Dear friends and readers,
Theodore Rousseau (1812-67), Sunset from the Forest of Fontainbeau (the Dyke Collection).
Walter Howell Deverell (1827-54), Twelfth Night (with Elizabeth Siddal) (Pre-Raphaelites first room)
Susan Herbert, “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid after Edward Burne-Jones”
Dear friends and readers,
Though we hadn’t a good leg or knee between us, and it had rained as in a monsoon in the morning, yesterday afternoon Jim and I set forth to the National Gallery around a quarter to two because we had promised ourselves we would see the much advertised new “blockbuster” show of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. It was sunny by then and warm, and by the time we left although I was limping super-slowly, letting myself down the stairs one at a time, and Jim not much better, the experience had been well worth it, though as sometimes happened as much for the “lesser” show, Color, Light and Line, that had not been heralded, trumpeted, advertised, several rooms of quietly brilliant beautiful, unusual 19th & early 20th century French drawings and watercolors (mostly) from the Dyke Collection:
Gustave Dore (1832-83), A River Gorge in a mountain landscape,
tucked away on the first floor, just before the side entrance of the museum (well after and apart from the ever-expanding Museum shop), as for the Pre-Raphaelites, which despite the large size, unexpected Shakespeare and narrative delights, the delicacy of these, and stunning use of color of other of the paintings, where the colors still sparkled on the canvas
John Everett Millais (1829-96), Marianna
and originality of still others,
William Dyce (1806-64), Pegwell Bay
did not teach us anything new about the Pre-Raphaelites as a group.
We learned more about them or their art as a whole a couple of Christmases ago in one of these small unadvertised shows where it was contended the paintings came far more from an interaction of natural landscape, photography, science studies than literary and medieval longings. That it’s easy to make fun of this exhibit, precisely this kind of picture in a group by substituting cats for the people suggests the solemn absurdity of some of the pictures, and the lack of an adequate perspective.
There seemed nothing set before us to make sense of the pictures in the way of an exhibit a couple of years ago. The individual paintings were therefore what one could enjoy, with each of the rooms having a theme. One of the most interesting for me was the one with wallpaper, furniture, tapestries, screens, but nothing was said about Morris or the Pre-Raphaelites politics. Ford Madox Brown’s Work. I put the lack of discourse down to the way just about any decent political talk is simply erased in popular American media. But nothing on religion much either: the Middle Eastern landscapes of Hunt are not presented as landscape natural art but religious iconography (The Scapegoat). Rossetti’s Found (1854, unfinished) was presented as about modern life (!?): how so? were these 19th century Italian outfits? to me, most of all what was the attitude towards sex here.
(The colors are all blended so that it’s unfinished is part of its charm)
While the paintings often seem to worship female sexuality and reject simple macho-male images, they can equally be seen to proscribe sex altogether. But there was no feminist discourse either. There were some Julia Cameron photos scattered here and there. But no sense of women’s development of an idiom of Pre-Raphaelitism of which there was one (see Deborah Cherry’s book). No Evelyn de Morgan. Nothing to comment on how these girlfriends were used, no comment on a room filled with huge pictures of so-called “beauties” — to me these are grotesque because of the masculine nature of the faces and huge size of the women’s bodies which seem to encompass one.
This Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is less grotesque than the others, but the face is the same and the allusion to women as dangerous (the apple).
Could the room be about fear? In life certainly these men seemed to be in charge — they had the high status, the money, lived much much longer.
And what is the relationship of this Proserpine to this woman, Jane Morris said to be its model? The photo itself by Wm Morris is a perspective on her so she is endlessly constructed for us:
The exhibit says nothing
This Elizabeth Siddal, A Lady AFixing a Pennant was there, but no explanation. Gentle reader it’s very small with a modest (very inexpensive) frame:
So, how easy for Susan Herbert to poke fun:
Susan Herbert’s “The Awakening after Wm Holman Hunt”
Susan Herbert’s “Pysche after John William Waterhouse”
One consequence was Susan Herbert’s books — two of them in the shop — seemed appropriate without however as I said ruining any enjoyment of the pictures, and the exhibit downstairs feeling superior. Perhaps perversely, but also because I own reproductions of so many of the famous pictures included in the exhibit instead of buying the catalogue, I bought ($40 cheaper), Susan Herbert’s parody, Pre-Raphaelite Cats.
I recommend seeing the exhibit nevertheless. where and when else will you see these astonishing paintings brought together in one place again? Or ever see any of them? The Pre-Raphaelite paintings project, many of them, complex real psychological states, original, beautiful, make statements worth thinking about on sex, religion, social life, and in one room are made from unusual materials too (tapestries, painted chairs, stain glass windows). Although some painters were unaccountably missing (no John Waterhouse), see it also for the lesser known painters, pictures, sculptors, and the striking famous landscapes. e.g., Dyce’s Pegwell Bay. A favorite for me was Ford Madox Brown’s picture from his window: An English Autumn Afternoon — Hampstead — Scenery (1853).
