The Collapse of Culture

Coventry Cathedral

Well, that is quite a hefty title and this is only a  short blog post rather than a multi volume academic treatise so I had better start by explaining very briefly what I mean by it. I am talking today quite specifically about the fact that over the last 100 years or so, our artists and architects have stopped producing works which previous centuries would  have recognised as being serious works and, which is perhaps more insidious, the public at large have generally not noticed, or if they have, they have regarded the decline as inevitable and irreversible.  Of course these two facts are closely connected, artists and architects are members of the public and subject to the same prevailing cultural influences; all art is, and always has been, reflective of the social milieu out of which it came. However before taking a closer look at these cultural influences I want to add the further point that a central tenant of the modernist movement, which has become the established and entrenched dominant ideology over the last century, has been that an intellectual divide between artist and public has been not merely acceptable but positively to be sought for and encouraged.

No doubt to some "the collapse of culture" sounds a pretty damning and sweeping statement, so before I go further in trying to dissect why it happened perhaps I had better illustrate that it happened. Ok then, what I am wondering is how we went from this

Paulo Veronese
 

 and this

Giovanni Bellini

to this

Jean-Michel Basquiat

 and this

Cy Twombly

 

 Or, in the field of architecture, how is it that once we produced buildings like these:

A Cambridge College

and now we produce buildings like these:



A Modernist Tower Block 



 

 

I hardly doubt that to a reasonable mind it is obvious that there is a loss there.

 

So how did this collapse come about? Well, it seems to me that the tremendous rate of change at the end of the nineteenth century must have seemed irresistible to those who lived through it. There were huge and rapid social, technological, political and economic changes. People could see and feel their lives change almost year on year as new inventions arrived, more and more people moved into booming cities, the world started shrinking in terms of both trade and tourism, and there is no doubt that many people felt a state of change had become a new mode of life. The world was in flux; old realities and stabilities were being challenged and overthrown in so many areas of life it was perhaps inevitable that young artists should feel that art needed radical change as well.

In addition to this general zeitgeist of restless change there were further factors in the art world which were identified even at the time as encouraging a seeking out of novelty for its own sake. These were, most particularly, the huge growth in exhibitions and private dealerships and the corresponding development of an arts media and professional commetariat. Young artists needed to make a big noise to be heard, and they needed to make it quickly. Sensations had to be made and they can be made more easily by shouting profanities than talking quiet good sense. Dealers and critics were competing to find the next big thing, the Impressionists and others had already eroded the distinction between a finished work and a quick sketch, in short all the conditions were right for an explosion in the amount of art produced, and inevitably in such circumstances getting any kind of art out there was more important than its quality. Thus it suited all involved to create a new environment where "quality" as previously understood was no longer a factor in critical or commercial appreciation.

 

Here we come to the role of the critic and professional opinion former. In previous ages perhaps one or two great men had had the power to influence taste in art, Ruskin being the last such and the first to reach anything like a mass audience. In previous times the power of these people was limited to a very small circle. But at the turn of the twentieth century with mass literacy, an ever expanding class of potential picture buyers and people keen to be educated in the arts their influence grew enormously. I have written in an earlier post of the baleful influence of Roger Fry but he was only the first of a long line of critics who engaged in a cynical attempt to destroy the arts and re-fashion them in their own image.

 

For in truth the great mistake of artists, architects and their literary supporters was to suppose that art could flourish without being aware of its own past. The urge at the time was to break completely with tradition and create a sort of year zero for art and to do this it was necessary to totally subvert all existing standards and traditional criteria for excellence. I should mention at this point that the catastrophe of the First World War cannot be under-estimated. It at once seemed to justify the wholesale rejection of the cultures and societies which had produced it and made reaching back to a time before it unthinkable to the generation who grew up in its shadow.  For five centuries the work of artists such as  Bellini as seen above had been considered a standard for excellence because of the skill with which he manipulated paint, his handling of tones and colour masses, the sensitivity of his drawing, the tenderness of expression and quality of ideas. Now clearly work such as that produced by the early heroes of the modern movement, still less later efforts by the likes of Twombly or Basquiat, could not hold a candle to the old masters judged by those standards so new standards had to be invented. Chief amongst these were meaningless words like "energy" "originality"  (no real artist ever strives after originality) "freshness" and the like. In fact when boiled down the importance of these works was considered to lie in their being unlike works which had gone before.

 

 It is still a commonly expressed idea, that there is value in a work of art just because it looks different from art of previous ages and this is true of architecture too. In fact so firmly has this idea taken root that it is probably impossible for an architect now to propose to build a building for example in the Gothic style. When reference to an historic style is made, as in the  vaguely neo-classical style at Prince Charles' development at Poundbury, both the Prince and his architects received a huge amount of criticism for just this fact; for "looking backwards" or not being "progressive". Never mind that people take pleasure from living in a well proportioned and well constructed house!  From personal experience also I know how much prejudice one has to overcome if one attempts to paint pictures in a style un-influenced by modernism. This may strike some people as an obvious fact, why should a mediaeval or pre-modern style have any relevance to the modern world? but yet what is "relevance" and why should we reject work of real quality simply because previous generations were able to enjoy them as well?

