lastknight

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/empty-suits-last-knight-met/"></div>There’s probably been no more thoughtful meditation on the nature of narrative and knighthood than Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight. Calvino’s first fully fabulist outing envisions an empty suit of armor set into motion by forces no more material than sheer will and a dauntless faith in the holy cause of war. The protagonist, Agilulf, is an impatient, peckish, unidentifiable something hurtling forcefully through the world, a solus ipse trapped in the confines of his armor like a homunculus in its flask. In his thoughtful moments, Agilulf dreams of sleep, and of the detachment it symbolizes from the gleaming exoskeleton of steel and leather that surrounds and defines him, and which is not so much protection (after all, there’s really nothing inside to protect — just a breath of thought, a wisp of being) as prison.
As the book progresses, Calvino asks time and again how a knight is known. Is it by the armigerous signs blazoned on his armor? By the parlous extensity of his nom de guerre, which goes on accreting superlatives like a snowball tumbled downhill? Or is it by the heroic acts themselves, which in the end are as detachable as any helmet or greave, as likely to be misattributed or co-opted for the burnishing of a new reputation? Even life and death, Calvino suggests, are made illusory by the modularity of the romance’s form, as well as its rigidity, which, he suggests, is kin to that of the knight’s armor itself. At one point, finding his horse unresponsive, Agilulf dismounts and discovers that a Moor’s sword has pierced its heart: “The animal would have crashed to the ground long before had not the iron pieces around his flank and legs kept it rigid, as if rooted to the spot.”
The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I, on view at the Met until January 5, 2020, shares many of the same concerns, and offers an interesting meditation on the purposes armor can serve when its immediate use-value has been tossed aside. Following the life of the titular emperor, who lived from 1459 to 1519, the exhibition charts the development of Maximilian’s powerful ambitions and their complicated interplay with the medieval ideal of knighthood. A political novice, Maximilian married Mary of Burgundy, the daughter of Charles the Bold, in 1477, only to have her die on him five years later; an outsider in his new rule, he was forced onto a lifelong course of legitimizing himself and his rule, which manifested conspicuously in a fetishy love of armor and tournament fighting. In the baroque public relations battles Maximilian waged, suits of armor, gifted to foreign leaders and knights, served as mobile monuments, symbols of both imperial fortitude and fine taste.
The insinuation of Maximilian’s delicate realpolitik into a storied craft tradition is interesting to witness — the armor that lines the halls is strange and rarefied, always bending away from the human; it is bloated and ponderous one moment, impossibly svelte the next. In a suit of field armor designed for Maximilian when he was 20 years old, an obvious warping of the human form is at play. The armor features an exuberantly hooded helmet, an alluringly hourglass-shaped waist, and talon-like toes, which were meant to imitate fashionable shoes, a reminder that in this late stage of armor development, design often centered on flourishes and the imitation of the more softly sartorial. Simulations of lightness and the flow of fabric stipple the exhibition, as though the steel itself were suspiring willfully, bending and contorting itself to accommodate the ideals foisted upon it. Elsewhere, bulkiness prevails, as in a set of foot combat armor made for Maximilian sometime before 1508, which looks at first glance like a medieval diving suit — its presence is overbearing, impermeable, with the air of a walking tomb.
It’s sometimes hard to escape a sense of claustrophobia when wandering through The Last Knight. So much of the armorer’s job — especially in Maximilian’s time, when most fights had devolved into feats of playacting — seems to have been about increasing immobility, tamping down the range of motion available to the knight in the name of protection. One of the strangest-looking objects in the exhibit is a padded coif worn during the joust of peace, a form of mock combat that employed blunted lances. Designed to immobilize the wearer’s head within his helm, the coif is a creepy mass of mud-colored wadding and straps that looks like something Buffalo Bill might have sculpted if he’d had but world enough and time. To the extent that armor functions as a method for  inscribing oneself upon space — for asserting one’s form and extension — the late-blooming works on display in The Last Knight feel counterintuitive; while directly preventing death, they nevertheless reduced the subject to a state of corpse-like stillness. Preservation, taken to its extreme, turns into puppetry.
