Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Despite wide interest in Woolf’s writings, and in the artists and art critics in her Bloomsbury circle, there is no accessible edition or selection of essays dedicated to her writings on art. This volume collects her longest essay on painting, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), alongside shorter essays and reviews, including “Pictures and Portraits” (1920) and “Pictures” (1925).
These formally inventive texts reveal the centrality of the visual arts to Woolf’s writing and vision. They show her engaging with contemporary debates about modern art and are innovative in their treatment of ideas about color and form, including in response to the work of her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, who designed many of her book covers and jackets. In these essays and reviews, Woolf illuminates the complex and interdependent relationship between the artist and society, and reveals her own shifting perspectives during decades of social and political change. She also provides sharp and astute commentary on specific works of art and on the relationship between art and writing.
An introduction by Claudia Tobin situates the essays within their cultural contexts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781644230589 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | David Zwirner Books |
| Publication date: | 11/30/2021 |
| Series: | ekphrasis |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.25(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Claudia Tobin is a writer, literary critic, curator, and art historian specializing in the relationship between modern and contemporary literature and the visual arts. She is the author of Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers (2020) and coeditor of Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices (2019). She worked on two major exhibitions exploring Virginia Woolf’s life and art, Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision (National Portrait Gallery, 2014) and Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings (Tate St. Ives, Pallant House Gallery, and Fitzwilliam Museum, 2018), and has curated numerous exhibitions on contemporary artists. Tobin was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Cambridge in 2017 and is a senior research associate at the Intellectual Forum, Jesus College, Cambridge. She is also a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.
Date of Birth:
January 25, 1882Date of Death:
March 28, 1941Place of Birth:
LondonPlace of Death:
Sussex, EnglandEducation:
Home schoolingRead an Excerpt
Colours went spirally through my body lighting a flare as if a rocket fell through the night and lit up greens and browns, grass and trees, and there in the grass a white bird. Colour warmed, thrilled, chafed, burnt, soothed, fed and finally exhausted me. For though the life of colour is a glorious life it is a short one.
The face of a civilized human being is a summing-up, an epitome of a million acts, thoughts, statements and concealments. Yes, Sickert is a great biographer, said one of them; when he paints a portrait I read a life. ... Words are an impure medium; better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint. But to me Sickert always seems more of a novelist than a biographer, said the other. He likes to set his characters in motion, to watch them in action. As I remember it, his show was full of pictures that might be stories, as indeed their names suggest.
His paint has a tangible quality; it is made not of air and star-dust but of oil and earth. We long to lay hands on his clouds and his pinnacles; to feel his columns round and his pillars hard beneath our touch. One can almost hear his gold and red dripping with a little splash into the waters of the canal. Moreover, human nature is never exiled from his canvas.
But since we love words let us dally for a little on the verge, said the other. Let us hold painting by the hand a moment longer, for though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much to tell each other; they have much in common.
Undoubtedly, they agreed, the arts are closely united. What poet sets pen to paper without first hearing a tune in his head? And the prose-writer, though he makes believe to walk soberly, in obedience to the voice of reason, excites us by perpetual changes of rhythm following the emotions with which he deals.