Genova, 17-19 September 2007
The conference on ‘Ford Madox Ford: Visual Arts and Media’ was held from the 17th to 19th September 2007. It was promoted by the Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione Linguistica e Culturale (Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere of Genova), the Università di Genova and the Ford Madox Ford Society. The baroque Palazzo Balbi Cattaneo, Aula Magna, Via Balbi, 2, provided a wonderful setting.
The highlights of the event were the Annual Lectures delivered by two outstanding authors, A. S. Byatt and Colm Tóibín, whose presence made the conference an even more memorable event. Byatt spoke on the discoveries of neuroscience concerning the perception of colour and explained how, as a writer, she can experience colour in either a painterly or non-painterly manner. She also discussed Ford’s use of the primary colours of folk tales in The Fifth Queen and Parade’s End. Tóibín, whose novel about Henry James, The Master, was published to acclaim in 2004, suggested a reading of The Good Soldier in the light of the fascination with double lives that Ford shared with other writers of the period: Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad. This duplicity, said Tóibín, finds its main avatar in Leonora who, he argued, is the most important Irish character since Trollope.
A variety of papers by international scholars provided new insights into Ford’s lifelong association with the arts and ranged widely across Ford’s production: his monographs on Hans Holbein, D. G. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites; his interest in portraiture as a painterly and literary genre; his avant-garde representation of war in Parade’s End; his connections with Stella Bowen and Janice Biala; his fascination with modernist painters like Matisse. Some papers focused on Ford’s involvement with a wide range of media and technologies: craftwork, furniture, cartography, the telephone, photography, and early cinema.
The conference was given coverage in the local newspaper, Il Secolo XIX (21 Sep. 2007), and, most notably, in the Times (24 Sep. 2007) with an article by Richard Owen, the correspondent in Rome.
It was a well-attended event, and the Society was pleased to see graduate and postgraduate students attending and contributing, several of whom were new to the Society’s activities. The tight focus of the conference encouraged everyone to join in a fruitful debate. Its proceedings will be edited by myself and published in Ford Madox Ford: Visual Arts and Media (2009), volume 8 of International Ford Madox Ford Studies (IFMFS).
The conference participants had an opportunity to visit the old town and port as well as some of the city’s art galleries. They also enjoyed an appetising welcome cocktail at The Old Port and a delicious conference meal in the atmospheric Garibaldi Histoire Café in the heart of the Renaissance city centre, next to the Palazzo Rosso where Conrad’s novel Suspense is largely set.
Dr Laura Colombino
Conference Organiser
See also article at Times Online: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2517677.ece
And an article in Il Secolo XIX (in Italian).