Talk | Art and Music in London’s Jazz Age with Professor Tim Barringer

Art and Music in London’s Jazz Age

Professor Tim Barringer, Yale University

Untitled frontispiece depicting Harlequins with instruments, in a snow covered landscape, from Facade by Edith Sitwell with a frontispiece by G. Severini - via General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

The Chelsea flat of the aristocratic Sitwell brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, was the unlikely birthplace of a masterpiece of English modernism, Façade (first performed 1922). Abstract, rhythmic poems by the Sitwells’ sister Edith were matched by witty paraphrases and parodies of jazz, popular songs and avant-garde music of the day by William Walton. This lecture reveals a forgotten dimension of this jazz age jeu d’esprit: the visual. It was performed originally behind a curtain painted in primitivist style. Later reworkings of the score, however, brought forth new ‘front cloths’ from Italian Futurist Gino Severini and English Neo-Romantic painter John Piper. The lecture explores the ways in which the dialogue between the verbal and the visual enhances our understanding of the evolving character of the piece, and of the culture of the Jazz age.

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). With colleagues he co-authored American Sublime, and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. He is currently completing a book Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock and is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, 2012, Washington and Moscow, 2013, Tokyo 2014).

Date: Wednesday March 5, 6:30-7:30

Venue: Public Lecture Theatre, Old Arts Building, University of Melbourne