There was this exquisite small marble scultpure by Alexander Munro, Paolo and Francesca (remember “that day they read no longer” from Dante?):
There are many photographs of the company and the women who served them and painted themselves (Siddal, Jane Morris, Jane Burden, Fanny Cornforth, about whom we were told nothing, suddenly she was just there and painted as as “Mouth to be Kissed”). The exhibit ends with some series paintings, one on Perseus: The Rock of Doom, The Doom Fulfilled, and the strangely compelling The Baleful Head, the latter (frozen dead images in a fountain looked down at by Perseus and the maiden) influenced George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.
What seemed to unite the whole show — one sought for something — was finally it literary content, Shakespeare, Scott, a medievalism which became a rationale or cover.
John Anderson’s review of the Pre-Raphaelites (much of it came from the Tate) is not enthusiastic, but Kayleigh Bryant does the movement justice and gives you a slideshow. The exhibition book catalogue expensive but it might come down in price soon.
The shop for the Pre-Raphaelites had the most exquisitely beautiful scarves, sewn exquisitely delicately with strips of velvet. It was all I could do to stop myself from buying one: $60 each so I didn’t. Perhaps they were intended to be there as examples of Pre-Raphaelite kind of craftsmanship or an artistic ideal? If so, no explanation. One was wrapped around a dummy knight.
*************************
I write this blog, then, also to tell of the other exhibit. Color, light, and line.which does not lend itself to cat parodies.
This George Lemmen was not there, but it represents the quality of the sort of thing by him that was —
Lemmen was featured as a pointillist and someone who like Vuillard did paintings of the people he lived with doing ordinary domestic tasks — women sewing
Strange these museums and their curators. Not only was the show not advertised (showing a lack of faith in museum-goers), but the catalogue has been printed only as hard-cover and there were few of them in the museum and at high price (over $60). I did buy the catalogue when I came home, on the Net for less than half that price so can’t share many of the pictures and lack the names of the painters and illustrators, several of them relatively unknown.
Paul Huet, A Meadow at Sunset, pastel
There was a wall of Paul Signacs, Vuillards, Dores, Monets, George Lemmen, Pissaro, Morisot; watercolor, gouache, pen and ink, charcoal, pastel and mixed medium. The periods of art represented include romanticism, realism, impressionism, postimpressionism, pointillism (neo-impressionism), symbolism, the Dykes looked for quality, not coverage, and were delighted to find great work among unknown artists (so were not looking necessarily to make money). Some of my favorites where I can remember the artists’ names were Eugene Isabey, Alexandre Calame, Maxime Lalanne: here’s a selection of small reproductions.
I’ve found a large version of one where you can gather the quality of the paint: Henri-Joseph Harpingies, Autumn Landscape, Washerwoman.
blog size version
It’s the unexpected that delights us, the unassuming. Many of these were unashamedly romantic: cliffs at twilight, tiny people in forests, near streams. Old people who were nobody. I liked the highly romantic drawings of landscape where there were no people. So often landscapes will have one or two tiny people. Not here.
The Examiner goes over why these colors, light washes, lines should so absorb us, and the nature of the Dyke Collection. The exhibition book catalogue, looks chock-a-block with pictures and has contributions by six people.
There was an informative plaque in tribute to the Dykes who apparently intend to leave most of their collection to the musuem.
**********************
Both shows eshewed painting the rich, famous, the military and the powerful.
Three more pictures:
Arthur Hughes’s April (click for large size which does justice to the purple coloration) is there:
(blog size version);
this Maxime Lalanne:
As to the cats, I recommend at least looking at Herbert’s irreverent fond mockery. Apparently she’s done several such books of art with pussycats, often of Victorian pictures. Herbert’s pictures are here on line if you are so unlucky as not to have a live pussycat with you in your home. Looking at them did lead me to some good books on the history of the cat and the pictures we have of them over the centuries, Caroline Bugler’s The Cat: 3500 Years of Cats in Art.
Susan Herbert, “Ecce Ancilla Domini after Dante Gabriel Rossetti” (making the expression and stance of the women’s scared eyes in the original — rightly terrified of pregnancy?)
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Mark Samuels Lasner:
When you went to the National a gallery did you see the second, associated display, Pre-Raphaelites and the Book? This includes loans from my collection and I am hearing reports that people are either unaware of it or can’t find it.
Mark
Indeed.
We found it after questioning 3 guards. There is no sign directing you to it. It’s my policy in asking directions to keep asking. It was our quest for it that led us to Color, Light, and Line. It’s way downstairs, in a nook off of the side entrance. You have to go through a room whose objects I can’t recall just now, but you turn right and then proceed through Chinese porcelains for a couple of rooms, turn right again and there it is. It’s small and is significant. It has the books, book illustrations, and offers another perspective.
We guessed it was put down there as part of a turf battle. It was listed as Library exhibit and you were told these books came from the NGA’s library. And the library is just to the right.
Since I was not making this up about my legs, it was a toil for me to get there.
E.M.
Thank-you to Ellen for posting her blog entry on the Pre-Raphaelites at the National Gallery in Washington to the List, which I enjoyed.
