BOOK REVIEW: Kenneth McConkey.MEMORY AND DESIRE: PAINTING IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Gordon Fyfe (bio) Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, by Kenneth McConkey; pp. xiv + 304. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002, £45.00, $89.95. For much of the twentieth century, late-Victorian and Edwardian British painting was judged by the lights of a cultural deprivation thesis. Measured against the achievements of French modernism, it was taken to be not only different but provincial and deficient. Whilst it was possible to glimpse British modernists in the glare of the supernova that was French modernism, it was the latter that provided the measure of British achievements. In recent times, however, this judgment has been challenged by scholars who have reassessed the relationship between English, British, and Irish art and modernism. Complex cultural and disciplinary issues are at stake in the debates that have ensued, and it is possible to identify several perspectives in the literature. First, there is an orthodox perspective that adheres to the conviction that the notion of English modern art constitutes an oxymoron, but that may nonetheless recognize the modernity of cultural markets and institutions. Second, there is a revisionist perspective that stretches out a canonical hand to neglected English artists with modernist credentials. Third, there is a radical perspective in which critical categories are transformed; this is sometimes linked to the claim that the modernist project is now exhausted. In this book, however, Kenneth McConkey adopts a retreatist position. That is, he opts out of the competition for a better British place in the modernist stakes: he is interested in "artists who did not consciously position themselves on the modernist map, who were in essence trying to be successful at the business of being a painter" (13). Thus, a particularly interesting aspect of his approach is that he spends some of his time with the Victorian successes (Alfred East, for example) whose reputations were eclipsed in the twentieth century and who had no knowledge that the story of art would be told as a modernist teleology or that J. M. Turner would, one day, have a coherent reputation. This approach has enabled the author to write an important study of visual culture in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. He covers a large number of artists, collectors, and critics who came to maturity in the second half of the nineteenth century and who, in some cases, survived into the 1920s. George Clausen, Charles Conder, Benjamin Leader, John Lavery, William Orpen, and John Singer Sargent are amongst the artists; P. G. Hamerton, George Moore, D. S. MacColl, Charles Holmes, and Roger Fry are amongst the critics. The collectors include James Staats Forbes, Abraham Mitchell, and Henry Tate. Moore is a key figure. The title, which is borrowed from Eliot, signals McConkey's interest in how memory and desire were interwoven and cultivated through the medium of painting. The desire which accompanies appreciation, say of a pastoral landscape painting, is a complex business that cannot be reduced to generalizations about a [End Page 315] retreat from modernity and archetypal categories such as landscape painting. Whilst a landscape painting might distract the eye from the uncertainties of the metropolis and might evoke a collective memory of the past, it was also the locus of a reflexive modernity that nuanced and transformed the very meaning of the genre. Thus, McConkey puts forward a subtle argument about the structuration, or active making, of painterly categories such as landscape, seascape, and portrait. The book's subject is the historical character of visual intelligence. It demonstrates that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the cultivation of visual memory had acquired a central role in the production and consumption of art. The author brilliantly conveys the subtlety of memory's implicit role in informing contemporary practice: "the whole attitude to past and present is the backdrop to a collusion between critics, writers and collectors" (162). McConkey is interested in moments when the artist, informed by past art and past experience, transforms things, so that the viewer, remembering and gazing at a landscape, can only say to herself: Yes, that...