Subject
Re: [NABOKOV-L] [REVIEW] of The Sublime Artist's Studio: Nabokov
and Painting by Gavriel Shapiro
and Painting by Gavriel Shapiro
From
Date
Body
Dear List,
Daniel Piza's review of my book,
made available in English by Jansy Mello, contains a number of serious errors.
For starters, Daniel Piza's article seems to
suggest that the book contains "only a few
images." Actually, there are twenty-eight illustrations in the book.
More importantly and regrettably, Daniel Piza
completely misunderstood and misrepresented the
chapter on Nabokov and German Expressionists. In
this chapter, I juxtapose Nabokov's and the
artists' portrayal of Berlin that stemmed from
their dissimilar backgrounds and life
experiences. Nowhere in the book do I say or
infer that Nabokov "admired the connection
between these painters and urban life, something
that might be responsible for a change in his
world view." Such an interpretation is a gross
distortion of my thesis. Furthermore, it is
unclear how this putative connection, as Daniel
Piza contends, is responsible "for his
[Nabokov's] preference for landscapes." I
certainly never made such a statement.
It is unfortunate that Daniel Piza's article,
which happens to be the very first review of my
book, contains so many flagrant misinterpretations.
I hope this letter sets the record straight.
With best wishes to all,
Gavriel Shapiro
At 09:02 AM 8/9/2009, you wrote:
>Dear List,
>
>I learned that Piza's review of Gavriel
>Shapiro's book came out before any other in
>America and I was encouraged to translate it and
>post it in the List ( I had only sent a few
>remarks about it and the url address).
>So here it is:
>
>Proust e Nabokov: pintura escrita
>Proust and Nabokov: written painting
>Books analyse the presence and importance of the
>fine arts in the work of the two geniuses of the word.
>
>Daniel Piza
>Literature and painting have always been
>blood-relatives. Since Dante, whose circles of
>hell and paradise were turned into a series of
>frescoes, like Giotto's, and even John Updike,
>who once stated that a good fiction-writer must
>know how to draw, the connection between these
>two art expressions has always been strong. How
>about Flaubert's books, such as St.Anthony's
>Temptation, without the painting-collection he
>harbored in his memory? Joseph Conrad considers
>that the function of literature is "to make
>people see" - something that is quite different
>from "showing" it. Even a painter like William
>Turner would agree with Conrad's definition.
>Diderot, Gogol, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde wrote
>extensively about art, as also did the Brazilian
>Mario de Andrade; Thomas Bernhard wrote an
>extraordinary novel called "Old Masters" ( which
>deserves to be translated in Brazil), about
>Tician; Balzac, on Poussin, wrote "The Forgotten
>Chef-d´Oeuvre". John Banville was inspired in
>Bonnard to write "The Sea". I will not expand in
>the opposite direction, from Doré to Picasso,
>passing through Goeldi (Dostoievsky) or
>Portinari (Quixote), because the illustration of
>the literary classics has never been despised by any first-rank painter.
>
>To speak about the relationship between writers
>and painting necessarily implies talking about
>the French Marcel Proust (1871-1922). He
>was not only influenced by pictorial resources
>or chose to have painters among his set of
>characters, but he also suffered the stylistic
>influence of an English art critic, John Ruskin,
>from whom he translated "The Bible of
>Amiens." Proust shared with Ruskin a taste for
>Gothic cathedrals, for the approximation of
>aesthetics and existence, for the beauty of
>Venice. This passion has gained expression in
>long undulating sentences and images as if he
>were searching after a tapestry that created
>perceptions instead of its being a copy of
>reality. Such an awareness led the American
>painter Eric Karpeles to organize, last year, a
>book that operates like a catalogue, his
>"Paintings in Proust" (Thames & Hudson editors),
>focusing in Proust's Recherche, where in one
>page he offers colored paintings being mirrored
>by its opposite carrying the paragraph that makes a reference to it.
>
>Another excelent book about this theme, "The
>Sublime Artist's Studio - Nabokov and Painting"
>(Northwestern University Press), written by the
>literary critic Gavriel Shapiro, has just been
>out. It not a catalogue, as Karpeles's, but a
>study about the history of painting as may be
>found in the writings of the author of Lolita,
>Pale Fire and in many other novels, Vladimir
>Nabokov (1899-1977). Shapiro's references avoid
>an excess of technical terms and are rich with
>quotations from specific lines and paragraphs
>extracted from Nabokov's novels, essays and
>letters. He presents only a few images, in black
>and white, related to the sentences he selected.
>If, in Proust, painting is the means through
>which essay and fiction are blended, when he
>demonstrates how the intepretation of reality is
>woven together with the interpretation of art,
>the importance of such a merging is not less
>important in Nabokov, also because he built a
>bridge between the Old and the New World's art.
