresse à présent dans la communauté, dans l’être en commun, c’est l’être avec, cette préposition indiquant une proximité sans recouvrement possible, sans recouvrement possible, sans fusion des identités.”

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response to France’s recently passed Pasqua laws, which restrict immigration to France, lamented that with such acts of state closure “[w]e never quite get to the politics of ‘with’” (Lebovici and Gauville 1998, 29; Warnock 217).

Defying Closure Hantaï only unfolded one of the five travaux, hesitating toward the end of 1999 about the next step he would take with the ones that remained folded (Hantaï et al. 2013, 97). In a letter, Hantaï stated that he had “abandoned” (not finished) his work on the travaux, maintaining, as Hayes has remarked, the project in progress (Hayes 2013), continuing, inadvertently or not, the promise of a potential future unfolding. This defiance of closure had been an important impetus for the many reactivations of earlier work Hantaï had engaged in since the early 1990. Though he reinvented pliage with each activation, many of the themes that had engrossed him from the 1950s onward were sustained throughout the later works, most notably the artist’s use of ever new procedures to abandon the self to external agents, to dissolve singularity by merging with others—yielding to touch.

References Baldassari, Anne. 1992. Simon Hantaï . Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou. ———. 2020. Simon Hantaï: Les Noirs du Blanc, Les Blancs du Noir. Paintings 1951–97 . New York: Gagosian. ———, ed. 2022. Simon Hantaï: The Centenary Exhibition, trans. Deke Dusinberre, et al. Paris: Fondation Louis Vuitton; Éditions Gallimard. Barnay, Sylvie. 2014. La Rétrospective de l’œuvre de Simon Hantaï. L’Image Acheiropoïète au Seuil du XXIe Siècle. Etudes 5: 73–83. Berecz, Ágnes. 2012. Simon Hantaï , vol. 1. Budapest: Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts. ———. 2013. Simon Hantaï , vol. 2. Budapest: Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts. Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind Krauss. 1997. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books. Bonnefoi, Geneviève. 1973. Hantaï . Ginals: Centre d’Art Contemporain de l’Abbaye de Beaulieu. Cixous, Hélène. 2005. Le tablier de Simon Hantaï: Annagrammes suivi de H.C. S.H. letters. Paris: Galilée.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 1993 [1988]. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley. London: The Athlone Press. Devisch, Ignaas. 2000. Geraakt Zijn: Derrida’s Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 62 (4): 733–742. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1998. L’Étoilement: Conversation avec Hantaï . Paris: Minuit. Fourcade, Dominique. 2005. Sans lasso et sans flash. Paris: P.O.L. Fourcade, Dominique, et al. 2013. Simon Hantaï . Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou. Froment, Jean-Louis. 1981. Simon Hantaï, Légendes. In Simon Hantaï, 1960– 1976. Bordeaux: Centre d’Arts Plastiques Contemporain de Bordeaux/ Entrepôt Lainé. Fyfe, 2010. Joe. Pliage. Artnet. http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/ fyfe/fyfe4-16-10.asp. Accessed 14 May 2023. Ghaddab, Karim. 2012. Les Panses de Simon Hantaï ou la Peinture en Outre. In Simon Hantaï, Panses, 1964–1965. Paris: Galerie Jean Fournier. Hantaï, Anna. 2014. Simon Hantaï’s Personal Archives. In Hantaï , ed. Julia Fabényi, Emese Kürti, and Viktória Popovics, 62–71. Budapest: Ludwig Múzeum/Kortárs Müvészeti Múzeum. Hantaï, Simon. 1998. Don de Tableaux. In Donation Simon Hantaï , ed. Suzanne Pagé, Béatrice Parent, and Dominique Gagneux, 23–44. Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. ———.1999. Hantaï: Briefe und Notizen. In Simon Hantaï: Werke von 1960 bis 1995, ed. Erich Franz, 65–81. Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte. Hantaï, Simon, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 2013. Jamais le Mot “Créateur” … (Correspondance 2000-2008). Paris: Galilée. Hantaï, Simon, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 2013. La Connaissance des Textes: Lecture d’un Manuscrit Illisible (Correspondance). Paris: Galilée. ———. Laissées (untitled, undated statement). Archives Simon Hantaï. https:// simonhantai.org/en/oeuvres/periode/15/laissees. Accessed 15 May 2023. Hayes, Julie. 2013. The Body of the Letter: Epistolary Acts of Simon Hantaï, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida. Postmodern Culture, 13 (3). https://www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/19/the-body-of-the-letterepistolary-acts-of-simon-hantai-jean-luc-nancy-and-jacques-derrida/. Accessed 14 May 2023. Keserü, Katalin. 2014. For the Opening of the Hantaï Exhibition. In Hantaï , ed. Julia Fabényi, Emese Kürti, and Viktória Popovics, 92-97. Budapest: Ludwig Múzeum/Kortárs Müvészeti Múzeum. Knobeloch, Heinz. 1999. Die Falte entfalten. In Simon Hantaï: Werke von 1960 bis 1995, ed. Erich Franz, 6–13. Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte.

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Lebovici, Élisabeth, and Hervé Gauville. 1998. Hantaï est de Sorties. Libération, March 12: 29. McDonough, Tom. 1999. Hantaï’s Challenge to Painting. Art in America, 87 (3): 96–99. Meurice, Jean-Michel. 2013. Hantaï . Deux Films de Jean-Michel Meurice. Paris: Centre Pompidou/P.O.M. Films. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Être Singulier Pluriel. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1996. Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Jean-Baptiste Marongiu. 2000. Interview: Le Partage. L’Infini et le Jardin. Libération, 17 February. https://www.liberation.fr/liv res/2000/02/17/le-partage-l-infini-et-le-jardin_318046/. Accessed 14 May 2023. Pacquement, Alfred. 1999. In ständigem Wandel, Fragmente. In Simon Hantaï: Werke von 1960 bis 1995, ed. Erich Franz, 13–19. Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte. ———. 2014. 1982: Simon Hantaï Withdraws. For Dominique Bozo. In Hantaï , ed. Fabényi, Julia, Emese Kürti, and Viktória Po-povics, 50-61. Budapest: Ludwig Múzeum/Kortárs Müvészeti Múzeum. Ratcliff, Carter. 2013. Hantaï in America. Artpress 401, June. https://paulrodge rs9w.com/simon-hantai-press. Accessed 15 May 2023. Warnock, Molly. 2012a. Penser la Peinture: Simon Hantaï , trans. Patrick Hersant. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2012b. Engendering Pliage: Simon Hantaï’s Meuns. Nonsite.org 6: 104– 149. ———. 2020. Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting. University Park (PA): Penn State University Press.

CODA: Encore—Notes on Lacan’s Reference to Mysticism in the Late Seminars Marc De Kesel

Paris, November 21, 1972. Jacques Lacan, 71, starts his twentieth seminar (Lacan 1998). Il enseigne encore; he still teaches. “Still,” maybe despite the fact that he is tired, or bored—the listener at least seems to sense ennui in Lacan’s voice at certain moments in the audio-recording. “Still,” he is teaching. Is this the reason why he entitled the seminar of that year “still,” “encore”? Even if he indeed felt a degree of fatigue while teaching, there was obviously another motivation behind Lacan’s choice of this enigmatic title. “Encore” is a way of placing a point—in a both banal and typically Lacanian way. “Encore” places a “point’ in the sense that it puts an end to a sentence, in this case to the title of the former seminar or, more precisely, seminars.

M. De Kesel (B) Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7_18

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“A Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance” For that is what a point in a sentence does, Lacan explained in his fifth (1957–1958) and sixth (1958–1959) seminars, in which he developed his “graphe du désir” (graph of desire) (Lacan 2017, 2019).1 In a chain of signifiers—the surface on which the libidinal being “surfs” to realize itself—a point functions as a stop, an interruption; and thanks to such a stop, a chain of signifiers can have sense, make sense, form a sentence. A point retroactively changes the flow of signifiers into a signifying sentence making sense, producing a “signifié,” a “signified.” “Encore” (still) makes a chain of signifiers meaningful, which in this case however means that it destroys the meaning of the chain, since the chain was already a sentence, a chain stopped by a point and, consequently, bearing meaning. Did it have one? The title of the nineteenth seminar was: “… Ou Pire” (Or Worse), which is not really a sentence. For that title itself was a point as well, formally similar to the point that “Encore” placed. “Ou Pire” gave sense to a chain of signifiers that, since they already formed a sentence, broke the meaning that sentence had. That sentence was the title of the previous seminar, the eighteenth, entitled: “D’un Discours qui Ne Sera Pas du Semblant,” “Of a Discourse that Might Not Be a Semblance.” “A discourse that might not be a semblance.” This may sound strange, but is it all in all not a particularly classical title? Translated in Platonian jargon, it reads: a logos that might not be mimesis . This is what philosophy—and, more generally, science—since its origin in the sixth century BC, intends to do: in a “cave” full of unreliable semblance, it tries to find a way out, a way to a place where semblance is replaced by truth, where epistèmè replaces mimesis and doxa.2 A classical intention, indeed, were it not that the discourse Lacan puts forward—in the seminar of that title and in the one developed in his theory in general—states explicitly that there is no way out of the cave, that “semblance” has no reverse, something that would be “true,” something that would not be “semblance.”

1 In mathematics, graph theory is the study of points and lines that represent mathematical relationships. The aim of Lacan’s theory (which is a theory of the subject of desire) is to come to such a ‘mathematical’ formalization of the way the human libidinal being constitutes itself as the subject of desire. 2 “Epistèmè” is Plato’s word for “knowledge” and “mimesis” means “mimicry,” unreliable “appearance”; “doxa” is Plato’s word for “opinion,” “unverified knowledge.”

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This is not to say that, to Lacan, there is no such thing as “truth.” But truth is not the reverse or the real reference of “semblance.” If there is truth, it lies in the way the subject relates to reality, a reality he inevitably relates to as “semblance.” In that “semblance,” he might be searching for truth, but that truth he will find in the search as such, in the way he is subject of that search, or—more generally—subject of his desire. And a discourse explaining this is what Lacan calls a “discourse that might not be a semblance.” Lacanian theory is a theory of the subject, and its central thesis is that the subject is the subject of desire. Man is desire, desire even for being, which is why real being remains hidden behind “semblance,” behind what seems to be real, but is not. Man does not relate to being on the basis of being itself (his own being or the being of reality), but on the basis of his desire for being, desire for real reality. This is the way in which man is basically subject to/of desire, the subject to/of “semblance,” to/ of mimesis, or, in Lacanian jargon: the subject of signifiers. Human desire (which defines his very human condition) has nothing but signifiers at its disposal. Yet, the desiring subject is not a signifier itself. It is nothing but “what represents a signifier for another signifier” (to quote a decisive definition of the signifier Lacan comes up with in his seminar session of December 6, 1961).3 Of course, we have and are a “substance” of our own, but we do not relate to reality on the basis of that substance. We relate to reality as if that reality is a realm of signifiers, and the point where we supposedly stand in that relation must be thought according to the primacy of the signifier. We, so to speak, “hang” on signifiers. And hanging on them, we imaginarily suppose a “self,” i.e., an “agent” or “subject” relating to them. This said, we must realize that this discourse, explaining that we are the subject of semblance and signifiers, is itself made out of signifiers, of semblance. But is that discourse itself “semblance”? That is at any rate not the intention. It must at least be more than “semblance,” since it must enable the explanation of how the subject of “semblance” can deal with

3 That session is part of Lacan’s Seminar IX: L’identification, 1961-1962 (unpublished, see http://staferla.free.fr/S9/S9%20L’IDENTIFICATION.pdf). The quoted words appear on p. 27: “Le signifiant, à l’envers du signe, n’est pas ce qui représente quelque chose pour quelqu’un, c’est ce qui représente précisément le sujet pour un autre signifiant.”