In fact, Maximilian’s tournaments were veritable salmagundies of mock combat variants, which served to portray his court “as a chivalric academy” of sorts. The removal of death from the tournament scenario — its conversion into a sort of large scale Borgesian festspiele — resulted in the creation of strange new mechanisms that heightened the drama while preserving the safety of its participants. On view are three mechanical breastplates, made of steel and copper alloy, that would have been used in the joust of war; as the exhibition notes explain, “each breastplate would have carried a shield in the front that was ejected via a spring-loaded mechanism over the knight’s head when struck by an opponent’s lance.” Fantastically engineered, these visually stunning contraptions stand as symbols of the absurdly complex engineering that went into the sustainment of the romantic ideal of combat, and the reticulations of artifice necessary to breathe life into the dying embers of chivalry.
At times, the exhibition can be dizzying — room after room presents an endless parade of cuirasses and pauldrons, sallets, bevors, and armets, covered in delicate fretwork, flute-like sprays of etching, or brocade patterns meant to simulate the appearance of fabric. Walking through the rooms, a certain horror vacui begins to rise up around you like a fog, gradually thickening until you find yourself standing in front of an elaborate shaffron. The shaffron, a horse’s helmet, hovers on its stand, empty as a mask; you can’t escape contemplating the absent burden the horse would have taken on when donning the shaffron — the sheer weight of it, the curtailing of vision, the unwieldy fit. A strange aesthetic of silence reigns in the exhibition, a gust of all that remains when the bearers of these mobile billboards have disappeared.
Documents in the exhibit help to clarify the high-handed touch Maximilian often employed when it came to armor craft, often presuming to lecture the masters on the finer points of their craft. In a letter from December 12, 1516 to the Austrian armorer Conrad Seusenhofer, Maximilian ordered a suit of armor for an 11-year-old German prince, and placed an emphasis on Seusenhofer’s “using bolts&#8230; so that [the armor] will fit the boy’s growing body for at least three years.” The image of little princes in age-appropriate armor, swaddled like tin soldiers in their ceremonial carapaces, is oddly tragic, though unintentionally so. Maximilian’s foresight, with its emphasis on control and increasing the armor’s flexibility, in fact only makes the armor more constrictive — the young princes, you realize, were not even allowed to outgrow their armor, to escape it through the simple fact of biological time.
Since the exhibit itself isn’t designed with an emotional core in mind, its moments of poignancy are doubly unexpected. In a milksoppy portrait of Philip I from 1490, the 12-year-old prince stares out with groggy eyes, his skin sallow and his mouth slackly ajar — he seems sickly, feeble, pale, a weak vessel for Maximilian’s ambitions. Set close by this portrait is a cuirass designed for Philip when he was seven years old, a simple, gilt-edged affair, remarkable only for its size. The imputation of war to the bodies of young princes is probably the most unsettling unconscious strain that weaves its way throughout the exhibition — it’s there in the armor crafted for the fragile, changeable bodies, and there as well in the small jousting figures, cast in bronze, that Maximilian commissioned for his sons and grandsons, which are almost indistinguishable from a fantasy-based Playmobil set.
The exhibit ends with an elegant pair of steel gauntlets resting on a velvety red pillow. A curious collation of the dangerous and the delicate — the steel is stippled throughout with fine holes, like a piece of lacework nibbled at by moths, while the knuckles are mounted with sharp, thornlike knobs — these amputated symbols of grace and power are a fitting coda, a record of the outsize mania which urged Maximilian to distill his fame in steel. Armor, the exhibit seems to concede at the close, is at once the ultimate substance of power and a negation of the flexibility of life — a symbol, to use Calvino’s words, of “the void-fullness that can only be dissolved by what is light and swift and slender.” In the end, Calvino’s Agilulf is a speck of dust, a phantom ideal twirling through the void of history. Maximilian’s gauntlets, bejeweled and arest on the red brocade of a pillow, are little more than empty filigree, and offer up nothing save the memory of a pose.
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The Empty Suits: On The Last Knight at the Met

