Rome, Italy—These days, Cinecitta is a place entrenched more in the mythic imagination than the geographic one. The birthplace of a bewildering number of accomplished filmmakers from the likes of Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Vittoria De Sica, the fabled Italian film studios are a virtual pantheon of cinematic history. Reaching a peak of activity in the 60s and 70s, its lore was augmented by the glitterati while films such as Roman Holiday and La Dolce Vita passed through its lots. In 1987, it became a character in its own right in Fellini’s Intervista—a love song of sorts to the place he once called his “temple of dreams”.

As I walk through the empty lots one spring morning, however, I am struck not by its storied glamour but by the crumbling facades and general state of disrepair. Once impressive props are now skeletal frames exposing the thin foundations of their artifice. Sets appear to be assembled then abandoned, entrusting time and nature with the task of their dismantling. The vast, 100-acre plot of land located on the outskirts of Rome is generally empty, eerie, and beleaguered by a sense of reality belying a motto which touts itself as the “factory of dreams”.

I am quick to realise, of course, that this is precisely the ruse of the movies—to emolliate the hard stuff of life with the sweet tonic of fantasy. Undoubtedly, here, in the shroud of nostalgia, it is easy to overlook the very origins of the place, founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini for propaganda purposes under the slogan “Il cinema è l’arma più forte” (“Cinema is the most powerful weapon”). In the front lot, a large head from Fellini’s Satyricon is half-buried in the ground, its wide, curious eyes averting the direction of a small plinth erected as a monument to the National Fascist Party. Etched with a fasces—a bundle of sticks bound together with rope—the image is a simple but effective symbol of the idea of strength through unity. I think how alluring this concept is, a pictorial parable of Biblical proportions, and how cleverly it has been reified into the easy veneer of the image.

I continued to wander through the lot, camera in-hand, letting the wilderness of my thoughts pave my trail. Circling through the maze of the back lots, I walked until I became increasingly less sure of my whereabouts, ultimately unable to distinguish between a dilapidated set-piece or the crumbling façade of a studio building. I was, nonetheless, diligent about snapping shots, happily abandoning myself to the small window of the camera.

This series of photos reveals my journey through Cinecitta over the course of one day. Though my intention was, in the most journalistic sense, to capture some documentary sense of the place, it became obvious that the camera could mask as much as it could reveal. The results are a series of images in which I leave the viewer to distinguish which space is imaginary and which is real.

Il cinema è l’arma più forte…

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Jane Han is a filmmaker and photographer. She is completing her DPhil in Fine Art at Christ Church, Oxford. Most recently, her films were shown at Modern Art Oxford, and her photographs exhibited in Treviglio, Italy. Her documentary Urban Scribe won the CINE Golden Eagle prize for best documentary and was broadcast on Comcast on Demand (USA).

The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World
Tate Britain, London
14 June 2011 to 4 September 2011

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The Tate Britain’s current exhibition gathers the Vorticist old boys (and girls) to London, where it all began almost a century ago. The retrospective recalls the visitor to a moment when the twin trends of nationalism and avant-garde modernism briefly intersected. In the years just prior to and during the First World War, a group of artists organised by Wyndham Lewis led an assault on traditionalism by simultaneously adopting and denouncing continental innovations. “Vorticism”, a term borrowed from Ezra Pound, began as Lewis’s answer to F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist movement. Lewis had become especially resentful of associations with Marinetti, reasoning that artists representing Britain, the nation that birthed the industrial revolution, owed nothing to the presumptuous Italian’s influence. These kinds of disputes characterized Vorticism as a school for insults, fight-picking, and expressivity. The youths were full of arrogance and brilliant energy.

Throughout the exhibition, one hears the hum of their works in conversation. The painting that greets the visitor at the door, William Roberts’s retrospective The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring, 1915, is very much in the spirit of a staged group shot, a Vorticist “last supper”. We see Wyndham Lewis presiding at the centre of a table; Ezra Pound looks pedantic with cane, coif, and green trousers; and, opposite Pound, Edward Wadsworth clutches a magazine “half a yard square, in steam-calliope pink,” Blast.

Just inside the first gallery, the opening salvos of Blast’s manifesto are printed on the walls, framing a huge reproduction of Jacob Epstein’s The Rock Drill. Epstein’s perfect man-machine straddles a massive industrial phallus, yoking primal force with mechanised efficiency. Further on, one finds another famous sculpture, Gaudier-Brzeska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, a work both masterful and juvenile. From the front, it is totemic like an Easter Island head–an icon for a modern age; from behind, it’s a cock.

The exhibition’s continuous juxtaposition of text with other media reinforces what is probably Vorticism’s most important legacy, the fusion of the literary and the visual. Alongside heavy geometric sculpture, for instance, pages of Blast are revealed to be explosive feats of typography. Vorticist phrases appear sharp as imagist poems, bold as newspaper headlines. What we would call “graphic design” today was essential to the Vorticist visual language.

It comes as no surprise, then, when we see Vorticist paintings and drawings that fill the frame with angles and lines that look like letters. Wadsworth, in particular, manages to build whole cities with such shapes. And though the shapes can, at times, seem repetitious among the Vorticists, the use of color varies greatly from one artist to the next. Some, like Dorothy Shakespear, describe subtlety and texture in blues and greys, while others, like Lewis, tend to eschew all primary colors, delighting in garish pinks and browns. Experiencing the latter’s contrast of tight angular organization with weird off-tones is something like hearing a melody made of only sharps and flats.

