The Art of Conversation, Conversation as an Art. ‘The Sisters’ Arts’

Abstract

The issue of the visual, of the interrelationship between language/literature and painting appears to be central to Woolf’s aesthetic interrogation. She tried to find a satisfying solution to the inter-art dialogue but it was to no avail. She constantly found herself confronted with the wall of what she called the reticence of painting. Her response then was to accumulate words detailing the experience of the reception of the pictorial work. The question of meaning, of making sense of a picture prevented her from envisaging another way of looking at painting, seeing it as an experience, an event, engaging the viewer in another kind of aesthetic intercourse resisting language. The silence and the reticence of painting which, for Woolf, represented a mystery, sent her back to her own activity, to her work and what it was worth via the mirror-image of the sister art.Apart from ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’ and ‘Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell’, the multiplicity of essays dedicated or referring to painting shows that Woolf was deeply inspired and moved by this art which she thought of in terms of the unreachable and much desired medium, at the same time feeling the need to reassert the superiority of language. This was grounded in a primary experience, that of her relationship to Vanessa and the sharing of the arts between the two sisters on the conversational mode.