39 - The Eye and the I: Essay and Image

Summary

This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.