0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Modern Painting," George Moore presents a comprehensive exploration of the evolution of art during a time of profound societal transformation. Through a critical lens, he examines the interplay between aesthetic innovation and the cultural zeitgeist of the early 20th century. Moore's literary style is both evocative and analytical, employing rich imagery and insightful commentary to unpack the philosophies and techniques of modern painters. The work contextualizes the movements of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and beyond, providing readers with a profound understanding of how art reflects and influences contemporary thought. George Moore was an influential figure in the Irish literary renaissance and a close observer of artistic movements in Europe. His own experiences as a painter and writer infused his scholarship with a unique perspective. Moore was particularly interested in the intersection of art and literature, often grappling with the role of the artist in society. This personal investment in the subject matter adds depth to his criticisms and insights, making "Modern Painting" a significant contribution to art historical discourse. I highly recommend "Modern Painting" to anyone interested in the evolution of artistic expression and the rich tapestry of modernity. Moore's articulate prose and profound insights not only educate but also inspire introspection on the role of art in our lives, making it an invaluable addition to both academic and personal libraries. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
Modern Painting
Table of Contents
Introduction
Modern Painting advances a bracing argument that painting must continually renew itself by answering the pressures and perceptions of its own era, testing inherited formulas against the living eye, weighing convention against experience, and insisting that judgment arise from the work as seen rather than from the authority of schools or institutions, so that what we call modern is not a matter of fashion but of candor, vitality, and the courage to accept artistic consequence wherever it leads, even when it unsettles taste, disturbs habit, or exposes the distance between practiced rhetoric and the truths that color and form can still discover.
Written by George Moore, Modern Painting is a work of art criticism composed as a sequence of essays, first published in the 1890s amid late nineteenth-century debates about the direction of European and British art. It belongs to a period when public exhibitions, press controversies, and shifting ideals of taste made criticism a lively arena in its own right. Moore situates his reflections in that dynamic context, addressing readers who are learning how to look as much as what to think. The result is a book that speaks from within its time while testing the criteria by which that time judged itself.
Readers encounter a discerning, argumentative voice that takes pleasure in close looking and in reasoning out the principles that looking implies. The experience is not a catalogue of names so much as a sustained examination of tendencies, ideals, and standards by which paintings might be measured. Moore’s essays move between description and evaluation, balancing sensory attention with intellectual rigor. The mood is by turns urgent, reflective, and unsparing, yet hospitable to ambivalence where the evidence is mixed. The book offers a conversation rather than a decree, inviting readers to adopt its methods of attention even when they resist its conclusions.
Central themes include the tension between tradition and innovation, the claim that modernity entails responsibilities of perception, and the conviction that sincerity in execution is the touchstone of value. Moore is concerned with how institutions shape taste, how public opinion confers or withholds legitimacy, and how individual artists negotiate these pressures. He also asks what it means for painting to be of its moment without being merely topical. In exploring these questions, the essays encourage a discipline of looking that recognizes both the autonomy of art and its entanglement with the social order in which it is made and received.
The style is lucid and intentionally provocative, marked by sharply drawn distinctions and an impatience with vagueness. Moore favors a clear line of argument anchored in what is visible on the canvas: structure, color, handling, and the expressive logic that holds them together. Yet the prose remains flexible, capable of admiration and doubt, and alert to the ways personal response can mislead as well as illuminate. The essays are shaped to build momentum but also to pause where the case is not yet proven, modeling criticism as an evolving practice that tests its own premises against the stubborn particulars of art.
For contemporary readers, Modern Painting matters because the questions it raises have not subsided: how should we judge new work, who sets the terms of excellence, and what balance ought to exist between institutional endorsement and independent vision. The book offers tools for navigating crowded cultural landscapes, reminding us that standards are argued into being, not fixed by decree. Its emphasis on disciplined attention, accountability to evidence, and openness to surprise equips readers to face shifting artistic norms, cross-cultural exchange, and the accelerating cycles of reception that define the present as surely as they did the late nineteenth century.
Approached today, Moore’s essays provide a demanding but rewarding guide to the craft of looking and the ethics of judgment. They invite readers to slow down, to test intuition against analysis, and to distinguish durable insight from momentary excitement. Whether you are new to art criticism or returning to it with fresh questions, the book offers a rigorous companion, neither complacent nor doctrinaire. Its enduring appeal lies in the clarity with which it frames problems that any age must solve anew: what we value in painting, why we value it, and how our seeing can rise to meet the art before us.
