Towards Night

Sixty artists explore the nocturnal. Curated by Tom Hammick. The evening hour too gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. – Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure, 1930 Towards Night is an exhibition exploring the nocturnal through paintings, prints and drawings by over sixty artists. Drawing on the nineteenth century European Romantic tradition, the show surveys contemporary and historical connections to wonderment and dystopia at dusk, twilight, night and dawn. Towards Night juxtaposes key paintings and prints by Constable, Friedrich, Munch, Nolde, Palmer and Turner, some of the best known visionaries of the Romantic tradition with contemporary artists who work with the transformative aspects of nightfall to convey emotional responses of awe, anxiety and solitude, love and loss, revelry, insomnia, and journey’s end. The exhibition opens with direct and positive responses to the natural world; Marc Chagall’s exotic dreamlike evening in The Poet Reclining (1915) sits close to eighteenth century Indian miniatures depicting brightly painted figures offset against darkening monsoon clouds, and William Crozier’s Balcony at Night, Antibes (2007), of a plant, blue and iridescent against the cool night sky. As the exhibition progresses, the dystopias become darker and more disturbing, and the connections between artists and works intensify: Emma Stibbon’s Rome Aqueduct (2011) takes on a heightened sense of pathos alongside Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter Landscape (1811); Peter Doig’s cinematic Echo Lake (1998) conjures up an increased sense of contemporary angst; and Prunella Clough’s False Flower (1993), a magical tree defying brutalism by growing out of concrete, becomes more miraculous near Night Shift (2015) Nick Carrick’s tomblike high rise. Tom Hammick’s Violetta Alone (2015) and Michael Craig Martin’s Ash Tray (2015), reinforce hedonistic aspects of night-time revelry alongside Four AM, Betsy Dadd’s young woman drinking in the early hours of the morning and L.S. Lowry’s drunken people in a pub in The Crowd (1922). In the final room, a cluster of works explores dreams and insomnia, from Louise Bourgeois’ Spirals (2010) to Munch’s lovers embracing in The Kiss (1902). Tom Hammick, curator of the show said “This exhibition has grown way beyond its original conception, to become a magnificent survey of painting and printmaking from over two hundred years based around the central tenet of night. The exhibition is a kind of painterly response to the way figurative artists use their artistic heroes as starting points for their own work, both compositionally and emotionally.” Artists featured in Towards Night: Christiane Baumgarter, Michael Craig-Martin, Julian Opie, Will Gill, Merlin James, Howard Hodgkin, WillIam Scott, Patrick Caulfield, George Shaw, Stephen Chambers, Basil Beattie, Betsy Dadd, Christopher Le Brun, L.S Lowry, Andrew Cranston, David Willetts, James Fisher, Emma Stibbon, Vija Celmins, William Blake, William Crozier, Tom Hammick, Georgia Keeling, Helen Turner, Humphrey Ocean, Julian Bell, Craigie Aitchison, Mark Wright, Ken Kiff, Matthew Burrows, Andrzej Jackowski, Sarah Raphael, Nick Bodimeade, Nick Carrick, Mary Newcomb, Hurvin Anderson, Peter Doig, Phoebe Unwin, Danny Markey, Sara Lee, Simon Burton, Susie Hamilton, Marc Chagall, Alfred Wallis, Emil Nolde, J.M.W. Turner, Prunella Clough, Samuel Palmer, Louise Bourgeois, Caspar David Friedrich, Alex Katz, Ewan Gibbs, Susie Hamilton, Andrzej Jackowski, Amanda Vesey, Edward Stott, Gertrude Hermes, Rose Wylie, Sidney Nolan, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Emil Nolde, Hiroshige, Edvard Munch, Samuel Palmer, Eileen Cooper, Charles Neame-Spencer, Samantha Cary.

Wondrous transformations: rereading and rewriting wonder in contemporary anglophone and francophone fairy tales

This thesis compares contemporary anglophone and francophone rewritings of traditional fairy tales for adults. Examining material dating from the 1990s to the present, including novels, novellas, short stories, comics, televisual and filmic adaptations, this thesis argues that while the revisions studied share similar themes and have comparable aims, the methods for inducing wonder (where wonder is defined as the effect produced by the text rather than simply its magical contents) are diametrically opposed, and it is this opposition that characterises the difference between the two types of rewriting. While they all engage with the hybridity of the fairy-tale genre, the anglophone works studied tend to question traditional narratives by keeping the fantasy setting, while francophone works debunk the tales not only in relation to questions of content, but also aesthetics. Through theoretical, historical, and cultural contextualisation, along with close readings of the texts, this thesis aims to demonstrate the existence of this francophone/anglophone divide and to explain how and why the authors in each tradition tend to adopt such different views while rewriting similar material. This division is the guiding thread of the thesis and also functions as a springboard to explore other concepts such as genre hybridity, reader-response, and feminism. The thesis is divided into two parts; the first three chapters work as an in-depth literature review: after examining, in chapters one and two, the historical and contemporary cultural field in which these works were created, chapter three examines theories of fantasy and genre hybridity. The second part of the thesis consists of textual studies and comparisons between francophone and anglophone material and is built on three different approaches. The first (chapter four) looks at selected texts in relation to questions of form, studying the process of world building and world creation enacted when authors combine and rewrite several fairy tales in a single narrative world. The second (chapter five) is a thematic approach which investigates the interactions between femininity, the monstrous, and the wondrous in contemporary tales of animal brides. Finally, chapter six compares rewritings of the tale of ‘Bluebeard’ with a comparison hinged on the representation of the forbidden room and its contents: Bluebeard’s cabinet of wonder is one that he holds sacred, one where he sublimates his wives’ corpses, and it is the catalyst of wonder, terror, and awe. The three contextual chapters and the three text-based studies work towards tracing the tangible existence of the division postulated between francophone and anglophone texts, but also the similarities that exist between the two cultural fields and their roles in the renewal of the fairy-tale genre.