The Empty Suits: On The Last Knight at the Met

paa_drill_02

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/designing-death-hito-steyerls-drill/"></div>The German filmmaker and visual artist Hito Steyerl is the great glossator of late capitalism. At once a prophetess of disintermediation and digital-age sleuth, she’s comfortable both with gumshoe work and critical theory, churning out works that chart the ramifications of our increasingly image-based culture, that dwell on drone strikes and dancing, on ecological disasters and the genealogies of mass-produced images. In her 2013 work How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, for instance, digitally rendered ghosts gradually and in increasingly disturbing ways come to model the experience of populations displaced by civil wars or natural disasters. In an age of insubstantiality, digital metonymy becomes a salvific modus operandi, locating critique in the hazy sphere of projections and modelling technologies. The appeal of her thematically diverse critical writings lies in the way they harbor a redemptive drive somewhere beneath the diatribe, an attempt to reorient praxis.
By and large, Steyerl’s work is dedicated to picking apart the self-serving, symbiotic mythologies of technology and late capitalism, which she accomplishes by revealing their seediest interpenetrations, casually occurring on the quotidian plane of the internet or within the rarefied spheres of geopolitics and the international art market. Drill, a recent installation at the Park Avenue Armory, which hosted the work from June 20 to July 21, see Steyerl’s focus turning to the American epidemic of gun violence. Grander than many of her previous works, and oddly polished in comparison to her smaller installations, Drill manages to both disturb and deconstruct, offering up a prismatic reflection on weaponry and modes of control in the 21st century. Devised as a video tour of the armory itself, the film bores through spatial and ideological palimpsests, interspersing on-site interviews with gun violence victims and gun control advocates with footage from 2018’s March For Our Lives rally in Washington D.C.
The physical setup of Drill is composed of a central screen buttressed by two angled, anterior screens, which together form a slight concavity. Walking into the drill hall, a massive hangar-like space, you’re overcome, at first, by the dense, velutinous darkness, and the attendant feeling of sensory deprivation. A daunting amount of space seems to open up invisibly around you in the cathedral-like stillness. The film’s soundtrack — largely atonal, indeterminate music à la John Cage — is pumped ambiently through the space by black speakers plunked down like boulders in the dark, and in the center of the hall a Blade Runner-esque hieroglyphic of glowing white lines sprawls across the floor, gradually resolving into the form of a floor plan. Small cubes for sitting are scattered before the screens; it feels, strangely, as though the audience were watching the film from the future, gathered in the high-tech video-dome of some silicon-bright 25th-century utopia to learn about the miseries of the past.
This feeling of temporal displacement is one of the installation’s cornerstone affects. The compression of space, or the bleeding of one space into another — the imbrication of a construction site, for instance, and its digitally revamped model, replete with computer-generated trees and render ghosts jerkily miming their midday promenades — is one of Steyerl’s typical hobbyhorses. When we learn, over the course of Drill, that the armory’s drill room frequently doubled as a ballroom, and that in the 1920s a Mars-themed dance was held there, replete with towering, fantastic mushroom structures, Steyerl’s intent is clear. The strange, off-worldly atmosphere of Jazz Age socialites twirling through a rufous fog seems emblematic of elite detachment, and there’s a stark irony in the fact that the armory should go to such expense to create a new world in the drill hall when depressing social realities begged to be recreated just outside the armory doors.