 

This indeed is a poisonous idea, that historic methods and styles which have graced our civilization for centuries are no longer valid merely by the fact of their being historic. It would seem, and in fact in a way, is really so, that a great divide has been erected between the past and the present; a chasm we are discouraged not merely from crossing but even acknowledging. We are told that the "modern" is qualitively different from anything preceeding it, the very phrase "modern art" is a giveaway, why is it not just "art"? The truth is that, in cultural terms, the greatest invention, (the only invention one is tempted to add) of the modern age is the concept of modernity itself, with which catastrophic results the pictures at the top of this post demonstrate.

 

It often strikes me as odd that people are so often keen to marvel at the artistic and architectural wonders of the past and yet seemingly accept that it is no longer possible to produce work of a similar standard. When queuing for a blockbuster show of Titian or Velasquez I am tempted to ask people if they feel angry or cheated that they can not get a similar pleasure by going to a contemporary show, but I suspect many people would not even understand the question. The belief seems to be ingrained that the art of the past is one thing and the art of our time is something else. One goes to the former for pleasure, joy, spiritual uplift, to the latter (if at all) to be "challenged" or "provoked". Quite what is being "challenged" by the way is never made clear, conventional notions of something or other usually, in some banal self referential way that requires a long winded curatorial explanation designed apparently to enlighten but in reality rather to obfuscate.

 

Well, as I often say "thank God for the past!" Can you imagine a world with art and architecture existing only from after the First World War? What a mean- spirited, ugly and depressing world that would be! how childish, narrow and self-absorbed! Culture is an organic growth, it cannot long survive being up-rooted from the past, and this, for a century had been the stated aim of a small but deadly band of theorists and practitioners. We all live with the results but I believe it is the duty of all of us who work at art to try and re-establish the link with history and tradition even if at times it seems hopeless. For surely to let ourselves be cut adrift and spin in an endless whirl of degraded modernist anti art is to accept that western civilization will in future be a thing only to be observed from the outside, as it were, rather than lived and breathed and enjoyed and nourished by in the way that previous generations took for granted.

 

 

Lord Leighton
 

 

 

 

 

The Mythic School of Painting

Hope: G.F. Watts

In my last post on Burne-Jones I talked a little about the difference between his poetic style of painting by comparison with the more  realistic style of Millais and the other first wave of Pre-Raphaelite painters, and in this post I propose to say a little more about this difference both in terms of style and technique and we will see how the one can affect the other.
I have borrowed my title from a talk given by Ruskin at Oxford in the early 1880's, one of a series of six lectures published under the title of "The Art of England".  Ruskin meant by the word "mythic" the desire to represent general truths rather than specific facts. One of the examples he chooses to illustrate the  "realistic" school is a watercolour by Rossetti of  "The Virgin in the house of St.John" where Mary is depicted rising in the morning to trim her lamp. Although the incident may have symbolic value it is presented in such a way as to impress on the viewers' mind the absolute veracity of the thing actually having happened. The contrast with the mythic school thus becomes clearer; here we are concerned primarily with the presentation of symbols and personification and the two artists he chooses to represent the mythic school are Watts and Burne-Jones. He summarises the difference between the two modes of thought thus: " had both Rossetti and Burne-Jones been set to illustrate the first chapter of Genesis, Rossetti would have painted either Adam or Eve - but Edward Burne-Jones a Day of Creation.

My experience at the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition was that the "mythic" school of painting, as represented primarily by Burne-Jones, seemed to suggest a deeper truth, to be in a sense more true, than the realistic school, although I accept of course that is entirely a matter of temperament and has no objective basis in reality. Nonetheless as a painter I am always interested in how a thing is done, and so  I then move on to the thorny question of why should this be so. What is it about the mythic school which seems to me to reveal something more profound? Here we come to the point which I often come back to in the analysis of painting, ie the means of expression at an artists' disposal are in fact fairly limited. Critics will talk of abstract emotions, of the anguish, joy or sympathy with the plight of lovers or whatever it may be that a painter puts in to his pictures but as a painter I have looked in vain in the art supplies shops for a tube of paint marked "empathy". They don't exist. All an artist has is a range of colours and the ability to arrange them on a flat surface. Subject of course is important, more important even I must confess than I used to be prepared to admit, but it is not as all important as many people might think. Here to demonstrate the point are two pictures of a very similar subject






Arthur Hughes ; The Nativity
 

Madonna and Child with St.John: Bouguereau.
 

One of the most interesting points a comparison of these two pictures raises, interesting especially for a practising painter, is how does the level of realism utilised by the artist effect the response of the viewer. Or to put it in the terms of the debate about the realist and mythic schools, do the different schools demand or require different levels of realism. It is fairly obvious that an artist who is intent on emphasising the actual facts of the scene depicted is hardly able to over play the realism of his or her technique but what interests me is does a similar technique help or hinder a painter of the mythic school in his attempt to portray the general or universal rather than the specific? If we look at Bouguereau's picture we are struck by the reality of the figures, by their weight and solidity, and of the props likewise, we feel we could give our knees a nasty crack against the Madonna's marble throne. The message of the picture is partly at least therefore, "this is real, the Christ child was also a human child, very similar to any we might meet every day of our lives". In comparison, look at the little picture by Hughes, surely what is being stressed here is the miraculous nature of the incarnation, what we see is a vision of something other, the fact of such an event once having taken place in history at a specific time and place is surely of secondary importance to the universal and on-going miraculous nature of that event.

