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

The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 marks the next phase of David Peters Corbett's ongoing reassessment of English painting as representative of modernity and even of modernism. Continuing the line of critical enquiry Corbett took up in his monograph The Modernity of English Art, 1914–1930 (1997) and his edited collections, including English Art, 1860–1914: Modernities and Identities (with Lara Perry [2000]), his latest undertaking continues to challenge the long-standing orthodoxy that understands the history of modernism as generally Franco-American, possibly pertaining to the wider Continent, but certainly never English.

The World in Paint is perhaps Corbett's most ambitious project yet. In this work, he presents a series of case studies, each of which attempts to uncover the often subtle formal intricacies of works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, Frederic Leighton, and George Frederic Watts, as well as others. In these investigations, Corbett convincingly undermines the assumption that "Victorian" and "modern" are mutually exclusive terms. To do this, he casts aside the precepts of social art history, which would view the works of the aforementioned artists as products of particular power relationships or ideological forces. Corbett focuses, as his title suggests, on each artist's use of paint to communicate his relationship to the changing conditions of the modern world.

This is not to say, however, that Corbett denies the relevance of historical context to analysis of a work of art. He does not, in other words, advocate a pure formalism. Rather, Corbett's goal is to reintroduce—in the face of social art history's institutionalization—formal enquiries as equally relevant and rewarding modes of critical engagement. As he states in his introduction, he wishes to show "the historicization of the visual facts of painting, an inquiry into how line, colour and the formal events of facture assume meanings specific to a time and to a culture" (14).

Key to Corbett's argument is an understanding of various central terms, including "modern," "visuality," and "unmediation." The first and second components of this terminology are relatively well known in today's academy (particularly in those institutions where the discipline of art history has been replaced by visual studies). The third term, however, is a neologism. Evoking Victorian society's understanding of visual representation in the world, it is the concept upon which Corbett bases much of his argument.

One argument for recognizing the cultural and social modernity of mid-nineteenth-century England is its ability to recognize vision as mediated. The Victorians were increasingly cognizant that representation is always contingent. That which one artist sees and depicts, however realistically, is not unilaterally real. Corbett's concept of unmediation—"the dream that the visual can diagnose and communicate realities about the world"—ostensibly twists this argument (17). He argues that Victorian painters engaged with modernity because they imagined the opposite: that they could represent the world in an immediate, authentic, and thus unmediated fashion.

Corbett's project to identify the modern nature of Victorian visual culture relies, somewhat paradoxically, on an insistence on the centrality of "unmediation" within this culture. In this schema, unmediation—alongside mediation—is a modern trait. In the first chapter, for example, Corbett argues that in the face of an increasingly superficial industrialized society, one of the hallmarks of which was the realization of written or spoken language's inability to convey an absolute truth, the artists under consideration believed that the sensual experience of facture—the viewer's reaction to the texture and movement of paint on a canvas—could provide an authentic, truthful, or even real experience. This is to say, unmediation is evident in the works of Rossetti or John Everett Millais not in subject-matter, but in the paint itself. And as Corbett suggests, this use of paint to convey knowledge is modern not merely because it is a...