RACHEL TEUKOLSKY. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics.

Abstract

This is a splendidly stimulating book for anyone interested in the relations between the visual and the verbal in the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It consists of five essays, arranged chronologically, which map the changing reflection of art in writing and vice versa. It is neither a book about art history, nor is it a history of criticism. Instead it is an account of the contingent factors that created what used to be called ‘taste’ in British literary and visual culture. ‘The value of the visual arts’, Rachel Teukolsky claims, ‘was (and is) determined not merely by intrinsic aesthetic qualities, but by a host of extrinsic factors, the most significant of which was the language used to characterize the arts—a language that, in the nineteenth century, often had little to do with the actual image itself, and was at time unrecognizable in connection with the art it was meant to describe’ (p. 16). This is not a cultural or intellectual history, but as the author tells us, ‘an amalgamation of both’. It is, nevertheless, a dense and rich amalgam, full of fascinating detail and shrewd observation. The argument covers the years 1840 to 1910, so the analysis opens with Ruskin’s Modern Painters and closes with Roger Fry’s essays prompted by the First Post-Impressionist exhibition. The whole period is marked by a growing professionalism and power in the art-critical milieu. Ruskin was at first just ‘a graduate of Oxford’ when the period opens; when it closed, Roger Fry, in Kenneth Clark’s opinion, had changed the taste of the nation. Throughout the story there is dialectic between art discourse and scientific discourse. Ruskin’s aesthetic is imbued with the language of geology, and botany; Pater draws upon current material models of the mind for his representation of human consciousness; Wilde and Morris both find in Darwinian theory ways of accounting for the relations between art and society, and Fry’s cool formalism has its roots in his early scientific training in the natural sciences at Cambridge.