Lawrence & the Visual Arts

BOOK REVIEWS temporary Irish literature. Michael H. Begnal puts into question Stephen 's artistic effectiveness in instances such as the "botched portrait" of the bird girl near the end of Portrait. For Begnal, Stephen's imagination does far better in the epiphany that arises from the carved word "foetus" at his father's college in Cork. To my mind, Gottfried does the most interesting tracking of the young Joyce. He finds that "a young artist may assert aggressively a personal judgment against more conventional " values. However, "over time, with growing confidence and experience, the mature artist may no longer need to separate himself from the values of the times and may come to permit his temperament to engage values of his society that he once held in disdain." Thus at 17, writing on Ibsen, Joyce is judgmental, casting about for a wider audience , as is Stephen through much of his aesthetic posturing in Portrait. By the time Joyce was composing the dinner scene in "The Dead" and Christmas dinner in Portrait (1907 and 1912, respectively), he had learned to make comic use of mundane material, such as a banal sketch on carving a turkey which he may well have encountered in the Dublin Illustrograph. As a final aspect of Joyce through the Ages, two essayists, Vivian Valvano Lynch and Sandra Manoogian Pearce bring Joyce forward as a touchstone for later writers, Pearce comparing the influence of "The Dead" on specific stories by Edna O'Brien, Mary Lavin, and Sean O'Faolain , and Lynch setting useful criteria forjudging creative evocations of Joyce by the American authors William Kennedy, Peter Quinn, and Henry Roth. This collection is well worth consulting for a number of angles on Joyce's historical and cultural contexts, his development through periods of his own creative life, and his connections, backward and forward, to both literary and popular culture. Bonnie Kime Scott __________________ University of Delaware Lawrence & the Visual Arts Jack Stewart. The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. xiii + 251 pp. $39.95 GIVEN THE PROMINENCE of visual artists in the works of D. H. Lawrence, it is natural for critics and readers to be interested in the significance that Lawrence attached to such forms of creative expression as drawing, painting, and sculpture. To name a few of the most salient ex503 ELT 43 : 4 2000 amples: in Sons and Lovers Paul Morel is a painter, by avocation if not by profession; in The Rainbow, Will Brangwen is a wood carver; in Women in Love, Gudrun and Loerke are sculptors; in Lady Chatterley's Lover, Duncan Forbes (modeled on Duncan Grant) is a painter. For over twenty years, Jack Stewart has been examining the affinities between Lawrence and movements in modern art, looking to explore if not to explain the underlying vitalism of Lawrence's art by reference to the artistic credos of the household names in twentieth-century visual art. Now, in this full-length study, he gathers together and expands on numerous journal articles over the last two decades. Stewart's book is not the first to place Lawrence in the context of modern art. His does not supplant the studies by Keith Aldritt (1971), Marianna Torgovnik (1985), Nancy Kushigian (1990) and others, but, rather, complements them. His chief aim, as stated in the conclusion, is "to illustrate the range of Lawrence's styles by drawing parallels with impressionist, expressionist, primitivist, and futurist movements in the arts." Stewart concentrates on the post-impressionists Van Gogh, Gauguin , and Cézanne; the expressionists Kirchner and Nolde; and the Japanese woodblock artists Hokusai and Hiroshige. Because Stewart's book ranges so widely among modern artists and movements, and employs references to artistic techniques and particular art works (many of which are reproduced in this volume—but poorly), the reader with a solid foundation in modern art will get the most out of it. Sometimes the author is chary with his information. In the midst of discussions of expressionism, for example, he inserts references to Van Gogh or futurism so that some readers may be momentarily confused about the relationship of this artist or that movement to expressionism itself. Clearly, Stewart...