The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England 1848-1914

In this book, David Peters Corbett proposes a new way of looking at English painting from the Pre-Raphaelites to Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists. An award-winning art historian, he contends that from 1848 to 1914, English artists confronted a world in which the rise of science and dedine in religion deprived painting of many of its traditional functions and powers. Yet these same changes presented the possibility that painting could become a crucial means of mediating the 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 use of a wide range of sources, including contemporary art criticism, artists’ letters, literature, and newspapers. But what gives his book originality is its incisive discussion of aesthetics, including debates about the expectations of the visual experience and the experiments in the handling of paint, codes of beauty, and strategies of representation that were directed toward questions of meaning. Beautifully illustrated with colour and black-and-white reproductions, this significant book will be invaluable to anyone interested in the art of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

In very good condition.