A lot of the press response to the exhibition, which I saw at Tate Britain, and response to it on the blogosphere, concentrated on the London title ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde’. This has been changed for the Washington showing to the anodyne ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design’. I don’t know whether this represents a lack of confidence (on the part of Dianne Waggoner and the National Gallery) in the central thesis advanced by the show’s curators (Alison Smith, Tim Barringer and Jason Rosenfeld) embodied in their title, or just a misgiving as to whether an American audience would be able to take such a thesis seriously.
No-one that I read engaged with the clear implication of the exhibition (made explicit at the press view at the Tate) that the movement rose to a climax with the late work gathered in the final gallery under the title ‘Mythologies’. Discussion seemed to concentrate on the early-to-mid-period work in the first half of the exhibition.
I don’t know how many of you have been able to see the show, or what you thought, but I would be very glad to find out.
Simon.
Dear Ellen
Thanks for your description of yout travails. This jibes with what others have said. We keep pushing the NGA to place some signs in the hallway and get the guards up to date on the book exhibit. The little gallery is specially designated for exhibitions drawn from the gallery’s library (located in the East Building) or using books from other collections and apparently few people ever find it. Glad you did.
Regards, Mark
Simon Poe has graciously sent me a thorough review of the exhibit which does explain what you see and put it in historical and modern context; if anyone is interested I can pass it on. It’s now the best thing I have in my house on the Pre-Raphaelites. I very much enjoyed the way you put it altogether — how in 1984 the modern view of the Pre-Raphaelites was changed by an exhibit at the Tate, the original or early hostile reaction to the pictures, how in the era the personal lives of these painters became part of the reaction against them (and many hostile ones there were), who exactly all the Pre-Raphaelites were, and simply how much he covered. Perhaps the catalogue book which accompanied the exhibit provided more adequate context than one could see just going through it and reading the plaques. Since I usually go with Jim, I eschew the talking tapes you can get to accompany you as you go through. I like to be alone with my own thoughts anyway. Ellen
I’d appreciate seeing the review. And now I hope to go see the exhibit!
Another view:
I saw the Pre-Raphaelite show last week, and attended the two-day public symposium that was also held at the Gallery, and I can testify that the curators are not backing down from their bold claims about the work. They want it to be seen as radical, troubling, groundbreaking, and beautifu l—- and have set up a display that allows for the possibility of appreciating all of these facets of this varied and multi-faceted group.
There was some very forceful discussion during the symposium of the concept of the avant-garde itself, and how any reasonably coherent view of the term would have to include the Pre-Raphaelites (as well as the Nazarenes, their intriguing antecedents). Also on display, in some of the responses from the audience, were the kind of banal but still deeply influential concepts of art-historical development against which the curators are valiantly struggling. There is much institutional and personal investment in an idea that neither reason nor history bears out: that the true merit of art of the second half of the nineteenth century resides fully and solely in the Impressionists, and that largely on the grounds that they anticipated the autonomy of the art object that came to full realization in Modernism. Whether you study Divisionism or Pre-Raphaelitism you will always confront this entrenched resistance to looking at other manifestations of nineteenth century achievement. The speakers at the symposium did not flinch from the challenge. It was a fascinating debate, and an intriguing demonstration of how little evidence actually counts in changing people’s minds.
I cannot comment on changes from the British exhibition, but it is worth keeping in mind that any display emerges from a blend of curatorial intelligence and aspiration (both of which are in great evidence in this show and its catalog) and practical constraints. It was clear from listening to the curators that there were gains and losses in the translation of the show from one place to the other, both in terms of objects that could be shown, and in conditions of display.
I’d encourage everyone to go see the show. It is hung with great care to lighting and other elements of display: you will never see some of these works again, never see many of them together, and possibly never see them so well. Even works you may have seen over and over again really pop out at you in this display (an example for me would be _The Awakening Conscience_, which in this context reveals visual depths and an internal light that I had entirely missed when I saw it over the years at the Tate).
Please note: the intelligence of an exhibit of this nature arises from the objects selected and the ways in which they are hung–conceptual juxtapositions that will emerge on reflection (why is Brown’s _Work_ in the room dedicated to religion? why is _The Awakening Conscience_ next to _Light of the World_), as well as practical and aesthetic decisions. Do look at the catalog for the rich and bold claims of the curators, if you want to hear those more directly. If you are looking for clear and simple accounts of a straightforward through-line of artistic achievement explicable in a few words, you won’t find that at this show. Neither, it bears saying, will you find one master narrative about some particular social determinant shaping or distorting the work. Artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement were extremely varied. The art and design (and don’t miss the fact that this is not only a show about painting) they produced signifies in many directions. This show will reward careful and slow contemplation. It might be better to look at a few objects closely, and to spend some time discussing what you are seeing with others, rather than to rush through the thing. The evidence suggests that kind of looking is what the artists expected, and the Victorian public often carried out.