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itself—i.e. with the desire of which it is the subject. It must do so in such a way that it is itself not mere “semblance.” Or, as the title of Lacan’s eighteenth seminar reads, it must be a “Discourse that Might Not be a Semblance.” Is this possible at all? And if it is, how then? That is what Lacan’s seminar of that title is after. This is not the occasion to develop a summary of the way Lacan treats that question. Let us simply point out that, in that seminar, Lacan reflects upon the “scientific” status of the discourse he has been developing in all his former seminars—which is basically a topological discourse: a logic pointing to the topos (or topoi) where the subject, surfing on the surface of signifiers, positions itself in the “dialectics of desire” (to use one of Lacan’s expressions from the fifties, Lacan 2006, 671ff.). The topic of the twentieth seminar, Encore, is to explain to what extent Lacan’s own theoretical—“scientific”—discourse is not a conventional one. And this is highlighted by the “point” placed after that seminar by the title of the subsequent seminar: “…Ou Pire” (Or Worse). The suggestion is clear. “A discourse that might not be a semblance” is bad. What, then, is bad about it? Certainly this: that we might think that our discourse on semblance might itself not be semblance. Do we read this well? What exactly is bad here? What is bad is that such a discourse might be a serious one, one that seriously tries to convey the truth on semblance, tries to change semblance into its opposite. The danger of Lacan’s own theoretical discourse is that it might be a philosophical or, what amounts to the same thing, a scientific one. To put it differently: a theory of the unconscious might be seen as one that makes the unconscious conscious. And this is precisely what such a theory must avoid. Its primary mission is to not turn the obscure unconscious into its rational clarification, but to clarify the unconscious as unconscious. A discourse on semblance must show how it does not escape the semblance itself, being nonetheless able to take position with respect to it and to disclose something about it. Suppose that such a discourse is possible and that a Freudian or Lacanian theory succeeds in it, even then there is a “still.” “D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, ou pire encore”; “of a discourse that might not be a semblance, or worse, still.” “Encore (still)” is the point added to the combined titles of the previous seminars, a point that once again breaks open the combined title and reinforces the “Ou Pire.” For it was already an open title, suggesting that the discourse on semblance might be worse than semblance, which is repeated by the third seminar in this

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series (“Ou Pire”), acknowledging this and, by doing so, suggesting that the understanding we had from the former seminar must be suspended once again. Is it a coincidence that Lacan, in the seminar Encore, refers to mysticism? Of all his seminars, this is the one in which the highest number of references to mysticism occur, though, taken all together, there are not that many. Besides a few occasional references, there is one page on which not much more than the names of some of the most well-known mystics of the Christian tradition are given. Besides the direct references to mystics, there is a statement that links “feminine jouissance” to the ecstatic experience of those mystics. But is “feminine jouissance” the only motive of Lacan’s references to mysticism? My intuition is that his reference to mysticism must be related to the core subject of his seminar, more precisely to that of his three seminars. “Of a discourse that might not be a semblance, or worse, still”—with all the aporias that title contains—not only characterizes the discourse of Lacan’s theory, it also typifies the mystical discourse—the mystical as discourse.

A Discourse That Might Not Be Mystical What is Lacan’s view on the mystical, on mysticism? Later on, I will quote the passage in which Lacan describes the mystical experience as one of jouissance, of feminine jouissance even (a passage that is reproduced on the back side of the French edition). Yet, from a Lacanian point of view, mysticism must primarily be considered as a matter of desire rather than as one of experience. Mystics desire, and they do so—so to speak—in an exquisite way. They love God, but since the divine lover remains absent, their love reveals the very basis of what, according to Lacan, loving is: desire. To love God is to cultivate an unsatisfied desire, a desire that is not lived as “covered up” by the desire of the other (which is Lacan’s definition of love in his 1960–1961, eighth seminar, Lacan 2015, 51– 52). God’s desire remains an enigma, an inaccessible object throwing the human lovers we are over and again back on our desire, on a reflection of what or who it is we desire and, even more basically, what desire exactly is. This is why mysticism is in fact inevitably a matter of discourse, as well as of text. And this is also why, to acquire real understanding of mysticism, one has to read corpus mysticum, its huge textual tradition. Each

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of these texts boundlessly testifies to a desire that never stops clinging to words and phrases, explaining how the mystic keeps on burning out of love, burning out of desire, burning without his/her love-fire ever getting quenched, extinguished—except in some rare, fleeting ecstatic moments. From sentence to sentence, from word to word, or, as Lacan would put it, from signifier to signifier, their desire keeps on running after the divine beloved. So it is no surprise that each of those mystics has a proper “theory of desire” and, even, a proper “theory of the subject of desire.” In the seventeenth century, the subject theories of spiritual authors like Benoît de Canfield, François de Sales, Madame Guyon, or François de Fénelon can be considered, each in a particular way, as an attempt to “deconstruct” the new, modern subject that recently had been put forward by Descartes’s cogito. And even the work of sixteenth-century mystics like Juan dela Cruz or Teresa of Avila can be considered in that way. Mysticism is a discourse establishing a theory of the subject of desire. Who, according to that discourse, is longing for God? Or course it is the mystic herself—longing for the ultimate object of desire which is God. However, in accordance with what Augustine and all other Church Fathers write, the mystic believes that, at the end of the day, it is God who is the subject of her desire. Ultimately, it is He who is the ground, the subiectum, the hupokeimeon, of her longing for Him.4 The desire she has with respect to God has been instilled in her by no one else but God Himself. Longing for God, she turns back to the origin of longing, to the subiectum of her desire. Lovingly desiring God is basically looking for what in her has always already been longing for the divine subiectum. Yet, if the mystic is not the subject of her desire, she is still the subject of the drama her desire is in. For a drama it is: she longs for God and therefore she has to fight herself; she has to fight the self in her which thinks it is she who longs for God. That “self” is an obstacle on her way to God. So, to love God coincides with fighting herself. And of that fight, no one else than she herself is the subject.

4 The word “subject” derives from “subiectum,” the Latin translation of the Greek

“hupokeimenon,” a term used in the logic of Aristotle. The term is to be taken in its original sense: that which underlies something. In the sentence “the tree is green,” “tree” is the subject of the attribute “green.” Of the mystic’s desires, the underlying and supporting subiectum is supposed not to be the mystic himself, but God (De Kesel 2023, 43, 46, 48–51).

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To put it into more abstract, but perhaps more clear terms: in his devout desire, the mystic (specifically the many seventeenth-century spiritual authors mentioned before) intends to reach God in the old, medieval sense of the term, God being the real subiectum—author and ground of all that is, including even of the mystic’s love for God. Yet, while doing so, the mystic meets herself as the obstacle of that goal. And that obstacle is nothing but the modern, cartesian subiectum. This is why it is not total nonsense to perceive those seventeenthcentury mystics as some sort of “Lacanians” avant la lettre. Burning of desire for the ultimate object that is God—whom they consider to be their real subject—they are blocked by the human subject of desire they themselves are. And so they are condemned to linger in the realm of that human, all too human, subject of desire. What they consider to be their real subject remains the object of their desire, an object stubbornly escaping their desire, except in moments in which, reaching that ultimate object that is God, they lose themselves as subject and wake up from those moments with the distressing feeling of unfortunately still being in the mode of “desire.” They describe their ecstatic moment as genuine jouissance, in the Lacanian sense of the word. This precisely is one of the reasons why Lacan refers to these mystics in Encore. But there is, I think, still another reason. What Lacan has in mind is also the mystical discourse. For mysticism is first of all a discursive practice, extensively covering the drama of desire. It follows the ways in which the (human) subject of desire is an obstacle for the satisfaction of desire for God; and how, subsequently, that desire can only be satisfied if its (human) subject fades away. But what is the status of that discourse? That discourse itself drives on desire. Is that desire satisfied once the discourse has said what it has to say? Of course not. In order to say what it has to say, the discourse must somehow express its inherent failure, the unsatisfied and unsatiable condition of its discourse—a discourse precisely expressing this. It is in this sense that the mystical discourse must be “a discourse which is not mystical.” It must avoid a kind of “full circle.” Now that we understand why mystical discourses are so boundless, why, in those texts, does the author never tire of, over and again, retaking the problematic, aporetic situations his desire for God is in. Every time the author succeeds in adequately expressing the impossibility of being the subject of that desire’s satisfaction, she must at the same time express the impossibility of this expression (however inadequate) itself.

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Her discourse should be “not semblant,” but it only achieves this by acknowledging that it does itself not escape the “semblant.” Yet, a discourse that does so and pretends, by doing so, that it is finally OK, is “worse,” for there is always a “still” that must undo the “OK,” inherently woven into the discourse. The discourse is never OK and has to express this by expressing, over and again, that a discourse pretending to have expressed all this, is “worse” “still.” A discourse on mysticism must acknowledge that it is not mystical, that it does not make, so to speak, “full circle.” Yet when it pretends that, then, it is OK, it must realize that it is worse than its opposite, and that there is always a “worse,” “still.” And that, regardless, it remains a fact that “Les non-dupes errent,” “the non-dupes wander” (the non-deceived are wrong), to quote the title of Lacan’s seminar XXI, the next one after Encore.

Other Jouissance Does Lacan himself discuss the abysmal condition of the mystical discourse as I just sketched it? Not exactly. This is not to say that he does not allude to it. In Encore, he explicitly advises the reading of mystical texts. At the end of his seminar of February 20, 1973, he states: These mystical jaculations are neither idle chatter nor empty verbiage; they provide, all in all, some of the best reading one can find—at the bottom of the page, drop a footnote, ‘Add to that list Jacques Lacan’s Écrits’ because it’s of the same order. (Lacan 1998, 76)

His own ‘Écrits ’ are to be considered as figuring in the list of mystical texts. They are “of the same order,” words that contend that both mystical texts and the Écrits are “neither idle chatter nor empty verbiage.” Are they not? If they are not “empty verbiage,” they are nonetheless “verbiage” about a kind of emptiness, about what no word is able to fill in, about what no signifier can include in a theory considering all as being of the order of the signifier. And, to be more precise, Lacan’s Écrits —his theory—considers really all that is from the perspective of the signifier, even that which only exists as being represented by a signifier to another signifier, which is the “emptiness” coinciding with the subject of the signifier, the subject of desire. Yet ultimately, Lacan’s “verbiage” is there to indicate what even escapes the latter, what even escapes the emptiness included in the signifying system. This is why Lacan’s “verbiage” is not a

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“verbiage,” but a “writing,” “Écriture” being the term Lacan uses for the set of “mathemes” to indicate the topological co-ordinates necessary to understand the way in which the subject of desire operates in the field of signifiers.5 That “écriture” is a “discourse that might not be a semblance.” What is it that escapes the universe as perceived by us as libidinally conditioned human beings? Or, what amounts to the same thing: what escapes the totality—“the all”6 —of signifiers, including the subject of the signifiers, i.e. the “emptiness” included in—for represented by—the signifiers? Is it jouissance, which is the concept defining the moment when the subject “gets” the object of its desire, an experience that makes the subject fade away and therefore, despite the subject’s satisfaction, keeps desire ongoing?7 Lacan typifies this kind of jouissance as “phallic,” a jouissance in which desire, although constituted by a lack (conceptualized as “Phallus”), makes “full circle.” In Encore, however, Lacan conceptualizes the finitude of that infinite totality by means of a jouissance conceived as going beyond all that. He introduces a jouissance that escapes the phallic order (the order making full circle in its lack, in its openness). That kind of jouissance escapes the order as such, the order of the “all,” since “all” is signifier and the “all of signifiers” makes full circle on the very place of the lack in which the signifier finds its ground, its subiectum. That is why the “all of signifiers” 5 Already early in 30-year seminar project, Lacan had shown a preference for algebraic and mathematical notations and schemes. Think of the “graphe du désir” mentioned above (see Lacan 2006, 692). In Encore, he developed the “sexuation formulas” to “algebraically” indicate the finitude of the infinite order of signifiers the libidinal being deals with. See Lacan (1998, 73). 6 In the late seminars, upon the titles of which I am commenting here, Lacan’s term for totality is “tout” (all) or “le tout” (the all). To indicate the finitude of “the all,” he introduces the term “pas tout” (not all) of “le pas tout” (the not all). Lacan (1998, passim). 7 We coincide with—we are—desire, unsatisfiable desire. Yet, we do have experiences of full satisfaction of our desire. Lacan calls such floating moments jouissance. Full satisfaction of the subject’s desire is possible because the lack that is the basis and motor of desire (conceptualized by Lacan as “Phallus”) persists in (and despite) the satisfaction of desire, because in the moment of jouissance, the subject itself fades away. In moments of jouissance, the subject itself lacks. This is to say that the subject of desire is not able to be present in the moment of full satisfaction of its desire. That experience has been countlessly expressed in the poetic tradition, when the poet/lover sings about “la petite mort ” (“the little death”) accompanying the enjoyment of his beloved. For an extensive explanation and contextualization of the Lacanian concept of jouissance, see Marc De Kesel (2009, 121–161).

