The Portrait Of Eccentricity

In this companion to his The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, Maiorino examines the links between Renaissance and the modern versions of the Groteseque. In this interdisciplinary study, the term &"eccentricity&" refers to styles of playful extravagance. Maiorino focuses on the rhetorical figures of excess employed by a critic-historian (Giorgio Vasari), on the willful artificiality of a painter (Giuseppe Arcimboldo), and on the programmatic and interpretive commentary of a theorist (Gregorio Comanini). Maiorino draws subtle and persuasive connections between the images he discusses and the grotesque &"face&" of sixteenth-century poetics and rhetoric. He sets the mannerist and the grotesque against the philosophical seriousness of Renaissance humanism, interpreting them as a celebration of the ludic and fantastic possibilities of art itself. Aiming at pleasure rather than instruction, this art plays on the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, the credible and the impossible, taking delight in parody, excess, disjunction, and exaggeration.

The concept of eccentricity was central to how people in the 19th century understood their world. This book explores how, from the turn of the century, discourses of eccentricity were established to make sense of individuals who did not seem to fit within an increasingly organized social and economic order.

What if we ascribe significance to aesthetic and social divergences rather than waving them aside as anomalous? What if we look closely at what does not appear central, or appears peripherally, or does not appear at all, viewing ellipses, outliers, absences, and outtakes as significant? Eccentric Modernisms places queer demands on art history, tracing the relational networks connecting cosmopolitan eccentrics who cultivated discrepant strains of modernism in America during the 1930s and 1940s. Building on the author’s earlier studies of Gertrude Stein and other lesbians who participated in transatlantic cultural exchanges between the world wars, this book moves in a different direction, focusing primarily on the gay men who formed Stein’s support network and whose careers, in turn, she helped to launch, including the neo-romantic painters Pavel Tchelitchew and writer-editor Charles Henri Ford. Eccentric Modernisms shows how these “eccentric modernists” bucked trends by working collectively, reveling in disciplinary promiscuity and sustaining creative affiliations across national and cultural boundaries.

'For years I'd been struggling with an identity crisis,' says the slight, immaculately dressed Boerma as he plunges a fork into a slice of carrot cake topped with a blob of cream and a pink bougainvillaea petal. 'My mother was English, my father Dutch; I was gay, while the Nelspruit community I grew up in was macho; I had fabulous visions of Parisian glamour, but I lived in Hicksville; and I had privilege, while my black friends were oppressed.' When John-Anthony Boerma, in exile in Holland, put down Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, his checkerboard life fell into place - Holly Golightly, the central character, was him. This was the fi rst of several identities that the artist assumed. Pat Hopkins tells the story of this eccentric man in a personal story that at times becomes intertwined with his own story. The result is a very personal and intriguing memoir of a writer describing an artist who leads him on a dance of discovery.

What did it mean to call someone 'eccentric' in 19th-century Paris? Drawing on etiquette manuals, fashion magazines, newspapers, novels, and psychiatric treatises, this interdisciplinary study illuminates figures of Parisian modernity, from the courtesan and Bohemian to the female dandy and circus freak.

Visual illusions are compelling phenomena that draw attention to the brain's capacity to construct our perceptual world. The Compendium is a collection of over 100 chapters on visual illusions, written by the illusion creators or by vision scientists who have investigated mechanisms underlying the phenomena. --