Dr Charlotte de Mille curates the music programme for The Courtauld Gallery, where she works for the education department. With them she co-authored ‘Animating Art History’, a joint initiative with Central St Martin’s and the University of the Creative Arts, which was long-listed for a Clore Award in Museum Learning. Receiving her doctorate from The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2009, she has taught at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Universities of Sussex, Bristol, and St Andrews. She also works freelance, as a Curator and Museum educator. For 2017-18 she was Curatorial Consultant for the Supreme Court Arts Trust, UK. She is a Mellon Centre Mid-Career Fellow for 2019-20, and an Honorary Research Associate at The University of Bristol.
Bergson and the Art of Immanence brings Henri Bergson's philosophy of immanence together with the... more Bergson and the Art of Immanence brings Henri Bergson's philosophy of immanence together with the latest ideas in art theory and the practice of immanence art as found in painting, photography and film.
This collection of 14 essays brings 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson’s work on immanence together with the latest ideas in art theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography and film. It places Bergson’s work and influence in a wide historical context and applies a rigorous conceptual framework to contemporary art theory and practice.
The variety of perspectives and methodological approaches present new levels of exchange between art and theory and bring philosophy closer to the history of art.
Music and Modernism is a collection of essays which re-evaluates the significant connections betw... more Music and Modernism is a collection of essays which re-evaluates the significant connections between the disciplines of music, fine art and architecture in the period covering the emergence and flowering of modernism, c. 1849-1950. Combining established scholars in the field with those at the start of their careers, this book presents and exceptional cross section of European and American modernism through a series of detailed case-studies.
Avoiding a simplistic engagement with cross- or inter-disciplinarity, the focus of attention centres on themes that became key to modernist artists and critics: association, perception, representation, subjectivity, writing and language. Accordingly, this book re-thinks modernism itself in the light of both the fine arts and music, to advocate a multiplicity of modernisms from which it is necessary for scholars to construct their own narratives.
Following the outbreak of war in 1914, Roger Fry encouraged a series of Friday concerts at the Om... more Following the outbreak of war in 1914, Roger Fry encouraged a series of Friday concerts at the Omega Workshop at 33 Fitzroy Square to raise funds for Belgian refugees. Poorly documented in any detail, these events nonetheless included some remarkable feats of organisation. This essay will look in particular at a staged production of Debussy’s Boite à Joujoux in early 1915, four years before its acknowledged premiere at the Théâtre Lyrique du Vaudeville in Paris. Debussy’s piano score was complete by the end of 1914, but the orchestration was only partially finished on the composer’s death in 1918. In spite of this, Norwegian artist Roald Kristian gathered a small orchestra of Belgians for a performance complete with dancing puppets made and worked by Omega artists. The production provides further intrigue for the radical use of marionettes made by Kristian, which Debussy himself recommended to French designer André Hellé for the French premiere but which were never adopted. Kristian...
Bergson and the Art of Immanence brings Henri Bergson's philosophy of immanence together with the... more Bergson and the Art of Immanence brings Henri Bergson's philosophy of immanence together with the latest ideas in art theory and the practice of immanence art as found in painting, photography and film.
This collection of 14 essays brings 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson’s work on immanence together with the latest ideas in art theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography and film. It places Bergson’s work and influence in a wide historical context and applies a rigorous conceptual framework to contemporary art theory and practice.
The variety of perspectives and methodological approaches present new levels of exchange between art and theory and bring philosophy closer to the history of art.
Music and Modernism is a collection of essays which re-evaluates the significant connections betw... more Music and Modernism is a collection of essays which re-evaluates the significant connections between the disciplines of music, fine art and architecture in the period covering the emergence and flowering of modernism, c. 1849-1950. Combining established scholars in the field with those at the start of their careers, this book presents and exceptional cross section of European and American modernism through a series of detailed case-studies.
Avoiding a simplistic engagement with cross- or inter-disciplinarity, the focus of attention centres on themes that became key to modernist artists and critics: association, perception, representation, subjectivity, writing and language. Accordingly, this book re-thinks modernism itself in the light of both the fine arts and music, to advocate a multiplicity of modernisms from which it is necessary for scholars to construct their own narratives.
