VIRGINIA WOOLF, WRITINGS ON ART

2023-05-16 10:43:00

VIRGINIA WOOLF, WRITINGS ON ART, ed. La Micro, Madrid, 2022. 110 pgs.

Dew of the Villa

As if it were another story by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) in which she misses women in institutions, the author’s facet as an art critic has gone practically unnoticed until now. These texts, published in newspapers, magazines and catalogs between 1920 and 1934, had been scattered among the volumes of her complete works, until her recent meeting in Oh, to Be a Pinter!, hastily translated under the more sober title writings on art. For this reason, it is almost inexplicable that in the Spanish version the introduction of Claudia Tobin has been eliminated. If she was judged too British, she would have to be replaced by a Hispanic. This lack contrasts with a very careful edition, translated by Olivia de Miguel, annotated and well illustrated, where we can see most of the paintings that Virginia tells us about.

Several of these eight texts begin, like other stories by Virginia, from the narration of her own daily experiences on walks and visits, also sharing her interior monologues and that fine characteristic irony that disrupts deeply rooted convictions with apparent lightness but with a stroke of the pen. in uses, ways and walls of culture. Thus, upon arriving at an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, she laments the absence of the face of Harriet Taylor Mill, née Harriet Hardy, decisive for the claim of women’s rights and so influential over her second husband John Stuart Mill, who signed women’s slavery. And when facing an exhibition in a gallery, as a woman, the following reflection on the relationship between women and art arouses in her: “although for hundreds of years it has been admitted that women come into the world naked, until sixty years ago, it was held that For a woman, to look at nudity through the eyes of the artist and not simply through those of a mother, wife, or lover, corrupted her innocence and destroyed her domesticity. Hence the extreme activity of women in philanthropy, social life, religion and all activities that require clothing.

Coherent, he defends the painters of the avant-garde London Group, Thérèse Lessore and Vanessa Bell, his older sister, whom he includes in a review with Picasso and Sickert and in another text with Berthe Morisot and Marie Laurencin, also prefacing more than one exposure. Undoubtedly, the familiarity with the creative process of her sister, who would marry the art critic Clive Bell, placed Virginia in a peculiar place within the Bloomsbury group, which they both helped to form, and in which she would join in 1910. the painter, and prominent curator, critic and art theorist Roger Fry, a reference for Woolf in the longest text dedicated to Sickert’s narrative painting in which, recreating a social gathering, he defends the Cézannian model as the origin of a post-impressionism that does not distinguishes between shapes and decorative elements. Above all, it is color that defines painting.

Precisely, the relationship between painting and literature is one of the obsessions that runs through these texts by Woolf, convinced of the need for its specificity for both; and, at the same time, motivated by images to take literature further: transforming it into a minor literature, according to Deleuze’s interpretation. In “Pictures” (1925), Virginia places literature as the “most sociable and influential art of all” and recognizes it in her time “under the domination of painting”: before the images, the writers try to take the secrets of painting, untranslatable.

In fact, underlining its importance for the gestation of Virginia Woolf’s own literature, as she has studied Liliane Louvel, the painting gives title to some of his short stories, as well as optical resources such as mirrors, meta-artistic reflections and reflections on the history of art are frequent in them. Without forgetting the painter Lily, one of the protagonists of his novel to the lighthouse (1926).

Lastly, this small anthology includes two very interesting texts separated by a decade, “El cine” (1926) which anticipates the need for the image-time in Deleuzian terms for its necessary specificity. And “The artist and politics” (1936), where the various possibilities of relationship are revealed and Woolf inevitably commits himself in a time polarized between fascism and communism with the survival of art and the artist.