Synopsis (Selection)
Modern Painting by George Moore is a collection of essays surveying the transformation of European painting in the nineteenth century, with emphasis on the rise of the modern French school. Moore outlines his purpose early: to describe the shift from academic conventions toward a new vision built on direct observation, tonal harmony, and a painterly truth independent of literary storytelling. He frames his approach historically and technically, situating living and recent artists in relation to earlier traditions. Throughout, he clarifies the criteria by which he judges art—sincerity of vision, coherence of design, and sensitivity to color and value—while tracing how these standards evolve within modern practice.
The book first locates modern tendencies within a broader lineage, observing how seventeenth-century masters and later landscape innovators prepared the ground. Moore highlights the renewed attention to nature, the study of light and atmosphere, and the move from idealized compositions to more immediate impressions. He notes how artists such as the Barbizon painters developed tonal unity and outdoor study, bridging studio classicism and plein-air experimentation. This context establishes the terms of debate between romantic description and realist observation, showing how questions of subject, technique, and truth to vision begin to displace narrative and allegory as primary artistic objectives.
Moore then turns to the pivotal figures of the modern French movement, presenting Manet, Courbet, and Degas as central to the break with prevailing academic finish. Manet’s frank handling of paint and revaluation of old-master reality, Courbet’s realism grounded in the visible world, and Degas’s draftsmanship and compositional invention are treated as decisive steps. The discussion extends to Monet and his sustained analysis of light and color across changing conditions, as well as to Whistler’s tonal harmonies. Moore describes their aims, methods, and exhibitions, situating each artist’s contribution amid institutional resistance and evolving public reception.
A sustained examination of Impressionism follows, defining it less as a doctrine than as a disciplined response to perception. Moore describes outdoor practice, the use of broken color to capture transient effects, and the prioritization of tonal relationships over detailed modeling. He distinguishes convincing applications from mannered excess, explaining how Impressionist procedure challenges academic ideas of finish and storytelling. He also records the movement’s fraught encounters with official Salons, the formation of independent exhibitions, and the gradual accommodation of new styles by critics and collectors. This account marks Impressionism’s consolidation as a legitimate approach rather than a passing sensation.
Technical questions occupy several essays, where Moore considers drawing, composition, and the medium itself. He weighs the relative capacities of oil and watercolor, emphasizing the painter’s task of arranging tones on a flat surface to secure unity and rhythm. Comparisons with Spanish and Dutch masters, especially Velázquez, clarify principles of economy and truth in execution. Moore stresses the importance of seeing values accurately, organizing the picture as a coherent decorative whole, and avoiding illustrative detail that weakens pictorial force. These chapters articulate a practical aesthetic: craft serves vision, and technique must remain inseparable from the artist’s perception of nature.
Turning to British art, Moore assesses the Royal Academy’s influence, the prevalence of anecdotal and moralizing subjects, and the training systems that shape taste. He contrasts narrative painting with the modern demand for pictorial coherence, noting how institutional practices can encourage finish over vision. Certain English artists receive praise for tonal sensitivity and stylistic independence, while the broader school is critiqued for conservatism. Moore argues that progress depends on reform in education, patronage, and exhibition, and he cites examples of artists who resisted prevailing fashions. The section frames national differences as matters of discipline, standards, and openness to continental developments.
Moore’s analysis of genres emphasizes portraiture and landscape as testing grounds for modern method. In portraiture, he notes the need to balance likeness, character, and decorative unity, showing how modern painters simplify and relate masses to avoid anecdote. Landscape emerges as a principal field for studying light, atmosphere, and tonal relation, with attention to artists who translate direct observation into coherent pictorial structure. The book also reflects on figure compositions and scenes of rural labor, referencing painters like Millet to illustrate how subject can gain gravity without sacrificing painterly integrity. Across genres, the criterion remains consistency of vision and clarity of execution.
The essays also address institutions, criticism, and the art market, explaining how these forces shape stylistic acceptance. Moore traces the role of exhibitions, independent societies, and collectors in the recognition of new schools. He discusses training in Paris as a corrective to provincial habits, advocating disciplined study of values and form. Questions of national character appear as issues of educational method and critical standard rather than innate temperament. By describing how public taste evolves under sustained exposure to coherent work, Moore shows the mechanisms by which modern painting moves from controversy to legitimacy within a broader cultural economy.
The concluding view presents modern painting as an art anchored in truthful seeing, harmonious construction, and independence from literary subjects. Moore summarizes the progress from academic description toward a visual logic governed by tone, color, and design. He acknowledges the diversity within modern schools while insisting on shared technical foundations and an ethic of sincerity. The book ends by projecting a future in which painters refine these principles, avoiding both formula and caprice. Its central message is that lasting art arises from disciplined perception and coherent craft, and that modernity, properly understood, is a rigorous fidelity to the conditions of vision.