Following the outbreak of war in 1914, Roger Fry encouraged a series of Friday concerts at the Om... more Following the outbreak of war in 1914, Roger Fry encouraged a series of Friday concerts at the Omega Workshop at 33 Fitzroy Square to raise funds for Belgian refugees. Poorly documented in any detail, these events nonetheless included some remarkable feats of organisation. This essay will look in particular at a staged production of Debussy’s Boite à Joujoux in early 1915, four years before its acknowledged premiere at the Théâtre Lyrique du Vaudeville in Paris. Debussy’s piano score was complete by the end of 1914, but the orchestration was only partially finished on the composer’s death in 1918. In spite of this, Norwegian artist Roald Kristian gathered a small orchestra of Belgians for a performance complete with dancing puppets made and worked by Omega artists. The production provides further intrigue for the radical use of marionettes made by Kristian, which Debussy himself recommended to French designer André Hellé for the French premiere but which were never adopted. Kristian...
This title takes an immanent turn in art history. Immanence is a theory of divine presence, in wh... more This title takes an immanent turn in art history. Immanence is a theory of divine presence, in which the divine is found in the material world, not outside of it. This new collection brings the major 20th century French philosopher Henri Bergson's work on immanence together with the latest ideas in art theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography and film. It places Bergson's work and influence in a wide historical context and applies a rigorous conceptual framework to contemporary art theory and practice. It includes 16 essays from world renowned art theorists, philosophers and Bergson scholars. Contributors include Iris van der Tuin, Eric Alliez, Simon O'Sullivan and Howard Caygill. It offers a variety of perspectives and methodological approaches that will appeal to both art theorists and practitioners. It explores concepts of rhythmic duration, perception, affectivity, the body, memory and intuition - all of which were first formulated as immanent objects through the work of Bergson.
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2016
Bergson(ism) Remembered: A RoundtableCurated by Mark William Westmoreland with Brien Karas (Villa... more Bergson(ism) Remembered: A RoundtableCurated by Mark William Westmoreland with Brien Karas (Villanova University, USA)Featuring Jimena Canales (University of Illinois-UC, USA), Stephen Crocker (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada), Charlotte De Mille (The Courtauld Gallery, UK), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University, USA), Michael Foley (University of Westminster, UK), Hisashi Fujita (Kyushu Sangyo University, Japan), Suzanne Guerlac (University of California, Berkeley, USA), Melissa McMahon (Independent Scholar, Australia), Paulina Ochoa Espejo (Haverford College, USA), and Frédéric Worms (L’École Normale Supérieure, France)
‘A gesture of the artist’s feeling’: Art History’s Bergsonian objects
In light of a recent shi... more ‘A gesture of the artist’s feeling’: Art History’s Bergsonian objects
In light of a recent shift in some quarters of art history to the prioritisation of experiential sensation and the vital agency of the art object, this paper sources the root of this perceptual and methodological approach in the Bergsonian aesthetics of Roger Fry. We return to the contentious reception of Bergson in British academia c. 1910, considering parallel aesthetic questioning by Fry’s fellow Apostles at Cambridge, and uncovering surprisingly atypical statements from Goldsworthy Lowes Dickenson amongst others. Piecing together the aesthetic of intuition in British art discourse immediately prior to Fry’s Post-Impressionism, we connect the contemporary art historical writing of T.J. Clark, W.J.T Mitchell, Yve-Alain Bois and George Didi-Huberman as the inheritors of Bergson’s – and Fry’s – vision for art.
Music and the Visual Arts: RMA Music and Visual Arts Panel
The paragone of the arts has a distin... more Music and the Visual Arts: RMA Music and Visual Arts Panel
The paragone of the arts has a distinctive and illustrious past engaging artists, writers and composers from Leonardo and Michelangelo, to Lessing, Goethe, Wagner and Greenberg. Rather than rehearsing contests for superiority, this panel addresses the close correspondence between music and the visual arts in terms of the structural innovations and the expressive intentions of the two arts. Often exchange between the arts serves as way of mediating qualities hard to describe: in the modernist period in particular, critics, artists, and public faced with the unexpected frequently resorted to metaphorical comparison. Ostensibly non-visual, music offered the painter an alternative trajectory through which to negotiate multi-sensual experience or to defeat mimetic representation. Through alertness to the emotive affect of instrumental music (and of Wagner’s in particular), critics extolled a ‘higher Realism’, shifting the intention of painting from mimetic illustration to the realisation of psychological experience. By taking on the qualities of another medium both arts defied expectation: and through these novel forms, aspirations, and intentions, the works resulting from these experimentations were self-consciously avant-garde. This panel of composers and scholars asks why is it natural to voice one medium through the visual or aural language of another? To what extent do such practices clarify or occlude the specific qualities of the media? And to what extent is this the goal of the artwork in question? How can attempts to conceptualise the ‘extra-musical’ dimensions of sound and rhythm challenge our habitual perception? Posing media as means not ends in themselves radically alters the terms on which the art work is assessed, opening meta-disciplinary and philosophical questions concerning the nature of creativity, and the limits of representation, verbal discourse, reason and analysis.
