As such, like many modernists novelists, Joyce above all, Woolf uses traditional realist mimesis for its own sake but also to point out the inadequacies of that mimesis, which fails to capture interior states. Woolf calls attention to this concern with mimesis in this sketch in particular, however, given its title and central image-the looking-glass-which, as a mirror held up to nature, is one of the most important metaphors for realist literature in general. Indeed, as mentioned above, the furniture seems to have a greater understanding of Isabella, albeit a knowledge that is incommunicable. However, conversely, this story and Jacob’s Room demonstrate Woolf’s enduring interest in the cataloguing of material possessions, in the old-fashioned mimesis of the details of bourgeois life. what one calls happiness or unhappiness” (224)-remains elusive. The narrator can imagine Isabella’s petty dinner-table conversation, but her spiritual side-the “profounder state of being. Unlike in a Balzacian novel, the painting of an interior scene sheds no light on the person who inhabits it. On one level, this short story provides an illustration for that thesis-here Woolf provides us with all the trappings of the woman, but the woman herself remains absent. As in that scene, this sketch complicates Woolf’s famous critical remarks about the Edwardian novelists, who she argues are obsessed with the material details of their characters’ lives and who lose sight of their interior, spiritual presences. In its minute description of the physical details of an interior, “The Lady in the Looking Glass” looks back to the final moments in Jacob’s room in Woolf’s earlier novel. The narrator then precedes to imagine the details of her life, to “prize” open her “locked drawers,” but the sketch ends with an image of Isabella shorn of illusions, presented as “old and angular,” as “perfectly empty.”

When the mail is delivered, the letters are imagined as “tablets graven with eternal truth if one could read them, one would know everything there was to be known about Isabella, yes, and about life, too” (223). The narrator begins a lyrical description of her, but then breaks off, calling attention to the inadequacy of the description of Isabella, to “how little, after all these years, one knew about her.” The sketch continues with a description of the letters that are imagined within the cabinets and drawers of the room, which, along with the furniture itself, seem to possess more knowledge of Isabella than the narrator. The sketch begins with a description of an empty room reflected in a mirror, with the mistress of the house, Isabella Tyson, having left. As such, this sketch uses many of the same motifs and illustrates in a concentrated, more explicit form many of the themes that Woolf had explored in more depth and complexity in Jacob’s Room and To The Lighthouse.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid presented the traveling survey Franz West: In & Out (2000-2001).“The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection,” a short story by Virginia Woolf published in Harper’s in December 1929, describes the images reflected in a mirror situated in a woman’s dressing room, providing a glimpse of the furnishings of her life, but, pointedly, not allowing us a glimpse into the more private aspects of her character. A major, mid-career retrospective, Franz West, Proforma, was organized by the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (MUMOK), Vienna in 1996 (it traveled to the Kunsthalle Basel Rijksmuseum Kröller-Mu¨ller, Otterlo Nárondi Galerie, Prague Muzeum Sztuki w Lodzi, Lodz). In the 1990s, the artist’s work was presented at the Austrian Pavilion of the 44th Venice Biennale (1990) documenta IX, Kassel (1992) The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Dia Center for the Arts, New York (both 1994) and the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (1996).

Projekte in Mu¨nster (1987) Kunsthalle Bern (1988) and the Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1, Long Island City, New York (1989). Franz West (1947–2012) began exhibiting his work in the 1970s and gained international recognition in the 1980s, with significant shows at such venues as the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz Secession, Vienna (both 1986) Skulptur.

Franz west furniture