Finally, there are the “vortographs”, billed as the first-ever abstract photographs. The lens used to create a vortograph fractures and distorts an image, producing a kind of cubist verisimilitude. While these are interesting contributions to the exhibition, the momentary fascination with the mechanical apparatus of the camera seems to overwhelm any lasting commitment to formal technique. Vortographs were novelties that didn’t manage to stay new.

Indeed, as a movement, Vorticism was markedly ephemeral. The onset of war cut short many associations, replacing revelry with tragedy. Gaudier-Brzeska fell in the trenches; his death notice appears in Blast’s “War Number”. Epstein’s brutal Rock Drill figure was recast as a vulnerable amputee, suddenly more human than machine. The Tate Britain’s exhibition admirably connects what is most vibrant, naïve, and poignant in the work that survives, providing the visitor a sense of continuity–the spectacle of a movement containing history. 


Aaron Rosenberg graduated from St John’s College, Oxford, with an M.St in English in 2007. He is now studying for a D.Phil at Cornell University.

Edited by Sria Chatterjee
Hilary Term 2011 Issue, Edgar Wind Journal

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The Hilary 2011 issue of the Edgar Wind Journal is a calendar, with holes where you would expect to find page numbers. It can be ‘hung on a wall, flipped through, written on, consulted, ignored’, according to its editor, Sria Chatterjee. She notes that the format allows the ‘viewer’ to consider the colour images apart from the accompanying text. It is appropriate to consider ‘viewers’ as well as ‘readers’, since Edgar Wind was a professor of Art History at Oxford in the 1950s, and the eponymous society is based in the University of Oxford’s History of Art department.

Turning the journal into a calendar is an innovative response to the issue’s theme, ‘materiality and temporality’. Each of the twelve months is paired with an image of an object from Oxford collections, and followed by a double-page essay by a curator, librarian, or faculty member who studies and/or looks after the item. These short pieces describe how the objects interact with time: a John Constable painting seeks to freeze ephemeral cloud movements onto canvas; a species of snowdrop called galanthus nivalis sprouts each February in the Botanic Garden; nineteenth-century photographs of Rome will continue to fade away in the Ashmolean until funding is secured to preserve them; and the mediaeval encyclopaedist Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum historiale encases world history in a huge four-volume book, a copy of which is kept in the Merton College library.

These material objects are gateways into the periods and places in which they were created. This issue of the journal is also a record of eye-catching items held in Oxford museums and libraries, and the research and conservation activity that goes on around them. As an academic publication it offers an interdisciplinary meditation on material culture, which is a burgeoning field in the humanities that recently came to public attention through the British Museum’s ‘History of the World in 100 Objects’. The journal is open-eyed and forward-thinking, but is attentive to Edgar Wind’s legacy as well: it follows his conviction that images and ideas belong together, and achieves the same balance that he did, between upholding exacting academic standards while disseminating research in an accessible and relevant way. This issue of the Edgar Wind Journal is well-written and imaginatively designed, and draws viewer-readers’ attention to an eclectic but coherent set of images and words that might otherwise pass them by.

* The Edgar Wind Journal has been recommended for full classification in the Bodleian Library. It is available from the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museum shops, and the History of Art department. Copies can be requested by emailing the History of Art department.

Peter Auger is a DPhil student in early modern English literature at Merton College, Oxford.

On the second floor of the Imperial War Museum in London, on a back wall near the stairs, is a large tiled eagle from Baghdad. Its caption is simple: “Built into the wall of a German residence facing the Tigris. Removed on the order of Lt General Sir William Marshall, commander-in-chief of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force after the capture of Baghdad, 11 March 1917.” Below, in the ground floor atrium full of polished, 20th-century military hardware—much of which never actually saw combat—is a car destroyed in Baghdad in 2007. The car’s title, “Baghdad, 5 March 2007”, refers to the day a suicide bomber drove a truck down Mutanabi Street and blew it up, killing 38 people and injuring over 100 others.

Mutanabi Street is Baghdad’s book souq, a centre of literary trade and activity since the time of the Abbasids, the Islamic dynasty that founded Baghdad in the 8th century. Modern Mutanabi Street is home to bookshops, a busy Friday book market and al-Shahbandar, a storied café that opened in 1917. Down the street from al-Shahbandar is the Serai, the former administrative officers of the Ottomans, who ruled Baghdad from the 16th century. In the Serai in 1921, the British crowned Faisal as the first king of the new mandate state of Iraq. In 2008 the restored book market on Mutanabi Street reopened, but without cars and with fewer book stalls.

The artist behind the twisted and flattened mass of rust-colored metal is Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller, who insists that the car is not a piece of art but an exhibition, a statement on the spike in civilian suffering in combat in the last century. In an atrium of war machines, none of which show any damage from battle, and all of which targeted civilians in some capacity, the car-bombed chassis changes the subject. This is what war does to civilians in cities—not what it looks like off the assembly line.

A place like the Imperial War Museum operates somewhere between memorial and exhibition; its objective is not jingoism, but not pacifism either. National pride is represented in the weapons and artifacts of the world wars, especially those from the Battle of Britain. In such an environment, “Baghdad, 5 March 2007” is a warning against extending patriotism to the present. Joint British-American adventurism and cooked intelligence led to the 2003 invasion and occupation; at that time, the legacy of Britain’s first foray in Iraq, seen in the floor above the destroyed car, was firmly ignored. Barack Obama may have declared Operation Iraqi Freedom over last year, but nearly 50,000 American soldiers remain. Sectarian violence continues, even if the media has moved on, drawn back only when the bombs are big enough. The car succeeds as an exhibit because it forces you to remember where it is from and how it got here; it doesn’t let you forget Iraq.

