Art in Context | Staffa, the “Indistinct”

Jessikah Díaz, PhD candidate in English, Yale University, will engage Turner’s “indistinct” Staffa with the period’s ambivalent attitude toward technological progress and its faint recognition of passing time.

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When buyer James Lenox first saw J. M. W. Turner’s Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1831–32), the painting’s “indistinctness” disappointed him. Whether Staffa’s dominating atmosphere or darkened color palette caused the displeasure, Turner’s first painting to enter an American collection fell flat. Jessikah Díaz considers Turner’s “indistinct” style as its own aesthetic category, one mediating his relationship between the shock and awe of Romanticism and the ordinariness of reality. By reconsidering Lenox’s comment, Díaz engages Turner’s “indistinct” Staffa with the period’s ambivalent attitude toward technological progress and its faint recognition of passing time.

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For more information, please view: https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/art-context-staffa-indistinct.

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