"Illuminating the Mind presents the discoveries from a week of performance research by a diverse ... more "Illuminating the Mind presents the discoveries from a week of performance research by a diverse range of practitioners exploring sensation, disorder, and the relationship between visual and aural aesthetics. The project takes as a case-study an extract of a piece by one of the most significant post-war German composers, Boris Blacher. Trained as an architect before assuming the directorship of the Berlin Academy of Music, Blacher is a composer intimately acquainted with the challenges of audio-visual work. Abstrakte Oper Nr I offers a profound assessment of the operatic genre in the 1950s. Synchronic and non-narrative, the opera combines abstraction with the figurative expressionism of its seven scenes, which chart a cyclic process through a range of emotional experience. Blacher’s emotive essentialism and tonal disorientation combine to express the (dis-)integration of mind and body. Explored through the site-specific venue of KCL’s Anatomy Theatre and Museum, the workshop dissects an ‘anatomy’ of human emotion, where internal and external states are inverted, individual and cultural experiences confused, and sensation performed.
We focus in depth on the second scene of Abstrakte Oper Nr I, ‘Schmerz’, which will be contextualized by responses from three speakers. This is preliminary research for the British première of the opera as part of the Opera Group’s Future Bodies in 2014.
"
Although little known in the UK, Boris Blacher is acknowledged as one of the most significant Ger... more Although little known in the UK, Boris Blacher is acknowledged as one of the most significant German composers of the post-war generation. This paper presents research towards the staging of the British première of Blacher’s Abstrakte Oper Nr 1 (1953), provisionally scheduled for 2013. First heard as a radio broadcast just weeks after the East German uprising of June 1953 and performed in October that year, the opera comprises seven scenes that chart a cyclic process through a range of emotional experience: fear, love, pain, negotiation, panic, love and fear. Finding words unsuitable for his means, librettist Werner Egk freely amalgamated sounds to convey emotion in raw purity. Taking expression to its limit, Blacher matched Egk’s libretto with sparse music, where flashes of recognizable tonality are superseded by the construction of a new order. Blacher’s emotional essentialism and structural innovation are explored through examples from two contrasting workshops on extracts of the piece. The first relates to scenes performed for the Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition ‘Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-1962’ in November 2009. Reflecting on the experience of working in an unconventional venue, we consider how the visual and aural intersected, the question of directorial responsibility in the construction of ‘visual music’, and the extent of creative freedom possible when responding to a site with a definite curatorial conception of its own. The second example presents material from an intensive period of research at King’s College London in March 2012. This return to Abstrakte Oper Nr I is motivated by recognition of the limitations imposed by the previous brief, the sense that despite productive tensions arising from contextual presentation, the Abstrakte Oper itself was manipulated and distorted. In contrast, the March workshop responds to Blacher’s structure rather than historical context, yet maintains the challenge of unconventional and site-specific production. KCL’s Anatomy Theatre and Museum has been chosen as the new venue for its provocative past as a site of medical training. Articulating Blacher’s cyclic range of emotions, the workshop dissects an ‘anatomy’ of emotion, where internal and external states are inverted, individual and cultural experiences confused, and sensation performed. The workshop explores state of the art lighting technology that enables light to respond directly to notation, rhythm, and tempi, which can be used to colour, isolate or obliterate performers.
In Abstrakte Oper Nr I, Blacher offers a profound assessment of the constituent parts expected of the operatic genre in the 1950s. Expressive, arguably even figurative, the piece eschews narrative, linearity, or sustained musical coherence. It challenges performance groups to consider the nature of ‘abstraction’ inherent to any production, and directorial decisions in the emphasis of narrative and musical material. The paper offers the opportunity to address these issues, to question the relation of form and content, and to critique the nature of site-specificity.
