Frederico Castellon: His Graphic Works 1936–1971 by August L. Freundlich (review)

Books 165 Jean Hagstrum advances the understanding of the enigma of Blake in whom paradoxical and contradictory qualities of Neoclassicism and Romanticism conjoin and for whom Edmund Burke's definition of the beautiful and the sublime includes grace and terror. Eitner, Woodring, Karl Kroeber, and Ronald Paulson deal with Burke's views of the sublime, and Martin Meisel takes a special approach to his views in his study of the 'material sublime'. L.J. Swingle in Wordsworth's Pictures of the Mind corroborates Arnheim's statements about the way the mind transforms experience into mental pictures. He makes a worthy plea that scholars not discuss Wordsworth's word-pictures out of context, but he is himself guilty of reading Wordsworth too literally and of omitting a consideration of rhythms and phonemic elements that generate meaning. Paulson's essay on Turner's use of the Sun might be read in conjunction with Swingle's study. James A. Heffernan's The English Romantic Perception of Color complements Swingle's and Woodring's essays by contrasting the antithetical concepts of nature and ways of 'seeing' among Augustans and Romantics, exemplified by Reynolds and Turner. The Augustan 'fixes' nature in a harmony according to rules of chiaroscuro and controlled color; the Romantic finds that 'in nature everything is distinct, yet nothing is defined into absolute independent singleness'. Karl Kroeber considers the 'temporal sublime', central to Wordsworth's poetry, Scott's and Tolstoy's fiction, Carlyle's histories and Turner's painting. He finds Turner challenged Claude's historical paintings both in what he included and left out, what he depicted through structure and through color, through single tonalities and interacting complexities. Thus, seemingly insignificant details, even incongruities, if considered imaginatively, can become significant. Paulson augments the discussions of Turner by Kroeber, Walling, and Heffernan on the significance in his paintings of details and peripheral inclusions, in particular Turner's landscapes with depictions of the Sun and how verbal meanings have been given them by scholars. The verbal interpretations result from Turner's way of seeing world and self, an inherently romantic way of experiencing reality. Thus, the Sun as a vortex can be taken simultaneously to symbolize an enlightening revolutionary creator and a bloody destroyer like the wind in Shelley's 'West Wind'. R.F. Storch's essay, Abstract Idealism in English Romantic Poetry and Painting, purports to apply the techniques of psychoanalysis to the works of Shelley, Turner, Constable and Wordsworth; instead, he diagnoses their personalities. I thought I would not again encounter this kind of naive sentence: 'The idealization of woman [in Shelley's 'Epipsychidion '] is a defense against repressed ambivalence toward his mother.' His main point is that 'idealization and abstraction are defenses against inner destructiveness', a means for 'keeping a natural world at bay'. In Turner he finds 'evidence for the oral and sadomasochistic traits ... prominent in his works, as well as in Ruskin's response to them ...'. He begs the question by telling readers, whom he patronizes, what they do and do not 'take pleasure' in. Martin Meisel examines John Martin's very popular apocalyptic illusions produced for the theatre, disparagingly called the 'material sublime', with Turner's paradisal ones and arrives at an understanding of the romantic concept as a yearning for dematerialization of the sublime. Meisel conjectures that Martin's presentations of visions of darkness retain a sufficiently recognizable bounded form to permit an audience to be thrilled while being terrorized, whereas Turner's paradisal paintings draw viewers into a vortex of light that dissolves self and boundaries and so forces viewers subjectively to imagine paradise anew; a viewer lacking an active imagination , however, may suffer insecurity and resentment at the loss of bounded space. This well-illustrated collection of essays should stimulate those, at any level, interested in verbal and visual affinities in works by British romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries. A Tribute to Paul Klee (1879-1940). David Burnett. National Museums of Canada, Ottawa, 1979. 125 pp., illus. Paper. Reviewed by S.I. Clerk" This catalogue, with the text in English and in French, was printed for the first exhibition of Klee's works in Canada to mark the centenary of his birth...