Literary Greats, in Seaside Galleries
MARGATE, England — At the eastern and western extremes of England’s coast this spring, art galleries are celebrating the life and work of two giants of British modernism. But the artists at the center of these exhibitions aren’t painters or sculptors — they are the writers T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
Varied in content, featuring visual art from the 1920s up to the present day, the shows use their literary starting points to explore the relationship between the self and nature, as well as the dramatic social upheavals of the authors’ times.
The town of Margate sits at the outermost lip of the estuary where the River Thames meets the North Sea. Here, in 1921, Eliot, who had come to the town on doctor’s orders after a nervous collapse, looked out onto the English Channel as he worked on “The Waste Land.”
“Journeys with ‘ The Waste Land’ ” at Margate’s Turner Contemporary gallery brings together art that engages with the poem’s themes, as well as works inspired by it. “There’s something very interesting about looking at one poem as opposed to a career,” said the curator, Mike Tooby.
The result is an idiosyncratic but evocative exhibition in which a nocturnal painting by Edward Hopper hangs beside a bittersweet video work by John Smith in which the artist recites a segment of the poem in the toilets of a London pub.
Presenting the exhibition in the Turner Contemporary, which looks directly onto the sea, gave poignan- cy to the poem’s motifs of “drowning, voyages and shipwrecks,” Mr. Tooby said.
Eight hours away by train, Tate St. Ives is perched on Cornwall’s toe as it kicks into the Atlantic. Virginia Woolf took vacations with her family at their holiday home, Talland House, in St. Ives until she was 13, and returned to the town in adulthood.
“Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings” is made up of the work of female artists from the last 100 years, divided into themes related to Woolf’s writing: landscape, the domestic sphere, public and private identity. Paintings by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, are shown alongside works by artists that came after her, many recently rediscovered. Included are Claude Cahun’s surrealist performances for the camera, Ithell Colquhoun’s f leshy and sensual depictions of nature, and audacious landscapes and portraits by the painter Hannah Gluckstein, known as Gluck.
Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse,” published in 1927, is the exhibition’s most significant literary reference. While the novel was set on a Scottish island, Woolf drew inspiration for it from Talland House and the surrounding coast.
The shows in Margate and St. Ives coincide with the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, a conflict that is an essential context for both “To The Lighthouse,” which portrays its devastating, transformative impact on a family, and “The Waste Land.”
Artworks reflecting masterpieces of modernist letters.