Jennifer Johnson

Bio

Dr Jennifer Johnson is a research fellow in History of Art at the University of Oxford. She has also held departmental lectureships in both History of Art and English Literature at Oxford. Her first book, Georges Rouault and Material Imagining was published by Bloomsbury in 2020 and represents her work on the ways in which matter and materiality inform meaning and process in modernism. Her new book, on women working in abstraction in Britain during the Cold War, will be published in 2025.

Contributions

Realism, Alienation, and Affective Distance in the Work of Prunella Clough

Peer Reviewed

There is no gentle way into the later twentieth-century work of the painter Prunella Clough. It is, as this paper will argue, a difficult kind of realism, embedded in an obdurate poetry of form. But for the viewer of Clough’s visual work or the reader of her extensive notes and diaries, it is also a brutal appraisal of the world at mid-century through an uncompromising reassessment of the process of paintings. “Considerations. Pickaxe etc. Multiple object forms repetitive, why? Cf human forms in...

Tags:

art material culture