A Study of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Early Art Essays and Their Influence on Her Novels

OH Jung-Sook

doi:10.21049/ccs.2020.61..267

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of Marguerite Yourcenar's early art essays (1928-1940) on her novels. The specific essays I examined were Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead (1928), Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel (1931) and Poussin Exhibition in New York (1940). In the essay on Böklin's -Isle of the Dead- series, Yourcenar considers it to be in the genealogy of Hans Holbein the Younger's Dance of Death and Albrecht Dürer's Melancholia. This short essay includes all the themes– plague, reformation, and death–that she later explores in her novel, The Abyss. She writes the essay on Michelangelo in the first person and structures it more like a novel than objective art criticism. Yourcenar portrays Michaelangelo not as a great painter of extraordinary genius and artistic spirit, but as a lonely old man with no human connections. The core themes of this essay include the artist's aspiration to keep the beauty on the ceiling of the chapel forever, the pain of impossible love and the sorrow of a woman who cannot become the object of desire. These themes, as well as the style and tone of this essay, are identical to a chapter in Yourcenar's novel Fires, which was published eight years later. Her essay on Nicolas Poussin, on the other hand, is narrated objectively and presents a wealth of information appropriate to art criticism. Of the four narrative functions of art criticism presented by A. Terneuil, the essays on Böklin and Michaelangelo fulfill the psychological function, and the essay on Poussin combines the informational, rhetorical, and structural functions in an organically harmonized narrative. Even in this seemingly objective art criticism, however, Yourcenar's subjective experience of exile and her identity crisis in being cast out from the old world into the new resonate from every page.

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* 2022년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

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