Pamela M. Fletcher - Narrating Modernity: The British Problem Picture, 1895-1914

BRITISH ART AND VISUAL CULTURE SINCE 1750

New Readings

General Editor: David Peters Corbett, University of York

This series examines the social and cultural history
of British visual culture, including the interpretation of individual
works of art, and perspectives on reception, consumption and display.

In the same series:

The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist

Contentions and Alliances in the Artistic Domain, 17601824.

Greg Smith

The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini

A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance

Adrian Stokes

Difficult Subjects

Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 18801914

Kristina Huneault

Memory and Desire

Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Century

Kenneth McConkey

The Cultural Devolution

Art in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century

Neil Mulholland

Art and its Discontents

The Early Life of Adrian Stokes

Richard Read

British Artists and the Modernist Landscape

Ysanne Holt

Modern Architecture and the End of Empire

Mark Crinson

In 1912, Clive Bell announced the triumph of the modernist aesthetic: Happily, there is no need to be defensive. The battle is won We have ceased to ask What does this picture represent? and ask instead, What does it make us feel? But was the narrative tradition that had defined British art since Hogarth and that had played so great a role in the moral vocabulary of the Victorian public this easily vanquished? When and why did questions of content give way to questions of aesthetic emotion? How did audiences learn this new response to works of art? In other words, what happened to the question What does this picture represent? in the late-Victorian and Edwardian art world? The immense popularity of the problem picture between 1895 and 1914 suggests that it continued to be asked, answered and transformed as artists and audiences grappled with the question of how art might best engage the modern world.

Problem pictures were an extraordinarily popular feature of the Edwardian Royal Academy. The term referred to ambiguous, and often slightly risqu, paintings of modern life which invited multiple, equally plausible interpretations. While based on the conventions of Victorian narrative painting, problem pictures omit the necessary clues, stock characters and textual titles that made such paintings and their moral messages legible, and thus presented to their audiences morally, as well as narratively, indeterminate problems. The pictures drew large crowds at the annual Academy exhibitions and were widely reproduced in newspapers, tabloids and magazines, encouraging a large and diverse audience to propose and debate possible solutions. As viewers invented narratives to explain individual pictures, they engaged with some of the most pressing social issues of the early twentieth century, including the nature of modern marriage and motherhood, the emergence and definition of the new professional classes, and the existence of a specifically feminine morality. Far from being easily dismissed by modernist aesthetics, the question What does this picture represent? continued to spark public debate over contemporary moral issues, while the transformation of meaning from an absolute to an open-ended game invited viewers to participate in modern debates over the criteria of aesthetic value and the relative role of the artist, the art object and the spectator in interpretation.