Séminaire SEARCH avec Frédéric Ogée (Université Paris Cité) et Rebecca J. Squires (KU Leuven)

Séminaire SEARCH avec Frédéric Ogée (Université Paris Cité) et Rebecca Squires (KU Leuven)

1. Frédéric Ogée (Université Paris Cité), “Turner’s traverses, passages and painting”

Abstract

Most of Turner's subjects describe what one might call ‘crossings’. From the difficult docking of boats to the tumultuous epics of Ulysses or Aeneas, from the Saint-Gothard pass to the simple crossing of a stream, from storms in the North Sea to dramatic journeys through the Alps, a very large number of Turner’s paintings represent the difficulties, the pains, the occasional triumphs, of all those human crossings, those constantly renewed experiences of traversing mountain, land and sea, where personal, ‘Romantic’ wanderings, Napoleonic cavalcades and colonial expansion (Carthage, Rome, Venice, London) enter into strong and sometimes unexpected metaphorical resonances with the tumultuous journey of life and post-lapsarian constructions of history.

Frédéric Ogée is Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité and Ecole du Louvre. His main period of research is the long 18th-century, and his publications include two collections of essays on William Hogarth, as well as ‘Better in France’? The circulation of ideas across the Channel in the 18th century (Lewisburg, 2005), Diderot and European Culture (Oxford, 2006), and J.M.W. Turner, Les Paysages absolus (Paris, 2010) and Jardins et Civilisations (Valenciennes, 2019), following a conference at the European Institute for Gardens and Landscapes in Caen. In 2006-07, he curated the first-ever exhibition of Hogarth for the Louvre Museum. He is currently working on a series of four large monographs in French on 18th- and 19th-century British artists. The first one, Thomas Lawrence--Le genie du portrait anglais came out in December 2022. The second one, on J.M.W.Turner, will be published end of 2024. From 2014 to 2017 he was a member of Tate Britain’s Advisory Council, and since 2014 has been a member of the City of Paris Scientific Council. In 2018-19 he was Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art at the Clark Art Institute and then the William Allan Neilson Professor at Smith College, both in the United States.​

2. Rebecca J. Squires (LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven), “A Re-Envisioning of Space-Time along the Picturesque Traverse of J.M.W. Turner’s Schöllenen Gorge”

Abstract

The eighteenth-century picturesque landscape in Europe occupied the uncharted space between the sublime and the beautiful, serving as an imaginarium for the in between and not-yet-known, elucidating emerging concepts of space, time and perception in the Enlightenment. The evocation of the sublime and the beautiful in the designed landscape, in concert with the will of the wanderer, elicited surprise and disorientation, catalysts for changing consciousness, exemplifying the picturesque landscape as a locus of transformation. This shift in perception led to a re-envisioning of space and time, which was re-shaped and re-oriented along the errant path of the walker, while the irregular disposition of the landscape reflected this new, non-linear time.

The picturesque view, captured in the eye and imagination of the spectator, and depicted in the landscape, garden, art, and literature of the long eighteenth century,  artialised the landscape (Alain Roger 1997), transposing land into landscape according to European aesthetic convention. This transposition effectuated an instantaneous transformation from landscape to image, positioning the picturesque as an interstitial space between the dualities of the sublime and the beautiful, nature and art, the three-dimensional visual world and the two-dimensional visual field (James J. Gibson 1950), and absolute and relational modes of space-time.

Challenging these dialectics was J.M.W. Turner, who conceived of space as multiplex and multidimensional, “an order of coexistences” (Leibniz 1717), transcending the dichotomic notions of the picturesque. In Turner’s paintings of Schöllenen Gorge, immovable massifs are dissolved, plunged into the contours of lakes and chasms, merging the single perspectival prospect with the roving three-dimensional view, while evidencing their manifold states.  Turner’s Alpine views seem a sublation of Hegelian dialectics, in which being, as a stable moment, passes to its opposite, nothing, and is destabilized, forming a “unity of distinctions” (1807).

Rebecca J. Squires is an artist-researcher at LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven, investigating the eighteenth-century picturesque view and its role in the development of modern visual perception.

Squires’ current artistic research project, The Grand Tour: A Transformative Traverse of the Neo-Picturesque Landscape, is a human-pulled carriage journey that re-envisions the eighteenth-century traverse of the picturesque landscape, the subject-objectification of the view, and the imperialistic impulse behind the voyage pittoresque. The Grand Tour proceeded throughout Belgium in 2022, and will launch in Düsseldorf, Germany in September of 2024. Squires’ papers have been presented at the Goethe University, Frankfurt, 2024; Société d’Études Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles, Paris, 2024; American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Baltimore, 2022; III International Congress Architecture & Landscape, Granada, 2022; Architectural Association Visiting School, Venice, 2021; and The Gardens Trust, London, 2020.

Squires’ publications include “Vedute of Venice: The Eighteenth-Century Venetian View as Picturesque Locus of Transformation”,  Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 46, No. 4, Winter 2023: 113-121; “The Sentimental Traverse of Claude-Henri Watelet’s Eighteenth-Century Picturesque Garden Isle, The Moulin Joly”, Studia UBB Philologia, LXVIII, 3, 2023;  “The Picturesque Deception: The Eighteenth-Century Picturesque View as Imperialist Mechanism”, in Unearthing Traces, Lausanne: EPFL Press, 2023; and “The Radical Traverse of Space-Time in the Eighteenth-Century Picturesque Garden”, in Arquitectura y Paisaje: Transferencias Históricas, Retos Contemporáneos, Madrid: Abada Editores, 2022.