On a stand next to the Baghdad car is a pamphlet recounting its journey to the museum. In 2007, a Dutch curator arranged for the car to be shipped out of Iraq for an anti-war rally in the Netherlands. Subsequently, Deller took it to America for an exhibit called “It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq”, which began at the New Museum in New York, where gallery visitors could talk to one of 33 “experts” on Iraq, including soldiers, refugees, scholars, artists, and journalists. “The car was really a conversation piece”, Deller said in an interview then. “It’s a way to get people talking, and get them agitated maybe.” Then Deller and two of his experts—an American soldier and an Iraqi artist—left for a three-week road-trip across the country, with the car in tow on the back of a trailer, with a white sign that read “This car was destroyed by a bomb in a Baghdad marketplace on March 5, 2007.” The conversations continued, and Deller’s performance—which this ultimately was—remained vague, somewhere between education and protest. But not art, he insisted. And most critics agreed. The car is not a found object, even it is on display and has a sculptural quality, a kind of aesthetics, to its ruined frame. It is a conversation piece, a jarring artifact from Iraq brought home.

The conversations that the car is now sparking in the Imperial War Museum are very different from those in America. It’s not only about national amnesia, or trauma, or ignorance about Iraq. In the atrium is a broader dialogue about war. And in a space whose mission is to honour the past while illuminating its horrors, the Baghdad car is firmly in the present, a warning of where we are. A century ago, 10% of all casualties in conflicts were civilian; today it is 90%. In the two months leading up to the Mutanabi Street bombing, 90 Iraqi civilians were being killed every day. These and other statistics accompany the car in the atrium in London. Three weeks before the attack, the much-publicised surge began—20,000 additional American soldiers into Baghdad to protect civilians and stem sectarian violence. The cultural cost is high, too: 25% of the book collection in Iraq’s National Library is lost—either stolen or burned; 60% of its archives have disappeared. The looting of Iraq’s celebrated National Musuem has left its collection depleted, much like the bookstalls on rebuilt Mutanabi Street.

There is a brief history of “Britain and Iraq” in the literature accompanying the car: how British interest in the Ottoman provinces of Mesopotamia during the First World War “lay in its importance as a route to India and its oil reserves”; how Britain was awarded the mandate over the new state of Iraq by a League of Nations that honored European colonial claims over wartime promises to Arab nationalists; and how a 1920 revolt, crushed by the Royal Air Force, pushed the British to install Faisal, who had briefly been proclaimed king of Syria before the French expelled him. The San Remo Conference had, after all, given them the mandate over Syria. With Faisal at the throne, living in the empty rooms of the former Ottoman Serai, the British governed Iraq from above. “At any sign of trouble, British aircraft dropped warning leaflets, then bombed villages” reads a page in a booklet next to the car. “This only increased hatred of the British.”

The salvaged car provokes conversations about all this history, but it cannot say everything. For one, there is the German tiled eagle upstairs—removed from a home in Baghdad by the victorious British general in 1917. Prior to the First World War, Baghdad had been the target of competing imperial schemes—including those of Germany, which fostered close ties with Istanbul and planned to connect Baghdad to Berlin via railway before war broke out. For Germany, control of Mesopotamia would disrupt Britain’s dream of linking Egypt to India while fulfilling unrealized colonial ambitions. Baghdad, like much of the pre-war Middle East, was seen by the European powers as geography to be won, another prize in a colonial contest whose end was, in fact, only a generation away.

The tiled German eagle and the bombed Iraqi car are two artifacts from Baghdad, 90 years apart, one a product of historic, imperial competition and the other of the continued hubris of war, dressed up by “democracy” and “food and medicines and supplies and freedom”, as George  W. Bush said three months before invasion. Iraqis have paid for it all.

Frederick Deknatel is reading for an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford.

Michael Fried
The Moment of Caravaggio
Princeton UP, 2010
328 Pages
£34.95
ISBN 978-0691147017

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The Moment of Caravaggio marks the unexpected encounter of two greats within the history of art: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610), whose violent realism transformed the scene of late 17th-century Italian painting, and Michael Fried (1939–), renowned for tracing the development of modern art in his trilogy on French painting, which includes the iconic Absorption and Theatricality (1980). Fried is the first to admit his position on the fringe of Caravaggio studies. His humbleness, however, might be overstated. The book, based on the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts that Fried delivered in 2001, marks the climax of his interest in an artist on whom he first lectured in 1993.

While The Moment of Caravaggio—a book preoccupied with the emergence of autonomous “gallery pictures” in the 1590s and onwards—historically predates Fried’s celebrated trilogy, it is positioned against the background of these earlier texts. For that reason, devotees of Caravaggio alone have to bear with large sections of text discussing artists both historically and geographically remote, among whom Gustave Courbet, the leading 19th-century French realist, is the most dominant. Such digressions, however, are essential for anyone intending to understand the origin of the internal structure of meaning in Caravaggio‘s art. Devotees of Fried, on the other hand, will not be disappointed, as the book carries the famous stamp of his art historical brand. By coming to new conclusions it validates old discourses. Yet in an age when micro-claims to truth are increasingly becoming the only claims that art historians feel comfortable making, the suggestion that Caravaggio and Courbet “may be seen as belonging to a single, overarching historical development” is not only brave but, indeed, refreshing. It is in such bold suggestions as these that we glimpse Fried’s greater ambition to create a grand art historical narrative, ranging from the Early Modern to the present.

