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PANAESTHETICS | DANIEL ALBRIGHT

The arts are many / the arts are one.

 
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 * Home
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 * Curriculum Development
 * Presentations
   * Wagner and Naming
   * Fantasies of Chinese
   * Symbolism in Painting
   * Symbolism in Music
   * Pound and Surrealism
   * Yeats and Art History
   * D.H. Lawrence
 * Books
   * Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts
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SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING

I believe that Symbolist painting, especially in the late nineteenth century,
obtained much of its power by borrowing techniques from poetry--by becoming, in
effect, a poem written in a language of paint. I discuss (and show many examples
from) paintings by Rossetti, Redon, Rops, Delville, and others from the fin de
siècle, as well as some works from the Renaissance and from the late twentieth
century, particularly those by Keith Haring.
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SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING

I believe that Symbolist painting, especially in the late nineteenth century,
obtained much of its power by borrowing techniques from poetry--by becoming, in
effect, a poem written in a language of paint. I discuss (and show many examples
from) paintings by Rossetti, Redon, Rops, Delville, and others from the fin de
siècle, as well as some works from the Renaissance and from the late twentieth
century, particularly those by Keith Haring.


YEATS AND ART HISTORY

W. B. Yeats attended an art school, not a college, and, although he gave up any
intention to pursue his father's occupation, painting portraits, visual imagery
is of great importance in his poetry. I discuss his debt to formal art history
(particularly to the art historian Josef Strzygowski) and Yeats's way of
devising his theories of historical cycles by studying, not politics (as Toynbee
and others did) but painting and statuary.


SYMBOLISM IN MUSIC

In setting to music the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, the composers Claude
Debussy and Paul Dukas developed a rich and complex vocabulary of musical
symbols, and I discuss, with many musical examples, how it is possible to make
musical equivalents to the half-visual, half verbal symbols common in the
Symbolist art found in other artistic media at the end of the nineteenth
century.


POUND AND SURREALISM

Surrealism was not central to Pound’s poetics; but it is possible to argue that
Pound was a Surrealist without quite knowing it. According to the usual
taxonomies of twentieth-century art, Pound stands almost diametrically opposed
to the Dadaist/Surrealist movement: if Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, André Breton
work to obliterate normal meaning, Pound works to intensify meaning, to kindle
concrete particulars into ideogrammic blazes of meaning. But nonsense and
excessive sense are extremes that tend to converge.


WAGNER AND NAMING

Names are important to the study of Richard Wagner's music dramas in two ways:
1) the hero often has a concealed or riddling name; and 2) his musical themes
often seem to have names--sometimes concealed, in that Wagner's semantic
intentions may be unclear, and he did not authorize any guide to his leading
motives. I believe that these are two aspects of the same problem, and I will
propose (with many recorded examples) a method for solving it.



WELCOME TO PANAESTHETICS!

> Welcome to Panaesthetics!
> This site takes its name from the title of Daniel Albright's recent book:
> Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts.
> 
> With the exception of this note, I have restored this site to as it was when
> he died. Further additions or expansions will be forthcoming, as Dan's work is
> not finished, but the parts we wrote together will not be altered. Feel free
> to contact me, his partner or as he liked to say, after Grey's Anatomy, his
> "person," at marta@phdeviate.org.



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