The preface to Hope Mirrlees’s 1919 novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists sets forth a statement of aesthetics and reads like a seminal text of modernism. However, the novel was published in a limited run in 1919 and has never been reprinted. In the brief paratext, Mirrlees outlines a distinctively modernist and materialist conception of literature, the threads of which can be traced throughout her oeuvre. The preface begins: Fiction—to adapt a famous definition of law—is the meeting-point...

There is no gentle way into the later twentieth-century work of the painter Prunella Clough. It is, as this paper will argue, a difficult kind of realism, embedded in an obdurate poetry of form. But for the viewer of Clough’s visual work or the reader of her extensive notes and diaries, it is also a brutal appraisal of the world at mid-century through an uncompromising reassessment of the process of paintings. “Considerations. Pickaxe etc. Multiple object forms repetitive, why? Cf human forms in assembly” wrote Clough in 1958 at the beginning of a typed page of claims and questions that interrogate her evolving process and subject matter. Written in a characteristic manner, at once telegraphic and peculiarly poetic, Clough is preoccupied here with the machinic and the depiction of mechanical form. She intertwines questions of paint: “warm red (madder) browns & clear Indians [yellows]. With green?” with concerns about composition and scale that also indicate anxieties about dealing with the logic of the machine and the processes under scrutiny. It is “almost meaningless without man or man-scale e.g. bicycle,” she speculates: unless rendered if possible without ascertainable scale as equivalent of traditional landscape (evocative horizon etc) or aesthetic detail (factory objects of mere scrap-abs), or mere lime waste water eg where pipes which had made connection had to be killed (?this). What basic landscape forms remain to be used? What others . . . can be made significant? For “interior” [landscapes] e.g. yards question of man/object grouping & space organising. (Clough, note)

“Poets in Vogue” is an interdisciplinary exhibition held at the National Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre, London, from 17 February to 10 September 2023. Sophie Oliver (University of Liverpool) and Sarah Parker (Loughborough University) worked with Gesa Werner, an expert costume-maker and mounter, to explore the relationship between poetry and clothes through the work and dress of seven twentieth-century women poets. The exhibition includes imaginative recreations of some of these poets’ signature “looks,” along with archival and reconstructed garments. In the following reflections on making the exhibition, Sophie’s and Sarah’s words are distinct, to emphasize two specific concerns of the project: a collaborative process and the materiality of language.

In a lecture entitled “Fairytale about Three Sisters: Painting, Architecture, Sculpture,” influential fin-de-siècle Russian architect and devotee of the art nouveau style Fyodor Shekhtel proposed that, “architecture, painting, and sculpture ought to go hand in hand in friendly collaborative work; this friendship, of course, encompasses equally artists working in furniture, bronze, ceramics, painting on glass and all the other branches of applied art. [1] By anthropomorphizing artistic genres as...

Almost as soon as they began corresponding in 1930, T. S. Eliot told Emily Hale that he treasured her letters—not just the words, but the paper itself: “I cannot bear to be separated from your letters at present, not so much for need to refer to the contents, some of which I repeat to myself often during the day and night, but for the touch of the paper and sight of the writing.”

At the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York City––a show attuned to the intense political divisions and racial tensions in the United States today––one artist stood out for her reuse of images of resistance from various moments in the history of modernity, marked by figures such as Marx and Engels, Muhammad Ali, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s Veterans Day (2016), a large oil painting on linen, stages these images in a domestic interior space with yellow wallpaper speckled with flowers and a vintage stereo emanating visual notes that unfurl throughout the room (fig. 1). The most salient image for understanding how Veterans Day represents the transnational scale of civil war is the small reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which is dwarfed by the much larger photographic depiction of American brigadiers who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War (fig. 2). On close examination, one can see, through her signature style of cartoonish wit, that Dupuy-Spencer portrays Guernica as kitsch––a small poster that has been ripped in half and torn from the top, stopping at the horrific screams of the horse and obscuring the lightbulb (fig. 3). The poster seems to have undergone a life of movement, having been stuck and unstuck from other walls, affectionately moved from other spaces. Guernica endures as an object in exile—unmoored from its own historical context and adrift among other contexts. For Dupuy-Spencer, Guernica enables her to register an historical relation between the legacies of the Spanish Civil War and the United States’ own Civil War and to cite and revise the aesthetic practice of modernism.

Although Mina Loy consorted with nearly every historical avant-garde movement, she was contained by none and is rarely mentioned in their histories. She’s not alone in this regard. Canonical histories and theories of the avant-garde typically marginalize the work of women, people of color, queer, and disabled artists. Despite significant efforts to articulate the importance of gender, sexuality, and race to the avant-garde, scholars have yet to offer a comprehensive theory of the avant-garde that accounts for the experiences of marginalized artists who were often ambivalent about claiming affiliation with white, male-dominated movements.