What are the technical means deployed by the two painters to help convey the different messages? The thing which distinguishes the Hughes from the Bouguereau above all is the flatness of the former. This flatness is apparent in two ways; firstly in terms of the overall composition, the figures are pushed up towards the picture plane and it is hardly possible to imagine walking around the manger whereas with Bouguereau the space is fully articulated, there is not a great deal of depth but everything is in its place. Secondly and perhaps more importantly the figures and objects in the Hughes picture are painted with the minimum amount of chiaroscuro. The development of chiaroscuro (literally light and dark) which occurred in painting around the turn of the sixteenth century was greeted as a great step forward in the quest to depict the natural world and was seized upon by almost all painters of the period. A generation or two later, the Mannerists had already come to realise that accurate depiction of natural light phenomena was a double edged sword and one great painter of the earlier period also seemed to sense the possible dangers and ignored it, to the great harm, it must be said, of his career at the time and subsequent reputation for almost three centuries. That painter of course was Botticelli, and its no accident I think, that the painter most concerned with mystery and allegory should have felt the new methods of realism would not help him achieve his aims. A picture such as this surely depends at least partly for its impact on the fact we don't pause for a moment to consider whether it depicts an historical fact.



Mystic Nativity: Botticelli



 

Compare this to the treatment of light by Raphael in his famous picture of the Transfiguration



The Transfiguration of Christ: Raphael

What we can see here is a demonstration of the interesting fact that most masters of the High Renaissance were happy to light their figures with a studio light even when they were placed outdoors, giving them a full tonal range and thus a great degree of roundness and solidity which, in fact would never be the case in an outdoor light. It is done so skilfully that the unnaturalness of the lighting tends to pass unnoticed.  Botticelli's figures on the other hand have enough chiaroscuro to prevent them looking perfectly flat like a playing card but no more. Solidity is not one of his concerns and I think it reasonable to suggest that too much solidity and thus too much reality can be counter productive for the painter who wishes to deal with allegories and archetypes.  Ruskin himself was certainly aware of the fact that too much realism could be inimical to symbolism. The critic who insisted on the minutest observation of nature for the painter of nature was also able to say :" I cannot...demand botanical accuracy in the graining of the wood employed for the spokes of a Wheel of Fortune. Indeed .... I am under an instinctive impression that some kind of strangeness or quaintness, or even violation of probability, would be not merely admissable, but even desirable, in the delineation of a figure intended to represent ... an idea or an aphorism." Well there is certainly no shortage of strangeness or quaintness in this wonderful picture by Botticelli

Burne-Jones, the starting point of this inquiry himself mused over the same problem, He once said that his pictures ended up as being "a reflection of a reflection of something purely imaginary". This wasn't merely a pretty turn of phrase but an accurate way of describing his work process. If he wanted a prop in a painting he would, if it were something complicated, have it made, armour particularly, then he would make studies from the made item and then make the final image on canvas from those studies. I can't help but feel that he was thus intentionally keeping realism at arm's length, he didn't want to get too involved in the physical matter of his pictures for fear that it would muddy the poetic matter. There is no "botanical accuracy in the graining of the wood" in this picture  below and it would seem that Burne-Jones agreed with Ruskin that that was to the pictures benefit rather than otherwise.






The Wheel of Fortune: Burne-Jones





 

In fact a quick survey of  art history (a very quick one I must admit!) appears to suggest that artists whose primary interest was of the symbolist persuasion have often cultivated a certain strangeness or vagueness of execution, Gustave Moreau is another name which springs to mind amongst a myriad of others, particularly from the nineteenth century, although as I mentioned earlier, Mannerists such as Pontormo or Rosso Fiorentino could also be included. Maybe we can introduce another duality into art history, to accompany the age old classic/romantic dichotomy, perhaps we might term it matter/spirit or fact/poetry. Either way, its a post for another day...




Hesiod: Moreau

The Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain Part 4: Sir Edward Burne-Jones



Sir Edward Burne-Jones: Love among the Ruins

I will finish my round up of the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Tate Britain with a piece about the artist, who, I must confess at the outset, I consider to be one of the very great artists of the world, Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898). This estimate depends to a certain extent on what one considers to be the purpose of art and its role in the life of society and I will be discussing this in a bit more detail in later posts. Purely in technical terms though, that is to say, the skills necessary to produce any worthwhile artwork, there are few in the history of art who can surpass him in the range and extent of his abilities. You may, reasonably enough, doubt my credentials to make such a statement, but you would be foolish to ignore the opinion of such a considerable artist as G.F.Watts so I can't resist quoting a passage from the memoirs of Charles Hallé who records the following conversation in which Watts asks "whereabouts in art do you place Burne-Jones?" "Amongst the first 12 or 15" I [Hallé] replied, "I place him first of all" said Watts. "Do you really mean that you place him above Michaelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Leonardo?" "No", was the answer; "I do not mean that the men you have mentioned were not greater in many ways, but that no artist who has ever lived at any time has united in himself so many gifts of the highest order - imagination, design, drawing, colour and manipulation". Praise indeed, and one thing is for sure, if that was true in the 1890's it is certainly still true today!

 

 There are one or two small early works of Burne-Jones in the first rooms at the exhibition, but, quite rightly, they are dominated by the works of the PRB painters themselves and their early associates  and friends. The work of the later period, of Burne-Jones and Morris, are left to the last two rooms. The penultimate one contains work in the applied arts, tapestry, embroidery, stained glass and the like but it is the last room where Burne-Jones' pictures can really be seen in all their glory.