>Yet Nabokov's expression is mainly achieved
>through alusions. After Shapiro's book, to speak
>about Nabokov will equally entail in speaking
>about the relation between the writers and painting.
>
>It's not by chance that those two authors are
>placed among the few 20th Century writers who
>may be truly considered to be masters of style.
>This linguistic domain doesn't only demand a
>rich vocabulary or strong cadences but also the
>ability to produce images, to describe a
>landscape or a person with such a unique
>richness that the resulting image impregnates
>the reader's mind, dismissing informative
>details together with all the other traces of
>"imparciality". Proust and Nabokov write as if
>they painted by matching lines, colors and
>spacial arrangements to reflect human ambivalence.
>
>Proust's "imaginary museum" - to recover the
>expression of another famous writer who loved
>painting, André Malraux - includes many masters
>of the Renaissance, such as Leonardo,
>Botticelli, Giotto, Mantegna, Bellini. He was so
>obsessed by Saint Ursula's Cycle by Carpaccio,
>that he spent endless hours sitting in front of
>the painting - in its intricated figurative web
>of historical episodes mingled with privade ones
>- in the Galeria dell'Academia, in Venice; it is
>not by hazard that Carpaccio is the only painter
>who has been mentioned in his seven volumes.
>Proust was also dedicated to Velásquez, Tician,
>El Greco, Poussin. Among the representatives of
>French impressionists in the generation which
>preceded him he was often undecided between
>Manet and Monet. Proust also had a lot in common
>with Renoir but his particular passion, one that
>marks a different point of view from Ruskin's is
>directed to the Dutch painters, mainly Rembrandt
>and Vermeer. In his "Sodoma and Gomorra", the
>wall and its Vista from Delft, we meet Bergotte,
>a writer who laments his inability to turn his
>language into something which would
>become"precious by itself," in the same way as
>the painted layers of yellow, a widely anthologized quote.
>
>Quite often Proust, who cultivated a precious
>language without being "preciose" ( in
>opposition to Nabokov's excess of affectation),
>didn't need more than a substantive and an
>adjective to translate an image into words. When
>he qualifies as "a gentle gravity" to his
>description of some of Rembrandt's subjects, he
>achieves a result that he, like Guimarães Rosa,
>considers as the key to a style as well as an
>interpretation: it is as if the author had
>profered an enrlaging lens, or a pair of
>glasses, the better to exhibit details and
>sensations which are usually left aside.
>"Without art", writes he in "Time Recovered",
>"landscapes would have been as unknown to us,
>today, as those in the moon" ( in 1922, of
>course); "thanks to art, instead of seeing the
>word as being only ours, we find that the world
>is multiplied," each aspect with a light of its
>won. This doesn't imply in being happier, but in
>being closer to his private suffering and truth.
>
>Inspite of being labeled a post-modern by a
>majority of analysts, Nabokov preferred the era
>of the Great Masters. Like Proust, he never
>erased from his interior canvas Botticelli, El
>Greco, Rembrandt, Jan Van Eyck. Gavriel Shapiro
>draws a parallel between them already in the
>second chapter: " Proust employs art not as
>much to express any didactic purpose, but mainly
>to share an impression, to evoke an
>association(...) For example, Proust demonstrats
>the devious attempt by Swann to introduce into
>society, Odette, his philistine, uneducated
>lover, later his wife, (...) associating his
>image to Florentine paintings, particularly to
>Botticelli's." Nabokov, in his turn, works with
>references and alusions in the name of an
>"authoral presence", as Shapiro called it*. Like
>Joyce, he uses painting to speak about the
>position of the author and his relation to the
>world, consequently this is why he always refers to himself in his narrative.
>Shapiro also mentions Nabokov's references to
>German expressionism, in artists like Grosz,
>Beckmann and Dix, the theme of his book's last
>chapter. The Russian novelist lived in Berlin
>for 15 years and admired the connection between
>these painters and urban life, something that
>might be responsible for a change in his world
>view, until then aristrocratic, and also for his
>preference for landscapes, if we consider that
>he was also an amateur naturalist (
>lepidopterologist). This influence is not the
>result of any political views but of his
>aesthetics - since Nabokov was against any kind
>of social engagement in art. Actually we may
>think about Humbert Humbert, and his Lolita, as
>a kind of realistic cartoon-sketch, to begin
>with his name. By examining Nabokov's pictorial
>tastes, Shapiro illumines Nabokov's literary
>traits in which visual humour plays an important
>role. One image is [not] worth a thousand words,
>but a master of words is also worth the two thousand images he creates.
>
>* - The words attributed to Shapiro are a
>re-translation from the Portuguese, not the ones
>encountered in his original book ( Jansy).