Jonah Siegel
I should admit I have in my house only two books specifically on the Pre-Raphaelites: the one I bought when I saw the previous exhibit (and I am a lover of landscape pictures) and Jan Marsh’s. Not that I don’t have chapters of books and essays in collections. Older books on Victorian literature which I still have are threaded through with material about the Pre-Raphaelites as they enact central strands of Victorianism (e.g., Buckley’s Victorian Temper, books on the fin-de-siecle movements). I’ve also individual books: where I like the paintings of a particular painter (John Waterhouse), art history volumes.
I had no idea that there is some kind of competition in ‘the public’s” mind and impressionism is preferred to Pre-Raphaelitism, nor that Impressionism is superior because it’s a prelude to or developed into post-impressionism and other “non-realistic’ schools of art, thus leading to 20th century movements.
When I saw Brown’s Work juxtaposed to religious paintings, it seemed to me to erase the political content of the painting — its presentation of class, of capitalist exploitation. Myself I think this new fashion for just juxtaposing pictures regardless of chronology or schools without words leaves exhibits inexplicable to the public. How are we to know what’s in the curator’s mind that made for the association?
I note Prof Siegel has nothing to say about the absence of women or the silent way the real women were presented.
I didn’t go to the two day symposium.
E.M.
Thank you very much for this. I am really interested in the Pre-Raphaelites and this looks fascinating. Anna
Two of the above comments here referred to an implicit idea that the contemporary or US public or museum people themselves (due to professional investment) resist the idea that pre-Raphaelitism is to be taken seriously. That there is some kind of opposition in “the public’s mind” between impressionism (which leads to today’s break-away from older conventions of realism) and Pre-Raphaelitism. I didn’t know that. From the earliest days of my graduate studies in Victorianism (a way while back) Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelites as a group and as individuals were presented as a central strand to Victorianism itself (Jerome Buckley’s The Victorian Temper came to mind). Of course the general public does not study Victorianism. It is though very attracted to Pre-Raphaelitism; my previous short blog and this one got an unusual number of hits over the three days since I posted it, and people have been querying me off-blog. I know I was disappointed by the lack of paintings by women and information about the women whose photographs were presented and were apparently the models for many of the paintings.
There is a new trend in exhibits, which I now realize was part of this one and what led to my complaints — I first saw it Writ Large (made very obvious) at the Modern in NYC and then the Clark (Massaschusetts). Art works are juxtaposed to one another without regard to chronology or the traditional schools of art that guided the way they have been usually presented. While these traditional categories impose ideas on artworks and blind us to their connections to other artworks outside the “schools” or movements or their very own qualities as individual works of art, to put artworks next to one another with no comment from the curators about what made them make this juxtaposition (what was in the curator’s mind) is to leave viewers at sea. Each of us can of course see what we see when we look at the juxtaposition, but that is by no means seeing what was intended by the curator. to me it seems a kind of a-historism or un-historism coming out of the post-modern new historism (which latter rightly looks at history from vantage points that the establishments of previous history writing ignored).
That I’m not making this up may be seen in an article by Hal Foster that appeared in the _London Review of Books_, vol 34, No 21, 8 November 2012, pp. 12-14, with the provocative title “Preposterous Timing,” on-line at
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n21/hal-foster/preposterous-timing
You do have to subscribe to read the whole article on line.So here are the highlights: Foster looks at this new trend in art exhibits as a “rehabilitation of anachronism” and he seriously questions it while acknowledging new insights into art works it probably fosters: He writes:
“Within art history it registers a turn away from the thinking of Erwin Panofsky, who privileged the historical perspective permitted by a clear demarcation of period styles, and towards the writing of Aby Warburg, a fellow German who was obsessed with the unexpected eruption of ancient forms of extreme expression in Renaissance art and beyond (accordingly, Warburg viewed the Renaissance less as the ‘rebirth’ of antiquity than as its ‘afterlife’) …”
He says hanging pictures “counter-intuitively” is part of this — e.g., the hanging of Brown’s _Work_ amid a group of landscape and anecdotal pictures whose over-riding “theme” or message is religious or conventional morality (from “The Scapegoat” to “The Awakening Conscience.” would be counter-intuitive.
The article’s content focuses on this movement in exhibits in medievalism but as many of us know I’m sure Christopher Wood has produced a number of superb books on Victorian art. He is an art dealer and it is probably in his interest to break apart old categories. With that I’ll cut to the article’s sceptical final paragraph:
“Today, students and others flock to contemporary art. At the same time, especially in its global extent and new media forms, it often seems divorced from art history. Hence the pressure to (re)connect the two that one senses in both Nagel and Powell, who recognise the divide in their very attempts to bridge it (their embrace of recent art is far preferable to the contempt for it that one often witnesses in the discipline and elsewhere)”
and the bringing in of Foucault and the concept of the “avante-garde’ which title was removed from the National Gallery exhibit:
:Not so long ago artists and theorists alike thrilled to the idea of such breaks: not only was representation, painting or art as such declared to be kaput, but also ideology, history or even man himself (recall the face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea that Foucault imagined being washed away at the end of The Order of Things). The avant-garde penchant for rupture was carried over into the rhetoric of critical theory, structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial, which effectively became its own avant-garde after the artistic one had dissipated, an avant-garde that wanted to put paid to metaphysics, humanism, patriarchy, heterosexism and racism. The worm has turned of late; today there is a preoccupation with stories of survival and models of persistence …”
E.M.
