No tendency to corrupt here
John McEwen
ALBERT MOORE by Robyn Asleson Phaidon, £19.95, pp. 240, 0714838462 Two things about this book — the first on the artist for over a century — are immediately offputting: intermittent mustardcoloured pages, which make it look like a magazine, and the insistence of Robyn Asleson, a fledgling American historian, that Albert Moore's paintings transcend words. Nonetheless she manages to hold the reader's attention, despite the additional disadvantage that her subject had an uneventful life.
Albert Moore (1841-93) was an important figure in the Victorian neo-classical revival, which in painting meant endless pictures of nude or draped beauties in a style derived from ancient Greece and Rome — none of it looking in the least classical, usually because the subject matter was clearly an excuse to paint a pin-up. But Moore, who began as a recorder of nature in the allinclusive style advocated by John Ruskin, genuinely aspired to aesthetic perfection. His female idylls, a hybrid of classical and Japanese art, never arouse a prurient thought, least of all when fully frontal in the buff — six-pack diaphragms and chaste nonnaturalism making them disconcertingly manly and inhumanly statuesque.
After dabbling with truth to nature Moore briefly earned a reputation as a mural painter. Although only in his early twenties he was asked to submit proposals for the major public commissions of the time, notably the Houses of Parliament and the Albert Memorial. Rejection made him abandon public work, but designing for architecture had profoundly affected his painting. His quest for figurative beauty was henceforth based on the eternal rules of geometry, to the degree that Asleson — and all Moore fans — see him as an abstractionist manqué, born before his time.
Moore became a leading light of the art for art's sake movement, which opposed Ruskin's moralistic advocacy of self-improving factuality, and was a close friend of Whistler, the leading advocate of aestheticism in England. When Whistler took Ruskin to court for his libellous criticism Moore was a witness for the prosecution, and the two friends were stars of the Grosvenor Gallery, which opened in 1877 to champion 'advanced' decorative art in opposition to the story pictures favoured by the Academy.
Asleson is claimed to flood 'new light' on her subject. The trouble is there is not much to flood. Moore liked to draw his models in the nude, sometimes as they ran around playing makeshift badminton in his studio. For some years he lived openly with a 'partner' (female), which seems to have prevented him becoming a Royal Academician. And latterly he worked in cat-infested squalor.
Nor does it help that in quantity and illustration his paintings seem dull. Designs of repeated figures can look like the equivalent of synchronised swimming; and when he succumbs to storytelling it is usually a hoot. But, although his art is never a match for the bolder Whistler's, in reality and at its most formal it is restful, subtle and sensually satisfying, as can currently be seen at Tate Britain and elsewhere. Asleson's arbitrary claims that Moore anticipated Cubism, Pollock etc., are as wild as they woolly; but she misses a trick not mentioning the sculptor Moore (no relation), similarly obsessed with the reclining figure, though probably not because of Albert.
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