View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by OpenGrey Repository A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Lost Works of Art: A Critical and Creative Study of Reception and Restitution Bethan Stevens DPhil, Creative and Critical Writing University of Sussex January 2012 3 Acknowledgements Thanks to my supervisor, Nicholas Royle, whose support and generous criticism have encouraged and inspired me throughout. My thanks also to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this research. I am grateful to staff at the research institutions that I have visited, particularly Agnew’s Gallery, the University of Sussex Special Collections and the British Museum. I am also very grateful to Derek Handley and Chris Petts, for sharing their work on Doctor Who with me, and for allowing me to interview and quote them here. Friends, family and colleagues have been valued readers of my work and have offered tremendously helpful responses and conversations at various stages of the project. Thanks to Sarah Jackson for being an insightful reader and a supportive friend throughout. I am also extremely grateful to Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies for comments on chapter 1; to Helen Bruder for her responses to chapter 3; to Vicky Blunden, Abi Curtis, Georgina Lock, Mônica Ribeiro, Karen Schaller and Sheena Stevens for their suggestions on the novella; and to Miles Mitchard, David Mellor, Katie Reid and Marcus Wood for conversations at the start of the project. Finally, thanks to my dear family and friends for all their love and encouragement. 4 University of Sussex Bethan Stevens, DPhil in Creative and Critical Writing Lost Works of Art: A Critical and Creative Study of Reception and Restitution Summary This thesis examines pieces of visual art that are untraced, stolen or otherwise understood as lost. It conceptualises how this alters artworks. Are they still ‘objects’ in ‘visual’ culture? Might they become literature? Lost works continue to be circulated and interpreted through practices of remembrance, narrative and often through visual reproductions. These become extraordinarily overdetermined once a work vanishes. I investigate this process in four critical case studies and a novella. The first study looks at Vanessa Bell’s painting The Nursery (1930-32), a major work which has been critically neglected because unavailable. I ask what this can tell us about memory and nostalgia, and explore the ghostliness of visual representations. The second study examines Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the period after it was stolen (1911-13). I closely read some startling journalistic responses to this and to earlier, Victorian thefts. Through these writings there emerges a new kind of ekphrasis and a new conception of the museum. My third study builds on these readings of visual and literary restitutions to consider how lost art could inspire a corresponding critical methodology. With reference to writings on aesthetics by Burke and Derrida, I look at William Blake’s Virgil woodcuts, reading them through their missing parts, including chopped-off edges. The fourth study explores how lost works can be restituted creatively as well as critically. I analyse missing episodes of Doctor Who, which have inspired reconstructions from fans – an active audience of lost art. Finally, my novella tells the story of a curator of an illicit museum; it uses the epistolary form, which has a history of creating drama through lost letters. My conclusion suggests how, using evidence to feel for what cannot be seen, a focus on lost art can spark unique ways of thinking about vision, writing and criticism. 5 Contents Acknowledgements 3 Summary 4 Abbreviations 6 List of Illustrations 7 Introduction 9 Chapter 1: The Memory Loss of Art: Vanessa Bell’s The Nursery 26 Chapter 2: Spekphrasis: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa 42 Chapter 3: Miniatures unbound: William Blake’s Virgil Woodcuts 72 Chapter 4: Tele-visionaries: the BBC’s Doctor Who 100 Novella: Letters from the Lost Museum 136 Conclusion 253 Illustrations Following p. 256 Works Cited 257 6 Abbreviations BLN 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Gale digital collections, online database. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, Cengage Learning. OED The Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2nd ed. OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. UKP 19th Century UK Periodicals. Gale digital collections, online database. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, Cengage Learning. 7 Illustrations Following p. 256 1. Christoph Gerigk, untitled photograph. 2-3. Ministerio de Cultura, República de Colombia, No dejes que se fugue nuestro patrimonio [Don’t let our heritage run away]. 4. Vanessa Bell, The Nursery. 5. Jean Béraud, La Brasserie. 6. Photograph of Julian Bell at Asheham. 