Please send the review. I had the pleasure of studying with Duncan Robinson at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1981 and the PRB became a bit of a passion. Thinking of handling the gorgeous original paintings still makes me giddy.
Sheila Ober-Brown
I live on the other side of the world and, unfortunately, will never see the exhibitions being discussed here. I’m fascinated and enlightened by the discussion these posts are part of, but I find myself quite torn by it as well. The two comments above (taken from much longer posts) have raised some troubling issues for me, particularly Ellen Moody’s point about what is missing. I know the concept of “master narrative” as “grand narrative” or “metanarrative” — but it is the same thing (although the master narrative as metanarrative usage may be confined to a particular strand of narratology). Are there no paintings by women at all in the exhibitions? Are women there solely as the subjects of the paintings? If you look at these exhibitions do you experience women solely as models? What master narrative was invoked or subverted in the shift in terminology from Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to Pre-Raphaelites? Is it the same group? In all the art movements alluded to in this discussion — Impressionists, Modernists, as well as Pre-Raphaelites — what is the proportion of male to female painters? If, as I suspect, males vastly outnumber females has not a definitive “particular social determinant shaping or distorting the work” already been invoked?
I fully understand that a discussion may be purely about light and shade, form and colour, and juxtaposing one painting with another with which it has usually not been paired. The eye is the eye, and images in themselves need have nothing to do with the hand that painted them, the body the hand is part of, the cultural determinants regarding whose eye/work/body should count. Is this the (formalist?) base from which the analysis/critique proceeds, both within the exhibition as curatorial decisions, and outside it in terms of the responses?
As I say, I’ve not seen the exhibition, I have no direct knowledge of its contents, and I’m way out of my subject area. I’m confused about what constitutes the new, the re-visionary, as raised in these posts, and about what kinds of cultural contexts are deemed to matter in the production of art and in the construction of critique and art history (and also, I think, about what is “avant” about the avant-garde).
Lee
Dr Lee O’Brien
Department of English
Macquarie University
In reply to part of Lee O’Brien,
In this particular exhibit there was only one painting by a woman: Elizabeth Siddal’s A Lady AFixing a Pennant. There were also some photographs by Julia Cameron. It’s not true that there were no women Pre-Raphaelite painters. Evelyn de Morgan comes to mind. Jane Morris painted. The exhibit was innocent of Deborah Cherry’s important book:
http://www.jimandellen.org/feministblog/683.html
While there were photographs of some of the women who lived with these men, nothing was said about them in the exhibit. Suddenly there was the name Fanny Cornforth, when she became one of the people in the group is not said, no explanation on a plaque. There were other sudden names. You were told when a woman’s face or body was the “source” of a painting, so Elizabeth Siddal was the face of Viola in _Twelfth Night_ or Cornforth (as I recall) in “A Mouth Kissed” (or a title like that), only the painting was of the woman”s body from the waist up.
I went to an exhibit of Impressionists by the Sea in the Philips in DC not long ago and the same thing occurred, except then there were no women and since women didn’t model nature, no mention of any. Again it’s not so, there were a number women impressionists beyond the two famous ones (Morisot, Cassatt). In a very brief blog I wrote, I included images of Fanny Churberg’s paintings:
http://www.jimandellen.org/feministblog/811.html
Ellen
I just read your lovely blog on the Pre-Raphaelites. The comments were also fascinating!
Too bad the exhibition was not put in context. It is amazing to live so near the National Art Gallery (and the other museums in D.C.). No excuse for the National Gallery not to do a good job!
One problem with living in the Midwest is that we are in the middle of the middle here and the museums are NOT good. Four hours away are some very good museums in Minneapolis, and there is a good one in Omaha. Omaha does a very good job with the placards and “programs,”–as for catalogues, they rarely have those– but we can tell their funding has been cut. The exhibitions are smaller than they used to be.
Kathy
[…] « At the National Gallery: Color, Line, Light & The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorians and Pussycats […]
Put simply, before 1850 European artists operating in the professional mainstream – i.e. aiming for money and reputation – had for generations followed the aesthetic precepts of their predecessors, hoping to surpass but not ignore them. The PRB in its initial manifestation challenged these precepts, notably those of composition, chiaroscuro, perspective, modelling and tonal values, as well as the use of ideal forms, adopting an artistic style with linear and colour elements reminiscent of what was then called Italian primitive art, together with carefully-observed naturalism, including out-door effects. The PRB did this intentionally to shock or startle. Thus they did form one of the first ‘avant-garde’ art movements, and were attacked critically. By the 1860s however major aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite style had both softened and become popular, though never as dominant as they now seem. Art movements are often fluid and hard to nail down; the task here increased both by the original choice of name and by subsequent developments and accretions.