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is an open, infinite totality. And yet, that “all” is “not all.” There is a “rest,” escaping that “all,” even its openness. Which is the “real.” In no way, this can be the signified. A discourse of signifiers of which the totality is open and receptive to all that is and yet confronted with what escapes that “all”: this is how mysticism can be described as well, Lacan states in Encore. The impossible happening in mysticism—more precisely in the satisfaction of the mystical desire, in his or her mystical jouissance—is what he conceptualizes as non-phallic (“non-male,” “not-all”) jouissance, as a jouissance that in no way exists—yet happens. Its being there, its surprising mystic desire, its appearance on Bernini’s statue of Teresa of Avila: all this cannot be said, although it is the only thing the mystic desires to get said in his discourse. It is what that discourse ultimately is about. Lacanianism “writes” it by means of its “mathemes” and its “logical formulas.” Mysticism covers it in its discourse that endlessly gets lost in the variety of its self-deconstructive gestures. It is mysticism’s way of showing that “a discourse that is mystical” is wrong, while a discourse that is not mystical is wrong as well, certainly when it is not aware that it risks to become a discourse, even “worse,” “still.”

Not a Matter of “Cum” This is, among others, Lacan’s way of dissociating himself from the widespread interpretation of mysticism as revolving around sexual orgasm. On the same page, a few lines farther than the passage already quoted, we read: What was attempted at the end of the last century, in Freud’s time, what all sorts of decent souls around Charcot and others were trying to do, was to reduce mysticism to questions of cum [affaires de foutre]. If you look closely, that’s not it at all. Doesn’t this jouissance one experiences and yet knows nothing about put us on the path of ex-sistence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance? (Lacan 1998, 77)

No doubt that, according to Lacan, the ecstatic experience of mystics is highly erotic and sexual, but the point he makes is that this does not mean that the mystic longs for a sexual experience in the common sense of the term. It is not a matter of “cum” (“une affaire de foutre”). It is not

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the “foutre” (cum, fuck) that shows us the truth of—and behind—mysticism. It is rather the other way round: the truth of “foutre” is revealed in the mystical experience. Mysticism shows what jouissance is about. Mysticism shows that we don’t know anything about what happens there. If jouissance shows us anything, it is that it shows nothing, that we see and know nothing while gazing at its appearance. If something appears at all, it is a kind of not-knowing as such—or, to quote the title of a fourteenthcentury mystic classic, a “cloud of unknowing” (Anonymous 2001). The mystic experience is one of “ex-sistence,” of ecstasy: it goes beyond all that is, it leaves the order of the “all” and in that sense, it shows the “not-all” (Lacan 1998, 102–119–121). But it shows that the “not-all” is not knowable and, consequently, not even showable, except logically. When we look at Bernini’s Santa Teresa, according to Lacan, it is clear that we see her coming. But the coming we see is something of which we know absolutely nothing. Of course, we know what we see: she’s coming; and, good Lacanians as we are, we know that we don’t know what we see—which, don’t forget, is knowledge anyway. This is what Lacan calls “phallic jouissance”: a cloud of unknowing, in an opening way concluding, so to speak, the “all” of our knowing—a “conclusion” fully aware of its finitude, of the fact that the “all” that is desired is as such out of reach of that very desire and that this is, indeed, all there is. But to that knowledge—that is really all it can be, including the awareness of its finitude—there is an outside, an outside that, with respect to “all” that is, has no place, not even the one of a non-place. It can only be indicated in “writing,” in “écriture,” with a “mathematical” letter. If it were possible to express it in the shape of discourse (which is absolutely not possible, not even in a discourse that concerns the “impossible,” this “not all” would be what is experienced in the mystical experience—in the sexual mystical experience, in the “sexual relation” which in principle “does not take place” and cannot take place.8 This is the experience of God. This is what happens as the mystic sees the face of God: she enjoys in a non-phallic way, she falls out of “all” that is. In the passage quoted, I left one sentence non-cited. After Lacan has positioned his own Écrits among the mystical writings “in footnote,” he adds:

8 Or, as Lacan puts it, “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship”; (Lacan 1998, 34–35, 57–63).

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[‘Add to that list Jacques Lacan’s Écrits’ because it’s of the same order.] Thanks to which, naturally, you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God. I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is extra (en plus), as long as you put a screen in front of this ‘extra’ until I have been able to properly explain it. (Jacques Lacan 1998, 76–77)

The mystic loves a Beloved that simply does not exist. God is dead. Lacan has no doubts about that. That is, however, what makes the mystic’s love so interesting. For what no doubt does exist is the mystic’s love, his desire. And that desire desires to “ex-sist” to leave the “all” of desire and to reach what is beyond that “all.” But to us, libidinal humans, that kind of “all” is indeed “all” there is; there is nothing not touched by desire, not touched by (phallic) lack, not shaped in the shape of a signifier. To us, there is nothing that is not desired. Which is to say that the ultimate object of our desire is not touched by desire and, consequently, does not exist—except as object of desire, as the imaginary object holding together the phantasm that ultimately sustains the desire we are. And our desire can have the experience of reaching and getting that object, yet not without the subject of that (inherently fleeting) experience fading away. That experience shows itself only when it simultaneously reveals its absolute impossibility. For instance, when a woman like Teresa of Avila, making love to the non-existing God, comes, enjoys, then we don’t know what we see. This way, our not-knowing is revealed—if we at least look with a Lacanian eye. To stress that dimension of not-knowing, Lacan takes that jouissance out of the category even of jouissance—of phallic jouissance, which is the “all” of jouissance (“there is no jouissance which is not phallic”; Lacan 1998, 73ff.). That kind of jouissance is what, in a universe where all is “phallic,” including jouissance, in no way belongs to that universe, to the “all” that nonetheless is indeed all there is. Here we meet the “truth” of coming, the truth of desire and jouissance: a “cloud of unknowing”: a “cloud” that is no cloud and an “unknowing” that evaporates the moment you suppose you have said something by uttering that word. How to talk about that, how to have a discourse on that “which is not a semblance.” The moment you think you have that discourse, you are in a cloud which is even worse than what you tried to avoid with that discourse. And the same accounts for that discourse, “still,” “encore.”

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References Anonymous. 2001. The Cloud of Unknowing, and Other Works, ed. A. C. Spearing. London: Penguin. De Kesel, Marc. 2009. Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII . Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ———. 2023. Effacing of the Self: Mysticism and the Modern Subject. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1998. On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 1972–1973, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. Bruce Fink. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company. ———. 2006. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russel Grigg. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company. ———. 2015. Transference. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII , ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2017. Formations of the Unconscious. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book V, 1957–1958, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. Russel Grigg. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2019. Desire and Its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VI, 1958–1959, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity.

Index

A Abiquiu (NM), 133, 137, 146–148 Abject, the, 316, 322 Abnegation of the self, 316 Absence, 216, 226, 260, 268, 270 Abstract expressionism, 59 Abstraction, 56, 136, 140, 141, 143, 148, 271, 316 Action painter, 60 Adams, J.Donald, 76 Adato, Perry Miller, 143 Adorno, Theodor W., 6, 37 Advanced age, 4, 5, 114, 244, 328 Aesthetics, 37, 74, 303 À Galla Placidia (Ravenna, Italy), 317, 320 Age, 5, 6, 11, 13, 63, 84 Agency, 20, 31, 126, 193, 219 Agent, 326, 341 Aging, 4, 11, 12, 155, 161, 163, 221, 242, 247, 253, 271, 285, 287, 308, 334 Airaudi, Oberto, 192, 206

Albers, Josef, 139 Aldridge, John W., 87, 88 Aliyah Bet , 26 Allegorical, 251, 257, 269 All-over painting, 317 All-Star-Blues Band, 187 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence A Spring Festival (1879), 238 Autumn (ca. 1874), 241 On the Road to the Temple of Ceres (1879), 238 Spring (1894), 242 Summer Offering (1911), 243 The Pomona Festival (1879), 242 The Voice of Spring (1910), 11, 235, 236, 238, 241–246, 248 “The Year’s at the Spring, All’s Right with the World” (1902), 238, 240 Unconscious Rivals (1893), 241 A’l’t Ben Haddou, 61 Altersstil , 221 Amateur film, 32

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Gieskes and M. Roza (eds.), Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39598-7

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INDEX

Ambition, 295 American Art Research Council, 140 American identity, 137 American literature, 3, 71, 79, 80, 86, 186 American modernism, 147 American Southwest, 137 Amigoni, David, 7 An American Place (New York), 137 Anamorphosis, 322 Anarchism, 118 Anarchist, 118, 120–123 Anarcho-communism, 118, 127 Ancienne Belgique (AB), 160, 161 Anderson Galleries (New York), 134 Andrásovits, Nándor, 8, 19–22, 26, 29, 31 Angrand, Charles, 118 Animal, 31, 60, 137, 260, 316 Anonymity, 254 Anticipation, 164, 225 Anti-monarchist, 122 Antwerp (Belgium), 236 Appreciation, 88, 139, 144, 244 Approaching end, 3 Appropriation, 10, 101, 176, 178, 185 Architecture, 56, 57 Archive, 20, 326 Argenteuil (France), 217 Aristotle, 344 Arnhem Land (Australia), 57, 58 Ars longa, vita brevis, 206, 271 Art critic, 118, 138, 146, 246, 301 Art Gallery of New South Wales, 63 Art Informel , 56 Art Institute (Chicago, IL), 138, 142 Artistic creation, 38, 236, 247, 249 Artistic trajectory, 303 Art market, 125, 126, 139

Art world, 13, 206, 236, 293, 294, 297, 300–302, 309, 310, 315, 319 Assmann, Aleida, 8, 38, 52, 54, 55 Atlas Mountains, 61 Auction, 125, 139 Audience, 3, 20, 82, 96, 104, 105, 152, 153, 155–157, 161, 163–167, 176, 178, 238, 244 Augustine, 344 Aura, 95, 153, 219 Auschwitz, 27 Australia, 8, 52, 59, 60, 63–67 Authentic, 153, 157, 176 Author, 2–5, 7, 8, 36, 37, 39, 43, 71, 86, 93, 95, 98, 103, 105, 121, 176, 294, 345 Authorial intent, 100 Authorial mark, 326 Authority, 3, 4, 87, 88, 96, 102, 144, 154, 182, 219, 321 Authorship, 3, 100 Autobiographical memory, 8, 52, 54, 55, 67 Autobiography, 73, 143 Automatic art, 193, 197, 198, 200 Automatism, 11, 202 Autonomy Cooperation, 119 AutorenEdition, 39, 40 Autumn, 126, 249 Avant-garde, 118 Avignon (France), 303 Avila, Teresa de, 344, 348, 350

B Backward/forward look, 2 Baldassari, Anne, 317, 319, 322, 324 Barman, Tom, 156, 158–161, 163, 165 Barrow, Rosemary, 235, 238, 241 Barthes, Roland

INDEX

“The Death of the Author” (1967), 3 Bataille, Georges, 322, 330 Baudelaire, Charles, 223 Beatles, The, 174 Becker, Edwin, 242 Becoming (Deleuze, Gilles), 330 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 5–7 Beholder, 224 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (New Haven, CT), 138 Belated, 247 Berecz, Agnes, 317, 320–322, 324, 327 Bernini, 348, 349 Bernstein, Roberta, 251, 253, 254, 257–266, 268–270 Berry, Chuck, 174, 176–178, 180, 181 Bessarabia, 21 Best, Marshall, 80, 89 Bildungsroman, 145 Biography, 175, 323 Birth, 5, 42, 98, 176, 230, 235, 260, 265, 269, 328, 329 Birthday, 115, 253, 261, 266 Bishop, Elizabeth, 278, 280 Bitter, 21, 22, 47, 246, 290 Bitterness, 85, 302 Black Lives Matter, 48 Blackmur, R.P., 76 Blind, 228, 326 Blotkamp, Carel, 7 The End: Artists’ Late and Last Works , 7 Blue Mountains National Park, 63 Blues, 10, 171–188 Body, 13, 99, 178, 184, 196, 241, 254, 258, 262, 263, 268, 270, 278, 279, 285, 286, 288, 289, 324, 328, 330

