The Resistant Materiality of Frederic Leighton’s Arab Hall

British Art Studies

Mary Roberts¹ 

[1] University of Sydney;

关键词: Frederic Leighton;    George Aitchison;    art history;    architectural history;    gesamstkunstwerk;    arabic art;    Lawrence Alma-Tadema;   

DOI  :  10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-09/mroberts

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Frederic Leighton’s Holland Park home, a collaboration with George Aitchison, William De Morgan, and Walter Crane, was one of London’s most famous nineteenth-century orientalist interiors. Built between 1877 and 1879, Leighton’s Arab Hall houses historic tiles of exceptional quality from İznik, Damascus, and Persia, distinguishing his orientalist project from the homes of his peers.The Arab Hall was conceived as a gesamstkunstwerk, a secular aestheticist fantasy of suspended time in which historic Near Eastern craft production was synthesized into an harmonious aesthetic present tense. De Morgan undertook the challenge of replicating tile fragments to repair some of these historic panels. In doing so, he submitted to an apprenticeship across time, as the products of his kiln were answerable to the superb precedents of Near Eastern master craftsmen. But the dislocation of these historic tiles is often legible in their fragmentary remnants and scarred surfaces. In this article, Roberts addresses the ways in which this obdurate materiality posed an impediment to an aesthetics of synthesis.

【 授权许可】

Unknown