Reactionary Modernism?

In a British context there can’t be many safer crowd pullers for an art gallery than a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition.   The Tate Britain is currently hosting one (a good strategy as the gallery is under major reorganisation at the moment and without a strong special show would be virtually deserted) which tries to say something new about this group of eminent Victorians.  The exhibition (which will be going off to Washington DC next year) is contains lots of beautiful things even though I’m not sure its underlying argument is entirely persuasive.

This is not to deny its real merits.   Unusually the exhibition actually includes a genuine piece of chronologically pre-Raphaelite Italian art (a panel from a Lorenzo Monaco diptych which was acquired by the National Gallery and first displayed in 1848).  It’s helpful to be reminded that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) developed their approach to art at least partially in direct reaction to the increased availability and visibility of 14^th and 15^th century art (Italian and Flemish) in public collections- in other words, their expressed preference for what was then known as “primitive” art responded to a shift in aesthetic values amongst the artistic elites which was already well under way in Britain and across Europe by the 1840’s. 

The exhibition also goes a bit beyond the usual suspects (though these are well represented too).  It’s nice to see Lizzie Siddal getting recognition as an artist in her own right, rather than the muse/mistress/wife role she’s usually cast in.  The model who nearly died of pneumonia after Millais made her lie in a cold bath for hours on end as he painted “Ophelia” was a talented artist in her own right, as the small works exhibited in the show demonstrate.   It’s interesting to see just how long a shadow Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics cast on the nascent world of artistic photography- as well as in the more familiar area of interior decoration, represented by a good display of William Morris furnishings and needlework.

After looking at the origins of the PRB, the show takes a thematic approach under broad headings like “History”, “Salvation” or “Mythologies”.   This has some slightly odd results- “Salvation” includes Ford Madox Brown’s iconic “Work” (of which more later), whose overt religious content is fairly limited, for instance.   Although not overtly chronological, this actually results in a hang which goes through from the PRB’s origins in the 1840’s to its mutation into the “art for arts sake” Aesthetic Movement and the latter’s Arts and Crafts offshoot from the 1860’s.  Definitions can be a bit of a problem; the “pure” PRB was actually a pretty short lived affair, active for a few years around 1850, and Ford Madox Brown was never a formal member; on the other hand, the core members of the Brotherhood like Hunt, Millais and Rosetti were obviously artistically active for many years beyond that point.   The drift away from an initial commitment to “realism” into a world of romantic mythologies- gorgeous women and an idealised medieval world of Arthurian legend- is striking.

The hang made me conscious of certain aspects of Pre-Raphaelite art which hadn’t really stuck me before.  One is just how literary the inspiration for so much of their art was.  Shakespeare obviously figures prominently as a source of inspiration, as does Chaucer to a lesser extent (though Burne Jones’ choice of the deeply unpleasant anti-Semitic “Prioress’ Tale” when decorating a piece of furniture brings one up a bit short).   Much more contemporary writers, some largely forgotten nowadays (I don’t think Coventry Patmore ranks very high on the Amazon sales charts) also rank high.  The storyline for “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” may have initially been located in Boccaccio but Holman Hunt’s appropriation of the topic owes more to Keats’ poem.   The 14^th century self-proclaimed Roman Tribune Cola di Rienzo comes on to the PRB radar screen thanks to Bulwer Lytton’s novel.  The thoroughly contemporary poetry of Tennyson inspires a number of paintings- not just the “Lady of Shalott”, whose most famous artistic offspring (the Waterhouse painting) isn’t in the show because its creator has for some reason been entirely excluded (I assume he’s viewed as too late and too far from the core PRB group) though she still gets in courtesy of Lizzie Siddal.   The 18^th century teenage poet and forger of medieval writings Chatterton is memorialised.   Overall the PRB and their associates seem to have responded to a past viewed through a strong literary filter of mostly recent manufacture.  It is interesting that the more “aesthetic” figures were also more open to the influence of “genuine” medieval literature (William Morris’ interest in Norse sagas and other medieval writings, Burne Jones’ enthusiasm for Thomas Mallory’s version of the Arthurian legends alongside the Tennysonian one).

