[Vwoolf] A New York Times Book Review that resonates with Woolf but does not mention her

[Neverow, Vara S.]

Greetings,

Holland Cotter's "The Pariah of Paris," a review of Picasso: The Foreigner by Annie Cohen-Solal, was published in the Sunday, May 14, 2023, print issue of the New York Times Book Review. It is evocative of the reception of Woolf in Great Britain after her death in some respects (note: there are two iterations of the review—the first one, titled "Pablo Picasso, the Pariah of Paris," was published online on 1 April 2023 and has more illustrations: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/01/books/picasso-the-foreigner-annie-cohen-solal.html__;!!KGKeukY!3aaCpAit6nuA5W2CQFWAk6j9lTVrzlpLQu86_WUM8azsOC7GP7hd3MvgL5vueej-6AMNcn3_q8L1GvcG4jzCZ3zLHrZV$ ).

The review is very interesting and well worth reading (I do hope the link is function) and so seems the book itself in which Picasso's life as an outsider in France is detailed. The rejection of Picasso's artwork in France, cast aside by the "tradition-minded French cultural establishment" (as per Cotter), echoes the marginalization of Woolf's work (despite Leonard Woolf's attempts to keep Virginia's work visible and viable and, after Leonard's death, Quentin Bell's own continuing efforts to write a biography, however contested, and also maintain Virginia's literary status by publishing her letters and diaries).

Outright rejection and neglect are closely related in terms of marginalizing artists and writers. With regard to reception, one can relish in retrospect how extremely embarrassing it is that the Louvre rejected Picasso's offer of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), which the Museum of Modern Art in New York happily acquired in 1939 (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.moma.org/research/conservation/demoiselles/history.html__;!!KGKeukY!3aaCpAit6nuA5W2CQFWAk6j9lTVrzlpLQu86_WUM8azsOC7GP7hd3MvgL5vueej-6AMNcn3_q8L1GvcG4jzCZ-1ZdBC9$ ).

It was the New York Public Library that acquired Woolf's archival work. As Mark Hussey highlights in his essay "Virginia Woolf in America" (A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections, 2009), Leonard Woolf believed that Virginia was not going to be recognized or respected in her home country and wrote in a letter to his brother that, "if the MSS went to Cambridge or Oxford, they would be stuffed away somewhere and no one would ever look at them again except that one would be shown from time to time to the public under a glass case." Mark continues: "Thus the bulk of Woolf's archive found its way to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library" (49). (The first wave of archival materials was acquired in 1958; the New York Times refers to this early acquisition in article on William Beekman's amazing artifacts that were purchased for the Berg Collection in 2019: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/arts/virginia-woolf-nypl.html__;!!KGKeukY!3aaCpAit6nuA5W2CQFWAk6j9lTVrzlpLQu86_WUM8azsOC7GP7hd3MvgL5vueej-6AMNcn3_q8L1GvcG4jzCZ5_HBzsF$ ; the recent Berg exhibition included many of these materials).

Of course, Picasso was truly a foreigner in France while Woolf was, after her own death, neglected in her own country for a significantly long period of time (of course, Brenda Silver's 1999 Virginia Woolf Icon is of particular value in tracing Woolf's emergence as a global pop star).

Much more could be said....

Vara

Vara Neverow
(she/her/hers)
Professor, English Department
Editor, Virginia Woolf Miscellany
Southern Connecticut State University
New Haven, CT 06515
203-392-6717
neverowv1 at southernct.edu


I acknowledge that Southern Connecticut State University was built on traditional territory of the indigenous peoples and nations of the Paugussett and Quinnipiac peoples.


Recent Publications:

Lead editor, Virginia Woolf: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2020; with Jeanne Dubino, Kathryn Simpson, and Gill Lowe); Editor, Volume One, 1975-1984, Virginia Woolf: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2020); Co-editor, The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature (Edinburgh, 2020; with Jeanne Dubino, Paulina Pająk, Catherine Hollis, and Celiese Lypka)

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