“Corbett
is one of very few scholars who are thinking deeply about the future
direction of art history, and of even fewer who are doing so in
the context of British art. This book has the potential to lead
the way not only in its own field but also in art history as a discipline.”
—Elizabeth Prettejohn, University of Plymouth
Paintings
of a "kept woman" sitting in her lover’s lap, of
the Lady of Shalott, of Merlin the magician, of an explosive, abstract
pattern—some rendered in meticulous detail, others only sketched—appear
side by side in David Peters Corbett’s book on English art.
The sharp differences in style as well as in subject matter are
striking and significant, but they are not presented in any of the
usual ways. They are not seen as markers of a progressive development
or expressions of strong personalities or signs of English artists’
inability or reluctance to master French Impressionism. All these
familiar narratives are abandoned in Corbett’s book, which,
in their stead, proposes a new way of looking at English painting
from Pre-Raphaelites to Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists.
An award-winning art historian, Corbett contends that from 1848-1914,
English artists confronted a world in which the rise of science
and decline in religion deprived painting of many of its traditional
functions and powers. Yet these same changes, according to Corbett,
presented the possibility that painting could become a crucial means
of mediating the widely decried materialism of industrial society.
It could expose the values that had been lost, reveal hidden spiritual
and emotional resources, or, alternatively, welcome and champion
the dynamics of modernism.
Corbett makes persuasive use of a wide range of sources, including
contemporary art criticism, artists’ letters, literature,
and, not surprisingly, the torrent of publicity touched off by the
Whistler vs. Ruskin trial of 1877. However, what gives his book
its originality is its incisive discussion of aesthetic issues that
art historians, intent on social history, have generally overlooked.
Corbett puts readers in contact with debates about the expectations
brought to visual experience and experiments in the handling of
paint, codes of beauty, and strategies of representation that were
directed towards questions of meaning.
Many of Corbett’s points entail close analysis of certain
paintings. Fortunately, his book is amply illustrated with high-quality
color, and black and white reproductions.
|
|
|
Contents
List
of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 “Not Material Enough for the Age”: Pre-Raphaelite
Words and Images
2 Aestheticism and Unmediation: Moore, Leighton, Watts, Whistler
3 Personality, Portraiture, and Illustration: Charles Ricketts and
Oscar Wilde
4 Walter Sickert: Surface and Modernity
5 The Aesthetics of Materiality: English Modernism Before 1914
Notes
Bibliography
Index |
|
|