>
>
>
>
><http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en>Search
>the archive
><mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu>Contact
>the Editors <http://www.nabokovonline.com>Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
><http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm>Visit
>Zembla
><http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm>View
>Nabokv-L Policies <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/>Manage subscription options
>
>All private editorial communications, without
>exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
Daniel Piza's review of my book,
made available in English by Jansy Mello, contains a number of serious errors.
For starters, Daniel Piza's article seems to
suggest that the book contains "only a few
images." Actually, there are twenty-eight illustrations in the book.
More importantly and regrettably, Daniel Piza
completely misunderstood and misrepresented the
chapter on Nabokov and German Expressionists. In
this chapter, I juxtapose Nabokov's and the
artists' portrayal of Berlin that stemmed from
their dissimilar backgrounds and life
experiences. Nowhere in the book do I say or
infer that Nabokov "admired the connection
between these painters and urban life, something
that might be responsible for a change in his
world view." Such an interpretation is a gross
distortion of my thesis. Furthermore, it is
unclear how this putative connection, as Daniel
Piza contends, is responsible "for his
[Nabokov's] preference for landscapes." I
certainly never made such a statement.
It is unfortunate that Daniel Piza's article,
which happens to be the very first review of my
book, contains so many flagrant misinterpretations.
I hope this letter sets the record straight.
With best wishes to all,
Gavriel Shapiro
At 09:02 AM 8/9/2009, you wrote:
>Dear List,
>
>I learned that Piza's review of Gavriel
>Shapiro's book came out before any other in
>America and I was encouraged to translate it and
>post it in the List ( I had only sent a few
>remarks about it and the url address).
>So here it is:
>
>Proust e Nabokov: pintura escrita
>Proust and Nabokov: written painting
>Books analyse the presence and importance of the
>fine arts in the work of the two geniuses of the word.
>
>Daniel Piza
>Literature and painting have always been
>blood-relatives. Since Dante, whose circles of
>hell and paradise were turned into a series of
>frescoes, like Giotto's, and even John Updike,
>who once stated that a good fiction-writer must
>know how to draw, the connection between these
>two art expressions has always been strong. How
>about Flaubert's books, such as St.Anthony's
>Temptation, without the painting-collection he
>harbored in his memory? Joseph Conrad considers
>that the function of literature is "to make
>people see" - something that is quite different
>from "showing" it. Even a painter like William
>Turner would agree with Conrad's definition.
>Diderot, Gogol, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde wrote
>extensively about art, as also did the Brazilian
>Mario de Andrade; Thomas Bernhard wrote an
>extraordinary novel called "Old Masters" ( which
>deserves to be translated in Brazil), about
>Tician; Balzac, on Poussin, wrote "The Forgotten
>Chef-d´Oeuvre". John Banville was inspired in
>Bonnard to write "The Sea". I will not expand in
>the opposite direction, from Doré to Picasso,
>passing through Goeldi (Dostoievsky) or
>Portinari (Quixote), because the illustration of
>the literary classics has never been despised by any first-rank painter.
>
>To speak about the relationship between writers
>and painting necessarily implies talking about
>the French Marcel Proust (1871-1922). He
>was not only influenced by pictorial resources
>or chose to have painters among his set of
>characters, but he also suffered the stylistic
>influence of an English art critic, John Ruskin,
>from whom he translated "The Bible of
>Amiens." Proust shared with Ruskin a taste for
>Gothic cathedrals, for the approximation of
>aesthetics and existence, for the beauty of
>Venice. This passion has gained expression in
>long undulating sentences and images as if he
>were searching after a tapestry that created
>perceptions instead of its being a copy of
>reality. Such an awareness led the American
>painter Eric Karpeles to organize, last year, a
>book that operates like a catalogue, his
>"Paintings in Proust" (Thames & Hudson editors),
>focusing in Proust's Recherche, where in one
>page he offers colored paintings being mirrored
>by its opposite carrying the paragraph that makes a reference to it.
>
>Another excelent book about this theme, "The
>Sublime Artist's Studio - Nabokov and Painting"
>(Northwestern University Press), written by the
>literary critic Gavriel Shapiro, has just been
>out. It not a catalogue, as Karpeles's, but a
>study about the history of painting as may be
>found in the writings of the author of Lolita,
>Pale Fire and in many other novels, Vladimir
>Nabokov (1899-1977). Shapiro's references avoid
>an excess of technical terms and are rich with
>quotations from specific lines and paragraphs
>extracted from Nabokov's novels, essays and
>letters. He presents only a few images, in black
>and white, related to the sentences he selected.
>If, in Proust, painting is the means through
>which essay and fiction are blended, when he
>demonstrates how the intepretation of reality is
>woven together with the interpretation of art,
>the importance of such a merging is not less
>important in Nabokov, also because he built a
>bridge between the Old and the New World's art.
>Yet Nabokov's expression is mainly achieved
>through alusions. After Shapiro's book, to speak
>about Nabokov will equally entail in speaking
>about the relation between the writers and painting.