Of ancient heritage, the commedia dell’arte serves as a genre of art that exemplifies the twisted... more Of ancient heritage, the commedia dell’arte serves as a genre of art that exemplifies the twisted combinations of the visual and the aural. Pierrot and Harlequin are forever identifiable by costume; players are masters of symbolic action, often masters too of music. For them as for Maurice Ravel, there was ‘only one art, not several.’ This paper uses the mode of the commedia dell’arte as a productive example of a synthesis of visual and aural to un-lock the qualities of their inter-relation. Although Norman Bryson has written of the connections between Antonine Watteau and Claude Debussy, scholars have not looked to commedia dell’arte depictions contemporaneous with Debussy’s piano pieces and song settings of Paul Verlaine’s fêtes galantes which engage with the subject. Doing so poses some intriguing questions, for on the surface at least, the sentiments of the Verlaine-Watteau of Debussy do not always accord with the examples available for consideration: Degas’ Two Harlequins; Cézanne’s series of four harlequins; or rose period Picasso. Commencing with Debussy’s only direct study of Watteau’s work, Isle Joyeuse (1904) inspired by The Emabarkation for Cythera (1717), the paper contests the significance of the commedia dell’arte for a modernizing synthesis of the arts, where the theatrical mask is a double bind that performs the shifting multiplicity of media: visual art and music, music and text, text and visual art. The bind however is not at its foundation a formal endeavour but one that seeks to retrieve meaning beyond the games and chances of making.
From the hedonism and haphazard living of fin de siècle Monmartre this event travels to its immed... more From the hedonism and haphazard living of fin de siècle Monmartre this event travels to its immediate precursor - the left-bank idealism of Henri Murger’s La Vie de la Bohème, immortalised by Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera. Premiered at the Teatro Regio under Arturo Toscanini, the opera reached Paris in June 1898, receiving over one hundred performances at the Opèra-Comique by 1903. La Bohème is the exact contemporary of Toulouse-Lautrec’s evocative series of images of Jane Avril and lithographs of performers and patrons of the cabaret artistique, music-hall and café-concert venues of Monmartre. Popular, idiomatic, and avant-garde mixed freely between venues: a lithograph of singer Yvette Guilbert at the Divan Japonais cabaret includes Avril with Eduard Dujardin, editor of the Revue Wagnérienne. Dujardin’s presence is indicative of the extent to which venues solicited cross-pollination of what might otherwise be regarded contrary genres in this period. This performance of La Bohème is refracted by another specific inter-relation of these worlds combined in the figure of composer Adolphe Gauwin. Research for the Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge unearthed a short waltz dedicated to Avril, but Gauwin is better remembered as an adept arranger of large scores, including a 1903 Bohème. La Bohème was self-consciously modern. Puccini parodied the forms of Italianate opera and exploited the popular romanticism of artistic life. The opera considers the conflict between patronage and creative freedom, and questions the relation of the arts through its protagonists - painter, writer, musician, and philosopher. It is then, a rich complement to Lautrec’s oeuvre.
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This collection of 14 essays brings 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson’s work on immanence together with the latest ideas in art theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography and film. It places Bergson’s work and influence in a wide historical context and applies a rigorous conceptual framework to contemporary art theory and practice.
The variety of perspectives and methodological approaches present new levels of exchange between art and theory and bring philosophy closer to the history of art.
Avoiding a simplistic engagement with cross- or inter-disciplinarity, the focus of attention centres on themes that became key to modernist artists and critics: association, perception, representation, subjectivity, writing and language. Accordingly, this book re-thinks modernism itself in the light of both the fine arts and music, to advocate a multiplicity of modernisms from which it is necessary for scholars to construct their own narratives.
This collection of 14 essays brings 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson’s work on immanence together with the latest ideas in art theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography and film. It places Bergson’s work and influence in a wide historical context and applies a rigorous conceptual framework to contemporary art theory and practice.
The variety of perspectives and methodological approaches present new levels of exchange between art and theory and bring philosophy closer to the history of art.
Avoiding a simplistic engagement with cross- or inter-disciplinarity, the focus of attention centres on themes that became key to modernist artists and critics: association, perception, representation, subjectivity, writing and language. Accordingly, this book re-thinks modernism itself in the light of both the fine arts and music, to advocate a multiplicity of modernisms from which it is necessary for scholars to construct their own narratives.
