Home

Ford Madox Ford: Visual Arts and Media
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

And an article in Il Secolo XIX (in Italian).

Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transitions

The Ford Madox Ford Society held its 2006 conference at the Birmingham and Midland Institute on 14-15 September, in conjunction with the University of Birmingham. The conference topic was 'Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transitions', and a variety of papers were presented on Ford's connections with a number of his contemporaries (including Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, William Carlos Williams and James Joyce) and on some key concepts concerning the rise of modernist literature. The Annual Ford Madox Ford Lecture was given by Zinovy Zinik, who recollected brilliantly his first encounter with Ford's work in Soviet Moscow during the 1960s; and a fascinating Keynote Address, delivered by Professor David Trotter, discussed some of Ford's pre-First World War connections, particularly with Lewis and Joyce. The conference participants had a rather brief opportunity to visit some of the city's art collections, which include works by Ford Madox Brown, and enjoyed a wonderful conference meal at Café Ikon in the heart of Birmingham's city centre.

The proceedings of the conference will be edited by Andrzej Gasiorek and Daniel Moore and published in Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transitions (2008), volume 7 of International Ford Madox Ford Studies.

Daniel Moore
University of Birmingham

Ford Madox Ford: Englishness and Modernism
(Manchester 17-18th December 2004)