Two Generations of Writer–Art Critics: A Study of Art Criticism as Genre through the Work of August Vermeylen and Jan Walravens (OZRSAB8)

This project aims to treat art criticism as a unique genre. Paramount to both literary and non-literary art criticism is the description, interpretation and evaluation of contemporaneous works of art, with a view to educating a wide audience. Unlike in surrounding countries, especially France and the Netherlands, art criticism is rarely a topic of study in Belgium. The focus of this project is the non- literary art criticism texts of two authors: the scholar August Vermeylen (1872-1945) and the journalist Jan Walravens (1920-1965), leading figures in two generations of Dutch-language art critics in Belgium. A prototypical approach to defining the genre of art criticism will be adopted, which will entail mining the work of (international) authors who served as models for the selected critics, as well as the secondary literature on those authors, in order to derive prototypical characteristics. Once those characteristics have been inventoried, the genre can be further explored from a pragmatic perspective. After subjecting the art-critical texts of Vermeylen and Walravens to a discourse analysis and studying their formal properties, the purpose of these texts will be determined. To gain a better picture of the specificity of the art critics, the authors’ visions of art will be contrasted with their opinions about literature. In addition, the project will examine whether generational differences between the two authors also resulted in different functions being assigned to the genre of art criticism.

Keywords:visual arts, literature, art criticism, sociology of generations

Disciplines:Literatures in Dutch, Modern literature, Literary history, Criticism and theory