Modernist Arts In _To The Lighthouse_

After reading extensive amounts of writings (really, way too much) on artistic movements in modernism for my DigiPrez, trying to make sense of all the madness that was behind them (and as a result only getting more confused), I saw a huge spectrum of ideas that artists were striving portray in their work. Though trying to understand these movements often led me in circles, usually pointing to no clear answer, it was nonetheless fascinating and helped me notice a lot of similar ideas in To The Lighthouse, which got me thinking about the relationship between literature and other art forms during the modernist period.

As I quickly learned when doing my research, modernism wasn't actually a clear movement of its own, it's more of an umbrella term encompassing several movements in the arts that branched off during this time in reaction to the radical shifting in worldview that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century. Because of this, you can't really directly compare modernist literature such as To the Lighthouse to modernist art because they weren't technically part of the same movement - the term "modernist" is a term we can use to describe the period now in retrospect, but at the time, visual art had a more subtle, fragmented influence on literature. So in this week's post I am going to look at the concepts behind different artistic movements in modernism and see how these concepts are present in To the Lighthouse.

Heckel, Erich. Portrait of a Man. 1919.

One of the first "modernist" movements to arise was German Expressionism, which began roughly in 1905. Expressionists sought to portray an image in the way that they perceived them emotionally - an object was portrayed beyond just what it was, it was portrayed as what it represented to the artist, which was reflected in use of color, lines, and composition. Much of the emotion that was being conveyed was a sense of alienation of the self from the outside world ("German Expressionism"). To the Lighthouse, and most of Woolf's writing, is brimming with expressionism - the smallest details, objects, encounters the characters have are described in such a way that a deep meaning is revealed behind them. Mrs. Ramsay shows this pretty clearly when she is sitting knitting and stops to look around the room: "It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one" (Woolf 97). Another particular instance in the novel which exhibits expressionism, including the idea of alienation of the viewer, is seen when Mr. Ramsay is looking at Mrs. Ramsay reading to James in the window and thinks:

"Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off,  and halts by the window and gazes at his son and wife, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of stars" (Woolf 57).

It's a very simple image, Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James, but Mr. Ramsay seeing them sees at once their beauty and his separation from them, revealing his inner turmoil about deciding between striving heroically for greatness and his desire to surrender and relish in life's beauty.

Mondrian, Piet.
Composition with White and Yellow. 1942. 

This image of Mrs. Ramsay reading to James evokes musing in several characters, one of whom is Lily Briscoe, who is painting a scene that includes the two in the window. In her painting, she has represented Mrs. Ramsay and James as "the triangular purple shape" - when Mr. Bankes asks Lily why she did this, it is explained as "in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness" (Woolf 81). Mr. Bankes has a hard time grasping this - he is used to the subject of paintings being portrayed with "reverence" - the largest painting in his house was praised by painters and valued at high prices, but for Lily the search in her painting is not for reverence, but "how to connect this mass on the right hand with all that on the left" (Woolf 83). I saw a lot of similarities between how Lily perceived the window and the art of the De Stijl movement. De Stijl began in 1917, and was a form of Dutch abstract art, which sought to create a "universal visual language", using shapes and lines not to depict particular people or subjects, but to convey an underlying sense of harmony ("Modern Art Timeline"). As Lily says, "the picture was not of them", instead they were represented in her deeper search to create a sense of connection and balance.

Magritte, René. Time Transfixed. 1938

Through the artist Lily's eyes, one can see a lot of "modernist" ideas appear in her perspectives. Oftentimes, how Lily sees things doesn't make a lot of logical sense, it's rather strange and surreal. I think comparison can also be done between some of these perceptions and the art of the Surrealists. Surrealism originated in the 1910's, and was heavily influenced by the work of Freud, seeking to free the mind from the constraints of the conscious through exploring dreams and the private mind  - Surrealist art often featured strangely juxtaposed objects that served as symbols, a warping of reality with the workings of the imagination (Voorhies). Though dreams and the workings of the unconscious is not  explicitly evoked, this use of symbolic, oddly juxtaposed objects I think is seen pretty well in Lily's "kitchen table"stuck upside down in a pear tree- the image she sees in her mind to represent Mr. Ramsay's work: "And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity which stuck there, its four legs in the air" (Woolf 38). It's very strange that Lily should see the work of a philosopher as a scrubbed kitchen table lodged in a pear tree, but we see that she uses this image because his work doesn't make sense to her: "She asked [Andrew] what his father's books were about. 'Subject and object and the nature of reality,' Andrew had said. And
when she said Heavens, she had no notion of what that meant, 'Think of a kitchen table then,' he told her" (Woolf 38). We see that Mr. Ramsay's "reality" doesn't make sense to Lily, so she uses her imagination to make sense of it, to create a superior reality, which was precisely what Surrealists sought to do.

Picasso, Pablo.
Ambroise Vollard. 1915.

A final artistic movement that is seen throughout the novel is Cubism. Cubism was invented by 1907 by Pablo Picasso. These works were made of up small fragments of images with shifting perspectives to create an image of a whole. This idea of striving to create a whole from fragments can be seen across several art forms and movements under modernism, and appears several times throughout the novel. Again, Lily Briscoe voices this idea, when looking at Mrs. Ramsay and James in the window, and thinking, "... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach" (Woolf 73). Mrs. Ramsay seems to be constantly undergoing fluctuations in feelings toward her husband, and in one part they converge: "Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him" (Woolf 39). This search for unity, for how all one's conflicting emotions and judgements and desires can be added up together is something characters in this novel grapple with frequently. You can see Lily struggling with this when she is trying to form some sort of opinion of Mr. Bankes, the Ramsay's, and love in general: "How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking what one felt, or disliking?" (Woolf 40).

While there was no one clear "modernist" movement, it makes sense that you can see similarities between so many of the movements in visual arts and literature. People had completely lost faith in traditional institutions, structures, forms, and were striving to create something new. This was obviously incredibly difficult however, and the struggle for original creation itself was very important to the time, and so it is only natural that artists fed off of each other, tried to take new ideas in their own direction, which is why I think there was such an intense relationship between the arts. Trying to read the novel with visual concepts in mind has been a little challenging but has helped give me new perspectives on the writing, so it will be interesting to see how this continues as the novel progresses.

Works Cited:
"German Expressionism". MoMA - The Collection. The Museum of Modern Art. 2013. 25 Oct 2013. <http://www.moma.org/explore/collection/ge/>.

"Modern Art Timeline"> ArtFactory. www.Artyfactory.com. 2013. 25 Oct 2013. <http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/timelines/modern_art_timeline.htm>.

Voorhies, James. "Surrealism". Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2000-. 25 Oct 2013. <http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm>.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955. Print.