Der verkörperte Augenblick. Überlegungen zum Ursprung und Wandel erzählerischer Strukturen in der viktorianischen Malerei zwischen 1840 und 1860 (narrative painting)

Abstract

This essay explores the cultural relationship between fiction and painting in the nineteenth century. Attending to the period between the late 1840s and the early 1860s, when the disintegration of the famous Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood into a set of differently oriented painters took place, it concerns itself with the expressive and narrative conventions that painting and fiction share and foregrounds the complex web of local conventions that show these two forms of art in the Victorian age to be one living tissue. Like the novelists, many nineteenth-century painters required a set of techniques that could be read for situation and development (of character, action, motif, etc.), one that left space for new combinations or coinages and forms of expression. Very often these artists struggled to ‘tell’ a story associated with ordinary or domestic life. With the help of ‘modifying agents’ it became possible for them to represent in painting a subject of finite duration; a set of symbolic devices did the important work of foreshadowing and retrospection and provided a set of specific story formulas which permit the spectator to supply the broken patterns of representation with sequential meaning. A whole group of artists was thus tied together by the idea of grasping in their work a particular moment with a readable past and future and therefore readable as a narrative situation complete in itself.