This week’s readings have revealed the complimentary relationship between visual arts and literature through the development of Modernism. Both aspects of art experienced similar challenges in trying to gain respect for their works. Just as modern literature moved through different movements, modern art simultaneously did so as well. Visual art also encountered issues in feminism, politics, and morality; at times, being accused of having agendas. Moving away from Impressionism and concern with naturalism, art became Post-Impressionistic and became more concerned with how we relate to objects, rather than simply color and light. Goldman cites Virginia Woolf’s response to Bergson’s criticism in “Romantic to Classic: Post-Impressionist Theories from 1910 to 1912” and Woolf’s concern with consciousness in art. Woolf focuses a great deal on being versus non-being and where, when, how, and why we float between these liminal spaces. This passage reminded me of another quotation by Woolf:
Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand – ‘non-being’. Every day contains more non-being than being. Yesterday for example, Tuesday the 18th of April, was [as] it happened a good day; above the average in ‘being’. It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages…These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This was always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously… When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger…The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being (“A Sketch of the Past” 70).
Woolf wants experience. For her, art should be a moment of being, whether in visual art or literature, as perhaps Woolf may argue here that her “nondescript wool” is a work of art in itself.
Along with this push for expression and design, form begins to supersede color in visual art. The emotional elements of design that Fry develops (rhythm of line, mass, space, light, shade and color) brought to mind Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Eliot uses all of these elements within the poem to make it a great piece of literature, so it is possible that Fry may have inadvertently set standards for poetry as well.
Similarities also spawned in the arguments between romanticism and classicism within the visual arts, just as it had within literature. Arguments within Goldman’s essays returned me to Eliot, yet again, but this time with “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in mind. Meier-Grafe said, “the light they gave us was not extinguished until it had revealed the way of the future” (127). I thought this was the perfect quotation to relate to Eliot’s concept of tradition – applied to all artistic works. No work is completely the artist’s. It is built on the canon of artistry and I believe that through this week’s readings, it can safely be said that this is true across mediums as well. Visual art can influence written art and vice versa. Goldman’s essays did, however, bring up the issue of elitism within visual art, as Eliot suggested in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (43).
Lastly, Goldman’s account of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf’s relationship is extremely interesting. I had not realized how important visual art was to Woolf and the significant reflection of it within her works. She attended art exhibitions to help herself with her own artistry. The artistic works of
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