Sir Edward Burne-Jones: The Rock of Doom

Sir Edward Burne-Jones: The Doom Fulfilled

 

The special attraction of this exhibition are three works from the Perseus series which normally live in Stuttgart and are rarely seen in Britain, It is perhaps not widely enough known that the complete series of gouache paintings, 10 in all, though in various states of completion, can be seen in Southampton Art Gallery, hung together in one room and a wonderful experience it is too, to be able to absorb the whole series at one sitting. Here though we have 3 of the oils, 8 were planned, only 4 of which were brought to completion. Poor Arthur Balfour, philosopher and future prime minister, meekly went along with Burne-Jones' recomendation to re-panel his drawing room to better suit the pictures only to wait 15 years and see the artist die before the commission was completed. Along side these works we have other masterpieces from the painters's mature years; "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" and the "Golden Stairs" from the Tate's own collection plus the wonderful "Laus Veneris" and "Love Among the Ruins". Burne-Jones is one of those artists who are at their best when seen in large quantity, many artists suffer in those circumstances, but Burne-Jones creates an imaginary world for the spectator to enter and when literally surrounded by his work the effect, I might have said "the spell", is hypnotic.


Sir Edward Burne-Jones Laus Veneris

As my previous posts have made clear, I dearly love the paintings of the Pre-Rapahelites, I mean those paintings which truly merit that tag, the work of the Brotherhood and others such as Hughes and Brown, but looking at several rooms of their work and then passing on to these magnificent Burne-Jones's was a shock and I want to try and examine the nature of the this shock because it tells me a lot about what art can do and will I hope be instructive for others.  So, my first reaction, completely unpremeditated, and catching me somewhat by surprise having bowed the knee before Millais and the others was something to the effect of "now this is real art". I was aware suddenly that I had been looking at descriptions of the physical world and now I was contemplating something which went beyond the physical, which used the physical world as a reference point but somehow hinted that the actual material appearance of things could be just a cipher for some kind of greater and more profound truth. I know this will seem a bit airy-fairy for some and yet it is what I felt and I felt it very forcibly too, in a moment all the truthful realism of the earlier rooms, beautiful though it often was, suddenly seemed rather thin and literally superficial. I hang on to the power of that first perception because I believe it to be very important. Of course with later reflection I was aware that many of the earlier works, especially some of Millais work, "Autumn Leaves" and "The Blind Girl" to name only two of many could be categorised as being much more than just a material description of the physical world but the strength and power of Burne-Jones' work was such as to make these pictures fade from my mind.

How Burne-Jones does this, how he achieves what du Maurier called the "Burne-Jonesiness of Burne-Jones" I will discuss in a later post, insofar as it is possible to analyse at all. But for now, the point I wish to make is that it struck me, not for the first time of course but with an unusual  sharpness and clarity that if art could do this, if it could lift the veil of the material world and give us hints of something more profoundly spiritual, if it can raise our eyes from the mud and give us even a hint of a better and fairer land (a land in Burne-Jones' own words, "more true than real"), then, simply, shouldn't it? Can there be a more valuable  purpose for art than as a repository for and conduit to, the highest ideals of mankind, and if the answer is, as it surely must be, no, then doesn't it follow that the greatest art is that which fulfills that purpose to the highest degree? Of course this is not to say that all artists should try and paint pictures of this sort or that sort, each must paint whatever he or she feels compelled to do.  In Ruskin's words "you can't tell a secret if you don't know it". Not everyone has a real sense of the immaterial, I adore Veronese for example but it was clearly this world in all its mundane physicality which delighted him, and with that delight to help and guide him he produced some of the world's most lovely pictures. I would maintain my belief though that it is reasonable to reserve the highest category of art, that which is most valuable to the spiritual being which is man, for that art which goes beyond the facts of the material world and provokes a sense of and reverence for the unnameable immaterial realm which we sometimes sense but can never fully grasp. I am led back to Burne-Jones' own famous definition of his art which is so superbly illustrated by the pictures in this exhibition: "I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream, of something that never was and never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone, in a land no-one can define or remember, only desire"



Sir Edward Burne-Jones: The Baleful Head

 

The Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain Part 3: Sir John Everett Millais

Sir John Millais: Ophelia

As has been recognised since the they first started exhibiting, the star of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the artist whose presence in the group was the main reason for its eventual success was John Millais. He was a prodigiously talented child, the youngest pupil ever at the Royal  Academy schools aged 10 and tipped for stardom almost from his earliest years. His years as a Pre-Raphaelite can be seen as a period of youthful rebellion against the institution which nutured him and to which he later returned as a prodigal son, to become, briefly at the end of his life, its president.

  Modern critics, who pretend to regard artists as inherently rebellious, even, ironically, arch establishment figures such as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst, consider Millais' Pre-Raphaelite years as the highlight of his career before a return to academic banality. I think this view is harsh and overlooks both the excellence of Millais' later work and his consistent awareness of, and experimentation with, the latest trends and ideas in the art world. But having said that I think it is also true to say that over the period 1849-1860 Millais produced a huge number of works of the highest quality with a consistency which he never quite recaptured at any other stage of his career. In so doing Millais produced most of the most familiar Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces and is always the star of any group show.