Historical Context
George Moore’s Modern Painting emerges from the Franco-British art worlds of the 1870s–1890s, with Paris and London as its twin poles. Moore, an Irish expatriate who lived in Paris after 1873 and later in London, writes from within studios, cafés, and galleries that defined late Victorian and early Third Republic culture. The book’s observations are grounded in an age of steam, railways, electric light, and mass journalism, when museums expanded and middle-class collectors gained new sway. Published in 1893, it surveys a Europe reorganized by imperial wars, urban rebuilding, and expanding cultural bureaucracy, situating painters and exhibitions within the social fabric of modern capitals.
The transformation of Paris under Baron Haussmann (1853–1870) created the physical and social arenas in which the painters Moore champions worked. Broad boulevards, new parks, renovated bridges, and the annexation of surrounding communes in 1860 produced a city of cafés, department stores, and promenades. This modern metropolis, with gas lighting, new sewerage, and reoriented traffic, reshaped public leisure and spectacle. Moore arrived into the afterlife of this redesign, studying in Parisian ateliers and moving among neighborhoods like Montmartre and the Place Pigalle. His commentary on contemporary subjects—city streets, theaters, and suburban riversides—reflects how Haussmann’s Paris generated both themes for art and audiences attuned to urban experience.
The Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and the Paris Commune (March–May 1871) devastated the French capital and reordered its institutions. The defeat at Sedan (2 September 1870), the siege of Paris, and the Bloody Week (21–28 May 1871) left thousands dead and the Vendôme Column toppled, an act for which Gustave Courbet was imprisoned and later exiled. The Third Republic, proclaimed in 1870, thereafter sought cultural legitimacy through museums and state patronage. Moore navigated a Paris still recovering from these shocks, and his essays repeatedly stress artistic independence from the state, evoking the war’s lesson that centralized authority could be both coercive and artistically constraining.
The state-controlled Salon system, and its reform crises, form a crucial backdrop. After the uproar of 1863, Napoleon III authorized the Salon des Refusés, exposing the politics of juries and official taste. Under the Third Republic, the Direction des Beaux-Arts purchased works, organized Salons, and used commissions to shape public art. In Britain, the Royal Academy maintained similar gatekeeping through its Summer Exhibition. Alternatives arose: the Grosvenor Gallery opened in London in 1877 as an independent venue, and the New English Art Club was founded in 1886, exhibiting first at the Marlborough Gallery on Pall Mall. Moore’s book aligns with these institutional challenges, arguing for exhibition freedom and against academic monopolies.
The modern art market, led by dealers and international collectors, decisively altered artists’ livelihoods. Paul Durand-Ruel, who met Monet and Pissarro in London during the war years (1870–1871), began sustained purchases in the 1870s, hosted group shows at his Paris gallery—such as the 1876 exhibition on Rue Le Peletier—and staged transatlantic exhibitions, including a pivotal New York show in 1886. Economic downturns, notably the Long Depression beginning in 1873, initially depressed sales but later gave way to robust American demand. Moore’s defense of contemporary painters repeatedly invokes this dealer-driven system as an alternative to state patronage, presenting market pluralism as a condition for artistic innovation.
Legal and public controversies over art crystallized in the libel case Whistler v Ruskin (Queen’s Bench, 1878). After John Ruskin attacked James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold (exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877), Whistler sued and won nominal damages of one farthing, yet bankruptcy followed in 1879, sending him to Venice. The trial exposed a widening gap between traditional moralistic criticism and experimental aesthetics, and it dramatized the vulnerability of artists to reputational and financial ruin. Moore’s essays on Whistler and related figures leverage this episode to indict philistine authority and to defend the right of the artist to define modern subject matter and value.
Broader political currents in Britain and France framed debates over culture and authority. In the United Kingdom, the Land War (1879–1882), the First Home Rule Bill (1886), and the Second Home Rule Bill (1893, passed in the Commons but rejected by the Lords) sharpened arguments about centralized power and elites—issues Moore, an Anglo-Irish writer in London, understood intimately. In France, republican consolidation and the Exposition Universelle of 1889, crowned by the Eiffel Tower, celebrated technological modernity and national renewal. Moore’s cosmopolitan vantage point positions contemporary painting within these cross-Channel contests over governance, citizenship, and modern life, insisting that art respond to the lived realities produced by such political transformations.
Modern Painting functions as a social and political critique by exposing how state academies, jury systems, and conservative patrons enforce class-based canons of taste that marginalize living artists. Moore attacks institutional monopolies in Paris and London for rewarding conformity, equating bureaucratic control with cultural stagnation. He criticizes the deference of middle-class collectors to official opinion, the punitive use of courts and press against experimental work, and the national prejudices that isolate schools from fruitful exchange. By advocating independent exhibitions, dealer pluralism, and the representation of contemporary urban life, the book challenges entrenched hierarchies and calls for a public culture capable of recognizing modern experience.
