Rethinking Albert Moore

Keynote speakers: Professor Tim Barringer (Yale) and Dr Robyn Asleson (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery)

In conjunction with the York City Art Gallery’s exhibition, ‘Albert Moore: Of Beauty and Aesthetics’, the University of York’s History of Art department presents two study days focusing on the life and work of the artist Albert Joseph Moore (1841-1893) and the history of York School of Art in the period of his lifetime (c. 1840-1900).

Best-known today as a painter of uncompromisingly ‘narrative-less’ pictures, Albert Moore’s distinctive pictorial practices facilitated productive alliances with some of the most progressive European painters, designers and architects of his age. Framed consistently as an ‘outsider’ to the London art world, Moore was in fact at the epicentre of artistic negotiations over the politics and principles of Aestheticism and the formulation of the beautiful as an inherently radical art practice. Yet despite his substantial contribution to nineteenth-century visual culture - not to mention his persistent afterlife through photographic reproduction - Moore has often been characterised as a marginal or isolated figure whose interests in ornament, atemporality and materiality place him outside mainstream narratives of British nineteenth-century art history.

Working in tandem with York City Art Gallery’s first monographic exhibition of the York-born artist since his death in 1893, this conference will seek to refocus debates around Albert Moore, his work as well as his social and professional networks. We hope to re-interrogate Moore’s frequent association with Aestheticism in the visual arts, to explore other, less well-known historical contexts for his practice, review his critical presentation as an outsider alienated from the institutional structures of the metropolis and more generally to consider what new methodological approaches might be necessary to ‘make sense of Moore’.

A full programme and registration will be published shortly at our website www.rethinkingalbertmooreblog.wordpress.com

Follow us on Twitter @AlbertMoore2017

This event has generously been supported by the Department of History of Art, York Art History Collaborations, the Centre for Modern Studies and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art Studies.