The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848-1914 (review)

The World in Paint is an ambitious study that takes the standard formalist account of modernism to task for its geographical prejudices, and social history for its dismissal of purely visual concerns. Like Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer, David Peters Corbett's book dates the origins of modern visuality prior to the emergence of Manet and the Impressionists and, in the English context, prior to the 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' exhibition organized by Roger Fry in 1910. Identifying a 'new climate of possibility for the visual' in the 1840s in England, Corbett proposes a rethinking not only of the development of English modernism, but of modernism and the registration of modernity in painting more broadly.

The book is divided into chapters on the Pre-Raphaelites, Aestheticism, the relationship of Oscar Wilde and his illustrator Charles Ricketts, Walter Sickert, and Vorticism. In each case study Corbett analyses how his artist-protagonists tried to negotiate the difficult questions of whether and how pigment could or should register modern experience. His discussion of Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray, for example, highlights the story's mockery of painting's truth-claims through its literalization of 'what it would really mean to impress experience directly onto the surface of a canvas.' Corbett explores a wealth of different painterly responses to these vexing questions, including scepticism about, repudiation of, or belief in 'the visual's access to the real.' In each instance, artists' concerns with pigment's potential for embodying, mediating, or disclaiming reality and modernity are examined in light of wider ongoing debates, such as the commodification of art, the experience of the modern city, and the different representational capacities of word and image.

The larger problem the book addresses is 'how to connect historical circumstance with the physical surfaces of paintings.' Corbett's analyses of the ways pigment and facture were understood in each period he discusses are thoroughly researched and draw convincingly on a broad range of published and unpublished sources. His textual citations give a compelling sense of how paint, in all its materiality, was culturally perceived. Corbett, however, rarely treats the surfaces of specific paintings in much detail. The book, then, doesn't entirely fulfil its promise of returning to the visual. The exception to this is the chapter on Walter Sickert. Corbett's detailed treatment of Sickert's music-hall scenes, particularly Gatti's Hungerford Palace of Varieties: Second Turn of Katie Lawrence, is stunning in its visual sensitivity and eloquent unfolding of the complexities of layers of fiction and reality, reference and self-reference in the work. Sickert's 'nuanced investigation into paint's adequacy as a vehicle' for describing modern experience is also compellingly, if not as thoroughly, explored through the haunting Camden Town Murder paintings.

The World in Paint is a welcome contribution to the history of English art, its complex weaving together of diverse agendas refreshing and admirable. If Corbett doesn't always provide as much formal analysis as one would like, he offers a rigorously historicized framework from which to begin.