Nevertheless, a sense of scepticism regarding the possibility of such a project is woven into the very fabric of the book. In discussing the impassive figures that dominate Caravaggio’s canvases, Fried adapts Stanley Cavell’s argument that Shakespeare’s plays are structured around “interpret[ing] and reinterpret[ing] the skeptical problematic—the question whether I know with certainty of the external world and of myself and others in it”. Fried would suggest, then, that the minimalist, often simply unreadable expressiveness of Caravaggio’s personages places his works in a very similar dialogue “with the skeptical doubt”. Such a claim, while well-argued and historically plausible, has immense implications for Fried’s own project, which is so often based on reading “the unreadable” in specific ways. Its shortcomings become particularly evident in his discussion of Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns. Dismissing Peter Robb’s claim that the man in armour occupying the left side of the foreground is depicted “in a pose of deepest boredom”, Fried argues that it is “unquestionable” that he is “utterly fascinated, spellbound, transfixed.” Yet, as Fried seems to admit, the “necessary separatedness” between the viewer and the viewed, a separation upon which Caravaggio’s paintings are arguably structured, prevents him from offering a persuasive basis for this interpretation. It thus becomes obvious that Fried does not occupy a privileged position of authoritative insight, but is simply another viewer denied access to the internal states of Caravaggio’s figures. His attempt to explain Caravaggio’s epistemological fluidity by placing him in the company of Shakespeare, Descartes, and the like, theorising the doubt in order to neutralise it, can be understood as an effort to escape that uncomfortable position.

Fried’s “moment” of Caravaggio is a nexus of relationships, both painterly and social, that enabled the rise of gallery pictures in Bologna and Rome between the 1590s and the first two decades of the 17th century. Neat binary oppositions are the trademark of Fried‘s art history, and this book is no exception. He theorises the production of Caravaggio’s canvases as based on two distinct yet often temporally simultaneous instances: immersion being a “moment” of continuity between the painter and his canvas, while specularity is a “moment” of ferocious separation of the two. Although the images often blur the tidy polarities that Fried projects onto them, the result is a captivating reimagining of Caravaggio’s violent realism based on the instance of pictorial production rather than the facts of the artist’s lurid biography (which get a reluctant glance).

While Fried defines his own interpretative strategy as “avowedly historical”, it soon becomes clear that he believes in close looking and in the pleasure of visual analysis more than he does in archival excavations. His descriptions epitomise the necessity of looking at the canonical works anew, and of offering seemingly awkward or accidental details a second chance. “Does anyone seriously imagine that Caravaggio could not have depicted [the jets of blood] more veristically had he wanted to?” he asks, while musing about Judith and Holofernes. The question is clearly rhetorical. Fried constantly scavenges for instances of mismatch between viewer expectations and the painting itself, taking these disjunctures as starting-points for new, predominantly image-based conclusions. While many will struggle with his unorthodox reliance on visual intuition (I remain unconvinced about the “abstractly ‘emotional’ character” of the folds in Jesus’s shroud in the Incredulity of Saint Thomas), the invitation to look closely, further supported by around 200 colour illustrations, is perhaps the book’s greatest merit.

The unearthing of the Caravaggisti, a group of artists who modelled their works on the example of Caravaggio, marks another of Fried’s contributions to the field of 17th-century studies. A large part of Lecture Five focuses on works by Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Giovanni Serodine, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and others, aiming to expose the imaginative ways in which these artists adapted and reworked Caravaggian tropes. The oeuvre of the Caravaggisti, Fried concludes, is expressive of a collective effort “to formulate a new paradigm for gallery painting, one extrapolated from Caravaggio’s canvases…but not, in the most developed instances, parasitic to them.” The attention given to the Caravaggisti expands the “moment” of the book’s title and moves beyond Caravaggio’s iconic figure, which has dominated other recent publications on the subject (I am particularly thinking of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s 2010 portrayal of an isolated genius in Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane). Paintings like Narcissus or the Toothpuller, whose attribution to Caravaggio’s hand remains contentious, fit comfortably within this extended “moment”, allowing Fried to discuss the relevant images and largely ignore the technical authenticity debates.

Overall, Fried’s ability to connect the worlds on both sides of the picture surface is admirable. Yet while the book succeeds in revealing the “density of depicted and implied relationships” that Caravaggio’s art contains, the unsystematic nature of Fried’s explorations makes it very difficult for him to arrive at a single concluding remark. Instead, Fried structures his final chapter as a collection of post scripts and afterthoughts. Misleadingly labelled a “conclusion”, it contains a series of comparisons that—perhaps frustratingly—open more discussions than they close. This openness, both structural and conceptual, does not earn Fried an established position within the community of Caravaggio scholars. It does, however, provide another testimony to the elusive character of Caravaggio’s art, so inviting of yet so resistant to interpretation.

Austeja Mackelaite is reading for an MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Holger Hoock
Empires of the Imagination:f Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850
Profile Books, 2010
544 Pages
£30.00
ISBN 978-1861978592

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In a violent evening assault in 1776, an equestrian statue of George III built of lead and gold leaf was knocked down by a crowd of soon-to-be American soldiers and commoners who took exception to His Majesty’s rule. The severed and mutilitated head was carried off with processional festivities, while the remaining lead from the statue was reportedly melted into 42,088 bullets. As one bemused writer commented, George III’s “troops will probably have melted majesty fired at them”. To the modern reader, this story might well call to mind the equally savage treatment of Saddam Hussein’s likeness in Baghdad.

