Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler and Transfigured Things

Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, and Transfigured Things Modernism and Still Life concludes by examining the writings of Aldous Huxley in his analysis of still life painters from Mark Gertler to Cézanne. Reading Huxley’s early art criticism in the light of his later meditation on visionary experience, The Doors of Perception (1954), returns this inquiry to a series of concerns about the ethics of the contemplative versus the active, the animate and the inanimate, which were first raised in the Introduction in Lawrence’s writing on Cézanne.