An adventure comprising the following; your humble narrator, being stout of heart and eager-eyed, ventured midst Winter's harm to London, heart of Empire, to attend that great institute Tate Britannia, for a viewing of pictures composed by the gentlemen comprising the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Though moved to speak of this, alas your narrator did not exhibit the industrious vigour of his ostensible subject and was remiss in inflaming his Babbage engine, with the result that he elucidates over an exhibition no longer available for public viewing.
Image
Clashes With Symbol
What
lurks behind that apparently oxymoronic subhead, 'Victorian
avant-garde?' The suggestion that these late Victorian artists were
proto-modern may simply be a handy means to incorporate them into the
Tate's set-list. (The venue's clock normally starts at 1900.) But it
does have some traction. Like so many Modernist movements the
Pre-Raphaelites were a distinct reaction to what had gone before, to
the point where they even formed a Brotherhood and wrote up a ringing
(if somewhat vaguely worded) manifesto.
As
the Tate website has it, “rather then emulate the early
masters, they espoused a rule-breaking originality.” They also
strove for a unity of the arts, embracing painting, music,
architecture and sculpture and became directly involved in the Arts
and Crafts movement. (An involvement which gets a room devoted to it,
but will sadly go under-noted here.)
Yet
at the same time their striving to move painting forward involved
looking further back. In their case this was an attempt to re-aquaint
themselves with the earlier masters, the world
before Classicism and in particular (in a name-defining statement)
before Renaissance artist Raphael. Which of course is itself very
much a feature of Modernism, for example in
Gauguin's fixation with folk art.
But
shouldn't we be suspcious of the whole term 'avant-garde', with it's
linear assumptions about history? Shouldn't our focus be not so much
on the group as harbingers of Modernism, but more on their historical
context? Of course the answer there is yes, but even that is not
enough - and would lead to us bypassing most of what is unique and
significant about them. Merely finding their point in a lineage
suggests art is made up of neat steps, ordered in a clear-cut ascent.
But art history works more like history, the story
of combustible chemicals thrown into an ever-more volatile mix.
The
artistic context of the Pre-Raphaelites is of course Romanticism. In
many ways it is hard to get a handle on this, which was less a
defined art movement than a meta-movement (akin to Modernism) and
perhaps by consequence was volatile and inchoate. Moreover, as a
reaction against the Enlightenment it prized feeling over intellect,
and was thereby virtually opposed to coherence on a point of
principle.
But
if there's scant use in asking Romanticism to define itself, we can
come up with some ideas of our own. While Romanticism sought solace
from and inspiration in nature, it's degree of fidelity to nature
varied greatly. It was at root concerned with accessing the human
imagination – the hay wain of the mind. It's not that it failed to
distinguish between the natural world and the human mind – it's
that it is precisely predicated upon refusing to make that
distinction. To Wordsworth the daffodils of the field were just
triggers for the daffodils in his head.
Yet
the Pre-Raphaelites had come rather late to this party. As a
reaction to the the growing Industrial Revolution, the peak of Romanticism is normally considered to be 1800-1840 when Turner and
Constable were at work.
What
else was afoot at this time? A reliable source of gossip states that by “the second half
of the 19th century, Realism
was
offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism” and goes on to give
it exactly the same starting point as this show does the
Pre-Raphaelites – the 1848 revolution. Across the water
in France, Realist painters such as Manet, Courbet and Corot no
longer set their star by Classical or Biblical scenes but by fidelity
to daily life.
If
this band took a different tack, perhaps we should look at that
“pre-Raphael” business by which they tagged themselves? Their
backwards looks were chiefly to Florentine religious art, represented
here by Lorenzo Monaco's altar piece 'Adoring Saints'
(1407/9). This influence chiefly manifested in the brighter, more
sumptuous use of colour which is such a signature of a Pre-Raphaelite
work. As Franny Moyle says “The revolutionary use of colour at the
very least justifies Tate Britain's claim.” (Royal Academy
magazine, Autumn 2012).
