Capturing gesture: Illustrations to dance narratives for the Beaumont Press

International audience

Illustration et intermédialité, entre gravure et photographie

International audience; Cet article envisage le rôle de l’illustrateur comme « changeur » du texte en image dans les manuels sur l’illustration parus dans les années 1890, alors que les procédés photomécaniques marquent des progrès décisifs. La transaction intermédiale particulière qui s’opère dans le livre illustré est envisagée à cette époque du point de vue des supports techniques conçus comme des écrans interposés entre l’original et sa reproduction. Les écrits de Liliane Louvel, Gérard Genette, Hans Belting, Jacques Rancière et Philippe Dubois sont convoqués pour montrer comment l’évolution de l’illustration s’inscrit alors dans le conflit médial opposant gravure et photographie et ref…

Cinematic Features in Gormenghast

International audience; Cet article analyse l'influence des techniques cinématographiques sur la construction de l'espace romanesque dans le roman Gormenghast de Mervyn Peake

Art and Science in Word and Image: Exploration and Discovery

International audience; Art and Science in Word and Image investigates the theme of ‘riddles of form’, exploring how discovery and innovation have functioned inter-dependently between art, literature and the sciences. Using the impact of evolutionary biologist D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form on Modernist practices as springboard into the theme, contributors consider engagements with mysteries of natural form in painting, photography, fiction, etc., as well as theories about cosmic forces, and other fields of knowledge and enquiry. Hence the collection also deals with topics including cultural inscriptions of gardens and landscapes, deconstructions of received history through word and i…

Introduction to volume 40 of Interfaces ("Gestures and Transmission")

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Recension pour les Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, n° 86 (automne 2017) : Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869-1891 (Farnham, Ashgate, 2015)

Couleur et transparence à l’ère des procédés photomécaniques

This paper aims to show that the reception of British coloured illustrated books in the early twentieth-century reflects the artistic and aesthetic repositioning induced by the development of photomechanical process. Photomechanical reproduction freed the graphic line as well as colour. Reviews published at the turn of the century—as exemplified by The Studio—reveal a tension between opacity and transparency, materiality and lightness, chromophilia and chromophobia. These oppositions apply to the art of the book—as in the books illustrated by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac—as well as to interior decoration. They are subsumed in the image of the peacock’s ocellus, the eyespot that symbolise…

In and Out: Eccentricity in Britain

The aim of the book is twofold: first, to provide an overview of the critical history of eccentricity; and secondly to conceptualise a notion that is often presented as a defining feature of the English "character". It addresses the key issues raised by eccentricity and brings out interdisciplinary links between science, politics, literature and the arts: the sources and dissemination of the concept of eccentricity; its relationship with the English national character as historical and ideological constructs; the structural need for variation and divergence within accepted social norms; the paradoxical status of the eccentric as outsider - when eccentricity is transgressive and alienating -…

Recension pour Les Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, n° 80 (automne 2014) : Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke (eds.), Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855-1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room (Londres, Ashgate, 2012)

Compte-rendu d'ouvrage

The 1946 production of The Fairy Queen in Covent Garden: 'A Triumph of British music and Stagecraft'?

The 1946 production of Henry Purcell's Fairy Queen in Covent Garden was staged to mark the beginning of a new musical era. It was based on the unity of music, ballet and design, the symbol of an ideal social cohesion notably fostered by state patronage, and the partnership between Constant Lambert, Michael Ayrton and Frédérick Ashton was informed by the aesthetic agenda of the Romantic Moderns. However the failure to convey a successful sense of harmony reflects the tensions inherent to this transitional period.

’Working from the black towards the light’: Modernist wood-engraving and photography

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“Promenade Along the Coast: (Re)visiting Dymchurch in the Works of Paul Nash and Dave McKean”

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Recension pour la revue Cercles : Alan Greenlees, Fiona Hayes, Joanna Meacock, Mark Roberts (eds.), Fred A. Farrell: Glasgow’s War Artist (Glasgow Museums & Philip Wilson Publishers, 2014).