355

Bone, 98, 143, 288, 322 Borges, Jorge Luis, 36 Boudin, Eugène, 223 Bourgeois, 73 Bourgeoisie, 118 Brabant (Netherlands), 56, 57, 61, 68 Brakhage, Stan, 7 Braque, Georges, 197 Break, 9, 78, 126, 174, 192, 216, 269 Breton, André, 193 British art, 53 British Invasion, 174, 177 British literature, 3 Brooks, Van Wyck, 88 Broonzy, Big Bill, 176, 177, 184 Browning, Robert, 238 Brown, James, 178 Brown, Walter, 180 Brussels (Belgium), 160, 236 Bry, Doris, 139, 140 Building, 43, 56, 219, 305, 307 Burke, Kenneth, 86 Burnett Foundation, 136, 142, 147 Burri, Alberto, 56 Bury, 329, 333 Butor, Michel, 225 C Cabet, Étienne, 45 Cale, JJ, 157, 161 Campbell, Joseph, 86 Canonical text, 3 CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain Bordeaux (France), 319 Caput mortuum, 329, 330 Career, 3, 7, 8, 13, 39, 52, 53, 72, 80, 94, 112, 124, 125, 141, 152–155, 157–159, 167, 168, 173, 174, 187, 235–237, 242, 247, 277, 279, 280, 284, 285, 290, 293, 297, 307, 308, 331

356

INDEX

Caribbean, 254, 264 Carpenter, Edward, 134 Castleman, Riva, 270 Catalogue raisonné, 139, 144–148 Cataract, 228 Catholic tradition, 317 Celebration, 162, 167, 187, 188, 235, 238, 242 Centre Pompidou (Paris), 322, 323 Cézanne, Paul, 200, 245, 262 Chagall, Marc, 302 Chain of signifiers, 340 Chama River Valley, 137, 148 Chamberlain, John, 75 Chance, 155, 163, 308, 315, 317, 327 Change, 9, 11, 35, 74, 75, 80, 82, 96, 99, 103, 105–107, 112, 218, 219, 223, 224, 230, 232, 253, 257, 264, 265, 283, 342 Chaos, 332 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 348 Charles, Ray, 186 Charteris, Evan, 215 Chave, Anna, 134, 144 Checkerboard Lounge, 179, 181 Chess Studio, 172, 174, 175, 178–181 Chicago, Judy, 144 The Dinner Party (1979), 144 Child, 41, 44, 176, 179, 258 Childhood, 41, 42, 171, 257, 258, 268, 270, 280, 281, 290, 295, 298, 303, 305 Christ, 267, 324 Christian tradition, 343 Church Father, 344 Cinema, 308 City, 56, 67, 202, 302 Cityscape, 113, 121, 137 Cixous, Hélène, 323, 332 Clark, Kenneth, 6, 12, 221

“The Artist Grows Old” (2006), 6, 12, 14 Classical age, 238 Classical antiquity, 236, 237, 241 Claudius (emperor), 237 Clock, 257, 258, 263, 269, 316, 324 Closure, 6, 13, 14, 335 CoBrA, 63 cognition, 7 Cohen-Shalev, Amir, 6 Collaboration, 126, 231, 320, 321, 331, 332 Collage, 57, 58, 61, 261, 321, 327, 328 Collective experience, 55 Collective memory, 3, 8, 24, 36 Collector, 126 Colonialism, 23 Color field painting, 60 Commemoration, 2 Commercial, 80, 81, 99, 124, 157, 158, 160, 161, 167, 187, 238, 245, 248, 319 Commune (France), 118 Communion, 187, 217, 316, 327, 334 Communism, 72, 77, 84 Communist Party (USA), 72 Community, 93, 96, 98, 101, 103, 187, 334 Conclusion, 6, 12, 14, 47, 81, 349 Confession, 10, 172, 173, 175–177, 182, 183, 185–187 Connection, 4, 11, 25, 46, 95, 105, 118, 134, 164–166, 241, 242, 331, 333 Conservatism, 117, 244 Conservative, 80, 122, 244 Constant, 28, 30, 105, 106, 216, 218, 265, 308 Contemplation, 12, 20, 251 Contemplative, 239

INDEX

Continuation, 9, 96, 144, 295, 325 Continuity, 26, 47, 216, 242, 265, 291 Contradiction, 159, 294, 297, 309 Contrast, 74, 96, 104, 121, 143, 165, 166, 172, 227, 228, 230, 231, 269 Control, 10, 13, 27, 95, 146, 148, 176, 244, 286, 287, 308, 315, 324, 327, 330 Convention, 5, 21, 183 Cooperation, 79, 118, 121 Copy, 81, 226, 308, 309, 334 Corn, Wanda M., 145 Corot, Jean-Baptiste, 117 Correspondence, 125, 138, 144, 146, 148 Cosmos, 269 Côte d’Azur, 216 Courbet, Gustave, 117, 264 Cowley, Malcolm, 9, 71 Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1951), 9, 71, 78, 87 Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934), 9, 72, 73 Cox, Ica, 182 Cox, Peter, 58 Crane, Hart, 72, 82, 258 Creative output, 133, 287 Creative process, 58, 59, 103, 105, 279 Creativity, 4, 7, 12, 134, 153, 159 Creator, 105, 317 Crisis, 46, 72, 101, 114, 286 Critic, 6, 9, 71, 72, 76, 80, 82, 87, 94, 104, 134, 151–154, 161, 179, 244–246, 284 Critical acclaim, 20 Critical construct, 5 Criticism, 39, 76, 78, 80, 138, 245 Crosby, Harry, 83 Cross, Henri-Edmond, 118

357

Crow’s Nest, 64, 65 Crow, Jim, 178 Culmination, 5, 181 Cum (Lacan, Jacques), 348 Cure, The, 85, 151 Cycle of life and death, 242, 251, 265 Cyclical, 12, 249, 257, 268

D Dada, 74 Danish, 118 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 260, 268 Mona Lisa, 206 Davis, Ben, 263, 271 Dawn, 216, 230 Dealer, 9, 81, 112, 119, 124–126, 198 Death, 5, 12, 39, 113, 114, 119, 127, 147, 192, 207, 230, 236, 242, 243, 245, 246, 249, 253, 258, 260, 263, 269–271, 278, 285, 289, 293, 309, 316, 327–329 De Canfield, Benoît de, 344 Decay, 326, 330 Decline, 5, 153, 177, 269 Decomposition, 327, 330 Dedifferentiation, 330 Deduplication, 309 De Fénelon, François, 344 Defesche, Pieter, 59 Deficiency, 237 Definitive, 82, 96, 102, 104, 133, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149 Defying closure, 335 Degas, Edgar, 117, 200 Degradation, 316, 324, 326 Degrade, 302 Deindividuation, 330 De Kooning, Willem, 57, 58, 60, 63 Dela Cruz, Juan, 344 Deleuze, Gilles, 330, 331

358

INDEX

Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) (1988), 330, 331, 335 Dematerialize, 324 Demise, 12, 249, 278, 302 Democratic, 118 Demolish, 122 Demuth, Charles, 137, 147 Depersonalize, 317, 331 De Pont (Tilburg, the Netherlands), 63 Depression, The, 73 Derrida, Jacques Donner le Temps: 1. La Fausse Monnaie (1991), 332, 334 Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Galilée 2000), 332, 333 De Sales, François, 344 Descartes, René, 344 Desingularization, 331 Desire, 2, 9, 13, 59, 98, 107, 154, 282, 289, 308, 326, 327, 330, 340–345, 347–350 Deskilling, 325 Despair, 285 Destination, 22, 52, 53, 204 Destiny, 115, 334 Destroy, 22, 101, 106, 340 Destruction, 282, 321 Deterioration, 98, 326 dEUS The Ideal Crash (1999), 10, 151, 152, 156, 158–163, 165, 167, 168 Devaluation, 139 Devaney, Edith, 264 Development, 9, 10, 41, 45, 46, 94, 100, 101, 105, 139, 153, 172, 177, 247, 294, 309 DeVoto, Bernard, 77, 78 Dialectics of Desire (Lacan, Jacques), 342

Dialogue, 13, 55, 57, 186, 261, 280, 303, 325, 331 Diary, 40, 111, 198, 204 Dickinson, Emily, 1, 2, 282 Dickson, Harry, 295 Diddley, Bo, 174, 176 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 321, 322, 326, 332 L’Empreinte (Centre Pompidou, 1997), 322 Diffuse, 228 Digestion, 328 Digital, 43, 322, 324–326 Dircks, Rudolf, 245, 246 Disappear, 157, 228, 257, 262, 266, 333 Disembodiment, 73, 200 Disharmony, 4 Disintegration, 326 Disorder, 11, 197, 198, 202, 330 Disperse, 334 Dissatisfaction, 302 Diss Debar, Ann O’Delia, 194 Dissolution, 147, 221, 232, 266, 326, 331 Dissolve, 225, 266, 284, 334, 335 Dissonance, 6 Divine love, 343 Dixon, Willie, 177, 181 “I Can’t Quite You Baby”, 181 documenta (Kassel, Germany), 297 Documentary, 8, 19, 143, 165, 166, 205 Donation, 10, 147, 320 Dormandy, Thomas, 5 Dorris, Michael, 99, 103 Doubt, 36, 48, 78, 215, 243, 279, 290 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 140 Downtown Gallery, 139 Draaisma, Douwe, 8, 54, 67 Why Life Speeds Up (2004), 54

INDEX

Dreyfus affair, 217 Dronryp (Friesland, the Netherlands), 236 Dubuffet, Jean, 302 Duchamp, Marcel Large Glass (1915–1923), 261 L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), 260 Locking Spoon (1957), 261 Self-Portrait in Profile (1958), 261, 268 Dufy, Raoul, 302 Duguid, David, 194, 195 Duncan, David Douglas, 254 Picasso’s Picassos (1961), 254 Dupee, F.W., 88 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 9, 112, 124–127 Dürer, Albrecht, 198 Dusk, 216, 224, 230 Dynamic memory, 55, 58

E Eagles, The, 151 Earlier motives, 217 Earlier themes, 11, 12, 218, 279 Earlier work, 2–4, 7, 10–13, 52, 60, 62, 67, 125, 143, 216–218, 224, 232, 237, 248, 251, 253, 254, 267, 270, 279, 316, 319, 321, 327, 332, 335 Early career, 52, 134, 236 Economic concerns, 112 Ecstasy, 284, 349 Ecstatic, 13, 343–345, 348 Ed Sullivan Show, 174, 178 Education, 39, 74, 118 Edwardian England, 236 Eindhoven (The Netherlands), 56, 63 Elaboration, 216 Elderly, 5, 101, 224 Elegy, 236, 247 Elevated, 322, 330

359

El Greco, 197 Eliot, T.S., 74, 76 Ellis, Havelock, 134 Embodiment, 122, 309, 327 Emergence, 23, 71, 160, 216 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 37 Emptiness, 346, 347 England, 124, 245 English language, 106, 107, 278 Entertainment, 20, 319 Entrails, 316, 322 Entropy, 328, 330 Epistème, 340 Epps, Laura, 236 Erdrich, Louise Antelope Woman (2016), 94, 103, 104 Love Medicine (1984, 1993, 2007), 9, 94, 95, 97–100, 102–104, 106 The Antelope Wife (1998), 94, 103, 104, 106 Erich, Albert, 5 Spätwerke Grosser Meister (1925), 5 Erosion, 219 Erotic, 146, 327, 328, 348 Eroticism, 144 Erudition, 238, 244 Escape, 22, 36, 126, 282, 342, 346–348 Estate, 10, 139, 148, 149 Eternal life, 230 Ethics, 8, 28, 32, 74, 202 Eugenics, 38, 42, 45, 46 European influence, 137 Evening, 227, 230 Exchange, 26, 28, 281, 330, 332, 334 Existential, 230–232, 278, 309 Experiment, 117, 316, 319, 322, 327 Expression, 3, 25, 106, 152, 155, 182, 183, 185, 218, 231, 342

