In “Virginia Woolf and the Jews,” a special issue of Woolf Studies Annual, Beth Rosenberg argues that “the time has come for critical discussion of Woolf 's relation to Jews and Jewishness to turn to the earlier years of Woolf 's intellectual development, the years before her marriage to Leonard” (9). Two of these key years were 1904–5. Although we have Woolf 's 1939 retrospective view in “A Sketch of the Past,” an equally significant account is by Vanessa Bell. In “Memories of Roger Fry,” Bell talks about 1904–5, Impressionism, and the importance of Camille Mauclair's “tiny book” The French Impressionists to her in those years (129). Bell was interested in politics, as her painting The Triple Alliance (referencing war-time treaties), and the naming of her 1913 Omega textile White after Amber Blanco-White, feminist and political activist, demonstrate. Yet, as I shall argue, in 1904–5 Bell seems to disregard the political subtext of Mauclair's The French Impressionists.

Following the move to Bloomsbury in 1904, Virginia records that so busy were the sisters “we had only just time to rush off to a Mr Rutter's lecture on Impressionism at the Grafton Gallery” (MOB 185). Their interest was triggered by Mauclair's book, translated in 1903, which Bell claims was “her chief source of knowledge of all that was going on in France” (129). Mauclair's “tiny book” inspired her, as she “poured over those absurd little reproductions” (129).

I'll return to Mauclair and Jewishness in a moment, but first to contextualize Vanessa and Virginia's interest. Impressionism derives from the title of Monet's Impressions: soleil levant, scorned when first exhibited in 1874, and the term applied initially to Monet, Pissaro and Sisley (Flint 14). The three were in England in 1870–71 due to the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune, and from 1887 Impressionist works were exhibited annually in the UK, culminating in the major exhibition of 1905 by Durand-Ruel at the Grafton Gallery, referred to by Woolf, which 11,000 people visited. As Brandon Taylor argues, Impressionism trained spectators to the cognitive pleasures of art not just to what content they might be seeing (xix).

Virginia Stephen enjoyed the happiest summers of her life in St. Ives until, following the death of her mother, the lease of Talland House was sold in 1895. The Stephen family were actively involved in the St. Ives’ arts scene: Leslie and Julia were among the first to join the St. Ives Arts Club and Leslie was voted President; while in St. Ives Vanessa (Woolf records) enjoyed “painting in water-colours, and scratching a number of black little squares, after Ruskin's prescription” (MOB 31); leading local painters Louis Grier and Julius Olsson were known to the family and dined at Talland House; Vanessa, like the other painters, bought materials at Lanham's art shop which hosted the annual Studio Day; Woolf 's half-brothers played cricket when the St. Ives Artists’ Eleven played. The artist Lily Kirkpatrick lived close by in Talland Road from 1893. Many London artists, including Vanessa and Virginia's friend Eliza Ramona (Lisa) Stillman visited Talland House (Humm Companion).

St. Ives impacted on Woolf's writing in multiple ways; for example, she incorporated real-life events there, such as Leo Maxse's proposal to Kitty Lushington in Talland House garden, into To the Lighthouse thirty-seven years later. But I want to focus on the arts of St. Ives: the artists who painted light in extraordinary, original ways and whose techniques must have influenced Woolf, and whose names may well have recurred in her writing.

Critical responses to this milieu are numerous and include the scholarship of Marion Dell and Marion Whybrow on St. Ives, Diane Gillespie and Frances Spalding's work on Vanessa Bell, and Leslie Hankins’ very stimulating and playful plenary at the 2012 Woolf conference in Saskatoon imagining encounters in St. Ives between Virginia Stephen and the Canadian painter Emily Carr—who did not arrive in St. Ives until after the departure of the Stephens (Dell and Whybrow, Gillespie, Spalding, Hankins). All agree that St. Ives had a strong impact on Woolf 's writing. But it is the specific impact of St. Ives’ art on Woolf 's aesthetics which concerns this paper. Her first memories of St. Ives she recorded aesthetically “if I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver and green” (MOB 66).

The title of the conference is the theme of my paper. I will sketch out some of the problematics of multidisciplinarity, focusing on visual studies, in relation to Woolf; touch on critics including Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière, who offer helpful prisms; and reflect on the relevance of multidisciplinarity to notions of authorship and signature in Woolf.

I start with, and return later to, this collage. When researching Snapshots of Bloomsbury I discovered the page in one of the boxes of loose photographs in Woolf's archive in the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Houghton Library. The image had no accompanying details of author, date or location. I was intrigued by Woolf's possible expertise in collage, as I follow Max Ernst's view in his Cahiers d'art that collage can produce “a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties.” So I researched in other archives seeking further examples of Woolf's collage techniques but without success. My response to this single collage, when reproducing the page in Snapshots of Bloomsbury, was to link the material directly to Woolf's publications. In a fairly obvious annotation, I noted the names of the figures in the image (Mussolini, Christ, Prof. J. M. Murray, Abraham Lincoln, Emperor Wilhelm, Count Berchtold, Frederick Delius); that the page might be a preparation for Three Guineas using, as it does, similar images as those in Woolf's scrapbooks; and that the image reflected Woolf's original title for Three Guineas, ‘Men Are Like That’, a phrase from Stella Duckworth. What I did, of course, consciously or unconsciously, was to exclude multidisciplinarity. I will return to the image in a moment, but first I wish to think through the ways in which visual materials challenge such an obvious determination.