Holger Hoock’s Empires of the Imagination is a veritable treasure trove of such stories, which put recent events into perspective and reveal the equal amounts of passion and absurdity ideologically invested in art. Hoock’s latest comes at a propitious moment in history when an introspective mood prevails across the globe. While questioning the ethics of recent war, countries are also attempting to salvage and restore the antiquities of battle-scarred countries and to encourage an artistic witness to war. Hoock’s book charts similar developments in an 18th- and 19th-century Britain driven by military and colonial enterprise.

Following memorialised heroes, painters, diplomats, and art collectors, Hoock expounds an original understanding of Britain between 1750 and 1850 as the crucible in which the country emerged into artistically informed maturity. Most histories of the period see little state involvement in the promotion of art when compared to countries like France. Hoock’s originality lies in recognizing precisely the opposite—galvanised by war and empire, the state was in fact vitally involved in shaping the artistic character of the nation. By studying the “interplay between aesthetically performed politics and politically inflected art” through acts of artistic commemoration, creation, and collection, Hoock frames the state, war, and empire “as powerful agents and sites of cultural change”.

In the first half of his book, Hoock analyses heroic memorialisation in the sculptural and artistic responses to the American and French wars. The strength of his analysis lies in revealing the contingency and pragmatism from which heroic art materialises. Though purported to embody patriotic ideals, heroic monumentalisation is often the result of the vying power-plays and agendas of a moment in time. For instance, the British parliament’s only commission for a military monument during the American Revolutionary War, the one erected to Admiral Rodney, is found on close study to emerge from an attempt to salvage the political reputation of the House of Commons amidst a furore of criticism and embarrassment. Navigating politics and the market, American artists too displayed a canny pragmatism in the ambiguity or candour with which they displayed their loyalties on canvas.

Hoock’s analysis is of an astonishing breadth and this is never more in evidence than when he charts the shifts in the character of British heroism from the 18th to the 19th century. He writes of the reconciliation of neoclassical allegory with naturalism and reportage; examines the differencing of Scotsmen in depictions of battle; demonstrates how educational discipline and the hot debate over corporal punishment fed harder codes of masculinity; surveys the responses of churches and preachers to earthly heroism and military glory; and integrates the revival of chivalry with that of Gothic architecture and medieval romances. Like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, the various pieces of literary, social, educational, and religious history lock into place. Through this intricate assemblage, Hoock illuminates not just the subject of political art but how parallel cultural movements mutually shape each other.

The section on collecting takes us to the East and to stories about such icons as the Elgin marbles and the Taj Mahal. Here Hoock’s argument hinges on recognizing the varying levels of state involvement entirely apart from a consistent official policy. The state’s artistic investment emerges through a complex web of relationships between the government, diplomats who had antiquarian interests, other  diplomats who used antiques as bargaining chips, and local antiquarians and translators.

It is in this section that we begin to see the contours of modern collecting emerge from the informal mess of public-private partnerships. Men like Alexander Cunningham began to argue for a responsibility concerning Indian antiques for no other good than the “honour of the British government”. We also witness the subsequent emergence of government policy concerning the preservation of antiques and the gradual standardization of archaeological practice. It is the peculiar conditions of colonial India that catalyze the emergence of the in situ ideal of preservation. The following period of the 1830s to 1840s saw the state’s effusive investment in the arts. This period, by Hoock’s demonstration, became the natural summit of several decades of state interest in the arts inspired by war and empire.

For a book that frequently discusses art’s accessibility to the public, Hoock’s narrative architecture renders his book pleasurable to the academic and the amateur historian alike. It proves equally entertaining and encyclopaedic by virtue of good story-telling. Opening with his dramatically coloured account of the coronation of George III, Hoock whisks us through groups perched on scaffolding to get a good view of the procession, street-viewers munching meat pies and drinking wine, and the nobility listening to the bishop’s sonorous tones at Westminster Abbey. The stories continue to roll with engrossing momentum. That said, the laboured conclusions to each section might pall on the non-academic reader.

But Empires does not just set out to regale the reader with its anecdotes. Hoock’s relish of a good story is integral to his methodology, for the book is itself a carefully constructed edifice of many inter-linked narratives. It is from attentively following the turns of each that Hoock teases out his precise and original conclusions. By his deft discernment of pattern in detail, he proves himself master of his subject in this empire of political and artistic tales.

Deborah Rosario is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

Calvin Bedient
The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion
University of Notre Dame Press, 2009
424 Pages
£43.50
ISBN 978-0231148160

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As Calvin Bedient makes plain in the introduction to The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion, Jack Butler Yeats has been “absurdly eclipsed” by his more famous brother, William Butler. On the other hand, “the Irish will tell you that he is their greatest painter, as his brother is their greatest poet, and pretty much leave it at that”. A starting point for Bedient’s combined study of the Yeats siblings is the notion that both views, both “regional sentiment” and wider global indifference, have hampered the reception of Jack Yeats’s work. A joint reappraisal of the two brothers’ artistic outputs along more detailed, objective lines promises to rebalance the scales while highlighting a defining feature in the work of both Jack and William (one that moreover epitomizes international modernism as a whole in Bedient’s outline): the emphasis on “process, mutability, activity, motion, evolution”, key facets of the “‘ism’ of all that is traveling”.

