Awards
2009 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Marnin Young, “Heroic Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaèlli’s Absinthe Drinkers” (June 2008)
Marnin Young
In his nuanced and elegant article, “Heroic Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaèlli’s Absinthe Drinkers,” published in the June 2008 issue of The Art Bulletin, Marnin Young offers an insightful and original interpretation of the work of an artist who has been virtually ignored since the early twentieth century. Firmly grounding his reading in social and historical context, Young closely analyzes contemporary critical responses to Absinthe Drinkers when it was exhibited at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881 in order to chart the ways in which the painting engages with the politics of both absinthe and the banliue. An image of lingering, of what the author calls “dead time,” Absinthe Drinkers enacts, in both form and content, a “pictorial aesthetics of duration, one deliberately in tension with an Impressionist mode of pictorial instantaneity.” Young’s well-crafted and subtle argument is beautifully paced, a kind of enactment of the very subject of his study that reminds us that when we look closely and proceed slowly, depth of meaning reveals itself in ever-more eloquent ways.
Jury: Marni Kessler, University of Kansas, chair; Catherine Asher, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; and Jack Greenstein, University of California, San Diego.