Curated by Mark William Westmoreland with Brien Karas (Villanova University, USA)
Featuring Jimena Canales (University of Illinois-UC, USA), Stephen Crocker (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada), Charlotte De Mille (The Courtauld Gallery, UK), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University, USA), Michael Foley (University of Westminster, UK), Hisashi Fujita (Kyushu Sangyo University, Japan), Suzanne Guerlac (University of California, Berkeley, USA), Melissa McMahon (Independent Scholar, Australia), Paulina Ochoa Espejo (Haverford College, USA), and Frédéric Worms (L’École Normale Supérieure, France)
In light of a recent shift in some quarters of art history to the prioritisation of experiential sensation and the vital agency of the art object, this paper sources the root of this perceptual and methodological approach in the Bergsonian aesthetics of Roger Fry. We return to the contentious reception of Bergson in British academia c. 1910, considering parallel aesthetic questioning by Fry’s fellow Apostles at Cambridge, and uncovering surprisingly atypical statements from Goldsworthy Lowes Dickenson amongst others. Piecing together the aesthetic of intuition in British art discourse immediately prior to Fry’s Post-Impressionism, we connect the contemporary art historical writing of T.J. Clark, W.J.T Mitchell, Yve-Alain Bois and George Didi-Huberman as the inheritors of Bergson’s – and Fry’s – vision for art.
The paragone of the arts has a distinctive and illustrious past engaging artists, writers and composers from Leonardo and Michelangelo, to Lessing, Goethe, Wagner and Greenberg. Rather than rehearsing contests for superiority, this panel addresses the close correspondence between music and the visual arts in terms of the structural innovations and the expressive intentions of the two arts. Often exchange between the arts serves as way of mediating qualities hard to describe: in the modernist period in particular, critics, artists, and public faced with the unexpected frequently resorted to metaphorical comparison. Ostensibly non-visual, music offered the painter an alternative trajectory through which to negotiate multi-sensual experience or to defeat mimetic representation. Through alertness to the emotive affect of instrumental music (and of Wagner’s in particular), critics extolled a ‘higher Realism’, shifting the intention of painting from mimetic illustration to the realisation of psychological experience. By taking on the qualities of another medium both arts defied expectation: and through these novel forms, aspirations, and intentions, the works resulting from these experimentations were self-consciously avant-garde.
This panel of composers and scholars asks why is it natural to voice one medium through the visual or aural language of another? To what extent do such practices clarify or occlude the specific qualities of the media? And to what extent is this the goal of the artwork in question? How can attempts to conceptualise the ‘extra-musical’ dimensions of sound and rhythm challenge our habitual perception? Posing media as means not ends in themselves radically alters the terms on which the art work is assessed, opening meta-disciplinary and philosophical questions concerning the nature of creativity, and the limits of representation, verbal discourse, reason and analysis.
We focus in depth on the second scene of Abstrakte Oper Nr I, ‘Schmerz’, which will be contextualized by responses from three speakers. This is preliminary research for the British première of the opera as part of the Opera Group’s Future Bodies in 2014.
"
Blacher’s emotional essentialism and structural innovation are explored through examples from two contrasting workshops on extracts of the piece. The first relates to scenes performed for the Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition ‘Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-1962’ in November 2009. Reflecting on the experience of working in an unconventional venue, we consider how the visual and aural intersected, the question of directorial responsibility in the construction of ‘visual music’, and the extent of creative freedom possible when responding to a site with a definite curatorial conception of its own. The second example presents material from an intensive period of research at King’s College London in March 2012. This return to Abstrakte Oper Nr I is motivated by recognition of the limitations imposed by the previous brief, the sense that despite productive tensions arising from contextual presentation, the Abstrakte Oper itself was manipulated and distorted. In contrast, the March workshop responds to Blacher’s structure rather than historical context, yet maintains the challenge of unconventional and site-specific production. KCL’s Anatomy Theatre and Museum has been chosen as the new venue for its provocative past as a site of medical training. Articulating Blacher’s cyclic range of emotions, the workshop dissects an ‘anatomy’ of emotion, where internal and external states are inverted, individual and cultural experiences confused, and sensation performed. The workshop explores state of the art lighting technology that enables light to respond directly to notation, rhythm, and tempi, which can be used to colour, isolate or obliterate performers.
In Abstrakte Oper Nr I, Blacher offers a profound assessment of the constituent parts expected of the operatic genre in the 1950s. Expressive, arguably even figurative, the piece eschews narrative, linearity, or sustained musical coherence. It challenges performance groups to consider the nature of ‘abstraction’ inherent to any production, and directorial decisions in the emphasis of narrative and musical material. The paper offers the opportunity to address these issues, to question the relation of form and content, and to critique the nature of site-specificity.