In concentrating attention on this thesis, Bedient dispenses with the historical dimensions of the brothers’ relationship, so those hoping for a dual biography along the lines of Jan Hulker’s Vincent and Theo Van Gogh or Adam Sisman’s more recent The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge will have to look elsewhere. The contextual backdrop—recourse to correspondences, suggestions of shared cultural and artistic reference points, moments of interpersonal influence, and so forth—does not interest Bedient. Instead, most of The Yeats Brothers consists of a series of extended formal readings of J.B.’s paintings and W.B.’s poems, all of which are intended to underline what Bedient terms the brothers’ obsession with “sweet kinesis”. This shared formal tendency is apparently (and arbitrarily, so far as is demonstrated in this unwaveringly aesthetic, un-historicizing portrait) the sole connecting bridge between the two oeuvres.

As a basic interpretive paradigm for both Jack and William, specifically in the work of their later “modernist” periods, Bedient’s argument is a plausible and even sound one. J.B. Yeats’s vigorous, ebullient paintings—rough aggregates of van Gogh, Cezanne, and Jackson Pollock—are at the more radical end of the post-impressionist spectrum; with their violent brushstrokes and atomistic variegation, his post-1925 works suggest a more fluid, animated pointillism. Similarly, of course, W.B. Yeats’s verse is intensely preoccupied with spectacular evocations of physical movement; from Fergus’s “brazen cars”, through the quasi-futurism of “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death”, to famous instances of Yeatsian dynamic gesticulation like the opening of “Leda and the Swan” (“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still”) and the first lines of “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…ch of hands watching Fred and Ginger dance against a b

Bedient is right on the mark when, around two-thirds into The Yeats Brothers, he summarizes exactly what is so distinctive about such taut, vertiginous writing:

What is exemplary in Yeats is the dramatic economy, the directness and immediacy, of his evocations of action and change … Though commonly thought of as the most staid of the Modernists, the one who was most fixated on formality, the logical one to get into a verbal scuffle with Marinetti, the Futurist, when the latter read from his work in a salon, Yeats nonetheless felt and thought in terms of great power-shifts and vectors. Hart Crane is most like him in this regard, though hardly a match. There is nothing comparable in Eliot, Stevens, Pound or Rilke … Yeats is a poet of urgent utterance, of getting passion out – precisely cut and brilliantly flaunted. Motion, the moment, the absurd position of sitting on the tiny seat of the vast unicycle of an epoch and affecting to be masterful in relation to its dynamics and direction, made him a performer of momentary or impending imbalance.

This is a bold, eloquent précis of the elder Yeats’s poetic. “Precisely cut and brilliantly flaunted” is well judged, with its compacted emphasis on sculpted form and galvanizing instinct, and the comparison drawn between Yeats and his modernist coevals is helpful. Pound, in particular, jumps out as a countervailing figure in the list, one for whom the pursuit of a monumental stillness was a lifelong pursuit (for all his peripatetic-adventurer motifs and radical talk of pentameter-breaking). Elsewhere in the study, glances at Nietzsche and Bergson provide a useful philosophical underpinning for the discussion.

Unfortunately, I quote the above passage at length because this rather oddly located peroration is about as pithy as The Yeats Brothers gets. Those who may have detected a hint of purple in Bedient’s prose toward the end of the extract may be disappointed to learn that this flamboyant, exaggerated method of engaging with form—a sort of bizarre Pynchonian belle-lettrism—is by far the most representative critical tone in the study as a whole. When the subject is W.B. Yeats, Bedient half gets away with it, because there is at least a semblance of substance lurking below the layers of verbosity. His readings of the Crazy Jane poems in the chapter on “Performance” are astute and subtle in their examination of Yeatsian personae, and the highlighting of Yeats’s utopian regard for the lost permanence of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy (in the chapter titled “Immanence”) introduces a much-needed element of antithesis into an otherwise extravagantly univocal and repetitive elongation of the central premise: that a dedication to riffs on motion was the guiding principle for both brothers.

Sadly, however, Bedient’s analyses are regularly undermined by a prolix vagueness that is, by turns, eccentrically bewildering and downright opaque. It is the work of Jack Yeats (perhaps because it does not offer logocentric textual grounding) that inspires the most fanciful flights:

Here, characteristically, the brushwork flies to be ahead of and beside itself, to escape copying and to get to what is unimitatively original and formless, in excess of a passive precise location. It broaches, rather than dwells in, the very ‘now’ of the now. At the same time, of course, the paint would be nothing more than paint, indeed nothing less than paint – that beloved, obsessive, sticky, smelly, real substance.

In similar fashion Jack Yeats’s art is described as “a spectacle both of nothing becoming something and of something becoming nothing, so that everything is almost something and almost nothing”, while elsewhere Bedient deploys the confusing analogy “a dandelion’s cemetery-nursery of parachutes”. Perhaps most bafflingly of all, at one point we are told that Jack was “a democrat, but not a slut, of color”. William, too, does not escape the effects of Bedient’s verbiage, through close readings that tend toward the clumsy side of idiosyncratic (“The only other colon in the poem has the mere yeoman’s duty of introducing Lady Gregory’s dialogues”) and the needlessly pornographic (“What was summoned in the shape of Cuchulain gives [Yeats] a hard-on precisely because it is an obscure and menacing power”). Occasionally Bedient is just plain wrong on the most elementary of technical levels, as when he claims that, phonetically, “salmon” is to “falls” what “mackerel” is to “crowd”.