Sir John Millais: Isabella

His first properly Pre-Raphaelite work, the first to be exhibited with the then mysterious initials PRB appearing in the picture was "Isabella" of 1849.  It is an extraordinary work in many ways and mostly because of its radical departure from accepted academic rules of composition. It has the curious flatness common to the groups' early work borrowed from early Italian work achieved partly by the rejection of academic rules of hierarchical lighting. Also immediately apparent is the concern with individuality, every character reveals an intense study of physiognomy and character. Above all we are struck by the Pre-Raphaelite concern for detail and finish, and all this the work of an artist not yet out of his teens!
Over the next few years Millais turned out masterpiece after masterpiece with an extraordinary facility. His "Ophelia" of 1852 has always, and deservedly, been one of the public's favourites in the Tate Gallery, a wonderful work displaying not just an extraordinary level of technical skill but also a great talent for selecting a psycological moment of great weight and import. This is an image which once seen is not easily forgotten, it has great beauty and pathos but also just that right amount of strangeness which makes it stick in the mind, My favourite probably, although it is difficult to choose, is "Mariana" of 1851. Like so many of Millais' works it is hard to see anything wrong with it. The drawing is faultless, the colour superb and the pathos and intensity of feeling in the moment selected is profound. In addition this is a small picture painted on a panel and has an almost enamel like quality of finish which enhances the jewel like quality of colour.

Sir John Millais: Mariana

In the mid 1850's Millais' technique started to get a bit broader and more painterly, a trend which was to continue through his career and end with an interest in painters such as Velasquez, surely one of the least "Pre-Raphaelite" painters of them all. But at this stage Millais retained his Pre-Raphaelite concern for mood and emotion and produced some of his most powerful and moving works. "Autumn Leaves" of 1856 is probably the exemplar of this type of picture. Millais himself said of this picture  that he intended it to be "full of feeling and without subject". By "subject" he meant narrative, there is a subject to this picture but it is not one which can be disentangled form the mood. Indeed it is truer to say that the subject is the mood, one of dreamy reflectiveness on the passing of summer and youth, and by extension, of life itself.

Sir John Millais: Autumn Leaves

Sir John Millais: Sir Isumbras at the Ford

Millais here was showing himself as a forerunner of the Aesthetic movement which is not usually though to have started until about 1860, and with which he is not normally associated. However the idea of dispensing with a literary narrative and painting a picture which is designed to evoke a mood was absolutely central to the Aesthetic movement and could be used as a summation of the work of Moore and Burne-Jones, its greatest painters. Here Millais' colour is at its most glorious, the evening landscape of both "Autumn Leaves", and another of the pictures of this period "Sir Isumbras at the Ford" are wonders of their kind as is the fresh sunlight after a storm in the "The Blind Girl"
It was seeing Millais' work, albeit in reproduction, which first made me aware of what painting could do and keen to try to be a painter myself. Thirty years later I am still proud to record this debt to a painter I regard as one of the greatest ever. In my next post I will introduce a small and possibly unfair caveat to that, but I think it only fair to close this article with a quote from Burne-Jones who after having seen Millais' "Return of the Dove to the Ark" in a private collection in Oxford as a young student, returned home and wrote in a letter to a friend, "and then, we knew"



Sir John Millais: The Return of the Dove to the Ark

The Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain Part 2: William Holman Hunt

I must confess at the outset that although I will always revere the Pre-Raphaelites as a group for their art and love them for the primary role they played in played in my own artisitc education, Holman Hunt has always been a slightly problematic artist. There can be little doubt that his pictures can be difficult to like and for two main reasons I think. The first is that his colour can be very harsh, he seemed to have a liking for rather acidic greens and yellows and this accentuates the hardness of the essentially linear method of early PRB composition. The second reason is his rather overbearing moralistic attitude which at times spills over into his painting with often a deleterious effect. This is not the place for a long discussion of the role of morality in painting (I will talk about it in greater depth in future posts though, so you have been warned!) suffice it to say here that as a general rule I think an overt "message" of any kind which might better be written, ie moral, political or social, tends to count against the artisitc merit of a picture. I say "tends to" because it is not an iron law merely an observable phenomenen; if art should appeal primarily to the senses, as I believe it should, then it follows that any overt intellectual message is likely, by impressing itself on the mind of the spectator, to weaken the sensual response.

 I am aware that this idea is a controversial one  and raises a lot of questions but I shall pass over this topic till a later date and continue with the specific subject of Holman Hunt at the Tate exhibtion. Having made the comment that he can be a difficult artist to warm to I shall start with a couple of pictures which I think illustrate why this might be so. First up we have "The Awakening Conscience" of 1853, one of the most famous of the many Victorian "problem pictures".

William Holman Hunt: The Awakening Conscience



For a modern audience (as indeed for contemporary ones, though for different reasons) it may not be clear what is going on here, we are not, (at least most of us are not) familiar with the practise of having a "kept woman" in a flashy St.John's Wood apartment the immorality of which was betrayed, as Ruskin pointed out in a letter to The Times, by the "fatal newness" of the furniture. The picture is littered with signs and symbols which, if read correctly, tell the story of the carefree young "swell" and the poor woman he has dragged down to a life of sin who realises, too late presumabably, that she is on the road to ruin. The whole situation is complete anathema to the modern view of sexual realtions of course, and indeed it may be argued that we are resistant to having our consciences awakened about any situation whatever. So the picture has a hard task to win modern sympathy to begin with and the microscopic depiction of a vulgar Victorian sitting room full of ugly furniture and uglier accessories isn't the best way to go about it however much we are compelled to admire Hunt's technical skill.

