Queer Beauty by Davis Whitney;

Author:Davis, Whitney;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy/Aesthetics
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

Elsewhere in the diaries, Lee observed Botticelli’s Primavera to have similar powers: when an observer is “made to tread [its] mazes,” its “upward and circular movements become actual almost, a sense of lifting and turning—yet not gibbering, though the thing is so fearfully acute as action.”44 But the “dapping” mosaic in the Baptistery was especially instructive because it was entirely abstract—virtually pure form. For the frontispiece in Beauty and Ugliness, Lee published Kit’s drawing of the Swirl (see figure 34), marking their collaboration and (in the text) acknowledging Kit’s original recognition of our corporeal-empathetic enaction of formal relations.45 In Art and Man Lee published an undated text by Kit, to which Lee gave the title “The Connection Between Man and Art,” which included Kit’s musings on “encrusted medieval patterns” with a drawing of another such mosaic at the Baptistery. Clearly Kit and Lee had spent a good time of time studying and drawing these floors. Lee’s Swirl, in other words, was partly a recognition of Kit’s aesthetic experience, of the natural and pleasurable movement of Kit’s responsive body for Kit herself—a body as it were now felt intensely by Lee as well. (Recall, too, that Lee entered the Baptistery and encountered the Swirl in a disgruntled mood shortly after the departure of Mlle K——.) In such empathy we identify (or, better, we try and we hope, perhaps we long, to identify) with another’s pleasurable corporeal responsiveness to the artwork.

By the same token, as Lee wrote in the diaries on January 23, 1903, in an artwork “the great artist captures us by filling us with a given movement, exclusively of all others, his, to which we willingly yield.” In just this way, she went on, such paintings as Sargent’s portraits “keep calling and alluring the ‘Eye.’” As the prime example, “think of the lady singing only in a labyrinth, so to speak, of Sargent.”

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