One of my closest friends and currently ABD in her Art History PhD program sent me the following blurb about a book. What a miserable reminder of the ludicrous lengths to which academics will go. This is not why either she or I began our respective studies and how horrifying to consider that this is the well-worn way ahead of us. Undoubtedly I should look forward to something similar on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey.
A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siecle Art
by Alison Syme
A Touch of Blossom considers John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilized ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his work to "naturalize" sexual inversion. In conceiving of his painting as an act of hand-pollination, Sargent was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism. Assembling evidence from diverse realms-visual culture (cartoons, greeting cards, costume design), medicine and botany (treatises and their illustrations), literature, letters, lexicography, and the visual arts-this book situates the metaphors that structure Sargent's paintings in a broad cultural context. It offers in-depth readings of particular paintings and analyzes related projects undertaken by Sargent's friends in the field of painting and in other disciplines, such as gynecology and literature.
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