‘Uncompanionable’ is the word Leo Steinberg used to describe the female figures in Pablo Picasso’s paintings of the early forties. This project demonstrates a series of attempts to imagine acts of companionship in an area of tension between art history and fine art, which it constructs anew. The object I’ve most tried to companion is the reproduction of a small portrait picture, Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937), which developed from work surrounding his celebrated political mural, Guernica. The effort of companionship makes a fool of me and I take my fool as methodology, understood as a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done. A key principle of my fool is a logic of encounter in which what’s conscientiously sought gives way to something else that emerges, repeats, insists; it is to this level of experience that my project addresses itself. For my fool’s procedures, I turn to a number of others, including Picasso’s lover in 1937, the photographer and painter Dora Maar (of whom Weeping Woman is a portrait) who made her own enigmatic companion to Weeping Woman, a half-painted copy known as Woman in a Red Hat; and psychoanalysis, whose own development might be seen as a sustained effort to companion the seemingly uncompanionable in the human subject. I’ve engaged with the PhD as an educational site through which to expose and reconstitute previous moments in my education as an artist and art historian. Reaching back to my childhood bedroom, the project opens to a reproduction of Weeping Woman in one of two art books I owned in my pre- to early teens, around 1986 to 1992. The other book is a monograph on Dürer, open at plate 38, Melencolia I (1514). Rather than becoming involved in this image’s details, my fool turns from it towards the field of melancholy, ultimately coming to the art historical literature of the eighties and early nineties that derogated melancholy as a pathological attitude to the end of painting, and which informed the discourse of art history to which I was exposed as an undergraduate student. My fool speculates as to whether painting’s sickness might have been misdiagnosed and the search for a cure misguided; following psychoanalytic insights, a slightly different problem for painting is proposed, one that Dora Maar’s copy of Picasso’s Weeping Woman is seen as a response to. The bedroom setting, two images, and several historical moments, cross the painting Weeping Woman with what is experienced as uncompanionable in me. This is a kind of pleasure, felt as both strange and intimate, which I take in this and other modernist paintings, and which my work continues to circle. Given this pleasure troubles as much as supports the working ‘I’, the project adopts the first person as the preferred pronoun of my fool and bearer of its principal problems. Here, by way of the lacunary autobiographical subject, art history and fine art find their interaction, not in fusional plenitude but in restive exchanges that precipitate a series of blind fields.

From Introduction: We not only tolerate violence, we put it on the front pages of our newspapers. One-third or one-fourth of our television programmes use it for the amusement of our children. Condone! My dear friends, we love it." -Karl Menninger, psychiatrist. War is one of the most violent of man's past-times, yet many of the atrocities committed are termed heroic deeds. Andre Malraux, one of the leading writer-philosophers of his day, praised the international involvement by so many writers, artists, etc. in the Spanish Civil War as one of the most wonderful deeds of brotherhood in the history of mankind. There is a strange idolatry that is often accorded to violent criminals such as the early American outlaws, and people like Charles Manson, around whom an entire cult has sprung up. The "aggressive machismo" is something that boys and young men strive to achieve in most countries in the Western world. Scientlsts and philosophers have puzzled these paradoxes for centuries, and this effort to unravel the mystery of violence and aggression bears a fateful significant. For the quality of human life and the survival of man are involved. Robbery, rape, riots, vandalism, are all now part of man's existence. Around the world, violence has soared. In London, violent crimes increased by 39 per cent in three years. Even sports events (the soccer fans stage gang wars at most soccer matches nowadays, especially in England,) and entertainment ---books, movies, television--- have become permeated with violence. It has not always been as bad as this, and as art imitates life, life imitates art, and so aggressive paintings, threatening paintings are now commonplace. In this dissertation, I have studied this development of threat in painting. What follows is the course my study has taken.

It is necessary to find out what the role of art is in order to see whether it changes. The role of art can be taken as synonymous with the words, 'function of art'. The role of art and the art work itself are inextricably linked. If we look at the role of art as analogous to a wheel we can look at the argument thus : the wheel exists in order to roll. Its function is to roll. The wheel's function of rolling informs us about its existence. Function and the wheel's existence cannot be separated. The role of art and the art work itself are inextricably tied. Intro. p. 1.

