Beautiful People in Beautiful Situations: York’s Albert Moore Monographic
- NRG Blog
- Sep 24, 2017
- 4 min read
The Albert Moore monographic currently on display at York Art Gallery (with the historic city as its backdrop) is a cultural delight for visitors, celebrating the ‘melody of form and symphony of colour’. Bursting with flowers, drapery, and graceful women who epitomise the nineteenth-century’s classical ideal, you can expect a serene atmosphere - nothing too gritty or thought provoking. Moore was a proponent of aestheticism; a movement prioritising beauty, mood and visual harmony over allusion or deeper meaning. As Algernon Swinburne commented, 'Its meaning is beauty, and its reason for being is to be'.
As you begin to make your way around the gallery, you catch the large, elegant portraits out of the corner of your eye. If you’re familiar with Albert Moore, it is this manner of painting that you might have expected from the first exhibition devoted solely to his work since his 1894 memorial exhibition. Yet your first introduction to Moore is not a sweeping, classical figure, but a tiny Goldfinch. This exquisite piece demonstrates Moore’s early desire to emulate the Pre-Raphaelites in their endeavour to duplicate nature in minute detail.
But while the artist’s personal (and often sexual) relationship with his models was a well-known trope in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, I couldn’t help but consider the role of the models in Moore’s paintings. Long-limbed classical women grace the portraits covering the main walls of the first room. Aestheticism perpetuated the nineteenth-century trend of painting beautiful women sleeping, enabling the viewer to see the female model as simply another aesthetic object. Pomegranates is a notable example of one of Moore’s ‘subject-less’ paintings; despite the presence of three women in the painting, the title draws attention to the small bowl of pomegranates on the table, around which Moore’s experiments with colour harmony and form revolves.
'Pomegranates' (1866)
As you move on, the order of the paintings have a sense of almost architectural craftsmanship, growing into a crescendo at the far end of the room with the enormous The Loves of the Winds and the Seasons. When all the gravitas of a work of art lies in the colours and the finesse of the composition, it is easy to see how the order of the display makes a huge impact. Here, Shells and Sea-Gulls have been strategically placed at either end of their central painting, the breeze catching the standing women so that their long hair flows inwards, drawing the eye to the central painting.
Moore’s preoccupation with colour makes a lot of sense when you look at Midsummer, a large scene of women lounging in striking orange drapery. The powerful hue recalled to mind Leighton’s Flaming June; and sure enough, the curators point out this parallel, explaining that Moore’s painting was undoubtedly an inspiration for Leighton. This was the point at which I really began to understand the importance of colour in Moore’s work. The painting looks vibrant and alive, but I later learned that the composition of the figures – two serene women facing inward to an apparently unconscious woman on a chair – was inspired by Greek funerary vases. Yet the morbid subject matter of the painting’s genesis was overshadowed completely by the use of colour and object. Indeed, the colour was said to be unusual for Moore, and yet it made a sufficient impact to inspire one of the most iconic works of the late nineteenth century.
'Midsummer'
Sometimes it only takes one line of text to catch your attention, and at the beginning of the exhibition a single sentence accompanying A Venus caught my eye. The painting is said to have been criticised for the androgyny of the model, and this really got me thinking about the models behind the work and why Moore made the choices he did. Perhaps Moore crafted the figure as androgynous to reduce the model to the status of an object; in giving his models an overt gender identity he would imbue them with ‘character’, a sense of masculinity or femininity beyond his control. I think where Moore is concerned, ‘beautiful’ people translates to ‘nondescript’. I found myself questioning the relevance or even the resemblance of the models to the final piece. It would seem that they are only as beautiful as the situations Moore puts them in.
I like to look for the story in things, and precisely the point of this work is to resist storytelling. This quality was a source of discomfort for many contemporary critics, who said that Moore’s pieces ‘had no precise place in time or space.
The gallery to the left gives attention first to the work and activity of the rest of the Moore family, and then to Moore’s contemporaries, to frame the work against the other visual art being produced at the time. This was well crafted and more informative than I had expected from an exhibit with traditional beauty at its centre. The main room was bordered on the opposite side to a more eclectic mix from the York School of Art and Design.
In fact, the desire to emphasise the intrinsic ties between the Moore family and the city of York is evident throughout the exhibition, which is surely in part motivated by York Art Gallery’s campaign to permanently acquire A Revery, which you can read more about here:
'Albert Moore: Of Beauty and Aesthetics' is on display until 1 October 2017.
For more information and image references: https://www.yorkartgallery.org.uk/exhibition/albert-moore-of-beauty-and-aesthetics/
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