*********************************
JAN MARSH
Looking at the Pre-Raphaelite show in the Tate last fall, one of things that struck me most was the significant amount of wall space that so many of the paintings occupied. They are really, really big paintings, many of them. You’d have to have a pretty huge house with pretty high ceilings to house them–a pretty expensive house, in other words. I found myself wondering about the relationship between revolutionary aspirations and the appeal to buyers with enough resources to afford the kind of houses the paintings seem designed for–buyers not likely to be all that approving of anything smacking of the revolutionary? Or were all these massive paintings just intended to make their political proclamations in public places like galleries all along?
Yours,
Perry Nodelman
Perry Nodelman asked about the “really, really big paintings” and the relationship between the artists’ “revolutionary aspirations” and the “buyers with enough resources to afford the kind of houses the paintings seem designed for–buyers not likely to be all that approving of anything smacking of the revolutionary.”
I’m not sure that most of their paintings are really so large, but your point is worth addressing certainly.
Dianne Sachko Macleod’s book “Art and the Victorian Middle Class” is an extensive treatment, and I build on her analysis in the 4th chapter of my book “Cultivating Victorians.” In a nutshell, the idea is that most patrons of the Pre-Raphs were not old money but new money, and their buying amounted to a modest kind of snubbing of the Royal Academy and like establishments, which early on scorned many of the the Pre-Raphs with some frequency.
Typical patrons were midland industrialists who’d made fortunes in the new factories and trade fields. Rather few aristocrats and nobles bought Pre-Raph paintings, at least those by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whom I tracked intensively. Some, like Millais, fit in a bit more smoothly.
Analogy: imagine the Veneerings in Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend” had a big interest in art as a scene to impress their social circle. They’d go for big and bold stuff that hardly anybody else’s walls could contain!
On this showing, if the 1789 French Revolution was a bourgeois economic revolution, the rise of the Pre-Raphs was a kind of bourgeois art revolution.
That said, the recent exhibition is making an exciting case for a different, more vanguardish view of this movement, as Jonah Siegel’s interesting post recently noted.
David
I am happy that Ellen Moody has returned to the topic of contemporary
practices of display in such a rich way. My earlier note was in part driven by my sense that those of us whose formation is in literature will tend to focus on forms of meaning-making with which we are more familiar–textual explanations on the wall or in the catalog–without engaging as much as we might with the actual phenomenological experience of the show, and with the intelligence and argument shaping the display. Those are my own tendencies, at least, so I am sympathetic to those who share them.
Having said that, recognizing that someone is making an argument and
advancing claims is, of course, not the same thing as agreeing with the argument being made or the claim being advanced.
I am entirely sympathetic to the resistance to the overuse of the
thematic hang. In my last few visits to England, I have been dismayed by various kinds of thematic displays–at Tate Britain or the Victoria and Albert, and elsewhere, which–to my eye often blend an odd sort of pandering (our public cannot understand the history or art history or ideas involved, so let’s just organize the display around some straightforward category we think they may be able to appreciate) and an odd transposition of the great man idea of creativity (let’s not over-value the artist by making him the absolute center of organization, but let’s make the curator that center instead . . .)
Having said that, I think that neither pandering nor an inflated sense of the need to kill the author to release the free play of meaning is manifested in the show at the National Gallery. Clearly any form of display is a compromise–including arrangements by chronology or by individual maker. When one is dealing with a group which collaborated so much and in so many ways (from the fantasy of being a brotherhood in the early days to the firm of Morris & Co.) and one whose history is in fact relatively short, the sort of thematic arrangement that was chosen for the current display seems more than justifiable. As a side note, one issue that emerges in the show is just how many works Ford Maddox Brown worked on simultaneously for a decade or more. I imagine scholarship could arrange them all in terms of date of beginning or completion, but the fact of their simultaneous production seems most interesting.
I’d add that it was evidently in part in response to the epochal (and
also controversial) show of 1984, which was apparently carefully
chronological, that the curators took this option. Being chronological is an interpretative and display decision, of course — as is, the single-artist display — and neither has always been seen as providing the bedrock of interpretation or meaning.
As to the question of reception: Ellen Moody identifies a kind of
disciplinary distinction worth emphasizing. There is a difference
between the ways in which Pre-Raphaelitism has been taught and
understood in literary studies and in art history. The public affection for some of the paintings is a third distinction worth mentioning. The debate on which Simon Poe and I have touched is an art-historical one. I appreciate it will sound improbable to some that such a banal vision of progress could dominate a field, or distort its historic sensibilities but there you are: the rise of autonomy and various reactions to that autonomy has been a vital story in art history. In that story the movements that did not feed into the central line have frequently been scrupulously voided of significance both conceptually (they were part of a conservative and/or kitsch line that was or should be outside the pale of what is admired) and aesthetically (they cannot be beautiful or at least interesting, because what is beautiful and interesting is what can be located in the main current of the development of Modern Art). The love of the public for Pre-Raphaelite paintings is in a way just more evidence of the vulgarity and kitsch nature of the work (the same is not true of the Impressionists for some reason).
