The Art Bulletin

In his celebrated Apologia of 1125, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux questions the purpose of the monstrous and deformed creatures depicted so frequently in Romanesque cloister capitals. Focusing on the cloister of St-Michel-de-Cuxa, this paper explains such images as corporeal manifestations of spiritual deformity. It is argued that these capitals represent the diabolical phantasms described in monastic accounts of dreams. By visualizing the monstrous in the cloister, where the monks devoted so much time to meditation, the Benedictines apparently sought to recall, and purge from the imagination, the diabolical illusions and temptations that impeded their struggle for spiritual perfection.

The poet Tao Qian (365-427), who retired to the country to farm, drink, and write, was fond of chrysanthemums. Tao came to be one of China’s best-loved poets, and the chrysanthemums in later art and literature served to represent personal, philosophical, and political values associated with him. Those values, however, could be variously construed, and the meanings and uses of chrysanthemums in visual culture are accordingly mutable and complex. The chrysanthemum’s iconographic multivalence testifies to the protean vitality of the culture hero in Chinese history and demonstrates how such signs function dynamically in Chinese pictorial systems.

This essay traces the ideology and imagery of Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera to sources in the contemporary opera-ballet. Focusing on two ballets (Le triomphe des arts and Les amours déguisez) and related works produced at the Paris Opéra between 1696 and 1713, it examines their protest of Louis XIV’s absolutism through the satiric reversals of eponymous court ballets of his early reign. Relating these works to Watteau’s Pilgrimage, it explores the locus amoenus of Cythera as the site of political subversion and traces the ways in which Cytherean imagery is used to undermine the iconology of royal propaganda.

Thomas Eakins undertook rigorous, systematic study of anatomy, linear perspective, motion, and reflection in the belief that the knowledge gained would enable him to paint intensely truthful likenesses. His paintings, however, are animated by irrepressible conflicts that stemmed from his attempts to bring seeing and knowing into harmonious union. Eakins’s efforts often led him away from mimesis and toward adventurous experimentation with diagrammatic and noniconic signs. This aspect of his work points to parallels with the philosophical writings of his contemporary Charles Sanders Peirce. The comparison clarifies features of both oeuvres and the cultural history they share.

This paper draws attention to the link between art and language in Yoruba society. It then focuses on the ontological, mnemonic, and ritual significance of àwòrán (visual representation) and the social, religious, and artistic conventions that influence the practice, modes, and reception of portraiture. The paper also examines the complex interaction between visual representation (àwòrán) and the beholder (awòran), underscoring the fact that in Yoruba society, the act of looking and seeing (ìwòran) is determined as much by individual responses to specific representations or spectacles as by culturally constructed modes of perceiving and interpreting reality.

Entering art school in 1945 with a well-developed appreciation for mass consumer culture and a history of making art occupied with that interest, Andy Warhol ran into a very different form of populism in a faculty that had come of age with the social consciousness and worker-identified fellow-traveler culture of the "Red Decade." This essay looks at the meeting of these two sensibilities in the early development of Warhol’s mature aesthetic position and investigates its implications for understanding the changing basis of legitimation for high art in a mass-cultural world.