Stylistic queries aside, at bottom The Yeats Brothers is hampered by its hugely broad, ultimately self-defeating premise. The equation of the brothers’ modernism with motion is accurate, but hardly, as is perhaps intended, revisionary or groundbreaking. Bedient’s study is an awkward amalgam of, on the one hand, late 20th-century critical theory in its more abstruse manifestations (Deleuze, Lacan, Lyotard—all apparently “anticipated” by Jack Yeats), and on the other, those quirky formalist readings: all in all a slightly limited frame of reference. With no historical backdrop, Bedient is reduced to offering a facile pseudo-political dichotomy as a foil for his rarefied, hypertrophied aestheticism: “liberal” flux battles “conservative” stasis, with the intimation that both the Yeatses and modernism as a whole are being polemically “rescued” by way of association with the former.

The more Bedient warms to his view of the works themselves as “weapons in a war against the quasi-official reign of forms in the received world”, and the more he portrays the brothers as resisting objectivity and the fixity of definition, the more his discussion deteriorates into amorphous insensibility. If Jack Yeats’s paintings suggest that “the control of infinity … is only a rhythm of inflexions and heightenings among multiples and storms of entanglement”, and if W.B. Yeats’s poetry is a “soft-cloth-flexible run of verbless syntactical fragments joined only by semicolons”, if for both “matter runs amok” as “it always has”, then after a while, as The Yeats Brothers seems to demonstrate, any sort of constructive, authoritative critical response to the works and their creators becomes nigh-on impossible.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is writing a thesis on Basil Bunting, modernist poetry, and music.

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Ashmolean

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After three years and £61 million, the temple-sized doors of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology reopened on Saturday. Five days earlier, when clouds of dust still engulfed the back entrance gates, the Oxonian Review previewed the renovation of “one of the world’s leading museums”. The first impression was one of shining glass and steel, fresh paint, and last-minute bustle. Everywhere, designers, curators, conservationists, and technicians talked intently over coffee tables and added the final amphora or bass viol to the display cabinets.

Designed by architect Rick Mather, the new building contains six storeys of 39 galleries hidden behind Charles Cockerell’s original structure, whose pillared façade of 1845 still fronts Beaumont Street. At a cost of £3,572 per square metre, and with enough square metres to double the Ashmolean’s previous capacity, Mather’s complex is intended to elevate the world’s first university museum from the status of “dear old friend” to internationally recognised “cultural jewel”.

On these statistics alone, an historian of the future might judge that museums are to us what churches were to our medieval forebears: a society’s monuments and, simultaneously, its public centres for education, spiritual improvement, and a higher form of entertainment than bear-pits or night clubs. It appears museums are just as keen to attract pilgrims: the Ashmolean’s target is a 25% increase, to half a million visitors per year. Not having eternal salvation at their disposal, however, the Ashmolean’s curators have resorted to a renovated building, design strategy, and a restaurant to improve their “access” ratings.

Like many a cathedral, the Ashmolean’s new building is an artwork for artworks. Hemmed in on all sides—by the Taylorian, Sackler Library and the Classics Faculty— its internal architecture has been constructed to exploit space and light.  On each floor, gallery windows open onto a skylight-lined atrium, which cuts right down to the lower ground floor. Together with the chalky Wiltshire white walls, this layout creates a sense of cool, inviting depths. The open views and abundant glass work on a symbolic level, too, suggesting the interrelations between the cultures and periods on display. Cutting dramatically across this scene, six steel “bridges” literally and figuratively link the distinct collections.

Museums—here again, like churches—are in the business of selectively preserving and presenting the past. In redeploying the Ashmolean’s innumerable relics, designers have produced a new “strategy” for this old project, which they’ve dubbed “Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time”.  Rather than grouping artefacts by country or period, the Ashmolean’s curators have arranged its wares according to themes which prompt visitors to trace connections between the many cultures represented in the museum. The second floor exhibition, for example, juxtaposes European, Chinese, Japanese and Russian art from the Renaissance to 1900.

Through the combination of several such exhibitions, the renovated Ashmolean aims to present a single, coherent narrative of the evolution of civilisation from prehistory to the present day. According to its curators, the museum is ideally suited for such a task because its modest scale allows a wide range of artefacts to be presented within a relatively small compass. This bid for coherence raises complicated questions and produces some inevitable gaps: South American and modern African cultures, for example, are thinly represented.

To the many groups involved in the Ashmolean’s redesign, however, this holistic narrative is only part of a much broader didactic goal: to show how a comparative approach can be used to demonstrate the intrinsic value of cultural variety and to advance a diverse conception of human progress. The new Ashmolean thus enlists beauty and history in no less a task than a new salvation of souls, if one more subtle than sermons, through the effacement of prejudice and the propagation of tolerance.

To give their artefacts—if not immortality—at least a longer shelf life, the museum’s designers have taken great care in presentation. This has evident benefits: display cabinets fitted with state-of-the-art environmental controls allow fragile textiles, such as an embroidered hanging from the Ottoman Empire, to be shown for the first time; and in-cabinet lighting reveals artefacts’ intricate details, including what is perhaps the Ashmolean’s most prized possession, the crystal, enamel, and gold Alfred Jewel, whose Anglo-Saxon inscription reads “Alfred ordered me to be made”.  In the European porcelain room, a series of enormous glass cabinets has been used to glittering effect to display a collection of 1,100 pieces of crockery, as required by the terms of a bequest. Reflections from the glass and the faint daylight which filters through a cabinet-window create a luminous, ghostly atmosphere, appropriate to the strange detached existence of these dinner party veterans. Wiring and other support mechanisms are discreetly hidden in the walls; beauty must not be marred by practicalities.