Drill does a good job of teasing out the technical ideologies behind the epidemic of gun violence, including the classically capitalist motives behind the National Rifle Association’s founding. Elites, as we learn, were shocked by the wasting of bullets fired off by poorly trained soldiers, and as a result they sought to form a group that could turn soldiers into sharpshooters, thereby increasing efficiency. The disturbing implications of these underpinnings are prefigured in Steyerl’s essay “How to Kill People,” where she describes the “design of killing” as “smooth, participatory, progressing and aggressive.” The “progressing and aggressive” character of design is evident in that it not only creates better guns — part of the pathological inaccuracy of the Union soldiers stemmed from the fact that they were used to wide-muzzle, smooth-bore muskets — but in turn necessitates the designing of human beings. Death-dealing designs, as Steyerl suggests, have a tendency to leach out, jumping from object to subject with the unthinking rapidity of a virus.
The real focus of the installation, however, is on the victims of gun violence. Steyerl’s interviews with the disturbingly diverse cast of victims — some of their traumas are only a year old, while others have carried their wounds for decades — make up the heart of the installation; strict narratives are eschewed in favor of allowing the victims to freely contemplate solutions based on their own experience, or simply to recount fragments, impressions, and disconnected observations. Kareem Nelson, the founder of Wheelchairs Against Guns, sits, for instance, in his wheelchair before a roaring fireplace, reflecting on the violence of his youth. Paralyzed from the waist down since being shot in the back in 1995, the Baltimore native moves from topic to topic, and recalls that in the 1980s, guns were easy to come by, but bullets were far harder to obtain. The solution he offers is simple, almost tentative — why not regulate, with the toughest laws possible, the buying and selling of bullets?
As a deeply plausible workaround, the proposal strikes a spark of reason, but of course Steyerl, in her framing of the interview, doesn’t mean it as an ultimate solution. She’s more interested in the fact that it’s a spot-on inversion of the practical concern that created the NRA — namely, that soldiers were wantonly wasting valuable bullets. It’s a striking parallel, one that points out the absurd recursiveness of gun violence (whose origins in placing an inordinate value on bullets might also be a solution) while also indicating dimly the need to search for solutions in unexpected places. What’s striking about considering Drill now, however, is the way certain aspects of the installation can seem oddly precious or twee. This isn’t so much the fault of Steyerl as it is a grotesque symptom of the exponentially growing rate of shootings in America — already Drill seems to belong to another era, one in which Americans, while growing accustomed to bi-monthly acts of gun violence, hadn’t yet been exposed to a full weekend of literally back-to-back shootings. If Steyerl comes out of the installation with a clean moral slate, it’s because she’s not really pontificating, but rather presenting.
The central gesture of Drill is that of a reclamation of space. In the armory, defense and glamor lasciviously intertwine their limbs; the baseline poshness of the building at large amounts to an absurd conflation of the bellicose and the beautiful. We learn that the basement of the armory, a shooting range still studded with the engrams of century-old bullet holes, flooded in the early twentieth century, the lead bullets stored their gradually poisoning the captive water. The poised violence inherent in cached bullets is thus figured as an ecological threat, an insidious leakage of constituent parts into an immanent whole. Once again, the idea of leakage is carried over into the story of a victim. Nurah Abdulhaqq, a gun control advocate affiliated with the National Die In, is one of the most prominent faces in Drill (her shots, typically head-on, are filmed in the massive drill hall). First exposed to the problem of gun violence by the death of a cousin and later galvanized by the Parkland shooting, Abdulhaqq recalls the insidious leakage of violent threats into her Facebook feed — it was common for other high schoolers, following a shooting, to post images of guns accompanied by jokes.