360

INDEX

Extraordinary, 113, 194, 330 Eye problem, 115, 119 Eyesight, 9, 133

F Failure, 23, 73, 244, 345 Fait accompli, 225 Fall, 254, 257, 258, 261–263 Family, 20, 21, 41, 56, 104, 106, 137, 243, 281, 295 Farewell, 230, 301 Farrell, James T., 76, 84 Fate, 298 Faulkner, William, 97 FBI, 79 Federal Republic of Germany, 48 Feldman, Frances, 117, 221 I Am Still Learning’: Late Works by Masters (1992), 5 Feminine jouissance (Lacan, Jacques), 13, 343 Femininity, 10, 144 Feminist art history, 144 Fénéon, Félix, 118, 119 Fiction, 2, 3, 48, 101, 205 Fictional experience, 58 Figurative painting, 57 Film, 2, 8, 19–21, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 308 Final look, 1 Final vision, 117 Financial considerations, 2 Financial support, 121, 125 Fin-de-siècle, 242 Fine Art Society, 243 Finite, 316, 326 Finitude, 347, 349 Fisk University (Nashville, TN), 138 Fitzgerald, F.Scott, 77, 79 Fleeting, 13, 54, 206, 344, 350 Fleetingness, 232

Flourishment, 5 Flow, 125, 340 Flux, 103, 106, 230, 232 Focal point, 22 Fold, 330, 331 Footage, 8, 19–22, 29, 32 Forerunner, 31, 143 Foreshadow, 32 Forgács, Peter The Danube Exodus (1998), 8, 19, 20, 22, 24–29, 32 The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River (2002), 19, 28 Private Hungary series , 26 Forgotten, 74, 160, 244, 308 Former motifs, 253 Formless (Bataille, Georges), 330 Foucault, Michel, 3 “What is an Author?” (1969), 3 Fragment, 6, 29, 30, 58, 59, 221, 222, 232, 260, 271, 315, 321, 322, 324 Francesca, Piero della, 321, 329 La Madonna del Parto (ca. 1459), 329 Francis, Sam, 231 Franco-Prussian war (1870), 118, 125 Free, 9, 38, 123, 126, 148, 319 French Republic, 118 Freud, Sigmund, 134, 348 Freundlich, L. and Shively, John A. “Creativity and the Exceptional Aging Artist” (2006), 4 Friend, 45, 63, 72, 78, 83, 120, 246, 254, 263 Fry, Roger, 245 Manet and the Post-Impressionists , 245 Fugitive, 121, 230 Fulfillment, 13, 222, 230

INDEX

Future, 2, 13, 47, 100, 147, 162, 247, 325, 335

G Galenson, David W., 247 Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (2007), 247 Galerie Tegenbosch, 51 Gallery, 65, 125, 244, 271, 301 Gannett, Lewis, 77, 87 Gauguin, Paul, 245, 246 Gehry, Frank, 7 Generalization, 6, 248 Generate, 36, 317, 320 Generation, 37, 39, 42, 44, 47, 71, 73, 75–77, 79, 80, 85, 87, 103, 143, 163, 244, 247, 291, 316, 321 Genis, Fred, 57, 60 Genius, 154, 158, 207 Genre, 10, 73, 119, 173, 198 Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 147, 148 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 136, 141, 147, 148 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, 147 German suffering, 8, 20, 28 Germinate, 329 Gerontology, 7 Gesell, Silvio, 38 Gestation, 104, 316, 323, 328 Gestural abstraction, 316 Getting older, 221 Ghost Ranch (NM), 137, 141, 148 Gibon, Sengai, 262 Gifford, Robert Swain, 201–204, 206 Giverny (France), 11, 82, 215, 217, 218, 222, 232 Glory, 242

361

God, 284, 343–345, 349, 350 Goethe, Johann Wolfang von, 5, 7, 12 Goldman, Judith, 254, 258 Gombrowicz, Witold, 302 Goodrich, Lloyd, 140 Gorky, Arshile, 58 Government, 32, 98, 102, 118, 123 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco José, 7, 198, 221 Grafton Galleries (London), 245 Grand Prix National des Arts Plastiques, 319 Graph theory (Lacan, Jacques), 340 Grave, Jean, 120, 121 Great Barrier Reef, 60 Great Britain, 124, 182 Greatness, 246, 247 Greece, 238 Greenberg, Clement, 138 “American-Type Painting” (1955), 231 Green Day, 151 Greenough, Sarah, 139, 145 Grow, 63, 96, 223, 225, 303, 307 Growth, 45, 225, 230 Grünewald Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16), 260 Grünhut, Aron, 21 Gulf of Mexico, 258 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 8, 55 Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004), 55 Guy, Buddy, 174, 177, 178, 180, 181, 186 Guyon, Madame, 344

H Halpert, Edith, 139 Hamilton, Juan, 138, 139, 146 Hamon, Augustin, 120

362

INDEX

Hand (of the artist), 241 Handwriting, 324 Hantaï, Simon Á Enguerrand Quarton (1968–73), 320 À Galla Placidia (1958–59), 320 Catamurons (1963–64), 317 … dell’Orto. Mariale M.D.2 (1962), 320 Del Parto (1975), 321, 329 Donation Simon Hantaï (1998), 320 Écriture Rose (1958–59), 317, 320, 332, 333 Études (1968–69), 318 La Connaissance des Textes: Lectures d’un Manuscrit Illisible (Galilée, 2001), 333 Laissées (1994–2004), 321–324, 326 La Saucice (1964–65), 328 Maman! Maman!, dits , 328 Mariales/Manteaux de la Vièrge (1960–62), 317 Meuns (1966–68), 318 Panses (1964–65), 317, 318, 325, 328, 329 Pliage comme method (folding as method), 317 Pliages à usage domestique (1990), 322 Pliages Interminables par Réductions Successives , 319 Sérigraphies (1981–96), 322 Suaire (2001), 323–326 Tabula Lila (1982), 324 Tabulas (1973–82), 318, 319, 321, 322, 326, 329 Travaux de Lecture (1999–2000), 332, 333 Happening, 45, 139, 348 Harbor City, 64

Harmony, 118, 119, 121 Hartley, Marsden, 137, 147 Hayes, Julie, 332, 334, 335 Health, 65 Heidegger, Martin, 334 Heinrich W. Risken Stiftung (Germany), 58, 61 Hemingway, Ernest, 77, 79 Heritage, 10, 93, 103, 152, 159, 162, 163, 167 Herrnstein Smith, Barbara, 5 Hesse, Eva, 7 High Atlas, 61 Hill, W.E. My Wife and My Mother-in-law (1915), 259 Hiss, Alger, 80 Hodgkin, Howard, 53–55 Hogarth, William, 205 Hokusai, Katsushika, 7 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 221 Hollein, Max, 4, 7 Holocaust, The, 22–25, 28, 37 Homage, 181, 260 Hooker, John Lee, 176, 177 Hôtel de Savoie (Rue des Augustins, Paris), 254 Houghton, Georgina, 196, 197 House, John, 121 Howlin’ Wolf, 181 “Commit a Crime”, 181 Hugo, Charles, 192 Hugo, Victor, 192 Human condition, 341 Human desire, 341 Human existence, 12, 231, 249 Human labor, 119 Human life, 42, 230, 231 Humble, 219, 316, 329, 331 Hungary, 21, 25 Husserl, Edmund, 231 Hutcheon, Linda, 5, 6, 37, 105

INDEX

Hutcheon, Michael, 5, 6, 37 Huyssen, Andreas, 22, 23 Hyslop, James Hervey, 202, 204

I Ideological construct, 6 Ideology, 41, 45, 74, 118 Ijmuiden (The Netherlands), 59–61 IJmuider Kring, 59, 60 Imminent death, 12, 258, 279 Impersonal, 254, 288, 323, 324 Impression, 51–53, 64, 67, 118, 160, 197, 217–219, 222–225, 227, 245 Impressionism, 9, 113, 117 Imprint, 38, 41, 225, 258, 262, 270, 324, 327 Improvement, 247 Improvisation, 216 Inception, 323, 328 Independence, 137 Independent, 118, 125, 148, 268 Index, 23, 156, 258, 262, 270, 271, 324 India, 53 Indigenous, 42, 57, 64, 94, 95, 101, 105, 107 Indigenous communities, 57, 67 Indigenous culture, 9, 101 Individual, 5, 36, 37, 41, 48, 53, 55, 117, 124, 179, 193, 317, 330, 334 Individualism, 72, 74, 317 Individuation, 316 Industrial, 119 Industrialization, 217 Infinite, 14, 316, 348 Innovation, 157–159, 167, 216, 246, 247 Innovator, 246, 247 Inscription, 266

363

Inspiration, 56, 61, 65, 118, 137, 145, 148, 171, 184, 196, 204, 206, 207, 242, 254, 257, 259, 262, 265, 282 Instability, 96, 227, 228, 264 Institutional cooptation, 320 Intensity, 117, 303 Intention, 2, 3, 81, 102, 119, 124, 134, 148, 340, 341 Interment, 330 International Association of Revolutionary Writers, 76 Interpretation, 3, 10, 37, 38, 105, 111, 134, 144, 148, 174, 181, 241, 259, 269–271, 320, 329, 348 Interview, 20, 29, 40, 45, 102, 137, 143, 156, 159, 300 Intimate Gallery (New York), 137 Introspective, 294, 309 Invention, 205 Inwardness, 242 Irhezm-n-Ougdal, 61 Ironic, 46, 143 Irreconcilability, 6, 37 Irreconcilable dissonance (Adorno, Theodor), 221 Isolation, 6, 40, 75, 85, 247, 289 J James, Henry, 5 Jane’s Addiction, 151 Janos, Leo, 143 Japanese, 222, 262 Jess, ellen, 60, 61 Jeunist , 246 Jewish community, 8, 20, 30 Jewish suffering, 23, 24 Johns, Jasper 5 Postcards (2011), 12, 251, 253, 265 Arrive/Depart (1963–1964), 253

364

INDEX

Arrive/Depart (1964), 261 Between the Clock and the Bed (1981), 263 Cicada (1979), 269 Cups 2 Picasso (1973), 261 Cups 4 Picasso (1972), 261 Device Circle (1959), 258 Diver (1962–63), 258 Perilous Night (1982), 270 Periscope (Hart Crane) (1962), 258 Racing Thoughts (1983), 260, 270 Spring (1986), 254–256 Summer (1985), 254 The Seasons (1985–1986), 12, 251 The Seasons (1990), 265 Two Flags (1962), 260 Untitled (1983), 260 Untitled (2018), 272 Untitled (Skull) (1973), 270 Ventriloquist (1983), 259, 260, 262 Winter (1986), 254 Johnson, Robert, 176, 185, 187 “Sweet Home Chicago”, 187 Jokinen, H.M., 43 Joselit, David, 265, 266, 268 Jouissance, 345, 347–350 Journey, 8, 19–22, 26–29, 52, 63, 72, 248, 289, 326 Joyce, James, 74 Juvenile, 124, 268

K Kandinsky, Wassily, 137 The Art of Spiritual Harmony (1914), 137 Karasek, Nina, 198 Kelly, Ellsworth, 139 Kenthurst (Sydney), 60 Keynes, John Maynard, 38 Khnopff, Fernand, 242 King Kong , 186

Klimt, Gustav, 199, 242 Kline, Franz, 58, 60 Knobeloch, Heinz, 325, 326, 330, 332 Kolenberg, Hendrik, 63 Kotz, Mary Lynn, 138, 146, 147, 149 Kropotkin, Pierre, 118, 120 Kuh, Katherine, 143 Kuijpers, Theo Australia (1983), 59 Down Under (1980), 57, 64 Illusion Marocaine (1994), 61 Morning Light (2011), 64, 66 Outback (2010), 64 The Night Turns Love Red (1985), 59 White House in Blue (1998), 62 Kunsthaus Zürich, 231

L Lacan, Jacques Écrits , 346, 349, 350 Seminar IX: L’identification, 1961–1962, 341 Lack, 6, 119, 226, 291, 347, 350 Ladder, 258, 259, 261, 269, 270 Lake George, 137, 143 Landscape painting, 124 Last Will, 147 Lateness, 6, 37, 154, 159, 167 Late painting, 11, 115, 216, 217, 221, 225, 231 Late period, 114 Late repertoire, 115 Late style, 5, 6, 9, 13, 37, 40, 112, 117, 152, 153, 173, 279 Late-Victorian England, 237 Laurens, Jean-Paul, 244 Lawrence, D.H., 302 Leader, Benjamin Williams, 244 League of American Writers, 78

