Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger: Imaginations and Images

Description

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a reappraisal of Murdoch’s novels – chiefly, three mature novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and The Good Apprentice (1985), and two enigmatic late novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) – which are perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. It draws on a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, and on Murdoch’s philosophical writings, Weinberger’s private writings, the remarks of both artists in interviews, and other material relating to their views on art and art history, much of which is unpublished and has received no previous critical attention. Scrutiny of their shared values, methods and the imagistic dialogue that takes place in their art provides original perspectives on Murdoch’s creativity, and new ways of understanding her experimentation with the visual arts. This book offers a new line of enquiry into Murdoch's novels, and into the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Foreword Acknowledgements Contents About the Author List of Abbreviations List of Figures Chapter 1: Writer Meets Painter References Chapter 2: Murdoch and Visual Art ‘Pictures Are About Everything That Human Beings do’ ‘My Own Dream Life as a Painter’ ‘Any Serious Pursuit and Expression of Truth Moves Towards Fundamental Questions’: Ideas in Evolution Thinking and Language: The ‘Spur to Images’ ‘There Are Visual Images Which Carry Mysterious Charges’ Language and Vision in A Word Child References Chapter 3: Murdoch and Visual Artists ‘I Know a Lot of Painters. I Know What Painting Is’ ‘How Close, How in a Sense Ordinary, are the Marvels of the World’: Reynolds Stone ‘A World of Becoming’: Jean Jones ‘That Particular Serenity and Presence of Being’: Alex Colville ‘There Is in a Rare Sense so Little Barrier’: Harry Weinberger References Chapter 4: Kindred Spirits ‘I Feel I have Been in a Huge World’: The Developing Friendship ‘Write What You Momently Think and Feel’: The Correspondence References Chapter 5: ‘All Your Colours Are So Triumphant’: The Rhetoric of Colour Colours of Consciousness Prelapsarian, Prelinguistic: Seeking Childhood Vision Learning to See: Personal Icons and Purified Attention ‘Those Absolute Rocks’: Colour in Landscape Beyond Colour References Chapter 6: ‘Shadow-Bound Consciousness’: The Mask as Icon Form and Transformation ‘The Attempt to Impose Order, to Organise and to Choose, Which Produces Art’: Finding a Truthful Form Visual Metaphor: ‘We Can Often “See” What We Cannot Say’ ‘Surely Art Transforms’: Multiple Perspectives in Masks I and Masks II ‘Faces like Masks’: Giving Form to the Void ‘We Can Picture Liberation Through Art’: Mythical Masks and Moral Development References Chapter 7: ‘More than a Likeness’: The Ethics of Portraiture Portraying Otherness ‘I Don’t Think of Myself as Existing Much, Somehow’ ‘Imagination Is Best!’ ‘We Feel Our Faces as If They Were Masks’: The Sandcastle and A Severed Head ‘In Eclipse’: Representations of Ageing ‘Pale, Still and Mythical’: Iris Murdoch by Tom Phillips ‘An Elusive Moon’: Portraits of Love Representing Ideal Concepts: Icon and The Polish Rider References Chapter 8: ‘Something in a Dark Picture’: Reconceptualising Angels Angels Reimagined ‘The “Modern Crisis” Can Be Seen as a Crisis About Imagery’ ‘A Haze of Enslaved Delight’: Angelic Fantasies ‘Trinitarian Thoughts’: Angelic Icons in The Time of the Angels ‘Jackson, Give’: Form and Colour in Jackson’s Dilemma ‘A Long Black Shadow’: Dark Angels in Jackson’s Dilemma and Triptych: Rider and Angels ‘A Place Where There Is No Road’: Jackson’s Dilemma and Jacob’s Dream References Epilogue References Bibliography Novels by Iris Murdoch Philosophy by Iris Murdoch Other Works by Iris Murdoch Writing by Harry Weinberger Interviews Murdoch Criticism Weinberger Criticism Catalogues for Exhibitions by Harry Weinberger Art and Art History Other Sources Index