The Sins of the Fathers: Iconoclasm in Melbourne and Massachusetts

Iconoclasm is not somewhere else. Instead, it lies buried deep within Western modernity, and especially deep within the Anglo-American tradition. This tradition insistently and violently repudiates idols and images as dangerous carriers of the old regime. The repudiation takes different but analogous forms across the centuries from the sixteenth to the twentieth. In this lecture I focus on some examples of American Abstract Expressionism. I argue that these paintings can only be understood within longer traditions of iconoclastic modernity. Such images might be displayed in the protected spaces of the museum, but they bear the scars of a tradition deeply hostile to the image.

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). He was formerly based at the University of Cambridge, where he was successively a University Lecturer in English (1989-1999) and Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English (1999-2003). He is a Life Fellow of Fellow of Girton College and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was educated at Scotch College Melbourne, the University of Melbourne (BA) and Oxford University (MPhil). He holds a doctorate from the University of Cambridge. His books are as follows: Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (Longman, 1990) (second, revised edition, 2007); Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Reform and Cultural Revolution, being volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2002) (winner of the British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize, 2007); and Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007).