INDEX

Lebenswelt (Lifeworld) (Husserl, Edmund), 231 Leering, Jean, 56 Leeuwarden (Friesland, the Netherlands), 236 Le Gac, Jean Collectif Le Gac - Jean Pleinemer, 308, 309 Comment ça va la mort de l’art? (Lyon, 1999), 301 Et le peintre - Tout l’Œuvre roman 1968–2003 (2004), 305, 306, 308 JEAN LE GAC & Robert Bonaccorsi, Villa Tamaris Pacha (2006), 305, 308 La Demoiselle d’Avignon et Jean Le Gac (Sête, 2008), 303, 311 La Monografie (2015), 308 L’Atelier parallèle (Geneva, 2015), 307, 308 Le Bâtard d’Avignon (2008), 304 Le Délassement d’un Peintre Parisien (1982–85), 298, 299 Le Délassement du Peintre (1981–88), 298 Le peintre, 293–298, 300, 301, 303, 305, 307–309 Le Peintre à cheval (1999), 300, 310 Le Peintre exposition rétrospective 1968–2002 (Vence, 2002), 302 Le Peintre X Y Z (Vence, 2002–2003), 302 Les Adieux (2000), 301, 311 Musée Jean Le Gac (2004), 305, 307 Story Art (1981–1992), 298, 300, 301 Legacy, 2, 10, 38, 138, 143, 162, 167, 247, 316 Legacy control, 133

365

Lely, Peter, 196, 197 Lesage, Augustin, 200, 206 Les Temps Nouveaux, 120 Letter, 80, 114, 117, 126, 127, 290, 333, 349 Lewinson, Jeremy, 114, 222 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 77 l’Humanité Nouvelle, 120 Liberation, 40, 42, 127, 191 Libidinal being, 340 Library of Congress, 138 Lievens, Jan, 195 Life expectancy, 303 Life magazine, 137 Life phase, 6 Lindauer, Martin Aging, Creativity, and Art: A Positive Perspective on Late-Life Development (2003), 7 Linkin Park, 151 literary criticism, 2 Literature, 7, 36, 37, 47, 77, 89, 96, 105, 107, 295, 321 Lithograph, 57, 60, 261 Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, 134 Liturgy, 317 Living together (Husserl, Edmund), 231 Lofty, 301 Logos , 340 London, 47, 124 Look back, 26, 35, 127, 155, 164 Lost, 36, 43, 77, 162, 163, 166, 198, 241, 246–248, 348 Lost generation, 9, 71, 72, 77, 82, 83, 88, 89 Louveciennes, 118 Louvre, 115 Love, 12, 54, 81, 106, 160, 163, 165, 187, 238, 241, 243, 262, 316, 343, 345, 350

366

INDEX

Lowell, Robert, 278–280, 290 Luce, Maximilien, 111, 118 Lynes, Barbara Buhler, 134, 136, 137, 139, 146, 147

M Madonna dell’Orto (Venice), 320 Magic, 164, 205, 224 Magnetic Island (Queensland), 60, 63–65 Mahler, Gustav, 7, 172, 221 Male artist, 138, 145 Male perspective, 144 Manet, Edouard, 245 Manic Street Preachers, 151 Manipulation, 96, 324 Mann, Thomas, 7 Margins, 332 Marin, John, 137, 147 Marion, Anne and John, 147 Market, 119, 160, 237 Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando, 30, 31 Marxian, 6, 38, 73, 86 Mass production, 137 Master, 5, 28, 175, 178, 187, 194, 198 Mastery, 332 Material, 20–22, 55–58, 99, 106, 178, 194, 296, 297, 305, 316, 325, 329, 331 Materiality, 55, 59, 279, 317, 330 Materialized memory, 8, 52 Material properties, 54 Matheme (Lacan, Jacques), 347, 348 Mathieu, Georges, 332 Matisse, Henri, 245, 246, 302, 321, 324 Chapelle du Rosaire, 302 Matthew Marks gallery (New York), 271 Maturity, 154, 158, 258, 298

McMullan, Gordon, 4, 5 Late Style and its Discontents. Essays in Art, Literature, and Music (2016), 4 McShann, Jay, 174, 180 “Confessin’ the Blues”, 174–176, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187 Meaning effects (Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich), 55 Media art, 21 Meditation, 12, 248, 294 Medium, 60, 192, 193, 195, 196, 202, 204, 218, 268, 271, 324, 326 Meissonier, Ernest, 122 Ruins of the Tuileries Palace (1877), 122 Meknes, 56 Melancholic, 2, 6, 12, 248 Melancholy, 114 Melville, Herman, 86, 259, 282 Moby Dick (1851), 259, 282 Memento mori, 148, 270 Memorial, 243 Memory, 2, 22, 27, 28, 38, 41, 43, 48, 52, 53, 160, 167, 172, 185, 225, 243, 258, 287 Memory artist, 8, 52 Memory studies scholar, 55 Mental health, 197 Merrill, James, 12, 278, 279, 285–287 “Christmas Tree”, 286, 287 Metaphor, 23, 67, 104, 105, 186, 247, 258, 264, 278 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), 113, 114, 116, 138, 241 Meun (France), 318, 320, 326 Miłosz, Czesław, 36 Michaud, Yves, 318 Michaux, Henri, 328 Michelangelo, 7, 260, 270

INDEX

Middle-life, 248 Millet, Catherine, 301 Mimesis , 340 Minimalism, 139 Minstrelsy, 183, 187 Miraculous, 101, 219, 223, 289, 324 Mistake, 2, 166, 295 Modern art, 134, 236, 247 Modernism, 71, 73, 186, 187, 247 Modernity, 121, 143, 206 Modernization, 217 Modern life, 119 Molin, Lei, 59 Moment, 2 Monarchy, 122 Mondrian, Piet, 7 Monet, Claude Cathédrale de Rouen, Façade Ouest, au Soleil (1894), 220 Le Matin (1914–26), 227 Les Deux Saules (1914–26), 224 Les Nuages (1914–26), 216, 218, 224, 227 Nymphéas (1917–19), 217, 226 Reflets d’Arbres (1914–26), 228, 229 Money, 78, 124, 125, 160, 161 Monograph, 134, 143, 145, 245, 246 Monopoly, 125 Mood, 80, 114, 183, 235, 238, 239, 242 Morbid, 270, 328 Morning, 115, 219, 230 Moroccan landscape, 55 Morocco, 8, 52, 56, 57, 61, 62, 67 Mortality, 12, 42, 148, 253, 260, 263, 270, 271 Motherwell, Robert, 58, 60 Motif, 2, 12, 30, 137, 141, 219, 225, 227, 253, 257–266, 268–271, 291 Mount Isa (Australi), 63

367

Mourn, 98 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 7, 221 Multidirectional memory, 8, 23–26, 32 Multilayered, 97 Mummy, 321, 327, 328 Munch, Edvard, 263 Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–1943), 263 Munsterberg, Hugo The Crown of Life: Artistic Creativity in Old Age (1983), 7 Musée de Carouge (Geneva), 307 Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 320 Musée de l’Orangerie (Paris), 218, 224, 227, 228 Musée Jean Le Gac (Paris), 13, 305 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 138, 228, 229, 254 Museum van Bommel van Dam (Venlo), 65 Music, 10, 151, 153–156, 158, 163, 166, 168, 173, 176, 184, 186, 231, 238 Musing, 127, 239, 242, 243 Mutual aid (Kropotkin, Pierre), 118 Mystic, 13, 343, 345, 348, 349 Mysticism, 13, 206, 343, 345, 348, 349 Mystic love, 350 Myth, 3, 5, 85–87, 164, 289 Mythmaking, 163, 165 N Namibia, 42 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 13, 315, 331–333 Être Singulier Pluriel (1996), 332, 334 Le Corps (1992), 332 Napoleon III, 122

368

INDEX

Narrative, 26, 30, 39, 54, 55, 73, 81, 82, 86, 96, 101, 105, 173, 242, 257 National Blues Museum (St. Louis), 187 National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), 138, 139, 145 National Socialism, 38, 41, 45 Native American literature, 94, 95, 97 Native American Oral Tradition, 9, 102 Native Australians, 57 Naturalism, 136 Nature, 11, 12, 40, 60, 61, 72, 84, 104, 106, 107, 117, 158, 205, 217, 220, 224, 232, 236, 242, 247, 264, 282, 295, 326, 334 Nazi–Soviet Pact, 84 Negativity, 221 Neo-impressionism, 9, 112, 117–119, 122, 124, 127 Neo-impressionist theories, 118 Nevelson, Louise, 7 New direction, 218 Newman, Barnett, 321 New Masses, The, 76, 88 New Mexico, 133, 137, 141, 145, 148 New Republic, The, 72, 79 New South Wales (Australia), 60 New turn, 317 New York, 20, 58, 59, 137, 177, 196, 202 Night, 79, 230 Nochlin, Linda, 122, 144 Nocturnal, 228 Noland, Kenneth, 139 Non-finito, 225 Non-phallic, 348, 349 Non-place, 349 Non-programmable, 325 Noon, 230

Nora, Pierre, 36 Normandy (France), 216, 222 North Sea coast, 59 Nostalgia, 10, 87, 163, 164, 271 Nothingness, 216 Novel, 8, 9, 38, 39, 42, 45, 47, 54, 93, 94, 97, 99–101, 103, 105, 194, 222, 294, 315, 327 Nuenen, 52 Nuridsany, Michel, 308, 312 Jean Le Gac in Memoriam (1999), 308, 312 Nüsslein, Heinrich, 198, 206 Nymphéa (waterlily) (Monet, Claude), 215, 218, 225, 227, 229 O Obama, Barack, 187, 188 Objective, 3, 117, 118, 230 Object of desire (Lacan, Jacques), 13 Oblivion, 79, 308 Obsession, 114, 202 Obsolete, 247 Œuvre, 305 Offspring, 151, 260 Ohnesorg, Benno, 39, 40 Ohr Pot, 261 Ojibwe, 106 O’Keeffe, Georgia Abiquiu Notebooks, 140 Above the Clouds (1962–3), 143 Abstraction (1916), 148 Abstraction White Rose (1927), 136 Black Iris (1927), 144 Evening Star (1917), 140 From the River–Pale (1959), 140, 141 Georgia O’Keeffe (Viking Press, 1976), 134, 143, 146 Jack-in-the-Pulpit (1930), 140, 143 Music, Pink, and Blue No. 1 (1918), 148

INDEX

Pelvis (1944), 142 Sky Above Clouds (1965), 142, 143 “Stieglitz: His Pictures Collected Him” (1949), 139 Old age, 6, 10–12, 112, 114, 133, 148, 218, 236, 242, 247, 248 Old-age style (Altersstil), 5 Old artists, 4, 5, 12 Old-fashioned, 180 Old-school, 118 Omen, 257 Open-air painting, 115 Optical illusion, 259 Oral literature, 96 Order of Merit, 237, 245 Origin, 98, 145, 340 Original, 9, 20, 26, 29, 54, 55, 82, 88, 89, 102, 106, 118, 159, 184, 260, 287, 308, 309, 322, 324 Original state, 324 Origin stories, 145 Orthodox, 21, 76 Ourzazate, 61 Outlive, 206, 245, 248 Outsider, 21, 193, 289, 297 Overview, 145, 186, 305, 316

P Painter, Karen, 4, 5, 152, 153 Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work (2006), 4 Painting, 9–12, 53, 54, 57, 62, 64, 112, 114–117, 119, 121, 122, 125, 126, 133, 134, 138–140, 143, 145, 147, 172, 194, 195, 198, 200, 202, 204, 215, 217–219, 221–229, 232, 236–238, 241–244, 246, 248, 251, 254, 257, 259–264, 266, 268–271, 295, 315, 316,

