A Brief Note on Gavriel Shapiro’s “The Sublime Artist’s Studio: Nabokov & Painting” and “Nabokov and the Art of Painting” by Gerard de Vries, D. B.. Johnson & Liana Ashenden
Professor Shapiro (Cornell) is a
Nabokov specialist with particular expertise in painting, an art that plays an
unusually large role in Nabokov’s fictions. It is an important and relatively
understudied aspect of his writing with its strong visual orientation both in
terms of content and style. The
writer-to-be, who had envisioned becoming a painter, grew up in an environment
saturated with the visual arts -- in his home, in imperial
Shapiro first examines Nabokov’s childhood artistic milieu and organizes the remaining chapters largely in terms of historical categories: Old Masters, landscape painting, the the early XXth century Russian “World of Art” group, Richard Muther’s magisterial survey of XIX Century European art impact on the young Nabokov, and, finally, the role of German Expressionism of the first decades of the XXth century during the writer’s decade in Berlin . Within these chapters Shapiro identifies (rightly, sometimes tentatively) the paintings alluded to in Nabokov’s writings and offers brief accounts of their role in the novels. Twenty-eight black and white reproductions are provided.
Prof. Shapiro’s fine study omits
Nabokov’s longest and most art-saturated novel from consideration on the reasonable
grounds that its extensive art references have been extensively treated in
another recent volume: Nabokov and the
Art of Painting co-authored by Gerard de Vries, et al (Amsterdam University
Press, 2006). Whereas Shapiro organizes his study by
painters and their “schools,” periods, etc., the de Vries volume is organized by
the Nabokov writings in which they appear. The first takes the paintings as the
basic approach; the second takes the novels as the organizing principle. Both
approaches have their pros and cons depending upon whether the readers’ interest
is primarily focused upon the novels or on the paintings. Shapiro is better on the Russian novels
while de Vries et al slight coverage of
the Russian novels while offering extensive material on the very
important
Taken together, the two studies offer a useful compendium of information about the unique blending of the literary and visual arts in the work of one of the finest writers of the XXth century.
D. Barton Johnson