These technological advances bring the inevitable paradox of rejuvenating a museum into view: its collection’s previous context—from room furnishings to display labels—must in some measure be abandoned to make way for the new. It is thus a relief to find that the Cockerell building’s familiar old ambiance remains largely unchanged. A few cabinets have been replaced, furniture re-upholstered, and walls repainted or re-papered. The floors in both old and new buildings have been freshly covered with European oak parquet, and Portland stone, a material also found in Brasenose College and other Oxford University buildings, appears in both structures. Touches like these provide a simple but tangible continuity between the two buildings and underline the value of both traditional and modern design materials. The rooms in the Cockerell are, however, a little barer and less comfortingly musty than visitors will remember. Where before an aura of haphazard curiosities collected by explorers and antiquarians lingered in the air, today this will not do; “access” requires that displays free from clutter and comprehensible to the most casual visitor. One is left feeling that the spirit of the new museum has subtlely but incongruously encroached on the old.

If the days of discoveries in dusty corners are over, it is nonetheless reassuring to see that some of the Ashmolean’s most intriguing relics have benefited from relocation to a modern setting. Guy Fawkes’ lantern, for instance, is now in the Mather building’s England Gallery, newly accompanied by the “Fifth of November” rhyme in full: “By God’s Providence he was catched/ With a dark lantern and burning match…” Legions of lekythoi which once stood in scattered cabinets among the other Greek vases now form a single display on the staircase down to the “Ancient World” section, with an information panel which quotes Aristophanes. It is also charming to find, in the Japanese section, a full-scale model of a tea-room, constructed in situ by master builders with authentic materials. (An inaugural tea ceremony was held there on 4 November by a Japanese tea-master flew over specially for the occasion).

In this renovated setting, it quickly becomes clear that 21st-century museum-goers demand more for free entry than our downtrodden progenitors. Exhibitions aside (and in addition to the boutique gift shop and subterranean tea-rooms), a modern museum would not be complete without an overpriced gourmet restaurant. Cue the Ashmolean Dining Room, touted as “Oxford’s first rooftop restaurant”, with views over St. John’s College and toward the Randolph Hotel. The air of pricelessness which lingers upon the treasures in the exhibition rooms is almost as tangible here.  Even the menu card, in the venerable spirit of Oxford benefaction dinners, includes eighty varieties of wine. In the evenings, the room’s large goose-feather lampshades will be seen glimmering onto the atrium’s cascading staircase; a tantalising reminder that beauty and history also have their price.

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Emma Park is reading for a DPhil in Classics at University College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

Akshat Rathi is reading for an MSc in Organic Chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford. He is the assistant editor at the Oxonian Review.

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Alex Danchev
On Art and War and Terror
Edinburgh University Press, 2009
256 Pages
£60.00
ISBN 978-0748639151

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A book which costs £60 and is neither a reference work nor a textbook can hardly be intended for mass consumption. Its inside flaps, marred neither by blurb nor authorial picture, suggests a lofty disdain for self-advertisement. Rather, On Art and War and Terror belongs to that strange symbiotic economy of academics, university presses, and libraries.

As an object, Danchev’s latest exudes ivory-tower luxury. Although pleasantly slim for its kind, the book’s thick, glossy pages ensure that it will not be picked up lightly. On the front cover is a photograph of a beach in ochre and grey, where waves swirl around broken groynes: the epitome of aestheticised desolation. The title’s grandiose polysyndeton reverberates like the opening of a sermon.

The back cover presents Danchev’s equally grave “manifesto”, borrowed from a cultural authority: “the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it.” Danchev’s book is a collection of essays which, by examining the theme of war in artworks from poetry to photography to film, aims to “piggy-back” upon their “moral benefits”. Its epigraph, taken from Montaigne, situates the author in a long tradition of great essayists and ethical thinkers.

As was admiringly observed by Professor Robert Eaglestone in his Times Higher Education review, On Art and War and Terror exemplifies the current fashion for “interdisciplinarity”, which in this case appears to mean the ceaseless search for new perspectives on much-studied material for the purpose of lengthening one’s publications list. Unsurprisingly, eight of Danchev’s ten essays derive from articles already in print.  Nonetheless, his work may be a stimulating anthology of artistic treatments of war for the lay reader; and for the student, a rare exemplar of well-formed academic prose.

Whether On Art and War and Terror is anything more is another matter. It is hardly original to claim that the imaginative experience provided by art is morally valuable. More importantly, Danchev often fails to provide a theoretical foundation for his claim that where historical knowledge fails, art can explain. This is because he sees his essays not as arguments but as “demonstrations”. But the view that art increases our moral appreciation of violence is debatable; some would argue that it keeps us at a safe aesthetic distance. If Danchev intends to be a moralist and not simply a historian or critic, the reader will perhaps be on his guard. An ethical authority based on art is only as good as its last interpretation.

Emma Park is reading for a DPhil in Classics at University College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

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Faheem Amin graduated from the University of Kashmir with degrees in English literature, philosophy, and sociology. He currently works as a senior officer at The Economic Times.