What makes studies of Woolf's encounters with the visual so interesting and productive is that such encounters call for multidisciplinarity. For example, photography escapes narrative. Photography sees without hierarchy. The smallest details become insistent signs. Photography has a capacity for unpredictable significance. The value of the documentation cannot be known in advance.

This very well-known question, posed by Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, is not a simple one. Issues of how the arts and the visual in general were perceived, and employed, by the sisters, bear heavily on all their auto/biographical encounters. Reading Virginia's accounts of art, particularly descriptions of her sister's art, is also to read a palimpsest of Virginia's anxious feelings about self representation. This is of particular importance in any examination of modernist writing since, although modernist literature was initially characterised as a movement from outside to inside (Meisel), new modernism is a continuum of theories about representations of subjectivity in both visual and narrative practices.

Woolf, as we know, had an “abiding obsession” with autobiography, just as the autobiographical “is never far from the surface of modernist writing” (Albright 1, Saunders 12). Woolf's own inter-weavings of the autobiographical with narrative have been the focus of many critics, although this epistemic community has mutated over the years. Woolf certainly places the subjectivity of the narrator/Woolf at the heart of her critical writings. I would argue that Woolf's haptic selfis most prominent in her accounts of her sister Vanessa Bell's art. Virginia Woolf's writings on art of ten create a kind of prosopopoeia – coming to know herself, her identity, by constructing figures of artists and artistic events, for example in “The Royal Academy” (1919). But while “The Royal Academy” shows Woolf abjecting her fears, her writings on Vanessa show Woolf constructing a more complex identity. From the momentary rupture in Woolf's description of Vanessa in “Reminiscences”(1976), to the very brief “It is strange as one enters the Mansard Gallery…” (1924), and to the “Foreword to Recent Paintings of Vanessa Bell” (1930), Woolf ';s empathetic understandings of Vanessa's art, reveal Woolf's developing sense of “being.”

Woolf did, after all, entitle her autobiography “A Sketch of the Past” (1976), the piece was written at Vanessa's request: “Nessa said that if I did not start my memoirs I should soon be too old,” and “A Sketch” foregrounds Woolf's aestheticizing of life events (MOB 64). Just as in “A Sketch,” Woolf's art writings address the issue of the self's representation.

As Ann Ardis argues, the New Woman is the key figure in turn-of-the-twentieth-century debates about gender, visual cultures, and modernity. Changes in gender relations, from 1882 - the year of Virginia Woolf's birth - to the 1920s, interact with the development of modernism. Women were central players in new city spaces as suffragettes and in novelists' newly imagined public modernities, for example in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. Women's experiences of urban modernity included the spheres of art galleries and cinemas which offered new modes of collective seeing. Women artists and art critics were highly visible in, and major contributors to, London journals. By the turn of the century, there were over thirty women critics contributing signed articles with some, for example the writer Alice Meynell, earning over £400 a year. In turn, twentieth-century women's modernism is obsessed with issues of visuality. Women modernists, including Virginia Woolf and her sister the artist Vanessa Bell, were also the first generation of women to be active photographers and cinema-goers from childhood. Like Bell, many women painters were photographers. For example, the American artist Susan Sears began photography at the same time as she was exhibiting paintings, and she joined Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession in 1904.

Virginia Woolf's Orlando, like many of her works, is shaped by her knowledge of, and fascination with, visual cultures. Orlando, Flush and Three Guineas all contain photographs and other images. All of Woolf's writings have visual tropes, and many draw on contemporary debates about the arts, and popular visual cultures. Here Orlando adopts the optical point of view of a classic Hollywood camera, with medium rather than long shots, and ends on a close-up frame. David Trotter argues in Cinema and Modernism that, as well as analogies between literary and cinematic forms in Woolf's writing, what cinema more radically taught her was how to portray 'constitutive absence', for example Mrs Ramsay's absence in To the Lighthouse, and the ways in which 'movement (in particular casual movement) defines space'.

Overview

But cinema was only one of a number of visual cultures that Woolf enjoyed and which impact on her work. In addition, she was an active photographer from childhood, she herself was photographed for Vogue, and references to advertising and architecture abound in her writings. Woolf wrote the first British essay on avant-garde cinema. Visual artefacts of all kinds, ranging from Omega Workshop crafts to the Hogarth Press book designs, were part of her visual landscape and she had a wide circle of artist friends and family. Woolf’s responses to modern visual cultures are what make her a modernist writer.