Many specialized art historians have vividly demonstrated the problems with this narrative, of course. And the latest generation of art historians and curators is troubling it all the time (cf the
re-arrangement of MOMA some years back, and the opening of the Musee
d’Orsay well before that), but the attitudes and unspoken assumptions of the powerful earlier model will rear up when it is challenged where it lives–as this show does–in part by its use of the term avant-garde.
Apologizing again for a long post would risk seeming disingenuous, so instead I’ll thank Ellen Moody for raising these interesting issues.
Jonah Siegel
Meanwhile at the Met Opera, the opera people have revived a 1984 (come to think of it the same year as the famous Tate exhibition) production of Zadonai’s 1907 Francisca da Rimini:
https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/zandonais-francesca-da-rimini-pre-raphaelite-picturesqueness-brought-back/
The original sets and costumes have been revived (cleaned, fixed, re-sewn). In the interviews the costume designer used the term Pre-Raphaelite for the embroidery and dresses, and it was utteredt here and there in the intermission interviews talking of the (pre-computer) production design. The opening scene especially seemed an imitation of a Pre-Raphaelite picture. You could see the influence of Scott too — in the minstrel scenes, and the costume of Gianciotto as a knight-warrior. It’s interesting this decor (with a good deal of art deco thrown in) was thought appropriate for this early 20th century semi-verismo opera.
Ellen
[…] Madox Ford, The Corsair’s Return (1870): Pre-Raphaelite painting of an episode from Byron’s The […]
There’s a review in the Friday March 29th 2013 *New York Times* of the Pre-Raphaelite exhibit that was exhibited at the Tate in London as “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde” (which I thought was a bit over the top) and has been toned down for its current location in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It’s now entitled “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design” although this title has gone to the other extreme and seems unnecessarily bland. The review is positively snarky about our dear old Pre-Raphs:
“If you are genuinely interested in art and emerge from this exhibit thinking that you have seen scores of outstanding paintings, you should spend some time studying some other examples.” (Section C, page 21)
Roberta Smith, the reviewer then goes on to recommend viewing some examples by Manet and Cezanne. Apparently if you think that the Pre-Raphaelites represent “good art” you are shallow and may be “entertained,” as she says earlier, but you are not interested in “genuine art;” if you want a *real* experience go look at some French paintings and savor the contrast between “the complex and the merely complicated.” The Pre-Raphaelites simply “do not go very deep.” (sniff)
Sorry to get all huffy and nationalistic about this, but I thought we’d moved on beyond the airy dismissal of the Pre-Raphaelites in favor of the contemporary French examples long ago.
Martin
Timothy Barringer:
Our choice of the sub-title ‘Victorian Avant-Garde’ for the London showing of our exhibition about the Pre-Raphaelites was a deliberate provocation, and we did indeed provoke the Murdoch press and Daily Telegraph in London with the Tate showing last Fall. Evidently even without the sub-title we have provoked the New York Times. The term avant-garde, of course, has habitually been used to describe French painting from Courbet through the Impressionists to the Cubists, and by appropriating it for the most important of Victorian art movements we fully expected the kind of response that we encountered this morning in the Times.
Our point is, of course, not to take anything away from painters of indubitable quality and importance such as Manet, but to argue that there was more than one way to create a modern painting (and a good one) in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The title was changed for the US showing (though the book remains the same) because, by sheer co-incidence, the San Francisco Museums, Legion of Honour, used that subtitle (Victorian Avant-Garde) for their showing of the ‘Cult of Beauty’ exhibition about the Aesthetic
Movement last year (the V&A, which originated Cult of Beauty did not use the subtitle). It was considered too confusing to use the same subtitle for both shows.
It’s fascinating that many of the same tropes of reactionary criticism are used against the Pre-Raphaelites now that were mobilized in the British press in 1849-51, before Ruskin’s intervention turned things around for the Pre-Raphaelites in May that year. This will provide an interesting chapter in the reception history of the Pre-Raphaelites. One might argue
that in the USA, the institutionalization of a Franco-American heroic history of Modernism has made it the ultimate in ‘academic’ narratives, backed up of course by the massive vested interests in academia, the art market and US museums which have millions invested in very second-rate Impressionist pictures (as well as some very good ones). To take the Pre-Raphaelites seriously is to mount an attack on this position which has
been naturalized as ‘common sense’ into American education and discourse, far more than it ever was in Britain, Germany or even France.