In 1543, after more than a century of exploration and expansion, the first Europeans, the Portuguese, landed on the Isle of Tanegashima fl ~lib, off the southern island of Kyushu, Japan. Their arrival has been described in Japanese as kamikaze 1$ 00,, 'by the winds of the gods', or by accident. Indeed the Portuguese did not intend to visit Japan; their landing on Japanese shores was caused by severe weather conditions. The focus of this dissertation is the so-called Nanban byobu l�J~ MOO. Southern Barbarian folding screen paintings, depicting the arrival of Portuguese merchants and missionaries on Japanese shores. The paintings are classified as kinsei shokifuuzokuga ili:t!t1'.JJ~OO.{~@ (Early Modern Genre Painting) depicting scenes from contemporary life in and around the city. They were designed and produced by Japanese artists for Japanese patrons and audiences, they were not items made for export. Typically the screens were displayed in pairs, each screen consisting of two, six or eight panels and are divided into groups of 'arrival scene' paintings; the first group shows the departure of the Portuguese 'Black Ship' from a foreign port on the left screen and the right the arrival of the ship to Japan, the next group show the arrival of the Portuguese 'Black Ship' to Japanese shores on the left screen and on the right screen is a procession of Portuguese merchants and missionaries through the streets of a Japanese port town. Around ninety screens survive and can be found in collections worldwide. The aim of this study is to 're-contextualise' these paintings in the Japanese interior space and the practice of Japanese painting workshops. It intends to challenge the frequent use of European sources to decipher and make meaning of the iconography of Nanban byobu by reconsidering their place in the development of Japanese painting in the early modern period.

Nineteenth-century writers and modern scholars have agreed that there was a major shift in the practice of landscape painting in England around the turn of the nineteenth century. Paintings by up-and-coming artists such as J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Girtin, and A. W. Callcott were seen to exhibit a concern for atmospheric effects and an "expressivity" lacking in earlier works. This shift has often been explained by invoking artistic genius: the keen intellect and sensibility of the artistic producer has served as a self-evident explanation of the rise to prominence of this form of landscape painting. This study endorses the centrality of the artistic subject to the enterprise of landscape painting, but disputes the notion that genius is a natural and self-evident phenomenon. It is argued here that the native landscape genius was a category of the creative individual which was socially produced at this historical moment in conjunction with or in opposition to other contemporaneous formulations of the artist. This examination of artistic subjectivity as determined by gender, social status, education, wealth, and so forth, is organized around three interrelated subject positions: the "man of letters" derived from the notion of the academic history painter, the "market slave," a negative construction of the artist who was seen to pander to the demands of the market and the "imaginative man of genius." The inscription of these positionalities in landscape imagery i s contingent upon a range of historically specific social phenomena. The discussion focuses particularly upon the discourse of nationalism during and immediately after the Napoleonic wars, epistemoiogical debates concerning the type of knowledge appropriate for a commercial society, and the discourse on the market as it relates to the circulation of paintings as cultural commodities. Determining the relationship of the artistic subject to these various social phenomena involves an examination of the physical spaces in which paintings were displayed and exhibited, the discursive spaces in which they were discussed and evaluated—including art criticism, aesthetic treatises, illustrated county histories and social and political commentary—and the institutional practices which shaped their production and reception. The power and appeal of the landscape genius, I argue, lay in its ability to a serve broad range of social interests in negotiating successfully the seemingly contradictory demands of the market in luxury commodities and of a social ideal of Englishness marked by independence, intellectual power and sensibility. The genius's imaginative encounter with external nature provided it with an alibi which served to obscure it s activities as an economic producer in a highly competitive market society. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