The other picture I would select as indicative of the difficulties a modern audience has with Hunt is "The Triumph of the Innocents".  Of course any religious picture has a difficulty now as for the most part a modern audience is completely unfamiliar with the stories which Hunt would assume his audience knew by heart. This particularly "story" of course is an imaginative invention of Hunt's and he set himself the difficult task of giving body to the essentially incorporeal spirits of the young children massacred by King Herod. He has doubled his difficult by setting his picture in an eerie moonlight and the result I think is a wonderful picture, in many ways full of delightful detail, but difficult to swallow whole as it were. We can't help but think, "what is going on here?" and the time spent puzzling it out is time taken away from letting the aesthetic sensation wash over us. Like so much of Hunt's work it demands intellectual appreciation rather than aesthetic appreciation.

There is very little in Hunt's work where one gets the impression that he has been affected or inspired by the purely sensual nature of the medium of paint. One is reminded of Wilde's quip about Henry James that he wrote "as though it were a painful duty" but although Hunt never entirely forgets his mission to teach the public moral truths there are moments when other elements force (one is tempted to say against Hunt's will, but that is perhaps unfair) their way to the forefront of the spectators impression. It is perhaps revealing that many of his most appealing works are in those categories which by their nature are not so well suited to moral messages, ie landscape and portraiture. It is not in the Tate show but the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has recently acquired a lovely portrait of his wife known as "The Birthday". This, along with the wonderful "Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil (see below) is one of Hunt's attempts at a picture in the Aesthetic mode as popularized by Moore, Burne-Jones and others and is a glorious exercise in colour which only makes one wish Hunt could have done more in this vein, though in reality of course no artist of the period was further from accepting the aesthetic watchword of art for art's sake.

William Holman Hunt: The Birthday

 In landscape too, Hunt produced some truly memorable work, among which the one pictured below is in my opinion one of the great British landscapes of the century and remembering that this was the century of both Turner and Constable that is not a small claim.

William Holman Hunt: Strayed Sheep (Our English Coasts)

The double title is typical of Hunt and hints again at a message beyond the obvious, in this case a political one hinting at the possible threat of French invasion. The point is though that it is entirely possible to look at this picture and be completely unaware of this and view nothing but some sheep standing in a gorgeous landscape. And how beautifully it is painted! Delacroix, on seeing this picture in Paris in 1855 recorded in his journal "I am really astounded by Hunt's sheep" and one can see why this great colourist was so impressed. This is a picture that really merits close and detailed observation, every stroke is a delight, the wool of the sheep is made up of tiny marks of pink and yellow and mauve and details such as the bright crimson of the  sheep's ears as the sunlight passes through them are faithfully and beautifully recorded.

This picture started life as a replica for the background for Hunt's most famous sheep picture "The Hireling Shepherd" of 1851.

William Holman Hunt: The Hireling Shepherd

To my mind this is one of the great masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It is a truly wonderful picture, both in the detail, which as one would expect of Hunt is painted with astonishing virtuosity, and in the whole, which is a beautiful arrangement of hue and value. For the latter point squint your eyes and see how cleverly Hunt makes one mass of the lower values running from left to right, through the shadow of the shepherd up through his dark clothes, into the hair of the girl and thence into the shadows of the trees and the landscape on the the right. Of course there is a moral to this picture, a mid Victorian audience couldn't have heard the words "shepherd" and "sheep" without being aware of the Christian allusions and here the shepherd's lack of concern for his flock is intended as an indictment of the clergy. Even without the fact that these sort of allusions mean nothing to a large part of the contemporary audence, the immediate impression made by this picture is of the lovely representation of a young couple set in a glorious English landscape. Everything is painted with such tender care and a reverence for the beauty of nature that the slightly critical moral message of the picture comes a definite second (if it comes at all) into the mind of the spectator.

I think it fair to say that the majority of Hunt's best pictures came in the early years of his career when he was working hard to establish himself and had the constant support (and perhaps the competition) of his Preraphaelite brothers, particularly Millais who was, and remained, a close friend. He always worked slowly of course, and unlike Millais never abandoned the meticulous and painstaking Preraphaelite technique. Many of his later works such as "The Shadow of Death" suffer from the defect I have talked about earlier where the need to stress a moral message has taken precedence over strictly pictorial concerns, the pose of Christ throws the necessary shadow on the wall but looks slightly ridiculous and the hint of the presents of the Magi in the trunk on the left is indicative, as has been pointed out by W Graham Robertson, of Hunt's curiously literal turn of mind.

The masterpiece of his later years, happily included in the Tate show, is "The Lady of Shalott" and it  may not be coincidental that this great picture is based on an illustration made at the outset if his career in the early 1850's. It has to be said this is an odd picture, it is not immediately apparent that the circular construction on the floor is a loom but the colours are more subdued than is usual for Hunt and the whole picture is dominated by the magnificent figure of the Lady struggling to break free of her tapestry and her destiny. Of course we view her struggle as a heroic one and her destiny, however shadowy, as inherently unjust, but we can enjoy the picture without knowing the poem from which it comes. It is a wonderful aesthetic conception and that, to borrow a phrase from Keats, is all we know and all we need to know. Incidentally I can't resist mentioning in connection of this picture, as an instance of the strange blindness which sometimes afflicts the masters of one art towards another, the single recorded comment of Tennyson when seeing the original illustration which was only "I never said her hair was flying about all over the place like that!"



