Artwork of the Month: ‘A Venus’ by Albert Moore

Our next talk will take place on Wednesday 4 November at 11.30 in the Burton Gallery. Our speaker will be Nicholas Dunn-McAfee, a member of our Friends’ committee and a Research Associate of the University of York’s Centre for Modern and Contemporary Studies.

Refined or Coarse? Albert Moore’s A Venus and the Aesthetics of Surface
In 1869, Albert Moore exhibited a life-size nude at the Royal Academy, and contemporary critics were divided over whether it was a distinguished study of form or a puzzling, even objectionable, picture. That painting, A Venus (1869), now hangs at York Art Gallery, and this talk invites audiences to consider it afresh, without recourse to a story. We begin with the title itself, and ask what it means for a painting to withhold its subject, before the discussion turns to the work’s materiality: a goddess modelled on the mirror image of a classical marble, rendered in paint so thin that the weave of the canvas shows through. Moore’s picture insistently reminds us what it is made of, and I will suggest that this self-conscious attention to surface is the key to its aesthetic power. The talk offers a close and unhurried look at what happens when beauty, rather than narrative, is the subject of a painting.

Our Artwork of the Month talks are free and booking is not required, but do remember to bring your membership card for free admittance to the Gallery.