A
sound-bite description of the group might be the attempt to make a
painting as vivid as a stained-glass window. The works almost radiate
with colour! (Though as any fule kno, the 'masters' then venerated by
the Academy had never actually painted the drab works thought of
them, their colours had literally faded before Victorian eyes were
set upon them.)
But
the Florentines made votive works, not for a gallery but a Church.
This different purpose gives them a different nature. The haloed
heads of the Saints are arranged in a constellation more than a
scene, a diagram which transmits a spiritual meaning to the believer.
And that's an influence you can see at work in this exhibition.
So
with the Pre-Raphaelites Romanticism, Realism and a kind of
heightened symbolism collided head-on. Like particles being bashed
together in a super-collider, image crashes against symbol. This
sometimes created something unexpected – a kind of dazzling
hyper-realism. Objects don't look removed or otherly as they would in
later Symbolism, they look rooted in this world. But at the same time
they can branch off into quite a different one.
However,
it seems less likely that any of this collision course was a
deliberate plan, and more likely that the Pre-Raphaelities were
unaware of any of those contradictions until they arose on their
canvases. With rather haphazard results - some Pre-Raphaelite works
can look intoxicating blends and others more like car crashes.
Take
for example William Holman Hunt's 'The Scapegoat'
(1854/6, above). Jesus' sacrifice had became associated with the
Hebrew tradition of making a goat the repository of human sins, then
driving it out into the wilderness. In this sense the painting is a
pointer, a religious allegory, we should see the
goat but think of Jesus. Yet at the same time Hunt
went to the effort of taking a real goat to a real location.
The
painting consequently has a kind of double existence. There's
something too vivid, too laboured, too intense for
it to seem a straightforward nature painting. Yet some of that same
laboured intensity, the weighing down of the image with detail, holds
you to the work itself rather than giving your mind leave to wander
off into considering the symbolism. The Scapegoat, in short, is a
kind of push-me-pull you.
Yet
it works in a similar way to that seen earlier with Gauguin, what makes the work wrong is
simultaneously what makes it right. When it doesn't resolve quickly
into some easy reading, there comes to be something strange and
compelling about it. And that kind of ambiguity, isn't that what
makes art alive? In this way they win out over their contemporaries
the Realists. A painting that simply delineates something, even a
thing you approve of being painted, is simply done with too easily.
It's the art which evades easy resolution which lingers.
Scenes
Against Tableaus
When
talking about the Pre-Raphaelites' influence on Modernism,
commentators are tempted to play up their realist side and talk about
the similarities between them and the Impressionists. True enough,
there are links there to be made. But for me that feels like chopping
off toes to make the foot fit the slipper. Yes, you can make the
story neater by cutting out the contradictions. But you then lose the
point of the story.
In
fact for years I have held on to the theory that their lurid
hyper-realism was more a precursor to the dream landscapes of
Surrealism, then it seems everybody else got in before me! Jonathan Jones for example, commented in the Guardian that in their “supercharged, luminous and
sometimes genuinely dream-like images... there is a direct line to...
surrealism.” Dali apparantly declared himself “dazzled by the
flagrant surrealism of the English Pre-Raphaelites.”
For
example compare Ernst's landscapes to Daniel Alexander Williamson's 'Spring, Arnside Knot and Coniston Range of Hills From Warton Crag'
(1863), where the desire to throw colours and textures about
is barely held in place by fidelity to the view.
But
anyway, what of that comparison to the Impressionists?
Pre-Romanticism, artists tended to make their compositions like grand
tableaus. They're not that different in effect to looking at dioramas
or even altar pieces. They appear in our space,
arrangements of symbols which we are intended to decode into moral
instructions. But with Romantic works there's a discovery of
pictorial space as a way to represent a scene, a desire to pull the
viewer inside the picture. They tend to be not poses but moments,
snippets of time and space. Art is no longer about what is public,
and we're less an audience and more visual eavesdroppers.