William Holman Hunt: The Lady of Shalott

So in closing, although Hunt can be a difficult artist (and indeed personality) to really warm to, he was a considerable artist who always merits attention and critical study. As is often the case, his merits were also his faults. He had the one quality which all the great Victorians had, and which we tend to lack, in fact we tend even not to regard it as a quality, and that is that he took himself seriously. Often today the phrase "he didn't take himsalf too seriously" is used as the ultimate accolade, but the Victorians knew the great secret that life is a serious business and you can't really enjoy it unless you understand that. What is even more certain is that you can't produce art of any value unless you regard what you do as supremely important. Hunt did that and deserves respect and admiration as a result. On the minus side his view of life as a serious business could slide off into a morbid and puritanical morality which impressed itself with often negative results in his art. But he produced, over the course of a long life, a number of truly wonderful works in different genres, portrait, landscape and religious. In the last category, I haven't yet mentioned his picture "The Light of the World" one of the most famous religious picture of any age and a work which, focusing on the Christian message of love and redemption, is probably the most tender and generous of Hunt's religious pictures. Hunt's work needs a sympathetic curator to save him from his worst excesses but thus treated he can be shown as a considerable artist, a superb technician and dedicated artist who always produced pictures worth looking at and thinking about, and I have to say, as an epitaph, that would do for me.

 

William Holman Hunt: Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil
 

 




The Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain Part 1: Ford Madox Brown



Ford Madox Brown: "The Last of England"

 

 

Well I am now back living in good old blighty (which is one of the reasons for the long gap in posting) and able to make regualr visits to the great galleries of London and elsewhere in this sceptred isle. By great good fortune Tate Britain have decided to mark my return with a large exhibtion of the Pre-Raphaelites who happen to be my first artistic love and who in fact inspired me to try to paint in the first place.

The exhibtion as a whole is not as large as that held in 1984 mainly because the earlier one contained large sections on both watercolours and drawings and developments beyond 1860 whereas this one, reasonably enough, concentrates on works in oil during the years when the brotherhood could be said to be working to some extent in concert. The consequence of this is that Rossetti appears as a slightly peripheral figure - only 4 or 5 of his watercolours from the 1850's are on display- but this reflects the way things would have appeared to contemporaries more than Rossetti's subsequent and posthumous fame would suggest to us.

Into his place as a vital and powerful member of the group steps the still under valued Ford Madox Brown (1821 - 1893). Although never actually a member of the Brotherhood he was perhaps the one artist working in England in 1848 who should have been. Having been born in France and trained in Belgium he had a knowledge of continental art far beyond that of the actual PRBs and crucially had developed an interest in the German painters working in Rome known as the Nazarenes who had anticipated many of the Pre-Raphaelites aims and concerns. It was to Brown that the young Rossetti turned when looking for an inspirational teacher, the elder man having already painted a pre-raphaelite picture before the fact as it were, in the monumental "Seeds and fruits of English  Poetry"

Ford Madox Brown: "The seeds and fruits of English poetry"

Brown was by all accounts an idiosyncratic sort of fellow, difficult to get close to and at times easily offended. His pictures perhaps reflect this, some are difficult to warm to, the colouring is sometimes a bit high and the faces and gestures can border on the grotesque. Some of his pictures are frankly bizarre such as "Stages of Cruelty" but Brown's diary reveals, almost in spite of himself, a warm and tender heart and this shows itself most evidently in his pictures of children, particularly his children such as this delightful early portrait of his daughter Lucy who in later life married William Michael Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel.

Ford Madox Brown: "Lucy"

Tender and loving, yes but never sentimental, the overriding quality of his art was its honesty  and determination to pursue his vision. These qualities are well illustrated by the most famous of his pictures "The last of England" (see top of the page). The reluctant emigrant and his wife stare broodingly out at us, hand in hand, challenging fate to do its worst as they head off to an uncertain new life but the tiny fist of a baby peeping out  from beneath the woman's shawl is a typically tender Brownian touch.

It was the same honesty which made Brown go out into the landscape and paint a picture such as "The Pretty Baa Lambs" a revoutionary picture painted entirely out of doors in full sunlight and experimenting with complementary colours in shadows a good 15 years before the impressionists. Landscape was a strong point for Brown, his "English Autumn afternoon" is one of the greatest of the period but my favourites are the smaller ones done entirely out of doors and experimenting with different light effects such as the lovely luminous "A Hayfield". Brown really was at the cutting edge painting these pictures and has never got the art historical credit he has deserved - a further instance of the wilful blindness of art historians and critics much of which by the way is still very much in evidence in the press reviews of this exhibtion.

Ford Madox Brown:" Pretty Baa Lambs"

Ford Madox Brown: "The Hayfield"

I will close this little piece with a mention of my favourite work by Brown the majestic "Christ washing Peter's feet" a work full of beautiful clouring and individual characterisaton which whilst thoroughly typical of Brown surely makes a little nod in the direction of Leonardo's Last Supper. Brown appears not to have been a Christian in the traditional dogmatic sense of the word but like so many Victorians who had lost their faith he retained a great reverence for the values and personality of Christ and he also tended towards a vague socialism in politics and the example of Christ humbling himself at the feet of a 'mere' fisherman clearly meant a lot to him on several levels.


