Читать книгу Sociology of the Arts - Victoria D. Alexander - Страница 27

Helsinger (1994) looks at how engravings made by the great landscape painter J.M.W. Turner in the 1820s and 1830s reflected aspects of English national identity. Helsinger situates Turner’s engravings, published in Picturesque Views in England and Wales, in “the genre of coffee‐table books that address readers as travelers” (p. 108). These books show pretty scenes from England that an actual tourist might see while traveling, and through them, middle class “picturesque travelers” can gain a symbolic possession of the country.

Purchase these books and you too may gain at least visual access to the land. The prints also…provide an analogue for experiences of touristic travel (itself established since the eighteenth century as a means of vicariously possessing England) and for the geographic and social mobility increasingly characteristic of their middle‐class, often urban purchasers. (p. 105)

When Turner was creating his views, England was facing particularly unsettled times. Unemployed workers were circulating about the country, generating fears of mob violence (both justified and unjustified) among the middle and upper classes. Turner’s landscapes reflect these unstable class relationships in a number of ways, most notably, through his inclusion of figures in the foreground of his paintings. For example, the work

Blenheim, Oxfordshire…explicitly asks who shall be admitted to the privilege of touristic viewing… [A] group of middle‐ and lower‐middle‐class viewers stand waiting, on the extreme right edge of the picture, at the grand gate of the most visited great house in England, just visible at the upper left. A top‐hatted figure holding a brace of hounds and a rifle stands squarely in the left center foreground, confronting the viewer and barring the visitors’ way with unknown intent while a riding party from the estate can be seen on the far left. Centered in the distance and lit by the sun emerging from clouds, a bridge (ironically a purely ornamental bridge, built on appropriated land from the town) links the two otherwise tensely separate sides of the picture. Blenheim, financed out of public funds to reward a national hero, was indeed a “sort of national property” that might appropriately stand for the privileges of nationality demanded by the middle classes—and, unsuccessfully in 1832, by the lower classes, who are notably not represented in the party at the gate… These drawings depict English landscape as contested ground (p. 111–112).

In other engravings, unruly lower‐class men and women depicted in the foreground stand between the viewer and the landscape painted behind them. They are also, significantly, portrayed at leisure rather than at work. Interestingly, Turner’s critics did not like these figures and labeled them as vulgar and incompetent elements in otherwise beautiful works. Helsinger is unable to find enough evidence to tell us if the presence of these figures mean that Turner “claim[ed] for them rights of possession” of England and English nationality, or instead expressed a “sympathy with those who felt profoundly threatened by their presence” (pp. 118–119).

Helsinger’s work is an interpretive study. She has taken a number of artworks and examined them in detail in order to extract their meaning, and, thereby, she has shown that elements in the paintings reflect certain aspects of society. Her study shores up the interpretation of the visual objects with a historical analysis, in which she matches the stylistic elements in Turner’s work with aspects of the political and economic climate of Britain of the time.