Book Description:
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.
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