James Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), marked a significant break with traditional modes of narration, representing a transitional point in the conception of the novel. An examination of A Portrait in the context of contemporary movements in the visual arts, specifically Cubism, sheds light on its narrative innovations and offers an insight into its ground-breaking literary techniques, in particular its focus on the individual, portraiture, fragmentation, emotional detachment, and the incorporation of a temporal dimension. Engaging with literary scholars, art historians, and theoreticians such as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Carola Giedion-Welcker, this article undertakes a close reading of the text, alongside formal analyses of Cubist works, in order to demonstrate the affinity of Joyce's literary endeavour, considered among the most significant of the twentieth century, with the visual arts, providing an insight into the aesthetic theory at the core of the novel. This article demonstrates that, contrary to what was previously thought, certain aspects of the Cubist aesthetic may already be observed in Joyce's novel, preceding Ulysses (1922) by nearly a decade.
Among the numerous painters who influenced Marcel Proust's depiction of water, James McNeill Whistler, through his Nocturnes, holds a uniquely significant place in Proust's vision of the tranquil sea. This article examines the portrayal of the sea in Balbec in & Agrave; la recherche du temps perdu and the artworks featured in the 1905 Whistler retrospective. It delves into the shared aesthetics of Proust and Whistler, examining their vision of colour, spatial composition, texture, and the ambiguity of the vaporous atmosphere in their works. As an artist of japonisme, Whistler drew inspiration from a diverse array of Asian artworks and artefacts, displaying a particular fascination with Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. This prompts an exploration of the elements Whistler might have absorbed from the porcelain he encountered and collected, especially concerning colour, spatial composition, and material. Furthermore, the article seeks to uncover the dialogue between Proust's literary text and the tradition of the Chinese Southern School landscape painting that influenced the ornamentation of porcelain admired by Whistler. In doing so, it aims to unravel a potential chain of intercultural communication in both visual and verbal aesthetics, shedding light on the nuanced intersections between Whistler's integration of an Eastern vision in his Nocturnes and Proust's unique echo and enrichment of seascapes in & Agrave; la recherche du temps perdu.
Late Ming Originalist artist Wu Bin rarely inscribed his paintings with anything beyond a title, signature, and occasional date. This is as true for Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock, sometimes called A Magnificent Rock for Mi Wanzhong, c.1610, as it is for any of his other landscapes and figure paintings. Absent a record of his intentions for this handscroll, how are we to understand the artist's thoughts about it? Might a useful strategy be to apply his words expressed on a closely dated landscape painting-also for Mi Wanzhong-to this work? This project attempts such an approach, analyzing the painting in terms of Wu's long and informative inscription on On the Way to Shanyin, commissioned by Mi in 1608. Its argument is bolstered with information culled from Wu's biography and gleaned from the inscriptions and colophons on the Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock handscroll written by Mi and other late Ming erudites. By further contextualizing it within intellectual history, this project sheds further light on the meaning of this work and from the artist's point of view.
The Benedictine reform movement (950-1066) was a large-scale initiative to reshape an English Church fragmented by ongoing Viking raids. Bolstered by ample support from the English monarchy, the Benedictine movement exerted its power through language, mobilizing the written word as a means of constructing both political and theological authority. Yet the material-visual presentation of words on the page destabilized, rather than amplified, this authority, for Benedictine illuminators' visual techniques made sacred text far less easy to read. This article frames chrysography, or writing in gold, as a mode that both elevates and destabilizes the sacred Word. In dynamic relationship with the play of light upon the page, chrysography signifies ambivalently: it renders text alternately legible and illegible, concealed and revealed. Placing into conversation an English Benedictine Gospel Book and legal charter, both richly illuminated in gold, this article argues that chrysography's ambivalent visual effects inflected both the theology and the politics of the movement. This article also situates the Benedictines' use of chrysography within a more wide-angled discussion of gold's perceived power-and precarity-in early medieval English material culture.
This article examines the figure of George Rodger, the British co-founder of Magnum Photos whose 1948-49 pictures of the Nuba people of Sudan inspired German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to produce color photobooks from Africa beginning in the late 1970s. It focuses on the media environment that first gave Rodger's pictures of the Nuba visibility and demonstrates how Rodger, Magnum, and his estate attempted to take control of the narrative about Rodger's work and life, in large part through retrospective photobooks. At the same time, putting Rodger and Riefenstahl together demonstrates a longer history of how magazine and photobooks markets worked together to present the Nuba to American and European consumers, and how both photographers used photobooks as vehicles of reinvention and self-promotion.
This article analyzes instances of photographic re-uses between mid-century glossy magazines and coffee-table books in order to identify a network of people who circulated shared editorial practices across the range of print. Using a photo-series by photographer Brassa & iuml; about Seville (Spain) as an exemplary case study, it retraces its publication history from a Harper's Bazaar photo-reportage (published in 1950) to a thematic monograph, S & eacute;ville en f & ecirc;te, issued in 1954 by Robert Delpire & Eacute;diteur and translated into German (1954) and English (1956). Besides such a canonical photojournalistic trajectory, however, this article also discusses these photographs' appearances in illustrated weeklies-including Paris Match (1952) and Picture Post (1953)-and in various illustrated books ranging from manuals to travel books. By complicating art-historical narratives about the photographer-as-author itself popularized through interconnected magazines and books, it argues that it is rather practices of images' re-uses and re-circulations that underpinned and ordered the visual culture of the twentieth century.
This essay treats the history of Time-Life Books. The series is an important case through which to expand the history of the photo book beyond the current historiographic orientation towards defining photo books as objects of exceptional quality. It demonstrates that Time-Life Books were ubiquitous and formulaic. Their serial form, their identical format, and their word/image configuration and layout saturated the visual culture of the mid-century American and European information aesthetic of which they were a part. They offer a key avenue for the reconsideration of the photo book as a primarily didactic and information-driven format, as well as allowing us to contextualize it within the broader media constellation of the period and within Time Inc.'s own multimedia empire.
This article examines how the Petite Planete and Microcosme collections at Editions du Seuil challenge conventional approaches to the photobook that emphasize the photographer-as-auteur. Through archival research and visual analysis, it traces how networks of image workers at Seuil developed innovative approaches to the photographic page, focusing particularly on the partnership between Chris Marker and graphic designer Juliette Caputo on Petite Planete. While scholars have often framed Marker's editorial work as preliminary to his filmmaking career, this article demonstrates how Caputo and Marker's collaboration established a distinctive visual economy-combining picture research and layout design-that shaped Seuil's broader approach to photographically illustrated books. Their work laid the foundation for an expanding network of female iconographers and designers who refined and proliferated these strategies across Seuil's popular education paperbacks. By examining how these collections integrate and constellate media through collaborative practices rather than singular artistic vision, this article proposes new frameworks for understanding how photobooks express the history of photography beyond the rhetorical framework of the cinematic auteur.
