Arts and Urban Life Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Arts and Urban Life - Essay Example Punch's versifier detailed 'The muck and mud that still our movements clog', while Conrad made the same point more sonorously in describing 'the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves unlovely and unfriendly to man." (Freeman, 89). The city of London is perhaps one of the oldest yet also one of the most powerful cities in the world. This account speaks about the atmosphere, weather, but not the people. All urban histories states about the city in terms of physical structures and ultrastructural layouts. When the reality is that the people of the city and their lives day in and day out constitute the core of urban life, which embodies their struggle, aspirations, and moments of heightened awareness, then art in the urban life in any form will also express those. In the detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle or Richard Harding Davis, fog underlay or encouraged the city's criminal associations, with Sherlock Holmes speculating as to how the 'thief or murderer could roam London' 'as the tiger does the jungle', since figures are but 'dimly seen, then blend once more into the cloud bank' (Doyle, CA, 913). The question arises, what is a city, is it the demonstrable difficulties of urban life, its malign incompatibility with human wishes, or entirely something else arising out of it. In some cases, the metropolis itself has been assigned a character in itself, which responds enthusiastically to the process of transformation in the city space and the ways it is perceived by the individual. Radical artists such as Whistler and Monet were exploring similar possibilities during the 1870s. Such figures moved away from the particularization of realist art and conventional topographic painting, concerning themselves with atmospheric evocation. James's immersion, in all senses, in London's fog was therefore something he shared with its most famous visual chroniclers, impressionist painters, even though he initially had little obvious sympathy for their art (James, 219). Accounts of London by Dickens, and, even more so, by Gissing, repeatedly emphasized the city's aromas and the tidal roar of its 'flaring and clamorous' streets where 'the odors of burning naphtha and fried fish were pungent on the wind'. To judge from The Princess Casamassima, the Thames is equally noisy and smelly, with Hyacinth (Gissing, 111), Robinson observing the 'grinding, puffing, smoking, splashing activity of the turbid flood', but in his own trip down river, James concentrates on the tonal limitation s of the scene, its blacks and sables, silvers and grays (Jackson, 277). Baldwin's "Another Country" is a novel, but more of an essay on love. Love on the backdrop of a city, where life at least takes the form of impressionist art. Love is a theme that the author had explored both on homosexual and heterosexual perspectives. On closer examination, there is another theme in this novel, racialism. While love is a necessity and is utterly constructive, hate is terribly destructive, and this theme is core concept