“Rebecca West’s and David Low’s Intermedial Dialogue with William Hogarth in The Modern ‘Rake’s Progress’ (1934)”
Résumé
The Modern ‘Rake’s Progress’. Words by Rebecca West. Paintings by David Low first appeared in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine in August 1934. The series was then published in book form later in the same year. Although the magazine had a high circulation and was popular in the 1930s, although West and Low were famous at the time as a novelist and a cartoonist, The Modern ‘Rake’s Progress’ has almost been forgotten. However, The Modern ‘Rake’s Progress’ is interesting in several respects. Not only was it Low’s and West’s only collaboration, but it also offers a unique take on William Hogarth’s series of paintings, A Rake’s Progress (1733-1735), one year before Gavin Gordon created his ballet The Rake’s Progress with choreographer Ninette de Valois, and fifteen years before Stravinsky’s opera brought it to the foreground. The painterly dialogue between Low and Hogarth is embedded within the conversation West holds both with Low and with Hogarth. The dialogue between images on the one hand, and the intermedial dialogue between words and images, on the other, are examined here as well as the artists’ method. If the three artists all resort to caricature, following Hogarth’s model, their butt and their achievement may differ. This chapter analyses how West and Low transform and expand Hogarth’s characters and narrative, how they adapt it to the 1930s and to what ends.