ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf is very much like Roger Fry’s companion at the second Post-Impressionist exhibition. This chapter argues that something happens to these gaps once they work their way into Woolf’s prose. Far from affirming the disinterestedness of her mentor’s modernism, Woolf tracks down formalism’s phantoms, the repressed of Fry’s disembodied gaze. The chapter shows that Kleinian writing on art and femininity begins to converge with Woolf’s. Imagine, then, that Fry’s companion at the second Post-Impressionist exhibition starts to stare at the gaps created by the bulbous legs of the women on the canvas: yes, but look at the psychic price paid for that disembodiment, she cries. The aesthetic implications of such sadistic remainders returned to bother Melanie Klein nearly twenty years later when she confronted William Coldstream’s half-finished portrait of herself. Troubled and disturbed by the message the picture seemed to give about her work Klein insisted on its destruction.
