edited by Sarah Kay and Timothy Mathews
https://uclpress.co.uk/book/the-modernist-bestiary/
This collection of writing is a collection of voices all responding to the power of art. Its entry point is the response of artists to each other, which is the beginning of these artists’ invitation to their viewers and readers. In 1979, why would Graham Sutherland spend some of the last months of his life creating new images in response to poems Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in 1911? Why did it become important to him to breathe another life into these poems? They were written as a bestiary, and what echoes and tones might have been swimming around in Apollinaire’s mind as he engaged with that tradition, in yet another of his attempts to span the old and the new? How do Raoul Dufy’s woodcuts contribute to the chorus, and what sort of book was made in 1911 by his pictures and Apollinaire’s poems together? And what do we see now in Dufy’s woodcuts, now that Sutherland’s procession of aquatints has dismissed them from view?
There is something silent about engaging with any image, just like there is about reading, and bringing the two together creates still more ways of talking about voices that are silenced. But the gathering of voices in the pieces in this volume developed through various pairings and groupings, and as the individuals involved became taken up in the effects of Sutherland’s images. The intimate space of the Prints and Drawings Room in Tate Britain as well as the gallery’s staff provided privileged moments in which conversations charged off in many different directions, and for myself I felt that Sutherland’s image-making was a springboard into what stays quiet within each one of us, and reappears or disappears in all sorts of fits and starts.
Timothy Mathews,
from this book
from this book
The Modernist Bestiary centres on Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée (1911), a multimedia collaborative work by French-Polish poet Guillaume Apollinaire and French artist Raoul Dufy, and its homonym, The Bestiary or Procession of Orpheus (1979), by British artist Graham Sutherland. Rather than reconstructing the lineage of these two compositions, the book uncovers the aesthetic and intellectual processes involved that operate in different times, places and media. The Apollinaire and Dufy Bestiary is an open-ended collaboration, a feature that Sutherland develops in his re-visiting, and this book shows how these neglected works are caught up in many-faceted networks of traditions and genres. These include Orphic poetry from the past, contemporary musical settings, and bestiary writing from its origins to the present. The nature of productive dialogue between thought and art, and the refracted light they throw on each other are explored in each of the pieces in the book, and the aesthetic experience emerges as generative rather than reductive or complacent.
A beautifully composed, colour-illustrated volume… Every Apollinairian, and every intermedial modernist, will thrill to this superb set of essays in its illumination of cultural co-production as a resonant subject and as a mode of critical enquiry.
Susan Harrow,
French Studies
French Studies
Enacting in multiple compelling ways the mobility and relationality at the heart of its concerns, this collection makes a major contribution to the various fields into which it intervenes, including modernist studies, translation studies, critical animal studies, and research into intermedial transmission, especially between text and image and text and music.
Martin Crowley,
University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge