Eric Robertson is a British academic, Professor of Modern French Literary and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. [1]
Robertson's research focuses on 20th century French literature, especially poetry, and the visual arts, with particular emphasis on European Modernism and the avant-gardes. He is the author of Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor (2006), Writing Between the Lines (1995), a study of the bilingual novelist and essayist René Schickele, and various articles and chapters on 20th century French literature, especially poetry, and visual arts. He is also the co-editor of Yvan Goll - Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts (1997), Robert Desnos: Surrealism in the Twenty-First Century (2006), Dada and Beyond Volume 1: Dada Discourses (2011) and Dada and Beyond Volume 2: Dada and its Legacies (2012). In 2022, Robertson's authored book Blaise Cendrars: the Invention of Life was published by Reaktion Books. It examines the poems, novels, essays and autobiographical prose of Swiss-born French writer Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) against a turbulent historical background and reassesses his contribution to twentieth-century literature. Further ongoing projects include a study of avant-garde art and virtual technologies.
Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor, published by Yale University Press, considers the close connections between the writing, painting and sculpture of Hans Jean Arp and reassesses his contribution to major artistic movements of the 20th century. This book was awarded the 2007 R.H. Gapper Book Prize. [2] The award, made annually by the Society for French Studies, is for the best book by a scholar working in Britain or Ireland in French studies.
In 2017-18, Robertson co-curated the international touring exhibition Arp: the Poetry of Forms with independent curator Frances Guy. [3] The exhibition was hosted by the Kröller-Müller Museum from May to September 2017 and by Turner Contemporary from October 2017 to January 2018. It was widely reviewed in the press and media, and The Guardian showcased it in 'The Best Art of Autumn 2017'. [4]
In 2017, Robertson was the featured expert appearing in two short films on the writings of Hans Jean Arp and René Schickele shown as part of the exhibition Laboratoire d’Europe: Strasbourg 1880-1930 curated by the Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg.
From September 2018 to January 2019, the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, Texas) hosted the exhibition The Nature of Arp [5] which travelled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice, Italy) from April to September 2019. At the opening symposium, Robertson presented the paper "Words Without Borders: Arp's Bilingual Poetry" and took part in the panel discussion. [6]
In 2021, Robertson delivered the inaugural Barbara Wright Memorial Lecture at Trinity College Dublin.
Robertson wrote the essay for the book Joan Miró: Feet on the Ground, Eyes on the Stars: Works from 1924 to 1936, published by Luxembourg + Co and Ridinghouse in 2022. The book accompanied the exhibition held from 7 September to 26 November 2022 to inaugurate the new premises of Luxembourg + Co in the Fuller Building, New York City.
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Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire, founded by Hugo Ball with his companion Emmy Hennings, and in Berlin in 1917. New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Dadaist activities lasted until the mid 1920s.
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German artist. He was born in Hanover, Germany, but lived in exile from 1937.
Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media as well.
HansRichter was a German Dada painter, graphic artist, avant-garde film producer, and art historian. In 1965 he authored the book Dadaism about the history of the Dada movement. He was born in Berlin into a well-to-do family and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland.
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Catalan Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramist born in Barcelona. Professionally, he was simply known as Joan Miró. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.
Frédéric-Louis Sauser, better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement.
De Stijl, incorporating the ideas of Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden, consisting of artists and architects. The term De Stijl is also used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 created in the Netherlands. Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour. They simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colors.
Robert Desnos was a French poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement.
transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by Maria McDonald and her husband Eugene Jolas and published in Paris. They were later assisted by editors Elliot Paul, Robert Sage, and James Johnson Sweeney. After the Second World War, the publishing license of transition was transferred from the Jolases and McDonald to Georges Duthuit who capitalized the title to Transition and changed its focus.
The Surrealist Manifesto refers to a collection of several publications between Yvan Goll and André Breton, prior leaders of the rival Surrealist groups. Goll and Breton had both originally published manifestos in October 1924 titled Manifeste du surréalisme. Breton later wrote a second in 1929, publishing it the following year, with his third manifesto in 1942.
Yvan Goll was a French-German poet who was bilingual and wrote in both French and German. He had close ties to both German expressionism and to French surrealism.
Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, painter, sculptor, textile designer, furniture and interior designer, architect, and dancer.
Ron Padgett is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Great Balls of Fire, Padgett's first full-length collection of poems, was published in 1969. He won a 2009 Shelley Memorial Award. In 2018, he won the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.
Der Sturm was a German avant-garde art and literary magazine founded by Herwarth Walden, covering Expressionism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, among other artistic movements. It was published between 1910 and 1932.
Universal War is an artist's book by Aleksei Kruchenykh published in Petrograd at the beginning of 1916. Despite being produced in an edition of 100 of which only 12 are known to survive, the book has become one of the most famous examples of Russian Futurist book production, and is considered a seminal example of avant-garde art from the beginning of the twentieth century.
René Schickele was a German-French writer, essayist and translator.
Anise Koltz was a Luxembourgish contemporary author. Best known for her poetry and her translations of poems, she also wrote a number of children's stories. In 1962, she was a cofounder with Nic Weber of the successful literary conference series Journées littéraires de Mondorf in which she has always played a key role.
Nelly van Doesburg was a Dutch avant-garde musician, dancer, artist and art collector. She performed under her dadaïst alias Pétro van Doesburg and used the pseudonym Cupera for her work as a painter.
Robert Vilain is a British literary scholar. He has been Fellow and Senior Tutor of St Hugh's College, Oxford, since September 2021. Previously he was Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, where he still holds an Honorary Professorship, and Director of the AHRC-funded South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, a consortium of nine universities and National Museum Wales dedicated to funding and training PhD students. He is also Lecturer in German at Christ Church, Oxford, and responsible for the College's teaching in German.
