Ophelia, by Arthur Hughes
The other day I read in The Guardian newspaper of a forthcoming exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art at the Tate Gallery, London to be held later this year.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/apr/16/pre-raphaelites-exhibition-tate-britain
Now the Pre-Raphaelites hold a special place in my heart as they were my first artistic love, the first paintings I saw in fact which made me want to paint, and being a loyal soul I love them still, and so I look forward to the show with real eagerness and will no doubt visit several times. However I wanted to make a comment on the general tone of this article because I think it gives an interesting side light on an important aspect of modern culture.
It is obvious that the curator of the show should take the opportunity to 'sell' it and encourage people to come. Museums these days it seems are as obsessed with ratings as TV companies, sadly they feel the need to justify their existence as part of the (horrible phrase) 'creative industries'. What interests me though is the stategy used to attract the public. The artists we are told were 'revolutionary', they shocked the establishment, brought in new ideas and were the YBA's (Young British Artists - a term invented in the 1980's for the likes of Hirst and Enim) of their day. The advertising for the recent TV series in England 'The Desperate Romantics' went even further down the same road calling them the punks of their day! There is of course some truth in this; their early work did provoke a vitriolic response in the press and they did upset many older artists by their apparant lack of respect for the Academic tradition based on the ideas embodied by the work of the High Renaissance masters and in especial Raphael. Calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood seemed particularly designed to offend those who regarded Raphael as the fountain of all artistic good practice and indeed the real criticism didn't appear until after the truth of the mysterious intials PRB on their works became publicly known.
However it must also be said that their works, although criticised in the press, were always accepted by the Academy and usually well hung. In an age when paintings were crammed into shows with frame touching frame and many established artists finding their work 'skied' almost out of sight, this was no small thing. Furthermore several academic artists were immediately sympathetic, Dyce and Egg to name but two. Within a couple of years they had won the support of easily the most famous and best regarded critic in the country, ie Ruskin, and only 4 years after exhibitng his first Pre-Raphaelite work ('Isabella' in 1849) Millais was elected as an associate member of the Academy itself.
Christ washing Peter's feet, by Ford Madox Brown
Given this, why it is considered necessary to encourage interest in these artist by over stressing their 'revolutionary' and anti-establishment nature? It seems to be a common trend in modern culture that we need our heros to have this element in their story. We struggle to accept the merit of any artist, writer or even scientist unless he spent several years being scorned and mocked by the older generation, battling against the odds and appalling predjudice to present his wonderfully visionary new view of the world. Of course the wonders of hindsight enable us to see that Millais and Rossetti were great talents, of course Keats was a genius and only a frock coated buffoon would have questioned the theories of Darwin or Einstein. It gives us I suppose a little frisson of self congratulatory pleasure to think that we would have spotted the unique genius of Constable or Manet or Van Gogh when the dull world of bourgeois respectability - which we would so like not to be a part of - failed to do so.
Today we have the gross spectacle of such entrenched establishment figures as Damian Hirst still being referred to as the 'enfant terrible' of the Britsh art scene when in fact the real radicals are those artists quietly painting away in their studios relearning the lost skills of painting; composition; draughtmanship, colour handling and design. Those artists who are painting in what would have been considered a century ago a traditional fashion are now the ones who really do threaten to overturn the establishment although we hear precious little of them in the media, nothing in fact.
Meanwhile I shall go to the exhibtion for one simple reason; the Pre-Raphaelites painted some of the most beautiful pictures of the century, and at their best, of any century. So let us go and enjoy that and not worry about how radical they were, or weren't, it makes no difference to the quality of the art and should have no impact on our appreciation of it.
The Blind Girl, by Sir John Millais