369

319–321, 324, 325, 327, 328, 333 Palazzo Altemps (Rome), 241 Palimpest, 67, 207 Paris (France), 124, 198, 301, 316, 339 Parker, Charlie, 180 Pasqua laws (France), 335 Passage of time, 165, 251, 253, 258, 266 Passing, 195, 219, 238 Passing of time, 219, 238, 242 Pata, Daniel, 64 Pater, Walter, 206 Patry, Sylvie, 216, 217 Pedernal Mountain (New Mexico), 140 Perception, 79, 122, 215, 225, 253, 259, 265, 268, 269 Perfection, 221, 248 Periphery, 301 Perish, 271 Perseverance, 96, 220 Persist, 291 Personality, 197, 254, 288 Personal life, 145, 316, 323 Personal museum, 133, 148 Personal reflection, 236 Pessimism, 221 Phallic, 328, 347, 350 Phallic jouissance (Lacan, Jacques), 349, 350 Phallic order, 347 Phallus, 148, 347 Phase, 22, 112, 157, 158, 166, 173, 218, 224, 287, 293, 294, 299, 303, 308 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 138, 254, 265 Philosopher, 13, 48, 315, 331, 332, 334

370

INDEX

Philosophy, 2, 76, 127, 316, 331, 340 Photochemical, 322, 325, 327 Photograph, 52, 134, 138, 144, 145, 147, 148, 182, 183, 228, 241, 269, 295, 298, 308, 322, 327, 333 Picasso, Pablo Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), 303 Minotaur Moving His House (1936), 254 Weeping Woman (1937), 270 Pictorial space, 226 Pissarro, Camille La Causette (1891–92), 112, 113 Le Jardin des Tuileries, Matinée de Printemps, Temps Gris (1899), 116 Le Jardin des Tuileries un Après-midi d’Hiver (1899), 114 Les Casseurs de Pierres (ca. 1882–83), 122 Les Ruines du palais des Tuileries (ca. 1882–83), 122 Pissarro, Georges, 119, 126, 127 Pissarro, Julie, 124 Pissarro, Lucien, 115, 117, 118, 120, 124–127 Pissarro, Rodolphe, 124, 126 Pissarro, Tommy, 124 Plagiarize, 60 Plate, Liedeke, 4 Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (2011), 4 Plath, Sylvia, 12, 278, 288 Plato, 284 Ploetz, Alfred, 38, 45 Ploetz, Dagmar, 38 Plural meaning, 3

Poetry, 2, 39, 254, 280–282, 285, 287–289 Point (Lacan, Jacques), 339, 340 Political, 3, 9, 23, 25, 28, 39, 45, 74, 76, 80, 81, 84, 88, 97, 100, 101, 103, 118, 119, 122, 197, 217, 282, 334 Pollitzer, Anita, 145 Pollock, Jackson, 231, 316, 324 Pop art, 139 Pop music, 152–154, 160, 162 Popular culture, 297 Posterity, 149, 228 Posthumous, 148, 192, 243, 246 Postmodernism, 105 Post-painterly abstraction, 139 Poststructuralist theory, 3 Pound, Ezra, 82 Praise, 246, 285, 287 Preceding work, 216 Precipitated art, 11 Precursor, 294 Predecessor, 231, 265, 303 Predestination stories, 145 Preparation, 3, 144, 243, 277 Pre-Raphaelitism, 117 Presence, 30, 52, 55, 178, 179 Presence effects (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht), 55 Present, 2, 6–8, 10, 12–14, 19, 22, 25, 28, 31, 36, 38, 45–48, 52, 55, 66, 67, 84, 85, 96, 100, 105, 139, 143, 144, 155, 156, 159, 165–168, 178, 216, 221, 223, 224, 231, 232, 243, 254, 258, 259, 269, 270, 283, 308, 309, 315, 347 Preserve, 100, 334 Pride, 84, 95, 309 Printmaking, 124 Private life, 143, 243 Prize, 79, 85, 94, 95

INDEX

Process, 2, 4, 7, 10–12, 35, 36, 40, 43, 52–54, 57–59, 63, 73, 75, 76, 80, 93, 99, 100, 103–107, 122, 139, 141, 156, 162, 168, 181, 207, 218, 221, 232, 253, 257, 290, 294, 295, 297, 300, 319, 321, 322, 324–326, 328, 330, 332, 334 Proficiency, 322 Profit, 125, 126, 167, 319 Progression, 75, 162, 167, 266 Progressist, 246 Promote, 39, 46, 148, 155, 247 Promoter, 133 Promotion, 134 Propaganda, 36, 118, 280 Prosthesis, 324 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 120 Proust, Marcel, 74 Proximity, 152, 164, 216, 232, 281, 334 P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), 58 Pseudo-modern art, 138 Psychological, 242, 254 Psychology, 7 Publication, 3, 5, 7, 10, 13, 40, 46, 66, 76, 93, 95, 98, 103, 120, 133, 134, 137, 138, 144, 146, 290, 303, 305, 308, 311 Public collection, 148 Public image, 10, 134 Public sphere, 316 Pueblo house, 137 Puzzle, 253, 259 Puzzling, 12, 257, 264, 268, 271

Q Quarton, Enguerrand, 320 Le Couronnement de la Vièrge (1454), 320

371

Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Vase, the, 259 Queensland (Australia), 60

R Rabbit-Duck illusion (1892), 259 Racism, 38, 44, 47 Radical change, 215 Radicalism, 39, 78, 80, 217 Rainy, ‘Ma’, 182 Rancid, 117 Raphael, 7, 196 Rauschenberg, Robert, 57 Ravenal, John B., 263 Ravenna (Italy), 320 Reactionary, 80, 246 Reactivate, 319, 331 Reactivation, 13, 322, 335 Realist, 112, 117, 118 Reality, 45, 54, 85, 101, 111, 118, 205, 219, 221–223, 227, 229–231, 295, 341 Reappear, 257, 294 Reappraisal, 48, 133 Rearrange, 261 Reawakening, 236 Rebellious, 117 Rebirth, 230, 242 Rebuild, 122 Reception, 9, 37, 71, 76, 78, 100, 244 Receptive, 287, 348 Reckless, 221 Recognition, 21, 24, 73, 76, 79, 200, 315 Recombination/recombining, 266, 271 Reconsider, 253 Recontextualize, 253, 271 Record, 32, 42, 45, 75, 96, 140, 152, 155, 157–159, 161, 163,

372

INDEX

172–174, 178, 180–183, 194, 202, 253, 257 Recreation, 122 Recur, 262 Recurrence, 268, 295 Recurring motif, 12, 253, 259, 262, 265 Recurring theme, 251 Recycle, 12, 122, 151 Recycling, 253, 294 Redding, Otis, 178 Redefinition, 253 Reduction, 237 Reexamination, 303 Reflection, 11, 14, 28, 31, 42, 44, 46, 47, 72, 106, 215, 223, 224, 227, 228, 232, 241, 249, 253, 270, 293–295, 298, 300, 303, 323, 343 Reframing, 13, 321, 324 Refusal, 101, 139, 287, 317, 322 Regeneration, 265 Regret, 297 Rejuvenate, 238 Rejuvenation, 247 Relief, 64, 87, 241, 246 Religious, 85, 175, 187, 219, 238, 330 Remembrance, 8, 24, 25, 36, 41, 43, 45, 47, 168, 236, 301 Remnant, 120, 247, 270, 334 Renewal, 106, 107, 242, 247, 265 Renewing, 309 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 125 Renovation, 137 Renunciation of mastery, 320 Repeat, 52, 77, 85, 96, 160, 248, 264, 270, 271, 279, 290, 318, 319, 342 Repertoire, 177, 182, 183, 303 Repetition, 27, 96, 98, 164, 237, 238, 248, 283

Repetitive, 200, 244, 279, 326 Replica, 54 Representation, 55, 57, 58, 96, 159, 166, 187, 219, 228, 231, 232, 237, 254, 257, 259, 260, 264, 271, 294 Reproduction, 30, 134, 146, 147, 183, 248, 260, 261, 305, 308, 311 Republican, 118, 122, 123 Reputation, 2, 38, 72, 79, 80, 124, 148, 158, 206 Resentment, 119, 301 Resistance, 6, 96, 182, 302 Restore, 3, 96, 122 Resume, 52 Resurrection, 98, 99, 269 Rethinking, 237, 321 Retire, 299 Retirement, 13, 300 Retreat, 158, 315, 319, 320, 331 Retroactive, 320 Retrospection, 2–4, 7, 9, 13, 37, 47, 127, 247, 309 Retrospective, 5, 7, 13, 138–140, 145, 156, 186, 218, 231, 244, 251, 294, 305, 320, 321 Retrospective exhibition, 61, 139, 243, 246, 251 Retrospective eye, 217 Return, 1–4, 9–12, 21, 37, 52, 57, 63, 82, 83, 85, 101, 112, 122, 126, 127, 158, 164, 181, 187, 205, 216, 235, 238, 249, 279, 280, 319, 321, 330, 331 Revenant artist, 6, 11, 192, 205, 206 Reverie, 241 Revision, 2–4, 7–9, 37, 47, 53, 71, 87, 88, 94, 96, 103, 207, 282 Revisionist critique, 4 Revisionist rewriting, 95

INDEX

Revisit, 2, 8, 11–13, 28, 31, 97, 172, 173, 205, 206, 217, 232, 253, 294, 316 Revisiting, 7, 8, 11, 12, 20, 52, 61, 72, 103, 107, 186, 206, 238, 248, 253 Revival, 2, 14, 79, 80, 155, 177, 184 Revolutionary, 72, 75, 76, 78, 82–85, 88, 216, 221, 244 Rework, 140, 253, 322 Rewriting, 3, 48, 94, 96, 100, 107 Rhythm, 230, 249, 285 Rich, Adrienne “At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand”, 285, 287 “Axel Avákar”, 280, 284, 290 “Call me Sebastian”, 282 Collected Poems (2016), 278, 290 “Dear Adrienne, I feel Signified by Pain”, 287, 288 “Diving into the Wreck”, 280, 283, 284, 290, 291 “Domain”, 280–283, 288, 289 “Emergency Clinic”, 285, 286 “Endpapers”, 12, 277–281, 290, 291 “From Sickbed Shores”, 285, 288, 289 “Powers of Recuperation”, 282 “Quarto”, 280, 282–284, 290, 291 “Scenes of Negotiation”, 282 “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”, 282, 283, 291 “Suspended Lines”, 280, 290 Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2010), 278–280, 290 “Twenty-One Love Poems”, 287 Richards, Keith, 172, 179, 185 Richter, Gerhard, 35, 47 Rieff, David

373

In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (2016), 8, 35 Risk, 5, 8, 20, 25, 80, 117, 162, 166, 334 Ritual, 2 River captain, 8, 19 Rock music, 2 Rol, Gustavo Adolfo, 197, 198 Rolling Stones, The A Bigger Bang (2005), 175 Blue and Lonesome (2016), 181, 186 Confessin’ the Blues (2018), 10, 175, 176, 180, 186, 188 Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out (1970), 177 GRRR! (2012), 186 The Rolling Stones/England’s Newest Hit Makers (1964), 179 Voodoo Lounge (1994), 181 Romantic, 77, 117 Romanticism, 5, 242, 247 Rome, 238, 241 Roots, 10, 171, 174 Rose, Barbara, 146, 253, 258–262, 269, 270 Rosenthal, Mark, 253, 254, 257–260, 263, 267, 271 Rothberg, Michael, 8, 23–28, 32 Rothko, Mark, 60, 231 Royal Academy of Arts (London), 251 Royal Institute of British Architects, 237 Royalty, 78, 89, 120 Rue de Rivoli (Paris), 111, 112, 115 Ruisdael, Jacob van, 194, 195 Rural, 115, 121

S Sacco and Vanzetti, 83

374

INDEX

Safekeeping, 133 Said, Edward, 37 On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006), 7 Sainte-Clotilde (Paris), 115 Saint Martin, 264, 265 Salvage the past, 2 Santa Fe (NM), 10, 133, 136, 147 Sant, James, 244 Schacter, Daniel L., 54 Searching for Memory. The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (1996), 54 Schlicht, Esther, and Hollein, Max Letzte Bilder von Manet bis Kippenberger (2013), 4 Schuster, Jean, 332 Season, 12, 116, 238, 242, 243, 251, 253, 264, 266, 269 Second World War, 40, 231 Seine (France), 122, 217 Self, 55, 206, 263, 287, 334, 335, 341, 344 Self-abnegation, 270 Self-effacing, 324, 331 Self-erasure, 325 Selfic Painting, 192 Self-portrait, 242, 260, 263, 270, 286 Self-presentation, 137 semblance, 340–343, 350 Semblant, 346 Semeraro, Antonio, 321 Senile sublime, 5 Sensory experience, 55 Sentiment, 243, 246 Serenity, 6 Serial, 124, 216, 305, 309 Series, 11, 12, 21, 30, 52, 53, 57, 60, 61, 64, 65, 96, 102, 115, 124, 140, 141, 143, 160, 216, 218, 219, 224, 232, 251, 253, 254,

