Dr Jennifer Johnson, Junior Research Fellow in History of Art
My research is concerned with artisticpractice as a way of thinking about the obligations and conditions of the worldas it is lived-in at particular moments, and the continuing interest into thetwentieth century in art as a form of metaphysical thinking. For example,looking at painters who deploy mixed media as a rethinking of their practice,such as Georges Rouault, Jean Fautrier, or Prunella Clough, I am interested inhow various constructions of the painted surface are understood as inscribed,or palimpsestual, or organic, or phenomenological. I am also concerned with the interactionbetween theory and artistic practice in the twentieth century – such asMerleau-Ponty’s interest in non-mimetic art as an opening into a form of vision– and in the debt twentieth-century practice has to older forms of thinking: toScholasticism, for instance, or to eighteenth-century aesthetics and notions ofempathy.
I have a background in literature as well asart history, and my research also borrows models from literary theory, and attimes from literature, since I believe that the desire to rid modern art of theliterary has led to a false division, and there is still much critical insightto be gained by such comparisons and borrowings.
I have just finished a book, derived from myDPhil research on the painter Georges Rouault (1871-1958). Rouault’s workexplodes the genre of painting – not least through his experiments with printmaking, ceramics and a host of mixed media works. Rouault also draws upon theresidue of Gustave Moreau’s symbolism, the extremities of Fauvism, the writingsof J.-K. Huysmans and Léon Bloy, and the radical theatrical experiments ofAlfred Jarry. The repetitions and re-workings at the heart of Rouault’s processdefy conventional chronological treatment, and place the emphasis upon thecoming-into-being of the work of art. Ultimately, the process of ‘making’ isrevealed as both a search for understanding and a response to the problematicworld of the twentieth century. My book,GeorgesRouault and Material Imagining(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), approachesRouault in relation to contemporary theories about making and material,examining how Rouault’s oeuvre constructs a ‘material consciousness’ thatdeparts from other modern painters.
Georges Rouault, 'Danseuse', (1943), oil on paper mounted on canvas, 85 x 46 inches. Photograph by Jean-Louis Losi. Fondation Georges Rouault, Paris.
My work involves close analyses of specificpaintings, and of sequences of paintings, in order to draw out the way in whichcertain terms of expression actually make certain epistemological andexpressive claims. The aim of myresearch on Rouault has been three-fold: to introduce Rouault, who is anotoriously ‘difficult’ painter, in the context of modernist painting; toexamine the notions of ‘material’ and of ‘making’ through Rouault’s work aswell as in the writings surrounding and directly provoked by his work; and topropose new critical approaches to questions of materiality and painting.
My next major project revolves around acomparison of British and French abstraction, particularly in relation tolandscape in the 1930s, and in the 1950s and 60s. Beginning with a study of thework and writings of Prunella Clough I am interested in the ways in which thegenre of landscape painting, including notions of the picturesque and topology,as well as changing ideas about the status of the ‘object’, inform this work,and what kind of experience – of the painted or constructed landscape, or ofthe world outside the work – is at stake.
Dr Jennifer Johnson