7. Photograph of Quentin Bell. 8. Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist. 9. Fireplace with painted tiles by Vanessa Bell. 10. Vanessa Bell, The Nursery, another version. 11. Lucian Freud, Wanted. 12. Sophie Calle, Last Seen (Rembrandt, The Storm in the Sea of Galilee). 13. ‘Vacant Space in the Louvre where the lost Mona Lisa hung’, The Daily Mirror. 14. William Nicholson, Le Retour de la Joconde [The Return of the Mona Lisa]. 15-27. William Blake, ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’. 28-30. Anonymous wood engraver after William Blake, ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’, continued. 31-34. William Blake, ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’, continued. 35-42. William Blake, ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’, proof impressions. 43-46. William Blake, ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’, trial versions. 47. John Byfield after William Blake, ‘The Giant Polypheme, from a famous picture by N. Poussin’. 8 48. Étienne Baudet after Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Polyphemus. 49. Anonymous, ‘The Cyclops, Polypheme’. 50. Anonymous, ‘The Golden Age’. 51. Anonymous, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’. 52. Anonymous, ‘Illustrations to Eclogue 2’. 53. William Blake, ‘William’, from the illuminated book Milton a Poem. 54. William Blake, ‘Robert’, from the illuminated book Milton a Poem. 55. William Blake, ‘And I only am escaped along to tell thee’. 56. William Blake, drawing for the ‘First Comparison’ for ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’. 57. Still from ‘The Roof of the World’, Doctor Who. Loose Cannon reconstruction. 58-60. Stills from ‘The Roof of the World’, Doctor Who. Reconstruction by Smiddylad. 61. Still from ‘The Roof of the World’, Doctor Who. Loose Cannon reconstruction. 62-3. Stills from ‘The Roof of the World’, Doctor Who. Reconstruction by Smiddylad. 64. Still from ‘The Roof of the World’, Doctor Who. Loose Cannon reconstruction. 65. After Maarten van Heemskerck, Crucifixion. 66. Anonymous, Christ on the cross. 67. Anonymous, Christ as the man of sorrows standing in his tomb. 68-9. Stills from ‘The Wall of Lies’, Doctor Who. Loose Cannon reconstruction. 70. Still from ‘Assassin at Peking’, Doctor Who. Loose Cannon reconstruction. 71-3. Stills from ‘Five Hundred Eyes’, Doctor Who. Loose Cannon reconstruction. 9 Introduction Lost works of art contribute to visual culture despite and through their absence. Because we know they have existed and continue to talk, write and think about them, lost works elbow their way spectrally into the canon. My thesis thinks through the role played by lost works as imagined objects, and the narratives that attach to them. This is most apparent with famous works: we might recall Pheidias’s Athena Parthenos, Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda, or the bronze version of Michelangelo’s David.1 But the loss of more ephemeral works also resonates through other texts. Consider, for example, the painted hangings that hung in people’s houses in seventeenth-century England, which have not survived and are pictured today through related prints and terse descriptions in wills and inventories (Foister 1981, 273-82). Lost art is intangibly ubiquitous; it is likely that more works of art have vanished or been destroyed than are extant (although such a question is by nature impossible to answer). This thesis has developed from my belief that there is a need for a considered methodology when writing about lost works, and that their difference from extant ones ought to be conceptualised. With lost objects slipping out of visual culture, I also argue that they have a special relationship with literature. I begin with a passage from Gombrich’s classic survey The Story of Art: The fame of Pheidias is founded on works which no longer exist. But it is not unimportant to try to imagine what they were like, because we forget too easily what purpose Greek art still served at that time… As we walk along the rows of white marble statues from classical antiquity in the great museums, we too often forget that among them are these idols of which the Bible speaks: that people prayed before them, that sacrifices were brought to them amidst strange incantations, and that thousands and tens of thousands of worshippers may have approached them with hope and fear in their hearts – wondering, as the prophet says, whether these statues and graven images were not really at the same time 1 For these works see Gombrich ([1950] 1984, 53-55), Meyer and Glover (1989, 75-82), Levine (1984, 91-120) and Flick (2003, 50-63). 10 gods themselves… The sculptures in our museums are, for the most part, only secondhand copies made in Roman times for travellers and collectors as souvenirs, and as decorations for gardens or public baths.