Take
for example John Everett Millais' first Pre-Raphaelite work -
'Isabella' (1849, above). The emphasis on the two
lovers comes not from the traditional means of centering and
arranging the other figures around them, but from their tender
interplay. The surrounding figures simply ignore them, as if unaware
of who's the subject of the painting.
While
the composition arranges the figures to the right of the table on a
neat diagonal, those to the left jut across one another. The one
partial exception is the figure in the left foreground who louchely
stretches out his leg, his chair tipped, yet his face intent on what
he's doing. It's not a pose struck, but a gesture caught. You can see
a kind of sequel to that leg in Millais' later 'Mariana'
(1850/1), which depicts a woman stretching as she stands after
working at her embroidery.
Yet
the Florentines linger and this new approach was not applied
consistently. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's first Pre-Raphaelite work, 'The Girlhood of Mary Virgin' (1848/9, above),
conversely is an uneasy blend of scene and tableau; halos on the
figures, an angel standing by, ostentateously displayed symbols
including books with their spines obligingly turned to us.
And
now we have touched on religion, why not stay there awhile?
A
Whole New Jesus For Our Age
In
one of the Gnostic traditions, Jesus never really took on human form.
He was actually a beam of light which merely looked like a man –
saviour as hologram. Of course that was a heresy, opposed by all the
major Churches. But there were traditions in religious art which
depicted him almost as though that might be
believed. He shines beatifically out of works, dominating the image
like a beaming sun with all else held in his orbit.
The
Pre-Raphaelites took this to almost the other extreme, with a
historical and even humanised Jesus - stones in his sandals, stubble
on his chin. In an unparalleled quest for authenticity they
researched artefacts and even went location-scouting to the Holy
Land.
Perhaps
Jesus is at his most humanised in William Dyce's 'The Man of
Sorrows' (1860, above). He is not preaching or performing
miracles, and there's not a disciple in sight. But it's not just that
he's alone in the wilderness, he's not even centred in the frame -
it's vastness expands behind him. Particularly with that
de-devinitising title, the viewer might be forgiven for thinking it
was the decidedly mortal John the Baptist being depicted.
(Incidentally, if that landscape doesn't look very Middle Eastern,
it's actually the Scottish highlands. Perhaps Dyce couldn't afford
the boat passage with the others.)
Standard
devotional images are alluded to at the same time as they are
avoided. In 'Christ
in the House of His Parents' aka 'The Carpenter's Shop'
(1849/50) Millais portrays the boy Jesus at home in his father's
shop, having cut his hand on a nail. Similarly, Hunt's 'The
Shadow of Death' (1870/3, below) has Jesus stretching, an
innocent act which creates the crucifixion pose on the wall behind
him.
It
was probably felt the standard images had been drained of their
meaning by over-use, and needed re-contextualising. Which seems less
Modernist than... well... modern. You could
imagine a contemporary retelling of the Gospel stories taking much
the same approach, taking the icons from oblique angles, trying to
find fresh perspectives on the over-familiar.
In
a sense this went quite neatly with English Protestantism, whose
Church services were deliberately less ostentatious and ceremonial
than in Catholicism or Orthodoxy. This is well illustrated by Ford
Madox Brown's 'First Translation of the Bible into English,' (1871/93), bookended by two figures above the
arch – one a cowelled monk holding a locked Bible to himself, the
other holding an opened book to the viewer.
And
yet Protestantism was associated with the dour liberalism that
Romanticism opposed, and besides by this point had morphed into the
Church of England which sought accord rather than challenge. The
Pre-Raphaelites were pushing at Protestantism from a more radical
side, playing up the conflicts of history in works such as Hunt's
(typically pithily titled) 'A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from thePersecution of the Druids' (1850).
Yet...
and there almost always seems a yet with the Pre-Raphaelites... their
art is bright and striking, not at all dourly Protestant in the way
we'd imagine. In fact the Florentines had given them a profoundly
Catholic flavour to their art.