>
>It's not by chance that those two authors are
>placed among the few 20th Century writers who
>may be truly considered to be masters of style.
>This linguistic domain doesn't only demand a
>rich vocabulary or strong cadences but also the
>ability to produce images, to describe a
>landscape or a person with such a unique
>richness that the resulting image impregnates
>the reader's mind, dismissing informative
>details together with all the other traces of
>"imparciality". Proust and Nabokov write as if
>they painted by matching lines, colors and
>spacial arrangements to reflect human ambivalence.
>
>Proust's "imaginary museum" - to recover the
>expression of another famous writer who loved
>painting, André Malraux - includes many masters
>of the Renaissance, such as Leonardo,
>Botticelli, Giotto, Mantegna, Bellini. He was so
>obsessed by Saint Ursula's Cycle by Carpaccio,
>that he spent endless hours sitting in front of
>the painting - in its intricated figurative web
>of historical episodes mingled with privade ones
>- in the Galeria dell'Academia, in Venice; it is
>not by hazard that Carpaccio is the only painter
>who has been mentioned in his seven volumes.
>Proust was also dedicated to Velásquez, Tician,
>El Greco, Poussin. Among the representatives of
>French impressionists in the generation which
>preceded him he was often undecided between
>Manet and Monet. Proust also had a lot in common
>with Renoir but his particular passion, one that
>marks a different point of view from Ruskin's is
>directed to the Dutch painters, mainly Rembrandt
>and Vermeer. In his "Sodoma and Gomorra", the
>wall and its Vista from Delft, we meet Bergotte,
>a writer who laments his inability to turn his
>language into something which would
>become"precious by itself," in the same way as
>the painted layers of yellow, a widely anthologized quote.
>
>Quite often Proust, who cultivated a precious
>language without being "preciose" ( in
>opposition to Nabokov's excess of affectation),
>didn't need more than a substantive and an
>adjective to translate an image into words. When
>he qualifies as "a gentle gravity" to his
>description of some of Rembrandt's subjects, he
>achieves a result that he, like Guimarães Rosa,
>considers as the key to a style as well as an
>interpretation: it is as if the author had
>profered an enrlaging lens, or a pair of
>glasses, the better to exhibit details and
>sensations which are usually left aside.
>"Without art", writes he in "Time Recovered",
>"landscapes would have been as unknown to us,
>today, as those in the moon" ( in 1922, of
>course); "thanks to art, instead of seeing the
>word as being only ours, we find that the world
>is multiplied," each aspect with a light of its
>won. This doesn't imply in being happier, but in
>being closer to his private suffering and truth.
>
>Inspite of being labeled a post-modern by a
>majority of analysts, Nabokov preferred the era
>of the Great Masters. Like Proust, he never
>erased from his interior canvas Botticelli, El
>Greco, Rembrandt, Jan Van Eyck. Gavriel Shapiro
>draws a parallel between them already in the
>second chapter: " Proust employs art not as
>much to express any didactic purpose, but mainly
>to share an impression, to evoke an
>association(...) For example, Proust demonstrats
>the devious attempt by Swann to introduce into
>society, Odette, his philistine, uneducated
>lover, later his wife, (...) associating his
>image to Florentine paintings, particularly to
>Botticelli's." Nabokov, in his turn, works with
>references and alusions in the name of an
>"authoral presence", as Shapiro called it*. Like
>Joyce, he uses painting to speak about the
>position of the author and his relation to the
>world, consequently this is why he always refers to himself in his narrative.
>Shapiro also mentions Nabokov's references to
>German expressionism, in artists like Grosz,
>Beckmann and Dix, the theme of his book's last
>chapter. The Russian novelist lived in Berlin
>for 15 years and admired the connection between
>these painters and urban life, something that
>might be responsible for a change in his world
>view, until then aristrocratic, and also for his
>preference for landscapes, if we consider that
>he was also an amateur naturalist (
>lepidopterologist). This influence is not the
>result of any political views but of his
>aesthetics - since Nabokov was against any kind
>of social engagement in art. Actually we may
>think about Humbert Humbert, and his Lolita, as
>a kind of realistic cartoon-sketch, to begin
>with his name. By examining Nabokov's pictorial
>tastes, Shapiro illumines Nabokov's literary
>traits in which visual humour plays an important
>role. One image is [not] worth a thousand words,
>but a master of words is also worth the two thousand images he creates.
>
>* - The words attributed to Shapiro are a
>re-translation from the Portuguese, not the ones
>encountered in his original book ( Jansy).
>
>
>
>
><http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en>Search
>the archive
><mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu>Contact
>the Editors <http://www.nabokovonline.com>Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
><http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm>Visit
>Zembla
><http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm>View
>Nabokv-L Policies <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/>Manage subscription options
>
>All private editorial communications, without
>exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/