Papers by Jonathan Shirland
Picturing Ujamaa: Painting in Public & Tanzania\u27s Post-Independence Nationalist Projects
Violence Transformed: Challenging the Prevalence of Violence in Contemporary Society
PsycEXTRA Dataset
\u27A Campaign of Extermination\u27: Walter Sickert and Modernism in London in 1914
One Who Dreams Is Called A Prophet by Sultan Somjee
African Arts
A Campaign of Extermination: Sickert, London and Modernism in 1914
A Singularity of Appearance Counts Doubly in a Democracy of Clothes': Whistler, Fancy Dress and the Camping of Artists' Dress in the Late Nineteenth Century
Visual Culture in Britain, 2007
Aries, 2013
This article surveys the reception of the Gnostic text Pistis Sophia in esoteric milieus in ninet... more This article surveys the reception of the Gnostic text Pistis Sophia in esoteric milieus in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Europe. The first part of the article contains an overview of the text and scholarship on it. Then follows a study of the reception of Pistis Sophia in a broader array of esoteric circles. It becomes clear that the text was hailed as an example of ancient and great spiritual wisdom, although seldom discussed in detail theologically. Next, this is compared to the academic reception at the same time where it was, as previous scholars have made clear, discarded due to what was understood as a discrepancy with "Gnostic" characteristics. This article shows that Pistis Sophia was not discarded in esoteric circles but rather read in light of already established esoteric trajectories, for example Blavatsky's, Krumm-Heller's, or Papus' particular spiritual evolutionary perspectives. Lastly, it is argued that the understanding of Gnosticisms that both these receptions reflect is still very much active today: academics and esoteric groups are guided by similar trajectories vis-à-vis Gnosticism, seeing it as a representative of a "universal religious essence" associated with progressive attitudes (for example regarding sex and gender), which allows/forces them to renegotiate the ancient sources themselves.
A Campaign of Extermination': Walter Sickert and Modernism in London in 1914
To See Where Her Strength Resides
Plenary 1: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Jun 22, 2016
At the entrance to the exhibition 'Sculpture Victorious', visitors are met in the foyer by John B... more At the entrance to the exhibition 'Sculpture Victorious', visitors are met in the foyer by John Bell's Eagle Slayer (1851), a beautiful, barely clad youth shooting an invisible arrow into the sky to avenge the death of the lamb who lies at his feet. It is a powerfully arresting piece, but one which is in a sense reassuring, meeting the modern viewer's expectations-or this modern viewer's, at least-of what 'traditional' Victorian sculpture looks like. It is beautiful, classically inspired (if anything, perhaps slightly more decorous than its classical models, with the carefully placed drapery around the subject's waist), its subject dramatic but fundamentally untroubling, imparting an air of triumphalism. With its nod to the national anthem, the title of the exhibition seems to acknowledge these preconceptions about Victorian sculpture, suggesting that the pieces on show are not merely Victorian but 'victorious', as we might expect of works produced in the heyday of British imperial might and scorned by modernists for their supposed smugness. What this exhibition goes on to do is to dismantle this set of assumptions. The promised victory turns out to be for variety and innovation rather than for any one style: the works on display range from the medievalist to the proto-modernist, from the magnificent to the miniature, the sublime to the ridiculous. There is plenty of smugness to be found here, and triumphalist imperialist propaganda is in no short supply, but there are also works which speak to doubt, to personal grief and national anxiety. Rather than attempting to tell a single narrative about Victorian sculpture, the curators have chosen pieces that testify to competing ideas about what sculpture could and should do. Far from being excessively academic and earnest, as some hostile press reviews suggested, the exhibition was, in my opinion, enlivened by the curators' decision to highlight these contrasts by juxtaposing pieces in unexpected ways, setting the traditionally revered and the usually ridiculed alongside one another. 1 This was an exhibition in which a majolica peacock, Hiram Powers's Greek Slave, and an example of 1 In his scathing review for the Daily Telegraph, Richard Dorment charged the exhibition with resembling 'an extended academic lecture', particularly objecting to the juxtaposition of stylistically and physically dissimilar sculptures. 'Sculpture Victorious', Daily Telegraph, 23 February 2015 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ art/art-reviews/11429728/Sculpture-Victorious-Tate-Britain-review-its-incoherence-isfrightening.html> [accessed 24 February 2016].
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2016
At the entrance to the exhibition 'Sculpture Victorious', visitors are met in the foyer by John B... more At the entrance to the exhibition 'Sculpture Victorious', visitors are met in the foyer by John Bell's Eagle Slayer (1851), a beautiful, barely clad youth shooting an invisible arrow into the sky to avenge the death of the lamb who lies at his feet. It is a powerfully arresting piece, but one which is in a sense reassuring, meeting the modern viewer's expectations-or this modern viewer's, at least-of what 'traditional' Victorian sculpture looks like. It is beautiful, classically inspired (if anything, perhaps slightly more decorous than its classical models, with the carefully placed drapery around the subject's waist), its subject dramatic but fundamentally untroubling, imparting an air of triumphalism. With its nod to the national anthem, the title of the exhibition seems to acknowledge these preconceptions about Victorian sculpture, suggesting that the pieces on show are not merely Victorian but 'victorious', as we might expect of works produced in the heyday of British imperial might and scorned by modernists for their supposed smugness. What this exhibition goes on to do is to dismantle this set of assumptions. The promised victory turns out to be for variety and innovation rather than for any one style: the works on display range from the medievalist to the proto-modernist, from the magnificent to the miniature, the sublime to the ridiculous. There is plenty of smugness to be found here, and triumphalist imperialist propaganda is in no short supply, but there are also works which speak to doubt, to personal grief and national anxiety. Rather than attempting to tell a single narrative about Victorian sculpture, the curators have chosen pieces that testify to competing ideas about what sculpture could and should do. Far from being excessively academic and earnest, as some hostile press reviews suggested, the exhibition was, in my opinion, enlivened by the curators' decision to highlight these contrasts by juxtaposing pieces in unexpected ways, setting the traditionally revered and the usually ridiculed alongside one another. 1 This was an exhibition in which a majolica peacock, Hiram Powers's Greek Slave, and an example of 1 In his scathing review for the Daily Telegraph, Richard Dorment charged the exhibition with resembling 'an extended academic lecture', particularly objecting to the juxtaposition of stylistically and physically dissimilar sculptures. 'Sculpture Victorious', Daily Telegraph, 23 February 2015 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ art/art-reviews/11429728/Sculpture-Victorious-Tate-Britain-review-its-incoherence-isfrightening.html> [accessed 24 February 2016].
The construction of artistic masculinity in James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert and Wyndham Lewis, c. 1880-1914 /
ABSTRACT
A Campaign of Extermination': Walter Sickert and Modernism in London in 1914
Hospitality, Nourishment, Conveyance: Works of Art from the People of Southern Africa
Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1870-1914
Visual Culture in Britain, 2009
As its slightly nebulous title suggests, Potvin's new book is a multifaceted, if occasionall... more As its slightly nebulous title suggests, Potvin's new book is a multifaceted, if occasionally dissipated, investigation into the creative tensions found within late-Victorian and Edwardian bourgeois masculinity. At root, it explores a basic contradiction within British culture that ...
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Papers by Jonathan Shirland