Perhaps Steyerl’s most striking observations center on the idea of control. The most persistent image in the film is that of the Yale University Precision Marching band weaving across the floor in the day-lit drill hall. These shots, swirling and elliptical, effortlessly call to mind the flowing grid on the drill hall floor and its latent suggestion of order imposed, of restrictions made on movement. While indicative of Steyerl’s interest in the fascism of patterns and formations, the fluidity of the marching band’s routine only increases the fascistic aspects of instructed movement, as a smoother execution requires more and more precision, demonstrates greater and greater levels of discipline and control. The shots call to mind Edward Said’s capsule summation of Foucault’s theory of power, in which he describes how “for power to work it must be able to manage, control, and even create detail: the more detail, the more real power, management breeding manageable units, which in turn breed a more detailed, a more finely controlling knowledge.”
Control, of course, means many things to many people — what to progressives seem common sense gun control measures can strike conservatives as infringements by an overpowered state. But gun control is of course aimed at greater freedom — the freedom to move about, unhampered by the fear of being randomly (or worse: calculatedly) gunned down. Anti-restrictionists seem never to recognize that a rabidly pro-gun culture tends to the ramification of more and more abstruse policies meant to preserve the availability of guns — one only has to think of the absurd suggestion, made by figures like Sean Hannity after the recent shootings in Dayton and El Paso, that every public school should be stocked with armed police officers. It’s no coincidence, of course, that Steyerl’s shots of the marching band are redolent of children marching to classes in rigorous line formations, or twirling and dodging through crowded hallways in between classes. The marching band becomes a symbol of control run amok, a heightening of the restrictiveness that’s the unconsidered endgame of so many propositions aimed at the preservation of a fatuous freedom, one that eats away at other, more precious liberties.
The film’s final section sees Steyerl digitally defrocking various portraits in gilt frames lining the armory’s walls, replacing their contents with videos of students speaking at the March For Our Lives rally. In itself, this might be a kitsch act, a simply performative enthronement, but Steyerl manages to salvage the images by roughly suturing the videos to their frames. The digital jitter at the videos’ margins and the disturbing not-quiteness of the overlay suggest a process of circulation, implying that this isn’t the videos’ final resting place. The film’s epigraph, “History is the act of hiding whatever is in plain sight,” hangs over these final videos, since fineness of presentation is one way of hiding something in plain sight — a gilt frame distracts the eye. Steyerl offers up a nervous circulation that mirrors the strange afterlife of tragedies today, when videos of victims, and sometimes of the incidents themselves, jump from feed to feed, inhabiting an uncertain sphere of circulation that, while largely controlled by algorithms, is still, at its core, ruled by human inclination, by what we choose to share. It’s no wonder that Drill often feels like a tour of a haunted house, with the specters of old glamorized violence turning through the musty, fin de siècle halls. The haunting return of violent ideologies of control and efficiency is paralleled by the haunting return of images, which — no longer chain-bound, like the phantasms of old, to the sites of their earthly suffering — are haunting precisely in their adaptability, in their tendency to flit about and settle, disruptively, wherever they may.
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Installation view of Drill © James Ewing.
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Designing for Death: On Hito Steyerl’s Drill

