Elegy Landscapes – Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime - Hardcover

Plumly, Stanley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393651509 ISBN 13: 9780393651508

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

Synopsis

Stanley Plumly explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from personal tragedy, these painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists' lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angled look at the philosophy of the sublime.

About this title

Review

In this erudite and probing study, award-winning poet Stanley Plumly yields new insights into the iconic works of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, Britain's greatest landscape artists. In the pastoral nostalgia of Constable and the modernist fury of Turner, Plumly finds a commonality in their quest to depict the sublime. A compelling portrait of two artists whose work continues to startle and amaze.--Donna M. Lucey, author of Sargent's Women

Twining biography with intense meditation on the paintings, Stanley Plumly shows how two starkly different landscape artists made masterpieces from ruin and grief, John Constable in quiet fields and clouds, J.M.W. Turner in scenes of storm and fire. This book is a hymn to art, in itself a work of visionary art.--Rosanna Warren, author of Ghost in a Red Hat

[Plumly] is a particularly effective art historian, capable of re-creating these sublime masterpieces with his inspired prose... A polyphonic, scholarly study of two of art history's most important figures.

[A] vibrant dual biography... Plumly's eye for detail and eloquent powers of description make this book a significant work of art history.

About the Author

Stanley Plumly (1939-2019) authored ten books of poetry and four works of nonfiction, including Elegy Landscapes, Posthumous Keats, and The Immortal Evening. Winner of the Truman Capote Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize, among others, Plumly was Maryland's poet laureate from 2009 to 2018 and taught at the University of Maryland where he founded the graduate program in creative writing.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0393651509
• ISBN 13: 9780393651508
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272