Perhaps
unsurprisingly, then, it was their religious works which tended to be
the most controversial. No less a figure than Charles
Dickens railed against Millais' 'Christ in the
House of His Parents', calling Mary “so hideous in her
ugliness”, while
another critic railed against “portraying the youthful
Saviour as a red-headed Jew boy, and the sublime personage of the
virgin a sore-heeled, ugly, every-day sempstress.”
Apart
from this surprise at seeing a semitic face show up in the Middle
East, as the vid-link below points out “what caused controversy was
that Millais dared show the Holy Family as poor, working class
people.” Yet to a believer the Gnostics were wrong, and Jesus truly
took human form. In which case the double-value of the Pre-Raphaelite
image, both image and symbol, could be argued the perfect means to
capture such a duality.
Born
In Revolution?
The
show makes much of the Brotherhood being formed in 1848, “a year of
revolution across Europe.” Yet Romanticism has had a conflicting
relationship with politics, often drawn to the thrill of radical
ideas yet with its emphasis on the subjective self wary of
fully-fledged political commitment. Though most of the
Pre-Raphaelites seem to have held progressive views for their times,
and worked directly with socialist artists such as William Morris,
there's less of the radical ideas held by earlier Romantic poets such
as Blake or Shelley, or by their continental contemporaries the
Realists.
The
most political was probably the oldest, who was never formally a
Brotherhood member. Brown certainly tended to contemporary themes and
settings more than the others. The programme explains how his
'Work' (1852/62) “celebrates the
'nobleness and even sacredness' of labour, suggesting salvation for
the heroic manual workers rather than the idle rich.” Highly
unusually for a Pre-Raphaelite work, it's a straight-ahead
celebration of Victorian engineering and development. The aristos are pushed to be back of the composition by ditch-digging navvies who (bathed in light) are almost literally building a new world, the road stretching away to the right representing progress.
However,
it's Hogarthian rather than radical, for all the focus on the navvies
it's colours bourgeois rather than proletarian. Notably, this celebration of the
sacredness of labour extends to contrasting the stout-of-heart
navvies against the flower sellers to the left, whose torn dresses
suggest the more feckless poor. (The ripped brim of the front woman's
hat, revealing the woman's peering eyes is a peculiar touch.)
Moreover
the piling-up of figures sits awkwardly with the apparent naturalism.
The tableau-like composition suggests an aesthetic conservatism
closer to the standard Victorian concept of art as a moral guide.
Ultimately, it's composition is as indigestible as it's message.
(Personally I incline more to Joe Strummer's view, when he sang
“never loved a shovel”.)
Telling
Us A Story From the Old Days
In
rejecting Classicism the Pre-Raphaelites embraced Medievalism,
normally depicted as a golden age made up of noble hearts beating in
wooded glades - essentially Middle Earth before Sauron showed up to
despoil it.
But
the real point of Medievalism is of course to hearken. The era
appealed precisely because it had already been lost. Millais has a
recurring motif of leaves or flower petals on the ground. No matter
the time of year, these Medieval forests are always in a kind of
Autumn.
William
Shakespeare Burton's 'Wounded Cavalier' (1855/6,
above), immediately belies it's title by showing a Cavalier who is
almost probably dying. The slaying Puritan, rather than standing
triumphantly over his body, hangs his arms flatly and in his dark
clothes is pushed almost into the background. An intrusively placed
tree all but cancels him out in the composition, while his own maiden
ignores him to comfort the cavalier.
It
looks so unlikely that this drab and undynamic a figure could have
killed such a dashingly-dressed fellow that popular opinion assumes
we're seeing the result of an ambush. It's rather reminiscent of the
summation in '1066 and All That,' of the Cavaliers
as “Wrong but Wromantic” and the Roundheads “Right but
Repulsive.” In short, here the figure clutching the Bible is
essentially the bad guy.
