The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (review)

A familiar narrative about modernist aesthetics bypasses the Victorians altogether. From German philosophy in the late eighteenth century through French impressionism and post-impressionism to the triumph of abstraction in mid-twentieth-century America, this narrative traces an ideal of formal autonomy that seems to have almost nothing to do with developments in nineteenth-century Britain. Indeed, to the degree that the Victorians were hopelessly mired in literary and moralizing approaches to art—or so the story goes—British modernists like Roger Fry and Clive Bell could only have been engaged in directly repudiating their predecessors. In The Literate Eye, Rachel Teukolsky sets out to counter this narrative by sharply repudiating what she calls, in a nice oxymoron, “the old-fashioned, modernist vision of Victorian aesthetics” (5). Looking at a wide range of art writing in the period, from the early volumes of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–60) to the controversies over the 1910 post-impressionist show in London, Teukolsky argues that efforts to distinguish the judgment of art from other standards have a long history in nineteenth-century Britain and that many of the central assumptions of modernist aesthetics can be directly traced to the work of the Victorians.

Teukolsky is not alone in her contention that the Victorians belong to the history of modernism. In recent years, art historians like Elizabeth Prettejohn and David Peters Corbett have shown how a new emphasis on pattern and formal autonomy characterized the work of a number of late-nineteenth-century British painters, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Edward Burne-Jones and Albert Moore, among others. While these scholars have characteristically woven together theory and practice, their emphasis has fallen, understandably, on the achievements of the painters themselves. Teukolsky, by contrast, focuses almost exclusively on art writing: hers is a study of reception and consumption, not production. And there is no question that the period witnessed a huge outpouring of words on the subject. What one observer termed a “nation of critics” recorded its opinions in a dizzying array of venues (qtd. in Teukolsky 15), from formal treatises, lectures, and volumes of art history to a vast assortment of periodical reviews and other commentary. Teukolsky appears to have read quite a bit of this material; and rather than concentrate on a few familiar figures like Ruskin or Walter Pater, she seeks to restore their work to this larger context. By her own account, “The Literate Eye cannot, then, be strictly categorized as cultural or intellectual history, but is some amalgamation of both” (21). That the autonomy of the visual was itself necessarily a doctrine formulated in language is one of the many paradoxes the book addresses.

Teukolsky loosely organizes her study around five key episodes in the history of Victorian aesthetics: Ruskin’s early championing of J. M. W. Turner in the first two volumes of Modern Painters (1843, 1846); the debates over the role of the arts in the Great Exhibition of 1851; the vogue for aestheticism inspired by Pater and others in the 1870s and 1880s; arguments over the relations among biology, beauty, and progressive politics at the fin de siècle; and finally, the scandal surrounding the post-impressionist show of 1910, particularly as this played itself out in conflicting attitudes toward the “primitive.” In her introduction Teukolsky says that each chapter “focuses on a different controversy” (7); but while there are disagreements to spare in the material she has gathered, their focus often remains elusive, and the particular lines of argument—both the author’s and her subjects’—can be hard to untangle. That each chapter is in turn broken up into seven or more separately titled parts, some as brief as a few pages, further obscures the arc of the work as a whole. It is not always clear, for example, whether we are being invited to trace the gradual emergence of formalism, as the introductory material suggests, or to...