It’s also a very British filter, with few “foreign” authors apart perhaps from Dante making much of a showing unless in some way they have an English language “chaperone”.   This is part of another aspect of the PRB and their associates which struck me forcefully in this show- their nationalism.  Admittedly this is often expressed in oblique ways and was by no means uncritical of the shortcomings of Victorian Britain (a point I’ll come back to) but it’s still there  It’s very visible in  Ford Madox Brown’s admiring nod to the first English language Bible in his early painting of John Wycliffe giving scriptural readings to the Black Prince and his family, with Chaucer and Gower in attendance to link the literary and sacred roots of modern English.  It also hangs over even apparently innocuous landscapes like “Our English Coasts” below.  This was painted by Holman Hunt in 1852 in direct response to a surge of invasion panic after Louis Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III.   One reaction was a flurry of volunteer military activity- Hunt and Millais both joined volunteer rifle corps, as indeed did Tennyson, who set himself up as the Volunteer Movement’s poet laureate.    Hunt’s painting was a more indirect one, depicting the conspicuously undefended coastline near Hastings and dropping a heavy hint that the British people were a flock of leaderless sheep in sore need of a firm governing hand to steer them away from danger.   Interestingly, when the painting was shown in Paris in 1855 it was given the much more neutral title of “Straying Sheep”- by then Napoleon III was an ally in the Crimean War…..

The dangers threatening the English sheep in the 1840’s and 50’s were not just secular ones like French invasion.   This was an era of deep religious division, with controversy hanging over the status of the Roman Catholic church in Britain compounded by the divisions within the Church of England which ultimately saw the major figures in the High Church faction like John Henry Newman defect to Rome.   The third aspect of Pre-Raphaelite art (at least in its formative period before, say, 1860) which emerged very clearly from the exhibition was the strongly religious element which it contained.   “Religion” isn’t necessarily a term one associates all that strongly with the PRB, especially given their distinctly non-stereotypically Victorian private lives, but it was clearly a major influence on their art.  It’s probably most transparent for Holman Hunt, whose “Light of the World” was toured round the world by its eventual owner and endlessly reproduced, but religious themes were a mainstay of their production across the board, at least until the shift to “art for arts sake” in the 1860’s.   Just how they stood in the arguments of the day is harder to work out.   Some of the figures on the fringes of the PRB were clearly attracted to High Church views, while the group’s interest in medieval devotional art would on the surface appear to have predisposed them towards a more favourable view of Catholicism.   It didn’t quite work like that.  

Blatantly anti-Catholic works were rare- Millais’s clumsily named "A Huguenot, on St Bartholemew's Day, refusing to shield himself from danger by wearing the Roman Catholic Badge" is the exception rather than the rule- but it was certainly possible to read some of their religious works in that light, with their intense focus on a highly direct personal relationship with a very human Jesus.   Apparently non-religious works like “Our English Coasts” were allegorised by anti-Catholic cultural commentators like John Ruskin in religious terms. Their religious works sold mainly to patrons of Low Church evangelical leanings.    Dante Gabriel Rosetti may have come from an Italian background and been very influenced by the art of Quattrocento Italy but his father was a republican political exile from a milieu which detested the Papacy on political as much as religious grounds and the Rosetti family’s rather complex relationship with Christianity was basically Protestant in flavour.   While Millais’ “Christ in the Home of His Parents” was jammed full of enough allegories and prefigurations of the Gospels to delight any medieval artist, its un-idealised presentation of a very ordinary family in a very ordinary carpenter’s workshop raised an outcry (led by none other than Charles Dickens) for its perceived lack of reverence; its defenders again came largely from the evangelical party. 

 Holman Hunt tended towards a non-denominational evangelical approach, though some of his most obviously religious pieces are very hard to interpret in denominational terms- are the Christian priests hunted by angry Druids High Church Anglicans being hounded for wearing the wrong vestments (a big issue of the day) or are they intended to stress the pre-Papal roots of a British Christianity which long predated St Augustine’s mission to Kent in the 590’s?   The key point, however, is that religious issues mattered for the PRB and played a big role in their art.

So far so good.  Where I have more problems with the exhibition is its attempts to claim the Pre-Raphaelites as modernists.  The “Avant Garde” of the exhibition title is fair enough- they did see themselves as something of a path breaking elite set against the prevalent tendencies of their day- but the very name they chose to adopt makes presenting them as modernists a tall order.   Groups favouring an artistic embrace of the contemporary world (one plausible definition of modernism) don’t generally take a name which implies that art went off the rails some three hundred years before and spend much of their energy painting the worlds of the more or less distant past.