The
English Revolution did not mark the end of the Medieval era of
course, not even in the Victorians' narrowed perspective of history.
But the picture suggests a worldview literally regressive as opposed
to progressive. The “pre” in their name never loomed larger than
here.
Their
numerous Shakespeare adaptations stem from this fixation, for he was
forever setting his plays in a faux-medieval garden of England -
which somehow stretched across the whole of a chivalric Europe.
Despite the afore-mentioned emphasis on scenes over tableaus, it's
this regurgitation of received images of Medievalism which so often
keeps the group in the hold of narrative painting. In this, in
another skewing to the notion of linear progression in art, they
notably look more Victorian than their predecessor
Turner.
Millais'
'A Huguenot on St. Bartholomews' Day, Refusing to Shield
Himself From Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge'
(1852, above) is of a French protestant defying a decree to wear a
symbol of Catholicism. Yet the lovers look to each other as they
embrace, not out at us, and you could easily take the white ribbon as
a token of love. It looks Romantic in the more colloquial sense we
use today. The picture becomes illustrational, it needs
that title (long and unwieldily enough to require punctuation). It's
not a work in and of itself but heavily reliant for it's meaning on a
wider context.
Similarly
Hunt's 'Valentina
Rescuing Sylvia From Proteus' (1850/1) cheerily assumes
it's audience is one of educated gentlemen who will be familiar with
Shakespeare's 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' and so
will have some clue who these funny-looking people are. (Personally,
I was lost!) At such points, Impressionism's direct experience
of the everyday world seems an age away.
Back
to Nature
John
Ruskin, one of the group's few contemporary supporters, enthused:
“every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last
touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite
figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some
living person.” (Actually, and unlike the later Impressionists,
they often only drew only the landscapes from nature, and added the
foreground figures later from models in the studio.)
Nevertheless,
this raises the question – did depicting nature en plein
air take them beyond the trap of narrative? The answer, as
you're probably already guessed, is yes and no.
William
Dyce's 'Pegwell Bay, Kent - A Recollection of October 5th
1858' (1858/60, below) notably captures a moment in time,
not even the passing of a single afternoon but the onset of sunset.
The comet in the sky (top centre) pins it to the single day given in
the title, like a date-stamp on a digital camera.
The
show smartly places this next to Hunt's verdant 'Our English
Coasts' (aka 'Strayed Sheep' (1852,
above), keeping us wary of generalising about the Pre-Raphaelites too
much. This look English pastoralism gone psychedelic! Yet the
pictures don't just vary in season or in colour scheme – for, as
the second version of it's name makes more explicit, here symbolism
is back. Though Hunt's work contains not a single human figure, that
is actually the very thing which pushes it from a literal reading.
The sheep are being tended by the absent shepherd just as the
invisible, omnipresent God looks after his flock. What places him
nowhere makes him everywhere. This is underlined by the red marks of
ownership on their backs, as red was often used as a symbolic colour
for Jesus. (Look again at 'The Scapegoat.') In
short, what makes it a pure nature scene simultaneously makes it a
religious work.
A
recurrent feature is the dwarfed and isolated human figure, as in
John Brett's 'Val D'Aosta' (1851, below), a
stretching panoply of the Swiss alps. We see the goat in the lower
foreground before we see the peasant girl huddled beneath a rock.
But
as ever there's contrasts. Millais' 'John Ruskin'
(1853/4, above), again hung near the Brett, portraying the great
Romantic as a Victorian hero, masterfully standing astride a
landscape. (A veneration which didn't stop Millais' running off with
Ruskin's wife, but that's another story...)
Beauty
is Back!
...which
sets us up for the most bizarre paradox of the whole movement.
Rossetti, feeling bound by the contradictions outlined above, saw he
had to choose - and chose. He abandoned both narrative and fidelity to
nature to instead ramp up the symbolism. The programme claims “beauty
came to be valued more highly than truth” while Carl Jacobi
comments these “expressed an idea that colour, pattern and texture
were as important as subject matter” ('Art Quarterly',
Autumn 2012).
