In October 2018, I took a research trip to the Fonds Roland Barthes at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. I had just started writing a book on Barthes, and I wanted to learn more about the amateur painting and doodling that flits through Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: for example, an early drawing in marker whose pleasure and stupidity Barthes comments on in the lower left corner

In May 1929, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held an exhibition of German paintings under the banner of “Neue Sachlichkeit,” based on Gustav Hartlaub’s seminal 1925 show at the Kunsthalle Mannheim of the same title. The Amsterdam leg of the tour exhibited many of the same artists included in the original program. Well-known painters such as George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Carl Mense, and George Schrimpf hung alongside several other artists who did not appear in the Mannheim iteration, including Franz Radziwill, Christian Schad, and Carl Grossberg. Exhibition organizers capitalized on the Dutch art world’s growing appreciation for the return to figuration that was emerging among artists associated with the Onafhankelijken (Independents) group in Amsterdam who also happened to be on display at the Stedelijk that month. By that time critics had begun to observe in the work of Pyke Koch, Carel Willink, Raoul Hynckes, Dick Ket, Charley Toorop, and Wim Schuhmacher, among others, echoes of “Magic Realism,” a figurative idiom sometimes synonymous with Neue Sachlichkeit, known for its cold visual sobriety and emphasis on banal subject matter. Often described as more of a broad stylistic tendency than a concise movement, Magic Realism was an idiom that transcended international boundaries, emerging simultaneously in Italy, Germany, France, and beyond, where it provided an aesthetic language to convey the experience of physical, psychological, and economic devastation that followed World War I, and the more generalized anxieties that accompanied the accelerating clip of modernization. Emerging nearly a decade after these other European variants, the major exemplars of Dutch Magic Realism expressed many of these same concerns as their stylistic predecessors but distinguished themselves in their pointed references to the temporal disjunctures and synthetic mediation of the film apparatus. These methods, I argue, allowed the aforementioned painters to visualize the rapid-paced, and sometimes dehumanizing, experience of modern life. A look into their production in the late 1920s and early 1930s will set the stage for a closer investigation into the understudied influence of film on interwar figurative painting in the rest of Europe and abroad.

Major advances in modernist poetics have long occurred through contact with experiments in the visual and plastic arts: one need only think of the “cubist” poetics of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Gertrude Stein, of the New York School’s links to Abstract Expressionism, or, most recently, of conceptual writing’s regular citation of Brion Gysin’s claim that “writing is fifty years behind painting.” Poets would find their community amongst artists; but also, the poetics itself would emerge out of critical engagement with the work of the poets’ artist peers: adapting compositional practices and techniques; adopting conceptual vocabularies. At times, this leads to intermedia experiment ( Calligrammes, collage, concrete work); at others, to a renewed focus on the medium–specificity of poetry: both the peculiar possibilities of language as material and resource for art–making, and the repertoire of techniques and conventions through which this material is deployed. The work of W. S. Graham (1918–1986) is at once an exemplary and singular instance in this history. If his life was spent in obscurity and neglect, Graham’s work is nevertheless central to any story of modernist poetics in Britain from 1940 onwards: he was associated with the “New Apocalypse” poets of the early 1940s, and then came under the patronage of T. S. Eliot at Faber at the end of that decade, before falling out of fashion as the anti-modernist “Movement” began its long hegemonic rule over the various organs of poetic taste. But he is also central to the story of modernist art over the same period. Unlike Stein and Reverdy, John Ashbery and Barbara Guest, Graham was not an art critic; but like them, he was a “poet among painters”: in Glasgow, London, but most of all St Ives. He was apprenticed in the shipyards of Clydeside in his teens, first as a draughtsman and then as trainee engineer, and in later life would produce meticulously rendered calligraphic copies of his poems, as well as watercolors, sketches, abstracts, and mixed-media works.

“Well this exhibition feels a little too timely,” my colleague Clare Davies posted to Facebook during a November 21, 2016 visit to Art et liberté: Rupture, guerre et surréalisme en Egypte (1938-1948) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The exhibit—a major contribution to contemporary

In 2011, the Japanese government designated Yasuda Yukihiko’s Camp at Kisegawa ( Kisegawa no jin, 1940-41) as an Important Cultural Property ( Jūyō bunkazai) (fig. 1). The left half of the painting, which portrays Minamoto Yoshitsune (1159-1189), a famous warrior from the Kamakura period (1185-1333), was initially produced and exhibited in 1940 as The Arrival of Yoshitsune (Yoshitsune sanchaku). The right half, which depicts Yoshitsune’s older brother Yoritomo (1147-1199), was added later, and the artist then titled the completed work Camp at Kisegawa (Kisegawa no jin). The finished painting, executed in ink on two paper folding screens, shows the much-desired reunion between the two men before their battle against the rival Heike clan. Given that the list of Important Cultural Properties includes Dogū clay sculptures from the Neolithic Jōmon period and the Niō sculptures at Hōryūji temple in Nara, the designation made Yasuda’s painting a canonical work of Japanese art. What this downplays, however, is the fact that the work was produced during the Second World War and served a political function. Since the Meiji period (1868-1912), which witnessed the intensive modernization and Westernization projects of Enlightenment and Civilization ( Bunmei kaika), there have been two broad categories of Japanese painting: Japanese-style paintings ( nihonga), executed in ink/color on paper/silk, and Western-style paintings ( yōga), created with oil on canvas. Japanese-style paintings have most often been considered as supportive of tradition, while the Western-style paintings have been linked to modernity. Nevertheless, during the Second World War, many Western-style painters were dispatched to the front to depict battles and political events, because of the medium’s supposed ability for realism. Western-style painter Miyamoto Saburō, for example, depicted an encounter between Japanese and British generals on the occasion of the Japanese occupation of Singapore in his The Meeting of General Yamashita and General Percival ( Yamashita pāshibaru ryōshireikan kaikenzu, 1942). The painting communicates Japan’s victory over Britain through the generals’ contrasting gestures: Japanese General Yamashita sits near the center of the painting in an imposing posture while three British officials in the foreground look at each other, unable to confront Yamashita. Since, on the other hand, it was generally agreed that Japanese-style painting was not conducive to realism, few Japanese-style painters depicted contemporary soldiers or battles; instead, during the war years, they continued to take as their subject matter traditional iconography, such as religious and historical figures, scenes of nature, and beautiful women.