On a technical level it is obviously possible to point to aspects of Pre-Raphaelite practice which could be seen as forward looking.   They were into painting in the open air a decade or so before the Impressionists decided that this was the way to go- though they were actually quite late adopters of the advances in paint technology and packaging which facilitated outdoor painting.  Like all artists active around 1850, they had to cope with the invention and rapid development of photography; while (contrary to what critics often alleged) they don’t seem to have worked up landscapes from photographs, photography does seem to have affected some of their approaches to, say, the rendering of perspective. 

Subject matter is a separate issue.   The PRB certainly made a big thing about “realism” and “truth to nature” in their programmatic statements.   After 1860, however, Rosetti and the core PRB members were generally painting portraits of beautiful women- usually Janey Morris, Lizzie Siddal or Francis Cornforth under various mythological-sounding names (the kind of work which probably best corresponds to popular understandings of “Pre Raphaelite”, in fact), sometimes commissioned works depicting members of the social elite.  Burne Jones was well launched in his vein of medievalist escapism alongside acting as designer for William Morris, who was pursuing his own agendas, to which I’ll return.   Not all that much “realism” there (the argument that Burne Jones was somehow modernist because he provided an escape from Victorian materialism strikes me as pretty strained, to say the least).  

What of the 1850’s, before the “aesthetic turn”?   It would be misleading to suggest that the PRB and their associates never painted any contemporary scenes- obviously they did.  What is striking (by comparison with, say, the Impressionists) is how selective they were in their coverage of the modern world.   I can’t think of a single railway engine or factory in any of the paintings in the exhibition.    London is reduced to a remote skyline viewed at the very edge of a thoroughly bucolic Hampstead Heath or a view of Regent’s Park which make it look like deep countryside.   There is something of an agenda of the city as place of corruption- the docks make a showing in the background to a moralising piece by Spence Stanhope whose message is somewhat undercut by the glamour of the fallen woman at its centre.   There is also a strand of social criticism, though it’s interesting that the victims of the Victorian social order who qualify for coverage tend to be either the traditional rural poor or the middle classes (the couple forced to emigrate in Ford Madox Brown’s “Last of England”, impersonated by the artist and his wife).  The urban industrial working classes, the focus of most social reform concern in the period, get very little showing.

This is even true of Ford Madox Brown’s monumental “Work” (see top).   This is an endlessly fascinating, multi-layered piece and one could literally spend hours trying to decode every detail (there’s a huge amount going on in every corner of the painting).   I won’t even try to interpret it all here, even if I could- there’s just so much of it and a lot of the detail is quite enigmatic on close inspection.   In very basic terms, a gang of navvies is (more or less) hard at work installing sewerage pipes in Hampstead, under the gaze of Thomas Carlyle and the Christian Socialist thinker the Rev F D Maurice on the right of the picture (Carlyle is the one with the strange leer looking out of the painting).  A group of casual agricultural labourers can just be seen resting up by the roadside.   Representatives of various social classes squeeze by on the left or inspect the work in the background; street urchins play on the very edge of the site (no Health and Safety worries in the 1850’s).   On the main road to the right a line of sandwich board men walks up the hill in an early example of electoral advertising calling on the electorate to “Vote for Bobus”; barely visible on the right hand edge behind Maurice’s head a policeman knocks a female orange seller’s basket over.  

On one level the message is clear enough- a glorification of the power and energy of the working man and an implied assertion that his (and it is very much his- working women are almost invisible) role in society should be more highly valued.  It is perhaps revealing that Brown focuses this sentiment on building labourers, perhaps the most “archaic” and pre-modern sector of the Victorian urban working population after agricultural labourers (the painting dates from some twenty years before anybody thought of trying to trade unionise unskilled workers).    This glorification of labour was, in rather different ways, in line with the views propounded by both of the intellectual onlookers. 