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This study is directed at the problem of an apparent contradiction within the theory of Chinese painting, between insistence on the importance of individuality in painting on the one hand, by Chinese critics, and on the other their veneration of traditional ways and means, subjects, styles, and the criteria used in judging excellence. Since this dichotomy is clearly embodied in the single most important document within the theory of Chinese painting, Hsieh Ho's Six Principles (the First and Sixth in particular), I have structured the first three parts of the thesis around an evaluation of Hsieh Ho's reputation, and the literal meaning of the First and Sixth principles, respectively. The method is essentially that of literary criticism, tempered, hopefully, by a familiarity with many of the great masterpieces of Chinese painting. In the last two sections I moved from an evaluation of the values and customs of the social class which supported the art of painting, back to the theory itself. Within the scholar-official class, as a social entity, a similar apparent contradiction exists between the importance placed on individual freedom and talent in living, and the recognized authority of fixed tradition. Since this dichotomy is embodied within the apparently conflicting ways of Confucianism and Taoism, I have built my argument around these two socio-religious traditions. The method used is one of socio-philosophical analysis and interpretation. From a consideration of Confucianism and Taoism a set of relatively a-historical constants emerges: for Confucianism a moral imperative and the practice of calligraphy; for Taoism a metaphysical imperative and the practice of meditation. In the great literary and artistic tradition of China, a fifth constant exists, shared by the Confucian and the Taoist mind alike. My formulation of these constants and evaluation of their inter-relationships, and interdependence, is almost completely philosophical--the intuitive and deductive construction of a resolution which seems to adequately explain all of the important issues. My actual presupposition that the conflict (between the individual talent and tradition) is illusory comes, foremost, from my sense of complete unity in the painting, and, secondly, from the fact that the Chinese themselves were never particularly aware of any such threat to the production of masterpieces of uncompromised spiritual significance. In the "Introduction" I suggest that the illusion of conflict or compromising conflict within the field-theory of Chinese painting is, very likely, based on a defensive Western cultural-egotism, and the superstition that the Orient has always negated the individual spirit while we in the new West alone know its true value. Once we emphathize with the Chinese scholar-painters, the illusion melts away. The conclusion I reach is that the apparently opposing and conflicting elements are in fact complimentary and supportive, within the overall unity of the Chinese spirit. However, a certain irony must be admitted in that an a-historical, or universal level of being is a necessary postulate in order to consumate the resolution. That the Chinese themselves were convinced of the reality of such a metaphysical level, I have substantiated with quotations; and it is on this level that the result of Taoist meditation emerges as the supporting basis of the Confucian moral commitment to the essential goodness of man. In a similar way the Confucian practice of calligraphy provides the essential technical equipment of the painter, and a ready-made audience of experts in brush work, while the final criteria for judging the excellence of painting is closely related to the experience of the Taoist mystic. Moralizing on the Confucian side of the coin takes the form of transmission of ideal types and subjects in painting, while the Taoist commitment to spontaneous use of the brush, on the other side, leads toward the unconscious lodging of individual moral character--and, conceivably, all within the same painting. Individual talent finds its freedom to live in expression primarily through the function of negative capability, while tradition, the authority of the sages, in strictly governing the artist's positive invention ironically preserves the ideal conditions under which the painter's negative capability may be activated. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

French Impressionism, the earliest vital and progressive modern art movement, was developed in France between 1870 and 1890. It was soon recognized as revolutionary, and the number of its followers grew as the style developed and became known. Paris, then the art center of the world, attracted many students, among whom were Canadian artists. In 1878 William Brymner sailed for Europe, to return in 1882, the year of the seventh Impressionist Exhibition and the year that J.M. Barnsley and Horatio Walker arrived in Paris. Homer Watson, already an established artist, first travelled in Europe in 1887. A growing facility in the use of color marked the evolution in the art of the nineteenth century. The painters John Constable, and Eugene Delacroix, the scientific color technicians M.E. Chevreul, James Maxwell, Ogden Rood, and Robert Henri, opened up new fields of interest. The progression from late Baroque and early English landscapes to the French experiments with color, culminated in Impressionist landscapes filled with sun and atmosphere. The major Impressionist masters Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, and Sisley concerned themselves with the visual effects of light reflecting from the surfaces of objects. Newly invented pigments supplied their palettes with almost unlimited color, which they applied empirically, searching for the most brilliant effect The decade from 1880 to 1890 marked the period when the established Canadian artists came in contact with French Impressionism. They returned home to teach and to paint, and became the Pre-Impressionist painters in Canada. Their work exhibited an intermediary style corresponding to that of the Pre-Impressionist painters in Europe. A survey of the growing Impressionist tendencies in their art led to the first consistent Impressionist style of Maurice Cullen and Marc Suzor-Côté after 1895. By 1900 the influence of Impressionist color technique had reached all art forms. Impressionism was an historically established style which had fostered other newer art forms, and many artists in Canada painted "Impressionist" pictures. Impressionism continued to be seen in Canadian painting together with Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Art Nouveau, Cubism, Expressionism, and finally Abstraction. The term Abstract Impressionism is applied to some recent paintings to indicate the presence of a style which freed art from formulas by introducing individuality, expression, and color, and then became almost a formula itself. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

The still life genre has been, and arguably still is, regarded as the lowest form of painting in Western fine art history. The absence of the human figure in still life painting means that the artist does not require knowledge of either human anatomy or history for the production of the work. Given seventeenth century female painters' exclusion from the academies where anatomy was taught, it was thus a genre regarded as appropriate for female painters in Europe prior to the nineteenth century. Such dictates of propriety were indicative of gender constructs that relegated women to the private sphere of society and the domestic environment. As an accompaniment to my Masters in Fine Art exhibition titled Masters, Master, Masturbate (A master's debate), this text explores what still life painting may reveal about the relationship between the home, the body and the self in the present day. Produced from my position as a contemporary, white, female painter of Dutch descent raised within an Afrikaner culture in the context of South Africa, I suggest that a critical reconsideration of this apparently constrictive genre offers potentially liberating perspectives of gender constructs and the female painter.

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