Book News: The "still life spirit" in modernism

 Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers

BY CLAUDIA TOBIN

Edinburgh UP, 2020

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-modernism-and-still-life.html

ISBN Hardback: 9781474455138

ISBN ePub: 9781474455169

ISBN PDF: 9781474455152

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterized as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cézanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Explores the ‘still life spirit’ in modern painting, prose, dance, sculpture and poetry
• Challenges the conventional positioning of still life as a ‘minor’ genre in art history
• Proposes a radical alternative to narratives of modernism that privilege speed and motion by revealing forms of stillness and still life at the heart of modern literature and visual culture
• Provides the first study of still life to consider the genre across modern literature, visual cultures and dance
• Uncovers connections and cultural exchange between networks of European and American artists including the Bloomsbury Group and Wallace Stevens

Modernism and Still Life reminds us that Modernism not only introduced new ways of making art but also new ways of looking at art. Tobin is alert to the paradoxes inherent in the title 'still life' but also to the many ways in which stillness and movement enter into conversation in early modernism. This is a work of deft scholarship and considerable originality of thought. It makes a fresh intervention into a major subject and deepens understanding, offering another landmark in the historiography of Modernism.

– Frances Spalding, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge

Claudia Tobin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and the Huntington Library, California. She has published commissioned articles, scholarly book chapters, and exhibition catalogues on interdisciplinary topics including Virginia Woolf and still life, modernism and colour, and on Vanessa Bell's abstract painting as part of Tate's 'In Focus' series. She is General Editor, with Julian Bell, of Ways of Drawing, Thames & Hudson (2019).