The details however are much harder to interpret.   For instance, the wall on the left hand edge is covered with advertisements for various self-improvement classes aimed at working class audiences.  Are we meant to assume this gang will pop along to one of them after they knock off?   The worker in the red waistcoat, clearly something of a swell, is obviously literate to judge for the newspaper under his arm- but he also sports a black eye.   What’s been going on here?   The lady third from the left is a Temperance activist to judge for the titles of the tracts she carries; she doesn’t look likely to find much of an audience among this group of workers, one of whom is ostentatiously quaffing a pint.  Sturdy working class independence from meddling do-gooders or moral weakness?   The strangely dressed, ragged (and to my eye slightly gender-ambiguous) figure on the far left is apparently engaged in selling foliage that would go in the bottom of bird cages (this comes from the catalogue- I’m taking it on trust…)- and apparently typed as a non-worker deliberately pushed to the fringes of society.   What of the urchins frolicking in the foreground?  The little girl seems to be trying to discipline her brother (which presumably is good) but her tattered red dress implies that she’s destined to end up on the streets.  

The presence of Carlyle may offer some clues- and they’re slightly disquieting ones, at least when viewed from a 21^st century perspective.   “Bobus” was one of his literary inventions- an upwardly mobile middle class entrepreneur and a venomous caricature of a man and a class which had got above itself and needed to be cut down to size.  Carlyle may have glorified the creative aspects of labour but he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to give these fine working men the vote- he despised Parliamentary democracy, feared the mob and idolised strong leaders, ideally issued from the people but not answerable to them.  It is interesting that one of the heroes Carlyle worshipped was Oliver Cromwell, whom Brown later depicted not in his hours of triumph but as a struggling yeoman framer on the way to market.   In many ways Carlyle could be seen as embodying a strand of Modernist thought- a thoroughly reactionary one which fed directly into some of the 20^th century’s darkest ideologies.  How far Brown bought into every detail of Carlyle’s views is unclear- Maurice took a more generous view of humanity- but it would certainly be possible to read “Work” in a Carlylean key.

The most overtly “political” member of the wider Pre-Raphaelite circle was of course William Morris, who was active in Socialist circles for much of the later years of the 19^th century.   I imagine the rather “Pre-Raphaelite” aesthetic of many early Trades Union banners ultimately goes back to his influence, mediated through associates like Walter Crane.  It would certainly be grossly unfair to suggest that Morris retreated into a world of pure aesthetics after 1860; he did his best to link his artistic practice with his principles, particularly after his formal embrace of socialism in the 1880’s.   The results were however rather ambiguous.  Morris’ socialism was pretty idiosyncratic and heavily based on a rather idealised view of medieval guild practice, coupled with an aesthetic and moral aversion to industrialised mass production.   He genuinely sought to run his workshops in line with his ideals; the problem (of which he was acutely aware) was that the beautiful artefacts which emerged from them were only affordable by a very limited wealthy clientele.  This was a circle which he never really squared; give or take the role of the Catholic Church, the ideal future worlds under socialism which he dreamed of in his writings have a disconcerting similarity with the idealised English 13^th century which Charles Augustus Welby Pugin imagined as the highest point of human civilisation.  Again this can be seen as a form of modernism, but in practical terms very much a blind alley.   The nascent Labour Party may have picked up on Morris’ aesthetics but had far too much realism to try to implement his policy recommendations and his ideas ultimately ended up keeping company which I am sure would genuinely have horrified him as “guild socialism” fed into Fascist corporatism in Italy and beyond.  His resurrection as a thinker of the left came, significantly, in the 1980’s from British leftists desperate to unearth any kind of native non-Marxist socialist tradition as the Soviet Union lurched towards intellectual and economic bankruptcy; the fact that his writings could at a stretch be counted as proto-Green was an additional attraction.

I suppose the strange effect of this exhibition is that, by its very obsession with arguing for the modernism of the Pre-Raphaelites, it made me look a lot harder at their work in a more “political” light and, at least to my eyes, the results aren’t entirely comfortable.   They emerge as something of a band of reactionaries (feminist commentators have already had pretty rude things to say about their sexual politics), drawing their economic sustenance from an industrial economy which they did their best to ignore and seem to have despised when they thought about it at all.  The original PRB members have sometimes been given a hard time for “selling out” in old age; I’m not sure (rackety private lives apart) they were ever that far removed from the more conservative parts of the Establishment.   It is perhaps revealing that the “forgotten” Rosetti, William, when not writing art criticism or editing literary journals, had a day job as a senior civil servant and sometimes acted as informal art adviser to successive governments.   This doesn’t make their art less interesting or less beautiful; it does however set them far more firmly in their Victorian context than the Tate exhibition might want to suggest.