Modern Painting and Morality

Abstract

This chapter explores morality in relation to painting in three eras: early modern painting, painting in the twentieth-century, and painting from the end of the twentieth-century and through into this century. Two early modern painters (from the mid-1600s) are considered in comparison with two modern painters as a way of highlighting significant differences within and between early modern and modern eras. From the end of the nineteenth-century, modern painting was a closely associated with the avant-garde and its hopes for moral and social renewal led by artists. But, after two world wars, these hopes had reduced to despair and scepticism, and artists had turned to the absurd in Dada, and increasingly away from figurative or expressive work toward abstract painting, minimalism, and subsequently to Pop-art. There was little from any of these movements that engaged—with any seriousness—moral, social or political issues. There were moral issues raised by the relationship between money and art as an enterprise, but few prominent artists who expressed moral issues in their work. Nevertheless there were notable exceptions, and throughout the twentieth century some artists continued to work in figurative and expressive forms. Major artists, including Picasso and Diego Rivera, along with less prominent artists such as Ben Shahn, have painted works that expressed moral concern. Since the 1980s, figurative painting has regained its importance and this has brought attention to artists like Luc Tuymans and Marlene Dumas who raise—or at least allude to—subjects with moral overtones.

In summary, this chapter addresses shifts from the role of art as moral instruction in early modern painting; to the high hopes for moral renewal through modern painting that were ultimately disappointed in the twentieth-century; and on to the more enigmatic and elusive images of moral concern expressed by painters in this century.