Ford Madox Brown; "Christ washing Peter's feet"

Brown's actual masterpiece was not included in the exhibiton because it is a series of murals in Manchester Town Hall depicting various scenes from the history of that fine city. Actually of the 12 pictures 8 are murals and 4 are properly speaking frescoes, that is painted directly onto the walls using the Gambier-Parry method which was very popular at the time and also used extensively by Lord Leighton amongst others. In these pictures Brown gives free rein to all his powers of invention in both subject matter, drawing and colouring and, after having seen this exhibition,  the Town Hall is the ideal place to get a proper estimate of this powerful and always interesting artist.

And another thing!

Piero della Francesca; The Flagellation of Christ

In my last post I had a go at art critics and historians for their constant desire to turn all cultural figures into anti establishment anti heroes and today I want to have another swipe at art historians in particular.
In fact the first thing to say is that historians and critics tend to get a bit confused over their separate functions, that is they don't seem to realise that they have separate functions. The job of the critic is to discuss the merits and demerits of a particular work whereas the role of the historian is to construct a narrative to make a coherent story out of the history of art.

Now put like that it may well occur to the intelligent reader that I have set the historian an impossible task, and indeed others before me, most notably Gombrich, have declared that there is no coherent story, there is properly speaking, no art history as such, only artists. This view has much to recommend it. It is true that there are certain epochs in history, the Renaissance being the obvious example when there seemed to be a cultural zeitgeist influencing the whole art world, when artists seemed to be working towards a common goal, in this case of greater descriptive truth and technical prowess, and yet on closer examination even this view has flaws, so much so that the old terms of High Renaissance ' and 'Mannerism' for example tend to be eschewed.

I shan't go into detail on this particular issue here suffice to say that perhaps inevitably in our age of fragmentation, the view that there is a coherent thread running through art history is beginning to seem less plausible.  The exception to this though is the history of modernism. Here there most definitely is an official narrative which quite firmly divides artists into sheep and goats, those who furthered, or at least accepted the rise of modernism and those who resisted. The former being praised to the skies, the latter cast into darkness. This is where the great confusion between the function of critic and historian lies and it leads to much mental turmoil for the honest historian and sometimes the adoption of an Orwellian mode of 'double think'.

The problem manifest itself in two complementary ways, both the result of confusing artistic merit with art historical significance. Now, if you construct a narrative which makes the rise of modernism the central cultural event of the last 150 years (and to be fair, you don't need to approve of it to recognise its importance) then that makes Cezanne an artist of great significance, the 'father of modernism' as he is often called, and he thus becomes at a stroke the most influential artistic figure of the modern world. Historians, confusing their function, thus have to market him as one of, if not the, greatest artists of the same period. The reverse side of the coin is that artists with no particular influence on modernism are relegated to 'also ran' status. The Pre-Raphaelites have long been the exemplar of this; they are dismissed as insignificant and as having been a cultural dead end and therefore of no merit.

The mistake made here is to take what is called (or at least was when I was a student) the 'Whig' view of history, which in short means reading it backwards. The great British historians of the 19th century regarded Britain as almost an ideal state, a peaceful prosperous democracy (in their terms) and asked themselves the question, 'how did we get from the barbarous past to the wonderful present?' and history became the story of that development. Art history, at least the last 150 years of it is now treated in the same way, 'how did we get from the ridiculous  Victorian academic to the glories of Damian Hirst?' thus a canon of relevant artists has been created. Courbet begat Manet, Manet begat Monet, Monet begat Cezanne, Cezanne begat Picasso and so on down the line. If an artist is not on that family tree he is rejected by most and desperately tried to force into it by his particular supporters.

For fifty years after their  deaths great Victorian artists such as Leighton, Millais and Burne-Jones were either ridiculed or ignored by art historians, their merits as painters deliberately traduced because they did not fit into the story of modernism and even now, when their skill and talent is more widely appreciated by the public, academic historians feel the need to justify their attention by trying to bring them into the canon. Thus Burne-Jones is praised because the young Picasso admired his work and Millais gains kudos because Van Gogh liked his landscapes as if who liked or disliked their work could have any retrospective effect on the quality of their work!

 Possibly the most ridiculous example I have come across was in a book about Piero della Francesca which invited the reader to admire that master's work because his interest in geometric forms 'anticipated' Cezanne. As if the only thought in Piero's mind in his workshop in Borgo San Sepulchro as he worked on his marvellous 'Flagellation of Christ' ( see the image at the top of the post, you see it was there for a reason!) was "this is bound to interest some semi skilled painter five centuries from now" and as if Cezanne could have produced anything with an iota of its thoughtfulness and strange beauty in five lifetimes of trying! Having said that takes the prize, I did see a close contender in a review of the recent exhibition of the Glasgow Boys in London. The writer (who I would name and shame if only I could remember who it was) noticing that these painters lived and worked in the last decades of the nineteenth century criticised them for not being followers of Monet but only of another painter he had obviously never heard of,  to whit Bastien Lepage.  Knowing only the official canon of modern art it seemed positively wilful to this critic that anybody could ignore the giant Monet and take as an exemplar an artist no longer thus enshrined,  rather as if a scientist of the eighteenth century had ignored Newton and tried to construct a model of the universe without gravity.


Jules Bastien-Lepage: Pauvre Fauvette

Well, art isn't science, there is no 'artistic progress' to parallel that of science. Let us therefore endeavour to look at each work of art as a separate creation; the product of an individual mind working in a specific time and place and approach it with the same criteria for excellence. It is strange how rare it is for anybody to ignore their knowledge of art history, however limited, when looking at art but it is an effort well worth making for only then can we arrive at a true appreciation of the work in question.