Following Alice into Wonderland

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Alice in Wonderland Through the Visual Arts

Edited by Gavin Delahunty and Benjamin Shulz, assisted by Eleanor Clayton

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly

‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’ first appeared as a short tale, made up in a book for private circulation by the Reverend Charles Dodgson, who adopted the name Lewis Carroll. But when in an extended form it was published commercially it became an instant success and has continued on its mission of surprise and delight ever since.  Although the incidents of Victorian detail – croquet games and the like – give a touch of period flavour, its essential characters and pervasive atmosphere of the limitless possibilities that open up, once the constraints of logical determinism are thrown aside, render it timeless in its appeal.

Carroll’s original manuscript was brought to life by a series of his own illustrations, which were later adapted by John Tenniel for the published version. But Dodgson’s most developed excursion in the visual arts was as a photographer. He left a portfolio of some 3,000 images, views of Oxford, portraits of friends and their children, most notably Alice Pleasance Liddell, the original inspiration for the tale. He used the medium inventively, with spectral images emerging by means of double exposure. It is fitting that contemporary photographers such as Anna Gaskell and Annelies Strba feature in the book, together with Dodgson’s work.  The Adventures have long appealed to filmmakers: the first known version dates from 1903, and Walt Disney brought them to worldwide popular attention in 1951.

The Surrealists eagerly picked up on the resonance of the books’ dream imagery, the play with mirrors and inversion, and their exultant challenge to the feeble claims of rationality and narrative coherence to explain our awareness of the world.  British art critic, Herbert Read, and the French Surrealists André Breton and Paul Eluard all acknowledged the work’s significance, and its imagery particularly motivated the artist Max Ernst.  Dorothea Tanning’s painting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik poignantly exposes the erotic forebodings of pubescent girlhood. Unsurprisingly, British Surrealists such as Conroy Maddox, John Armstrong and Roland Penrose displayed a discernible affinity with Carroll. Taking a different tack, Oskar Kokoschka employs the image of Alice in Wonderland to furnish a bitter satire on the seeming refusal by the rest of the world to recognize the outrage of Hitler’s annexation of Austria.

The 1960s and ’70s saw another peak of enthusiasm for Wonderland when anticipations of hallucinogenically induced visions were identified there, as in the case of thec aterpillar of Sigmar Polke’s painting, Alice in Wonderland. And the theme is pursued by Peter Blake and Graham Ovenden.  For a later generation of women artists, such as Adrian Piper and Kiki Smith, Alice provides a vehicle through which to explore questions of female experience. In Smith’s etchings, Alice is in danger of drowning in the pool of her own tears.

A number of supporting essays are provided.  Edward Wakeling places Lewis Carroll at the heart of the Victorian art world, specifically in the company of the Pre-Raphaelites, resulting in some relaxed family photographic portraits of the artists. We can appreciate that the frequency of loving depiction of young children took place at a time when infant mortality was a constant reality.

Gillian Beer informs about the fundamental challenges to accepted confidence in the regulation of time and space that were emerging through the contemporary speculations of mathematicians and physicists. Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, appears to be covertly acknowledging these in Alice’s constant experience of the perversity of collapsing and expanding space and the unstoppable haste of the White Rabbit and the Red Queen.

Alberto Manguel reviews the extensive role of the dream narrative and its inherent challenge to any universal faith in rationality throughout modern literature, referring to the novelists Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka and, especially, to Jorge Luis Borges.

Carol Mavor weaves an inventive recreation of Alice’s story, set in a timeless Virginia, around a selection of photographs and video stills, with a nod of recognition towards the French Surrealist, Georges Bataille.

All in all, this is a delightful concoction of a book in celebration of Alice and her extraordinary adventures, which works well as an independent project, but also as the catalogue for the exhibition that runs at Tate Liverpool until 29 January 2012, before transferring to Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto, Italy and then to Hamburg.

Alice in Wonderland Through the Visual Arts, edited by Gavin Delahunty and Benjamin Shulz,  assisted by Eleanor Clayton is published by Tate Publishing, 2011.192pp., 120 col illus.ISBN 978 1 85437 991 7