David Peters Corbett

‘Gross Material Facts’: Sexuality, Identity and the City in Walter Sickert, 1905—1910

Sickert’s painting between 1905 and 1910 imagines the character of city experience within modernity through an explicit and programmatic depiction of the sordid character of urban lives, above all those of working-class women. These lives and their surroundings stand for the incomprehensibility and alienness of modernity, and Sickert attempts to cope with this perception by subjecting his models to the gaze of a ‘dispassionate observer’, the painter whose material control of his subjects on the surface of the canvas mimes his desired comprehension of modernity. The article argues that this project is visibly unsustainable in the works themselves where the figure of the male artist as dispassionate and controlling observer is insidiously undermined and his powerlessness before the spectacle of women, the city, and modernity is confessed. Sickert is sceptical about the imposition of authority even as he is eager to impose it, and his works at this period distil a modernist irony out of this historical problematic.

A companion to British Art: 1600 to the present

This companion is a collection of newly-commissioned essays written by leading scholars in the field, providing a comprehensive introduction to British art history. A generously-illustrated collection of newly-commissioned essays which provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of British art Combines original research with a survey of existing scholarship and the state of the field Touches on the whole of the history of British art, from 800-2000, with increasing attention paid to the periods after 1500 Provides the first comprehensive introduction to British art of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, one of the most lively and innovative areas of art-historical study Presents in depth the major preoccupations that have emerged from recent scholarship, including aesthetics, gender, British art’s relationship to Modernity, nationhood and nationality, and the institutions of the British art world.

Visuality and Unmediation in Burne‐Jones’s Laus Veneris

This article argues that a contest between the image and verbal knowledge is central to the work of Burne-Jones and that this contest thematizes cultural tensions around the capacity of the visual arts to deal adequately with the new conditions of contemporary experience. Contrary to most established readings, I argue that Burne-Joness painting possessed for contemporaries the possibility of critical potential in its resistance to the instrumental values of late nineteenth-century modernity and that this potential was expressed most powerfully through their visual character. But if Burne-Joness dream was critical in this way, it was also insecure. Opposing the visual to the word as forms of effective knowledge about reality, Burne-Joness paintings of the 1870s nonetheless turn out to be dependent on the word and to enact a dialectic between word and image as a central part of their constitution.

Seeing into Modernity: Walter Sickert's Music Hall Scenes, c. 1887-1907, and English Modernism

The French tradition beginning with Baudelaire’s writings on art and the work of Manet has seemed to generations of scholars to be the most compelling modernist work there is. In the earliest historiography of modern painting this art was conceived as possessing an inherent drive towards abstraction, the full realization of which was understood to occur only with the passing of the modernist baton to New York in 1945. The dominant concern of modernist art was said to be the pursuit of a pure painting, a preoccupation with pigment and the surface of the canvas, and a consequent denigration of the importance of subject matter. Associated above all with Clement Greenberg and Alfred Barr, this style of thinking has been widely criticized from the 1970s onwards and largely replaced by an alternative reading which privileges engagement with social modernity.1 Stemming from the thought of Walter Benjamin, a very specific reading of Baudelaire, and, most immediately, from the popularity of T. J. Clark’s powerful analysis of Impressionism in The Painting of Modern Life, this approach defines a modernism in painting that is engaged with the society of the spectacle and the social consequences of modernity.2 However different these accounts may be, they share a fascination with the art and thought of France as central to the project of understanding modernism, and hence provide a norm upon which any definitions must explicitly or implicitly be built.3 One consequence of such a situation is historiographical hesitancy MODERNISM / modernity / VOLUME SEVEN, NUMBER TWO, PP 285-306.

‘Collaborative resistance’: Charles Ricketts as illustrator of Oscar Wilde

Abstract The entries in Charles Rickettss diary for December 1990, scored through, altered and revised as they are, give an intriguing account of his reactions to the death of Oscar Wilde. On the 5th he heard the news, then six days old: ‘I feel too upset touched to write about it, and the end of that Comedy that was really Tragedy … I know I know that I have not realy [sic] felt the fact of his death, I am merely wretched, tearful, stupid, vaguely conscious that something has happened. Oh that stirs up old resentment, and the old sense that one is not sufficiently reconciled to life its vicissitudes to death.”1 The effect of these cancellations and revisions — the phrase containing vicissitudes has been added and then subsequently cancelled — is to place the emphasis on ‘life’ rather than ‘death’, and to do so partly by drawing attention to the difficulties of expression writing about ‘life’ brings with it. It is the ‘life’ Ricketts shared with Oscar Wilde rather than the fact of his death that Ricketts...

The Problematic Past in the Work of Charles Sheeler, 1917–1927

This article examines the place of the past in Charles Sheelers photographs and paintings made in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, around 1917, in New York City during the 1920s, and in the short film of New York, Manhatta (1921), which he made with the photographer Paul Strand. It situates these works in the context of the scholarship on Sheeler and on the art of New York in the early twentieth century, in particular that of the Ashcan School and of visual representation which attends to the architectural fabric of the city in preference to depicting its inhabitants. The article argues that although the scholarship has identified Sheelers interest in making connections with the American past, it has not recognized the fraught nature of that relationship. By looking at the Doylestown and New York pictures, the analysis demonstrates how the problematic status of the past for Sheeler appears in these works as hauntings and absences.

Ekphrasis, history and value: Charles Ricketts's art criticism

Abstract In 1903 Charles Ricketts gave this account of Titians Bacchanal in his book on The Prado and its Masterpieces (figure 1): On the hill-top we see the grapes crushed beneath the weight of a Polyphemus-like figure: from the grapes issues the rivulet of wine which is the central motive of the work. By this sit two fair Venetians: the fairer one leans towards her companion, and from their hands, a pipe has slipped. Crouched at her feet, with his hands clasping her very ankles, is the brown ardent figure of a man who turns towards the other revellers, who are all absorbed — one in the wine he holds in a crystal flask against the sky; whilst others, wrapped in the mazes of a dance, move at once passionate and listless .... Beyond, the vines flash white among the trees at the horizon, and the season and the hour ripen. The love of beauty emanates from the very motive and substance of this work, as the perfume emanates from the flesh of a peach or the cells in a bunch of violets.1