Interfaces volume 39: "Gestures and their Traces"

International audience; This, the first of two volumes featuring the topic of gestures, presents a selection of essays published in the wake of the Interfaces conference that was held at Université de Bourgogne (Dijon, France) in June 2017 (“Gestures in Texts and the Visual Arts”). Volumes 39 and 40 inaugurate a new phase in the publishing history of the journal as we are moving from print to digital publication.The present collection brings together contributions that encompass philosophical analysis, media archaeology and artistic experimentation with a bent for anthropology, art history and intermediality. They emphasize the reconstructive nature of critical and artistic enquiry when dea…

Illustration and Intermedial Avenues

International audience; This volume contains nine original articles by artists and researchers who offer a variety of perspectives on illustration from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. This selection is the result of the research work carried out by Illustr4tio, a French interdisciplinary network devoted to expanding the field of Illustration Studies worldwide and to bringing together illustrators, printmakers, publishers, curators, collectors and academics who have a common interest in illustration. It offers a wide spectrum of stances and practices which highlight the intermedial dimension of the illustrative image. The topics under consideration range from the illustrator's an…

Julie Maeck et Matthias Steinle (dir.). L’Image d’archives. Une image en devenir. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016, 339 p.

Recension pour la revue Cercles : Laurent Mellet, Jonathan Coe : Les politiques de l’intime (Paris : Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2015).

Les Possibilités de survie sur notre planète

National audience; Traduction du premier chapitre de The Possibility of Life’s Survival on the Planet de Patrick Keiller (Londres, Tate Publishing, 2012).

Eccentricity in Mervyn Peake’s work

International audience; Ce chapitre analyse l’un des motifs principaux de l’œuvre de Mervyn Peake: l’excentricité et ses modes d’expression textuelle et picturale dans Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948) et Figures of Speech (1954), au sein de l’intertexte formé par les biographies d’excentriques et le nonsense.

Recension : David Fraser Jenkins, John Piper: The Forties (Londres: Philip Wilson publishers, 2000 / 2012) pour la revue Cercles.

Compte-rendu d'ouvrage

Ivy and Bones: ruins and reversibility during the Blitz

"Ivy and bones: ruins and reversibility during the Blitz" examines how the representation of the ruins of the Blitz is informed by the aesthetic and semiotic tension between abstraction, modernist purity and picturesque accretion. Subsequently building on the notion of reversibility, it explores the way wartime destruction and/or cultural decline is recorded as well as counteracted and compensated for in works by Elizabeth Bowen, Herbert Furst, Claire Leighton, Rose Macaulay, John Piper, and Virginia Woolf. The trope of reversibility provides a template to consider some of the sites where aesthetic conflicts are re-enacted, from blitzed spaces to the printed page as threatened modernist art…

Lines or Dots? Reproduction Processes in Handbooks on Illustration, 1890s-1910s

International audience; This chapter examines the way that black and white illustrators came to terms with the industrial use of photomechanical processes and the major changes that occurred in the reproduction of illustrations from the 1890s to the early decades of the 20th century. It explores how handbooks on illustration and illustrators’ autobiographies reflected the need to preserve the so-called “vitality” of the graphic line, an autographic trace of the artist’s gesture. It focuses on the contemporary description and reception of half-tone, the screened process that breaks up tone into dots and that was used to reproduce wash, watercolour, and photographs. This process was often cri…

Recension pour la revue Cercles : Maeve Gilmore (ed.), Peake’s Progress: Selected Writings & Drawings of Mervyn Peake (Londres: British Library 2011).

Compte-rendu d'ouvrage

Évolution de la critique intermédiale dans Word & Image : le cas de l'illustration

International audience; Cet article analyse l'évolution de la critique intermédiale dans la revue Word & Image en s'attachant au cas précis de l'illustration à partir du corpus constitué par tous les articles publiés sur le sujet par la revue jusqu'en février 2017.

Expiation et filiation dans Death of a Hero de Richard Aldington

International audience