Naturally I do not agree with Martin that to claim the PRB as an
avant-garde is ‘over the top’: it has been very fully aired in the work of Liz Prettejohn over the years, and is widely accepted beyond the retardataire circles of American modernist art history. What’s interesting about Roberta Smith (who, incidentally, reviewed an earlier show of mine, ‘American Sublime’, Tate, 2002, gushingly — and that really did contain
some kitsch, but of course it was American kitsch!) is that she is so defensive: the phrase ‘cornered rat’ comes to mind to describe the vehemence of the language. Just as Modernism in the visual arts is dead as a set of creative practices, so its critical avatars and those who hold to its pieties (Smith is closest in this column to the late Hilton Kramer of the New Criterion) are an embittered and doomed breed, as Smith’s angry
listing of contemporary artists (‘wrongly’) engaged with the
Pre-Raphaelites makes clear. What’s fascinating is the extent of the oscillations in Smith’s texts: according to Smith’s account, the PRB are not modern and yet they are modern; they influenced the course of art history and they are irrelevant to the course of art history. They are popular and that is bad; Manet is popular (with the same people) and that is good. The problem for Smith is that Clement Greenberg’s argument about avant-garde and kitsch, of which she articulates a vulgar version, was a
brilliant intervention into the art world of the 1940s. But the movement he supported then (Abstract Expressionism) and the Manichean binary that, in some texts, he proposed, are entirely irrelevant either to 1848 or to 2013. Post-modernism has indeed been kind to the PRB.
We present the Pre-Raphaelties as a secessionist, anti-academic group producing a radically new means of viewing and representing the world, engaging with new technologies (photography and new chemical pigments), new thought and scholarship (Christian Socialism; new Biblical scholarship; Darwin; Marx and Anarchism) and articulating a distinctive political vision (from Madox Brown to Morris). As such, we argue, they most definitely constitute an avant-garde. We did not argue (as some seem to have thought) that “they influenced French painting”, which is surely not a credible determinant for defining an avant-garde.
As Martin points out, Smith’s strategy of belittling those who disagree with her perspective as ill-educated or shallow is particularly reprehensible – exactly the opposite of the move towards inclusiveness that museums have successfully promoted in recent years. Our primary goal in bringing the show to Washington was to allow a huge visitorship the chance to see these works in the flesh and make up their own minds about them. That a national newspaper (the national newspaper?) mocks them for this – whether or not they agree with our thesis — is pretty shocking. Nearly 250,000 people saw the show in London. I do not believe them to
have been shallow, ignorant or deluded, and the same goes for the
thousands visiting the show in DC.
We would welcome discussion about the ‘avant-garde’ label — is it, for instance, even a useful act of revisionism to make this claim? — from VICTORIA members.
Tim Barringer
Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art/Yale University – Co-Curator, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate Britain)/Victorian Art and Design (National Gallery, Washington DC).
Having just seen the show this week (and, by the way, I give it all my thumbs up), let me jump into the debate over the “avant-garde” label. While Barringer’s defense of the term makes much of the nationalist undertone in Francophile art criticism and Barringer et al.’s resistance to same, I think the tactic allows Danahay to make rather too little of the really breakthrough character of the PRB contributions to art itself. So leave aside the nationalist debating points and just look at the stuff: the radical departures in treatment of painted surface, in subject choices, in handling of framing, in range of materials; and, on a less formal level, the real challenges to the dominant/academic range of representation of sexuality, religious ideas, modernity, and much else. And do all these young radicals stay that way? Danahay may be right about Millais, maybe Holman Hunt as well, but I think it’s pretty clear that Rossetti is still causing umbrage throughout his career, and of course Morris gets more radical with age. So the label seems quite appropriate (and the show remains a must-see for anyone interested in Victorian art).
Tom Prasch
I was left after Roberta Smith’s comments thinking about lesser Renoir (little girls on a par with Millais’ “Bubbles”) on the one hand–how wonderful were the French as a group in every instance? I was thinking on the other hand about pickled sharks, diamond skulls and overgrown puppies. Is creating umbrage a criterion of value? Or making money? Or creating umbrage to make money? I am uncomfortable judging any artist for her need to make a living or for his supposed ability to shock the bourgeoisie, and I’m equally uncomfortable about celebrating shocking the bourgeoisie as a criterion of value.
Surely if the Saatchis have helped us to any critical perspective, it’s never to discount the power of the market. And, in response, never to reduce what we’re looking at to that same power, as Tom suggests …
Mary Ellis Gibson
As Dr. Barringer pointed out, there seems to be a long-standing belief in art criticism that the French Realists were truly avant-garde, whereas British counterparts such as the Pre-Raphaelites failed to be truly avant-garde for basically the reasons that Smith cites in her article. As Dr. Barringer also points out, this belief has been heavily critiqued so it’s surprising to see a professional art critic clinging to it so staunchly. I’m reminded of Bordieu’s arguments about how statements of personal taste are flaunted as markers of social class.
Daniel Brown
The review of the exhibition “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design” in the Friday March 29th *New York Times (Section C, page 21) asserts “that the Pre-Raphaelites rebelled against their own time and introduced a hyper-realistic style does not necessarily make them avant-garde. They didn’t radically rethink painting as Manet, Cezanne or van Gohg did.” This is actually a teleological argument. North American art history departments have created a genealogy that privileges non-representational art. The further from realism the art (realism being the province of photography and middlebrow art) the more it can earn the title “avant-garde” and be canonized as “high” art.
But what if we were to create an alternative genealogy that privileged adapting literary texts in multiple media and defined film adaptations of Victorian novels as our “highest” art? Then the Pre-Raphaelites become “avant-garde” because they adapted narratives from many sources and many of them used multiple media.
Martin Danahay