Varying
from the earlier insistence on the unity of the arts, Rossetti now
saw music as the medium to emulate. Music is non-mimetic, it doesn't
have to be about anything yet it can still move
the listener. Notably, musical instruments appeared frequently even
in earlier works while Rossetti's watercolour 'The Blue
Closet' (1856/7) uses it's composition to evoke the sound
of music.
Ironically
this new turn taken by Rossetti should strictly be called Aestheticism,
yet these are the works most popularly associated with
Pre-Raphaelites! Notably the poster image for the show is a later
Rossetti - 'Astarte Syriuaca' (1877, up top).
Perhaps they represent the Victorians as we like to think of them –
doomed romantics, consumptive poets – with all that cumbersome
baggage about weighty literature, religion and muesli moralism
removed.
You
see it as soon as you enter this exhibition. Images of the artists
include a self-portrait of a long-haired bohemian Rossetti among
others looking as upright and stiff-collared as only Victorians can.
Italian lineage even gave him that dashing, romance-novel name. Yet
taking Rossetti to represent the Pre-Raphaelites is like taking Dali
to represent Surrealism, it's taking the poster boy at face value,
it's taking the exception for the rule. At the same time, if these pieces easily transfer to the wall of a teenage bedroom, that
doesn't make them bad works in themselves.
There
was a biographical motivation as well as an aesthetic one, which
needless to say involved doomed romance. Rossetti's wife and model
Elizabeth Siddall had died young of a laudanum overdose, and is
presented in 'Beata Beatrix' (1864/70, above) as
tortured and as ecstatic as a martyred saint. (As in so much
Victorian fiction, there's a close relationship between female virtue
and being dead.) This composition doesn't place her in pictoral space
but surrounded by an arrangement of symbols – a red dove, a white
poppy, a sundial. In other works, backgrounds fade almost to
vanishing point.
It's
in the manner of the devotional Florentine works we saw earlier. Yet
it has the same relationship to them as Gospel to Soul; the religious
content is removed, while the religious fervour is retained and
reassigned to love. As Jonathan Jones said in the Guardian, “for Rossetti, painting and desire
were pretty much the same thing.”
This
inscrutable otherness of women was all but inevitable in a man's
world. As soon as they manage to shut the women up they start to
wonder what they're thinking. And the natural answer to that is not
to ask them but to try and paint
them.
Moreover,
Victorian society tended to assume women were closer to the world of
nature than the more civilized menfolk, and perhaps by consequence it
would most likely be impossible to separate the Pre-Raphaelites' view
of nature from their view of women. And one way to prove that would
be to look at the room in this exhibition that's ostensibly given
over to nature. Millais' 'Opehlia' (1851/2,
below), shows Shakespeare's heroine effectively melting back into the
nature from where she came.
Meanwhile
in 'Lady Lilith' (1865/8, below) Rossetti provides
the inevitable counterpoint to the doomed good girl Beatrix – the
femme fatale. While Beatrix's eyes are devotedly closed, Lilith's
vainly go to a mirror, highlit in the wickedest black. Lilith's evil
is underlined by this unnatural act, she is no innocent natural
beauty but has calculatedly made herself this way. Another mirror to
the top left reflects a nature scene, which she ignores in favour of
beautifying herself.
The
Brotherhood Break
Was
Rossetti really alone in turning to Aestheticism? The show tends to
present Edward Burne-Jones as his obliging henchman, following
wherever he leads. Who was something of a latecomer to the movement,
and possibly did idolise Rossetti somewhat in his early days. But the
evidence on show here suggests more that this divergence stretched
Burne-Jones, as he tried to straddle both new paths like the
offspring of divorcing parents.
It's
possible the fourth bigtime Pre-Raphaelite was like the Fifth Beatle
upside-down; there actually was one, but people always forget about
him. Certainly he often seems reconciled to his future as fodder for
for jobbing artists hired to provide covers for cheap fantasy novels.
