Pandora's Box
Walter Crane, “ Our Sphinx-Riddle,” and the Politics of Decoration
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12411769 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Morna O’neill (corresponding author), Morna O'Neill |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 309-326 |
| Publication date | 2007-01-22 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1060150307051534 |
| OpenAlex | W1997969852 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
W ITH W ALTER C RANE , marginality is a question of medium. For his contemporaries, Crane's artistic practice embodied the ethos of Arts and Crafts eclecticism, apparent in this view of his studio from 1885 (Figure 15): watercolor, oil painting, tempera, sculpture, design, and illustration vie for our attention. As the painter Sir William Rothenstein recalled, “Crane could do anything he wanted, or anyone else wanted” (292). As an artist, designer, and – crucially – a socialist, Crane disregarded the traditional distinctions between high art and popular culture. With a history of art constructed along the fault lines of media, school, and style, Crane's diverse artistic practice and radical politics defy easy categorization. And this is precisely the point: his work requires the viewer to think across media, to move from the margins of wallpaper and illustration to the center of painting and back again. Or perhaps it is more fruitful to think of this process as one of inversion, placing wallpaper at the center and painting at its margins. According to Homi Bhabha, it is this “disjunctive temporality” (151) of the margins that allows cultural identity and political solidarities to emerge. The forging of political solidarities through art was the crux of Crane's project, and the disruption of established cultural hierarchies signaled the central role of art in political agitation. Visible on the right margin of photograph of Crane's studio (see Figure 15), the watercolor Pandora from 1885 (Figure 16) provides an ideal starting point for an exploration of the ways in which socialist politics move from the decorative margins to the very heart of Crane's art, a process enabled by the artist's politicized reinterpretation of classical mythology
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Painting · Politics · Sculpture · Studio · Style (visual arts · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Law · Theatre and Performance Studies
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2025 (16) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |