http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1544 Sun, 19 May 2013 16:18:52 GMT 2013-05-19T16:18:52Z http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk:80/retrieve/3710/ACE.jpg http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1544 http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5633 Title: Surrealism and psychoanalysis in the work of Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff: 1935-1940 Authors: Montanaro, Lee Ann Abstract: The story of the collaboration between the psychoanalyst Dr Grace Pailthorpe and the artist Reuben Mednikoff is indeed an extraordinary one. The aim of this thesis is to throw light upon their joint research project between 1935, when they first met, and 1940, when they were expelled from the British Surrealist group with which they had been closely involved since its official launch in 1936. The project that Pailthorpe and Mednikoff plunged into just days after they first met in February 1935 focused on how art could be used as a way of curing mental problems. Paintings and drawings produced ‘automatically’ were used as a means to bring memories to a conscious level. Many personal tensions, obsessions and fears that had lain dormant and repressed were released and detailed commentaries and explanations followed every work they produced in order for the exercise to be fully therapeutic. The aim was to externalise the unconscious and reintegrate it with the conscious. Despite the fact that Pailthorpe’s work was hailed as ‘the best and most truly Surrealist’ by the leader of the Surrealist movement, André Breton, at the 1936 International Surrealist exhibition in London, which brought the movement to Britain, the couple were expelled from the British Surrealist group just four years later and moved to America into relative obscurity. After their deaths, Pailthorpe and Mednikoff’s drawings and paintings were dispersed and their commentaries never read. My thesis provides biographies of Pailthorpe and Mednikoff before they met. It analyses the work they made together, discussing the impact on their thinking not only of Surrealism but also of psychoanalytic theory, notably the work of Melanie Klein. Apart from this, the thesis also reintegrates the couple into the history of Surrealism in England. Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5633 2010-11-26T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5631 Title: "Puppeteer of your own past” Marcel Duchamp and the manipulation of posterity Authors: Lee, Michelle Anne Abstract: The image of Marcel Duchamp as a brilliant but laconic dilettante has come to dominate the literature surrounding the artist’s life and work. His intellect and strategic brilliance were vaunted by his friends and contemporaries, and served as the basis of the mythology that has been coalescing around the artist and his work since before his death in 1968. Though few would challenge these attributions of intelligence, few have likewise considered the role that Duchamp’s prodigious mind played in bringing about the present state of his career. Many of the signal features of Duchamp’s artistic career: his avoidance of the commercial art market, his cultivation of patrons, his “retirement” from art and the secret creation and posthumous unveiling of his Étant Donnés: 1° la chute d’eau/2° le gaz d’éclairage, all played key roles in the development of the Duchampian mythos. Rather than treating Duchamp’s current art historical position as the fortuitous result of chance, this thesis attempts to examine the many and subtle ways in which Duchamp worked throughout his life to control how he and his work were and are perceived. Such an examination necessarily begins at the start of his relationship with the general and specialist media, through the auspices of his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. This is followed by an examination of Duchamp’s decades-long relationship with the press through the interviews given during his life. Duchamp’s concern for his physical legacy is explored next, initially through his relationships with his two dominant patrons, Walter and Louise Arensberg and Katherine Dreier. Not only did he act as advisor and dealer in the development of both prestigious collections, Duchamp had the privileged position of participant in the negotiations surrounding the disposition of the collections he had helped to build. Duchamp’s concern for the preservation of his physical legacy continued after the installation of his own work within major American museums. Thus, next is considered the development and effects of the two large-scale retrospectives of Duchamp’s work held within his lifetime. Finally is considered the role of Duchamp’s posthumous work, the Étant Donnés. Through the combination of secrecy and strategically revealed hints, Duchamp ensured that his final work would engender discussion long after his death. Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5631 2010-06-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5505 Title: Play and learning in Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s games Authors: Orrock, Amy Louise Abstract: This thesis offers a reassessment of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Children’s Games (1560, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna). Addressing the lack of historically accurate interpretations of Bruegel’s panel, I use a wide range of sixteenth-century sources to develop fresh insights into how the work might have been understood by its original audience. The Introduction opens with a description of the painting’s iconography, provenance, current condition and conservation history. A review of previous literature relating to the panel sets Children’s Games within the trajectory of scholarship on Bruegel and other related works in his oeuvre and serves to highlight areas of scholarly difficulty and disagreement as well as current methodological trends. Considering the reception, rather than the inception, of Children’s Games, the third part of the Introduction outlines broader cultural developments which shaped habits of looking in the sixteenth century, including