Noble, shiny-armoured knights rescue fair maidens from phallic
beasts, who have already obligingly got their kit off in anticipation
of expressing their gratitude. (However, let's concede some of his
other works here are better than this, such as 'The
Golden Stairs,' 1876/80).
Besides,
Rossetti's new-found Aestheticism may have influenced the others more
than is made out. Compare Hunt's 'Isabella and the Pot of Basil' (1860/8, below) to Millais' earlier take on the same
legend and Keats poem. The crowds are gone, the focus on a single
female figure. Though you might wonder quite why she's cuddling a
plant pot, you could put that down to her ovulating mysteriousness.
Narrative may not have been eliminated so drastically as with
Rossetti, but it's been quite seriously curtailed.
Yet,
if they didn't follow in Rossetti's footsteps, the remaining
Brotherhood didn't always come up with much by way of competition.
Contradictions which were previously held in check or even pressed
into service finally blow up in their faces. Remember the earlier
warning about some works being car crashes? Hunt's 'The
Massacre of the Innocents' (1863/4, below) is enough of a
multi-pile-up on the M4 to get its own news item.
The
concept is that Jesus' parents escape with him from Herod, as the
spirits of the massacred infants accompany them. But with their
kitsch, cherubic chubbiness they jar with the realism of the rest of
the picture, without it being clear they're intended to inhabit a
different realm. It's a grand folly, a sorry mess.
Yet
Millais' 'Chill October' (1870, above) rids
itself of narrative perhaps even more effectively than Rossetti. Millais has perhaps proven himself more refined than Hunt throughout and this is perhaps the purest and most effective of the 'pure nature'
pictures – effectively putting you in a time and place, with little
of the standard day-glo colours. However much I can appreciate
'Our English Coasts' it looks like a
painting of England, a received image of a
storybook countryside, a cold country wishing it was a warm one.
'Chill October' is the place I live, the misty
semi-opaque landscape that seeped into my heart at some early age.
We're told it's one of a series of twenty-one, and I would like to
see more.
The
Lovers
Notably,
the Pre-Raphaelites provoke a kind of love/hate reaction. Unusually
for the quieter Tate Britain, there didn't seem much way of getting
into this show without booking in advance. Yet others can be quite
derisory about them. Apart from the standard snobbish distancing from
the popular, the chief red rag to their critics may be their bright
colour schemes, so easily dismissed as kitsch in technicolour. (Matthew Sweet wrote
of their “nougat-pink sk[ies] and Soylent Green foliage”, and
speculated we have a psychological need to picture the Victorians in
crisp black and white, “a world from which we can maintain our
distance”, 'Art Quarterly', Winter, 2012.)
Meanwhile,
perhaps their contradictions enable their fans to pick their response
– they can be a steam-punk avant-garde or proto-hippy
pastorialists, just as you choose. The irony couldn't be greater, you
strain your whole life for accuracy to your subject matter and others
see what they want in you regardless.
...which
makes the whole business rather hard to sum up. Whenever people don't
think of the totemic image of Pre-Raphaelism as Rossetti's
mysterious-but-demure poster girls, it tends to be the lovers. Of
course it's a universal theme, but as those lovers embrace they're
caught up in the moment. Which is kind of like Symbolism and Realism
giving each other a hug. If they put conflicting conceptions of art
in a super-collider, perhaps the image of the lovers is their
Higgs-Boson. Perhaps the afore-mentioned ambiguity of emphasis in
Millais' 'A Huguenot on St. Bartholomews' Day' was
not a mistake but a hidden intention honoured.
This
theme doesn't necessarily mean the Pre-Raphaelites were
subconsciously aware that their art had conflicting tendencies which
required reconciliation. But then again, it just might. And if the
lovers tiffed ended up squabbling over who owned the cutlery... well,
let's focus on the glory days. For unfashionable as it is to concede, when the boys were good, they were
really good.
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