Earticle

이 논문은 예이츠, 아오키, 그리고 피카소를 트랜스 미학의 표현으로 관찰하고자 한다. 이 두 사람을 연구하기 위해서 입체파와 라파엘 전파라는 두 맥락을 살피려고 하는데, 후자는 영국의 운동이다. 라파엘 전파에 영향을 받은 예이츠는 비교적 잘 조사되고 알려진 것에 비해서 일본의 큰 화가(시인)인 쉬게루 아오키는 일본 밖에서는 거의 알려진 게 없다. 라파엘 전파운동이 영국에서 일어난 운동인 것을 감안하면 20세초 일본의 한 화가기 이 운동에 깊은 관심을 가졌다는 사실은 상당히 놀랍다. 더구나, 두 사람은 이 미학으로 자신의 나라의 대표적 작가가 되었다는 것이다.

This paper discusses Yeats, Aoki, and Picasso as an exemplification of a trans-aesthetics. I will put Yeats and Aoki in two contexts, Cubism and pre-Raphaelitism, in order to study Yeats and Aoki. To do so, I will discuss the two art movements, Cubism and pre-Raphaelitism, the second being a movement in England. While the pre-Raphaelite Yeats is now relatively well researched and well known, Shigeru Aoki, a great Japanese painter/poet, who was also a pre-Raphaelite, is hardly known outside his country, Japan. Considering that pre-Raphaelitism was an English movement, it is rather surprising that a painter in Japan in the early 20th century had become deeply interested in it. Furthermore, both Yeats and Aoki, with this aesthetics, became the leading figures in the literary and art worlds of their countries.

Yeats wrote “The Wanderings of Oisin” with devotion. He spent a lot of time on the poem. It is about the Irish literary revival and is with a lot of Irish elements. In here he wanted to deal with fundamental human conditions, connecting Irish myths with the present. For he believed that human nature remains the same, unaffected by the passage of time. “The Wanderings of Oisin” is deeply involved with symbolic and Pre-Raphaelite elements. Particularly, the early Pre-Raphaelite Yeats applied the various aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism to this work, in which human emotions are fitly imbued with the mood of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The allusion of light and darkness represented in Pre- Raphaelite paintings has the poetic implication. Eventually, Yeats strove to connect the mood of “The Wanderings of Oisin” with Pre-Raphaelite characters. Such an attempt of his seems to be very successful, making a new, vital poem.

It is well known that the Pre-Raphaelites was deeply influenced by the poems of Alfred Tennyson. They used his poems as their motifs in their paintings such as “The Lady of Shalott” and “Mariana.” This essay, however, focuses on John Keats’s influence on them, which is relatively less studied by scholars. My point is that especially the early Pre-Raphaelitism is greatly affected by Keats’s notion of imagination. He emphasized the significant role of the room for imagination in reading poems. In other words, instead of giving detailed descriptions, good poems should create vacant space that should be filled by the imagination of readers. Likewise, Pre-Raphaelites refused to follow the traditional techniques taught by the Royal Academy and emphasized the role of imagination in reading paintings. For instance, Isabella and Lorenzo, which is the outcome of John Millais's acceptance of Keats, is a kind of ‘montage' which does not give detailed description, but instead, asks observers to use imagination to understand his artistic will and personal conflict, in comparison with the traditional works that were expressed under arranged chiaroscuro and composition based on the academy custom of a mythic subject.

This study of William Morris’s News from Nowhere perceives artificiality as the main target of his social criticism in the novel. Artificiality, according to him, permeates every area of Victorian society: gender relations, education system, motherhood, commerce, manufacture, and most significantly, artistic practices. Morris believes that the artificial nature of capitalist society (its drive for mass production, increasing mechanization, the alienation of labor) inhibits artistic creativity and freedom, making it impossible to produce truly beautiful things. This study traces Morris’s conception of Victorian artificiality back to the Pre-Raphaelites, who attacked artificial modes of painting and aspired to truthfully copy nature in their works on the advice of Ruskin, whom Morris deeply admired; and further back to the Romantic poets, who pursued the sincerity of literature in reaction to artificial (or unnatural) practices of language in their day. What can be called the Romantic spirit runs through the different phases of Pre-Raphaelite movement, and also through Morris’s remarkable achievements in decorative art and his News from Nowhere. Nowhere, twenty-first-century Britain, is a utopia where all traits associated with modern artificiality have been completely removed, an ideal community in which art/work brings genuine aesthetic pleasure. In this utopian vision, Morris successfully integrates the Romantic tradition and Pre-Raphaelitism into his own socialism.