1910, Post-Impressionism and Beyond

The conference kicked off today with four parallel panels on Popular Culture in 1910, Europe and Modernism, 1910 and History, and 1910, Post-Impressionism and Beyond.

The latter panel began with Maggie Humm's talk, entitled "Roger Fry, Gertrude Stein, Post-Impressionism and John Maynard Keynes in 1910". Using scribbles in notebooks (the Steins' address, written in French) and newspaper cuttings from Duncan Grant and others' scrapbooks, Humm created a more "kaleidoscopic" picture of the environment across Europe at the time of the Grafton Gallery's Post-Impressionism show in December of that year.

Federico Sabatini, in his paper "'To Find an Equivalent for Life': Virginia Woolf, Transference Modernism through Roger Fry and the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition", explored the relations between biography, autobiography and fiction through Woolf's biography of Fry and her diaries. His paper looked at questions of the possibility of biography as art, the Freudian and Lacanian ideas of transference, the biography being as much a portrait of the biographer as the subject, as well as the tensions between reality and fiction and Woolf's struggles in creating a biography that included "scattered and incongruous fragments" and the many "lives that Roger Fry lived simultaneously".

Roxana Preda's paper was entitled "Before and after 1910: The Life and Death of Gertrude Stein's art collection" and followed the Steins' construction and destruction (in a sense) of their collection of modernist art. It explored the relationships between the arrangement of art on walls and that of words on the page and the clues to Gertrude Stein's biography as seen in her tastes between 1904 and the 1930s. Preda's paper included a fascinating recreation of the collagistic arrangement of Picasso, Cezanne and other paintings in Stein's rue de Fleurus flat by arranging reproductions of the paintings on a white background in the same combination as in the historical photographic record.