encyclopaedic texts, atlases, Wunderkammern and memory systems. Surmising that Bruegel’s viewers would have been adept at searching for arguments within abundant collections of material, I then introduce a number of sixteenth-century sources which detail contemporary attitudes towards game-playing. The Introduction ends with an outline of the structure and methodological approach of the thesis. Chapter 1, 'Artistic Precedents: Illuminated Manuscripts', considers the panel in relation to the iconography of popular games found in the borders of illuminated manuscripts produced in France and the Netherlands in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. After highlighting areas of shared iconography, I discuss how Children’s Games differs from illuminated manuscripts, concluding that Bruegel rejected the 'game of the month' tradition found in the calendar borders and instead amalgamated a variety of children’s games and festive customs to create a humanistic encyclopaedia of children’s culture. A second sixteenth-century source which details popular games is François Rabelais’s book Gargantua (1532). Chapter 2 presents my research into why Rabelais’s writing is relevant to Bruegel scholarship, including archival evidence that Rabelais’s books were available in Antwerp and an analysis of the Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (1565), a collection of woodcuts which combined Rabelais’s name with Bruegelian imagery. I then compare Children's Games with the list of 217 popular games played by Gargantua and discuss how these fictional lists related to the factual compilations of the period. Gargantua’s game-list occurs in the context of his humanist education, a context which is also relevant to Bruegel’s panel. During the sixteenth century a wealth of material on children’s play and deportment emerged in the form of humanist school colloquies and treatises. A number of these were closely related to the education system in Antwerp and were penned by members of Bruegel’s circle of associates. These have never been brought to bear on Children’s Games, and are used in chapter 3 to develop a new, historically-accurate reading of the painting. The pedagogical texts suggest that during the sixteenth century children’s play was viewed positively and was closely bound to education, and so challenge the canonical view arising chiefly from c.17th emblem books and paintings that Children’s Games makes moral points about adult behaviour. Appendix 1 - Enumerates Bruegel’s games and records comparable depictions found in manuscripts, printed images and paintings from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Appendix 2 - Presents versions of Gargantua’s game-list from original editions of Rabelais’s text alongside standard translations and modern critical editions. Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5505 2010-11-26T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5489 Title: Worlds writ small: four studies on miniature architectural forms in the medieval Middle East Authors: Graves, Margaret Susanna Abstract: While academic discussion of ornament within medieval Islamic art has laboured much over the codification and meaning of certain forms, there has been relatively little research to date on the visual and iconographic function of architecture as ornament in this context. Those few authors that have dealt with this issue have focused overwhelmingly on two-dimensional architectural representations, largely ignoring the considerable body of portable objects from the medieval Middle East that imitate architecture through three-dimensional forms, whether in a mimetically coherent fashion or in a more elliptical or reconfigured manner. This thesis proposes, first and foremost, that there is significant cultural meaning inherent in the use of architecture as an inspiration for the non-essential formal qualities of portable objects from the medieval Islamic world. Through iconographic analysis of the relationships that such objects form with architecture, an understanding of both full-size architecture and its miniature incarnations in the medieval urban context is advanced within the thesis. To maximise the intellectual scope of the study whilst still enabling an in-depth treatment of the material, four discrete studies of different object groups are presented. All of these are thought to date from approximately 1000 to 1350 CE, and to come from the core Middle Eastern territories of Persia, Syria and Egypt. The first chapter examines the glazed ceramic ‘house models’ believed to originate in late or post-Seljuq Persia. The second discusses six-sided ceramic tables from the same milieu, and more numerous related tables produced in Syria during the same period. In the third chapter carved marble jar stands from Cairo, apparently produced from the twelfth century onwards, are analysed. The final chapter, on metalwork, broadens its approach to encompass two very different strains of production: inkwells from Khurasan and incense burners from the breadth of the Middle East. Because much of the thesis focuses on material that has been dramatically understudied, it performs the primary action of compiling examples of each of the object types under study. Though this information is presented as a catalogue vi sommaire, this component of the thesis is not regarded as an end in itself. The major tasks of the thesis are the identification of the architectural tropes that are being evoked within each object group, analysis of the manner in which those forms have been modified to suit the miniature context of the objects, and the location of meaning within such diminutive evocations of architectural form. Through comparisons with other objects, full-size architecture, two-dimensional representations of architecture and historical texts, the thesis moves discourse on this type of motif in Islamic art beyond the traditional and sometimes superficial discussion of ‘ornament’, re-setting architectural iconography within larger contexts of urbanisation and city culture of the medieval Islamic world. Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5489 2010-11-26T00:00:00Z