Designing for Death: On Hito Steyerl’s Drill

field

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/world-ornament-american-pre-raphaelites-radical-realists/"></div>The British Pre-Raphaelites, founded as a painterly reform movement in the middle of the 19th century, are notoriously easy to dunk on. Frequently criticized as purveyors of stilted Romantic freeze frames (in their figural works) and of a monomaniacal realism (in their nature-focused images) that in the very same century would be eclipsed by the invention of photography, they’ve become a shorthand for good intentions gone awry, and a reminder that dramatic spirit-affirming theories, if left unchecked, can easily devolve into camp.
Their American counterparts, brought to light by an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, aren’t exactly immune to these accusations. The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists, on view until July 21, is stuffed to the brim with eye-achingly bright flowers and more still-lifes of dead birds than even the biggest dead-bird-fan could possibly find palatable. The gallery walls are spangled with, among other minor atrocities, close-up studies of bird nests propped on the forest floor that would have small town grandmas everywhere watering at the mouth, and baubly depictions of grapes that seem like they’d be more comfortable adorning the walls of an off-ramp Olive Garden than those of a museum.
But despite these quibbles — which, admittedly, are fun in their own way — the exhibit offers up remarkable moments of beauty, while its clear curation effortlessly unearths a forgotten history of influence. The show pegs the rise of the American Pre-Raphaelite movement to a tour John Ruskin made of America in the middle of the 19th century. Ruskin’s insistence on en plein air drafting, strict, workmanlike methods, and the patchwork analysis of light became touchstones for the American painters, ultimately giving their movement a strangely different spirit than its English counterpart, one that largely eschewed figural canvases and instead dwelt on the land.
Supporting this shift was a lesser-known influence, that of Thomas Cole, the enigmatic draughtsman of cataclysmic natural visions who, in a pioneery stiffening of Ruskin’s original recommendation, insisted on tramping through fields and over rough mountain paths — cutting right through the difficult landscape — to find his views. Renowned amongst the American Pre-Raphaelites for his metaphysical landscapes, Cole was already gone by the time the American movement started (strangely enough, he died in 1848, the year of the British movement’s founding), but his home in the Hudson Valley became a shrine of sorts for the Americans. Thomas Charles Farrer’s A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm, for example, was painted from the forebear’s property.
The painting that kicked it all off, Ruskin’s own Fragment of the Alps, goes a long way towards explaining the intermingling of spirituality and scientific exactitude found in the best of the American Pre-Raphaelites’ works. Shuttled around America in a touring exhibition in the year 1857, the small canvas is a fantasia of vivid yellows and saturated purples, yet this almost surreal medley stems from no more mystical source than Ruskin’s hidebound attention to the play of light on stone. As the exhibition notes make clear, the careful delineation of the natural environment was a profoundly moral act for Ruskin. Detail became a form of prayer, a sort of thanksgiving for and hymn to God’s creation. The delicate plexing of boughs in Charles Herbert Moore’s Pine Tree, from 1868, are a perfect non-Ruskinian example of this drive — the detail is so fine that the tree seems to be melting upward, the fine pen markings gradually being blown away by the wind.
Between the exhibit’s broad vistas and minutely realized ephemera, it manages to capture American painters torn between the grand and the picayune as ways of expressing the bountiful landscape of their home. Moore, as it turns out, was a luminary of little things. His Lilies of the Valley, a watercolor from 1861, is less than a foot tall, offering up a fairy’s-eye-view of the blue drooping blooms in which the filigree of the flowers’ stems assumes a strange solidity, as of wrought iron. Moore, who lectured on Ruskin’s theories at Harvard, was a fan of the isolated close-up — his Dried White Oak Leaf depicts a frilled arabesque of dull gold, spotlit in white, as though a divine eye had singled it out for attention.
While grander vistas in the exhibit, bled dry by a sense of unalloyed awe, come off as static, empty byproducts of the surveyor’s art, it’s in middling subjects — closed-off fields and family homesteads — that the American Pre-Raphaelites found firmer footing, deftly suturing their spiritual inclinations to these cozier scenes. John William Hill’s West Nyack, New York (The Lilies of the Field), whose title references the Sermon on the Mount, captures the ancestral Hill home in the background, while the foreground is dominated by the titular lilies. Painted in 1865, William Trost Richards’ A Neglected Corner of the Wheatfield — probably the most iconic work in the exhibit — presents a picturesque facade, with unruly weeds impinging on a regulated wheatfield and a lightly decrepit post-and-rail fence stamped in the picture’s center. But behind the painting’s simple bucolicism lies a coded message; as the exhibition notes explain, “the Union cause was often symbolized in the popular press by wheat,” as opposed to the South’s cotton.