265, 266, 269, 279, 298, 317, 318, 320, 328, 343 Settler colonialism, 9, 95, 96 Seurat, Georges, 118, 119, 122 Sexual identity, 144 Sexuality, 10, 134, 186, 263 Shakespeare, William, 5, 37 Shively, John A., 4 Shroud, 321, 324 Sick, 12, 74, 120, 279, 289 Siege of Paris, 118 Signac, Paul, 111, 112, 118, 120, 121 In Times of Harmony. The Age of Gold is not in the Past, it is in the Future (1896), 121 Signature, 12, 13, 67, 206, 277, 278, 281 Signified, 13, 287, 288, 340, 348 Signifier, 13, 340–342, 346, 347, 350 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 94, 95 Silver, Anneke, 60, 63 Simmel, Georg, 6 Singular plurality (Nancy, Jean-Luc), 334 Sistine Chapel (Rome), 260 Skeleton, 271 Skill, 45, 57, 225, 244, 247 Skull, 258, 270, 328, 330 Slim, Memphis “Blue and Lonesome”, 181 Smiles, Sam, 5, 117 Late Style and its Discontents. Essays in Art, Literature, and Music (2016), 4 Smith, Bernard, 76 Smith, Henry Nash, 86 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 105 Smith, Mamie, 182, 183 “Crazy Blues”, 182 Smithsonian Institution, 147 Social Darwinism, 38, 45 Soil, 326, 331, 334

INDEX

Solitary, 6, 241, 281, 284 Solitude, 236, 248, 320 Sontag, Susan, 8, 52, 53, 55, 57, 287 Sothern, Edward Askew, 195 Source, 118, 137, 148, 184, 192, 202, 253, 257, 259, 265, 294 Soutine, Chaïm, 302 Space, 29–31, 36, 123, 166, 174, 222, 227, 268, 277, 285, 307, 324 Spain, 78 Spätstil , 5, 117, 242 Spielmann, Marion, 244 Spiller, Robert, 79, 88 Spiritual, 5, 192, 194, 242, 316, 344, 345 Spivey, Queen Victoria, 182 Spring, 12, 47, 195, 235, 238, 239, 243, 247–249, 257, 259, 261, 271, 332 Springsteen, Bruce, 162 Stadler, Matthew, 54 Landscape: Memory (1990), 54 Stalinist, 76, 78 Steen, Jan, 194, 195 Stevens, Wallace, 12, 254, 258, 278 Poems “The Snowman”, 258 Stieglitz, Alfred Georgia O’Keeffe (1918), 135 Interpretation (1919), 148 Waste Basket Collection, 138 “Woman in Art” (1919), 134 Stillinger, Jack Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems , 3, 100 Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991), 3, 100 Still-life painting, 115 Stoichita, Victor I., 258, 262, 263, 268

375

Story, 11, 22, 39, 40, 54, 73, 75, 82, 98, 134, 144–146, 160, 172, 176, 177, 185, 191, 195, 205, 262, 295 Storytelling, 9, 94, 97, 102, 103, 105, 107, 163–165 Stranger, 288, 290, 297 Strategy, 125, 137, 167, 183, 303 Strauss, Richard, 7 Struggle, 28, 74–76, 202, 248 Stubborn, 345 Studio, 10, 52, 53, 59–61, 63, 65, 133, 147, 172, 174, 175, 191, 192, 217, 243, 254, 264, 265, 308, 317 Studio reconstruction, 147 Sturm und Drang , 60 Style, 4–7, 9, 11, 12, 39, 57, 60, 62, 67, 96, 101, 112, 116, 127, 154, 173, 174, 185, 198, 206, 221, 242, 278–280, 285, 286, 307 Subconscious, 134, 206, 295 Subiectum, 344, 345, 347 Subject, 4, 11, 13, 20, 42, 52, 80, 114, 120, 138, 140, 143, 205, 223, 225, 237, 238, 248, 263, 271, 330, 334, 341, 343–345, 347, 350 Subjective, 54, 55, 117, 317 Subject of desire (Lacan, Jacques), 341, 344–347 Sublime, 206, 230 Substratum, 327 Success, 9, 80, 94, 124, 155, 156, 161, 177, 185, 187, 204, 215, 217, 225, 237, 282 Successful, 22, 38, 94, 140, 148, 154, 166, 168, 172, 217, 237 Suicidal, 258 Summer, 1, 2, 21, 137, 204, 242, 245, 257, 259–263, 265, 270 Sunday Times , 244

376

INDEX

Surrealism, 193, 316, 327 Surrealist automatism, 317 Surrender control, 315 Surrogate, 262, 269 Survival, 13, 96, 155, 293 Swanson, Vern, 237, 238, 242, 243, 246 Sweeney, James Johnson, 138, 144, 145 Sydney (Australia), 60, 63–65 Symbol, 122, 231, 258, 268, 270 Symbolism, 74, 117, 242 Synthesis, 59 System, 97, 119, 123, 125, 182, 319, 346 Systematic, 326 Szemz˝ o, Tibor, 30 Szymborska, Wislawa, 36 T Tactics, 125 Talent, 112, 134, 179, 243 Tamdaght Castle, 61 Tapiès, Antoni, 56, 64 Television, 143 Temporality, 31 Temporary, 223 Testament, 147, 282, 288 Tharpe, Sister Rosetta, 182 The Athenaeum, 243, 245 The Atlantic Monthly, 99, 143 The Broad (Los Angeles, CA), 251 The Burlington Magazine, 245 The Hague (The Netherlands), 231 The Journal of the Royal Institute, 237 The Manchester Guardian, 244, 246 The Nation, 77, 138, 245 The Native American Renaissance, 95 The New York Times , 139, 145, 196 Theology, 316 Theory, 37, 100, 127, 196, 247, 341–344, 346

The Playgoer and Society Illustrated, 244 The Scotsman, 244 Thickness of feeling (Sontag, Susan), 53 Third Republic (France), 123 Thompson, Frederic L., 201, 203 Thornton, Big Mama, 182 Time, 2, 11, 27, 29, 39, 44, 48, 56, 60, 66, 75, 80, 88, 94, 117, 125–127, 140, 147, 159, 161, 162, 164, 167, 177, 178, 202, 223, 235–238, 245, 247, 258, 269, 281, 284, 297, 305, 309, 316, 322, 332, 348 Timeline, 98, 147 Timm, Karl-Heinz, 40 Timm, Uwe Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), 38, 40, 41 Der Fremde and der Freund (2005), 39 Der Verrückte in den Dünen: Über Utopie und Literatur (2020), 38, 41 Die Entdeckung der Currywurst (1993), 38 Heißer Sommer (1974), 39, 40, 42–44 Ikarien (2017), 8, 38, 42, 45 Morenga (1978), 38, 42, 43 Van Anfang und Ende Über die Lesbarkeit der Welt (2009), 39 Tintoretto, 320 Titian, 5, 7, 221 Tóibín, Colm, 53 Tomkins, Calvin, 146 Topological, 342, 347 Topos , 342 Torschlusspanik, 114 Touch, 13, 289, 331, 333, 335

INDEX

Townsville, 60, 63, 64 Trace, 41, 58, 59, 112, 173, 217, 225, 232, 254, 259, 302, 324, 330, 333 Tradition, 9, 36, 94, 96, 98, 100–102, 105, 107, 175, 178, 187, 197, 343 Traditional, 3, 57, 72, 98, 100, 101, 103, 177, 221, 222, 251, 330 Traditionalism, 244 Transformation, 11, 14, 24, 26, 155, 218, 225, 232, 257, 265, 324 Transformation of the past, 2 Transience, 242, 326 Transition, 168, 217, 218, 223, 225, 231, 258, 263, 264 Transitory, 54, 231 Translate, 226, 229, 261, 340 Trauma, 22, 23, 122 Traumatic memory, 8 Travel, 8, 52–54, 57, 62, 63, 140, 161 Traveling, 51, 204 Tribal gaming, 102 Trilling, Lionel, 86 Trip, 8, 31, 56, 59, 61, 64, 65, 174 Tripartition, 5 Triumph stories, 145 Trotskyite, 76, 78 Truth, 82, 103, 105, 107, 192, 283, 340–342, 349, 350 Tucker, Paul Hayes, 217 Tuileries Garden (Paris), 9, 112, 122, 123 Tuileries Palace (Paris), 122 Turner Prize, 53 Turning point, 9, 158 291 (art gallery New York), 134

U Unbury, 315

377

Unconscious, 342 Unearthing, 13 Unfinished, 204, 221, 227, 232, 279 Unfold, 19, 28 United States, 57, 64, 95, 173–175, 177, 178, 182, 185, 186 Unstable meaning, 3, 12 Updike, John, 5 Urbanization, 217 Usuyuki, 262 Utopia, 38, 45 V Vaginal, 328, 329 Valéry, Paul, 74 Value, 32, 36, 39, 41, 44, 97, 105, 118, 152–154, 156, 158, 162, 167, 219, 230 Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), 56 Van Gogh, Vincent, 245 Vanguard, 247 Vanitas , 242, 251 Van Rijn, Rembrandt, 7, 196, 200, 221 Varangeville (France), 222 Varga, János, 22, 29 Variation, 56, 96, 220, 237, 248, 271, 297, 322 Varnedoe, Kirk, 253, 254, 258, 259, 261, 263–265 Veil, 270, 324 Vence (France), 302 Venice Biennale, 297 Venice (Italy), 300 Venturi, Lionello, 113, 116 Verbiage (Lacan, Jacques), 346, 347 Vercauteren, Rick, 56, 58, 63 Vermeille, Patrice, 321, 324 Veronica (Saint), 270, 324 Vétheuil (France), 217 Victim, 24, 27, 28, 79, 200, 206, 263, 283

378

INDEX

Victorian art, 235 Victory, 122, 123 Viewer, 3, 8, 20, 26, 27, 31, 32, 55, 216, 219, 224–227, 229–232, 241, 242, 262, 295 Villa Gesell, 38 Virgil Georgics (ca. 29 BCE), 238 Virgin Mary, 317, 320, 328, 329 Virtuosity, 324 Vizenor, Gerald, 94–96 Vocation, 281, 298 Void, 227 Vulgar, 248 Vulva, 144, 320 W Wagner, Richard, 7, 45, 46 Walter, Little, 181 Walter, Marie-Thérèse, 260 Warhol, Andy, 260 Warnock, Molly, 316, 317, 324, 328, 330, 335 Water, 27, 47, 60, 176, 178 Watercolor, 61, 64, 65, 140, 269 Water, Ethel, 182, 183 Waterlily, 11, 215 Water, Muddy “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, 178, 179 “Hoochie Coochie Man”, 178 “Mannish Boy”, 176, 180 “Rollin’ Stone”, 171, 176 Watts, Charlie, 181 Weaken, 222 Weather, 112, 115, 126, 216, 219, 232, 257

Webster, Ben, 180 Weightlessness, 223, 232 Weijers, Wouter, 8, 55, 218, 224, 225, 227, 264 Westheider, Ortrud, 223, 225 Wheelwright, John Brooks, 78 White supremacy, 182 Whitney Museum of American Art, 140, 251 Widdowson, Peter, 3 “Writing Back: Contemporary Re-visionary Fiction” (2006), 4 Wilde, Oscar, 206 Winter, 80, 111, 115, 217, 235, 258, 261–263, 265, 271, 280 Wissmann, Hermann von, 43 Withdrawal, 217, 316, 319 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 225 Woman artist, 136, 138, 148 Womb, 134, 328 Woolworths, 64 Wordsworth, William, 268 Work in progress, 322, 326 World Heritage, 63 World War I, 73 World War II, 21, 22, 24, 28, 45 Writing, 9, 13, 23, 39, 76, 84, 93, 94, 97, 102, 104–107, 119, 134, 163, 183, 198, 245, 278–281, 283, 290, 331, 333 Y Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL), 138 Youth, 56, 98, 155, 161, 164, 177, 242, 247, 285