The looming tragedy of the Civil War haunts the exhibit, with Thomas Charles Farrer’s exuberantly titled Gone! Gone! depicting a young woman grieving the loss of a loved one. Farrer drew the essence of his painting from Romantic works by the British Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, but there’s something in the work that hearkens back to even older forms. The simplicity of the woman’s pose seems somehow Gothic, and the brightness of the window scene behind her — a view at dusk of the Hudson River — feels torn from the Quattrocento. While figural compositions like Farrer’s were central to the British mission, the Americans by and large managed to transfer the moralizing themes of the British movement away from figures and onto the landscape. Farrer, who’d studied with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was one of the biggest American proponents of figural works, but his pictures, typically indoor scenes, lack the breathlessness and flow of line you’d expect to find in a work by his teacher — his lines are crisp, his poses stiff, with a sort of religious intensity turning the figures to stony archetypes of suffering.
Other figural works in the exhibit show a strange interest in material coziness that often overpowers their more British-derived affects. William John Hennessy’s Mon Brave is a somber depiction of a young woman kissing the image of her lost lover, but while the girl’s flowing hair is a clear signal of British Pre-Raphaelite influence, the eye is drawn instead to the memorial wreath that bears the painting’s title. Its severe detail — ruffled and bristling with petals — stands in clear contrast to the hazy facture of the wallpaper, which seems to feather away into a blurry mist. The immateriality and morbidezza cribbed from the British scene — the ghostly wallpaper, the flowing, ungraspable hair — here meet a profoundly American passion for objects and density of detail.
The exhibit has your standard grab-bag of scènes à faire — plenty of shrubbery and boscage to go around — but it also features several strange one-offs, works that gesture dimly at other movements still to come. The frilly umbrellas of the two trees in Henry Roderick Newman’s Study of Elms, for example, seem a fore-echo of impressionism, one that resounds whenever the stippling technique employed by many of the painters falls on subjects full of fine filiations — an ancient elm hung with vines, for instance, or the grass on a windy hillside. Milkweeds, a watercolor by Fidelia Bridges, one of the more well-known woman artists working in the Pre-Raphaelite idiom, presents an almost hallucinatory wash of colors, redolent of the shattered, demented skies of Edvard Munch. Henry Farrer’s Winter Scene in Moonlight, from 1869, is a stark nocturnal moonscape, flensed and oddly regimented, that seems like the setting for a Beckett play.
It’s no wonder that seemingly sui generis works like these should be among the best in the collection. The American Pre-Raphaelites were, after all, a movement held together by principle yet fractured by the immensity of its subject. If Cole’s ideal of a rough engagement with the landscape never seems to have fully inserted itself into the movement, it’s because the strong pull of the wilderness was offset by another equally tempting drive. It’s hard to view Farrer’s occasional homely sketches of lamp-lit reading sessions and young women drawing outdoors while wrapped in firm-looking quilts without finding, secretly expressed, the old fear of woods and wolves, of dark nights and winters that gnaw to the bone.
The final room in the exhibit is given over to the works of Henry Roderick Newman, granted the sobriquet of “The Last Ruskinian” by the gallery notes. Based in Florence in the latter half of the 19th century, Newman made excursions to countries like Egypt and Japan, developing a lush style curiously intent on patterns. His watercolor from 1898, Sasanqua, Wild Tea, Yokohama, for example, sets a goblet of minutely realized camellias before a citrous background reminiscent of the textile designs of William Morris. As the last of his line, Newman presents a satisfying summation of the American Pre-Raphaelites’ modus operandi, one in which the world, subjected to a scientific gaze, is made to disclose a surfeit of detail, turning nature into ornament and enshrouding its mad volubility in a peaceful, palatably domestic guise.
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Image: Neglected Corner of the Wheat Field (1865), William Trost Richards
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The World as Ornament: On The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists

The World as Ornament: On The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists

I Live in the Slums

Bailey Trela is a writer living in New York whose work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Tablet Magazine, Hyperallergic, and The Cleveland Review of Books.

Bailey Trela

Dreaming Freely: On the Ecstatic Fictions of Can Xue

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Bailey Trela is a writer living in New York whose work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Tablet Magazine, Hyperallergic, and The Cleveland Review of Books.