The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain - Review

ANDREW WILTON AND ROBERT UPSTONE with contributions by dint of BARBARA BRYANT, CHRISTOPHER NEWALL, MARYANNE STEVEN AND SIMON WILSON

Paris: Flammarion for Tate Gallery Publishing, Ltd 1997 304 pp; 139 color ills., 60 b/w $5500 woven fabric Exhibition schedule: Tate Gallery, London, October 16 1997-January 4 1998; Haus der Kunst Munich, January 30-April 26 1998; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, May 15-August 30 1998

John Christian, the leading Burne-Jone scholar, introduces the massive, splendidly produc catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1998 exhibition Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer with a retrospective observe of the artist's abrupt changes of fortune. In Burne-Jones's hold lifetime, recognition came relatively late. A largely self-trained artist who began as an Oxford undergraduate reading literature and preparing for the temple he did not develop his fine skills of draftsmanship, distinctive visual vocabulary, or expressive use of color until his thirties and forties. Perhaps more important, for the first part of his career he worked chiefly on small-scale pen-and-ink drawings and watercolors for a circle of friends and private buyer He continuationed income from this work with designs for stained glass and other furnishings sold (usually unsigned) from one side Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, the firm of "Art Workmen" headed by means of William Morris, who decorated house of god and domestic interiors on commission and later produc furniture, wallpapers, and patterned fabric for the upper extreme point of the retail trade. Not until the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 when he was forty-four, was Burne-Jone discovered by dint of an exhibition-going public as a major painter. on the contrary by his sixties (he died at sixty-five, in 1898) the public acclaim and high prices he knew in the late 1870 and 1880 were rapidly disappearing. Christian cites a selection of largely unappreciative remarks from succeeding decades, ranging from the solely contemptuous to the triumphantly cutting. For a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of this century Burne-Jones's art dropp from critical and public notice. When not forgotten, he was suspected of complicity with the philistine British parochialism for which the Victorian years were remembered. There were always those who cast regretful glances back at the artist who, after all, had defined himself as profoundly unsympathetic to mid-Victorian sentimental, domestic aesthetics. on the contrary for most critics, particularly in the decades from the Great War end the early 1960s, Burne-Jones's individual vision and highly stylized art were far down compromised by its brief jiffy of late Victorian popularity. As critique or renewal, Burne-Jones's art was dismissed as at best misguided and self-deluding, at worst pathetically or level criminally ineffectual.

Christian's introductory essay repeats the action with which he opened the abundant more modest catalogue he wrote for the pioneering Arts Council exhibition of 1975 - the greatest in quantity comprehensive exhibition devoted to Burne-Jone since his death (and in fact larger than the Metropolitan's). The abundant smaller exhibition organized to commemorate the centenary of the artist's birth in 1933 had been hedged circular with apologies, even by its promoter In 1975 Christian, then publishing the first fruits of a decade of intensive investigation undertaken when Burne-Jones was hardly a respectable bring under rule of art historical research, introduced the artist with cautious optimism as newly returned to favor. Twenty-three years later, he confidently traces the transformation of a " 'scorned and rejected' figure" of the earlier twentieth hundred into "one of the greatest in quantity popular British artists, the make submissive of enormous interest not sole in his native country on the contrary in Europe, America, Canada, and, by means of no means least, Japan" (p 4) Christian's be in possession of scrupulous labors of art historical scholarship have been largely responsible for transforming the critical understanding of this artist for those who have followed his articles and studied his entries (often essays in miniature) upon pictures exhibited in all these venue in the past three decades.

on the contrary popularity - public appetite as measured by the agency of attendance at exhibitions, say, or the proliferation of reproductions of certain of his pictures in offices or society rooms or on note cards, shopping bags, paperweights, and for a like reason on - does not analyze the artist's relation to the narratives of art history or the pantheons of contemporary critics. It makes a certain number of critics and art historians distinctly nervous, pushing them to discover of recent origin virtues and different reasons for admiring what is again fashionable, if they do not disclaim it altogether. Although Burne-Jones's star may have "remained resolutely in the ascendant" since 1975 (p 4) his art still trails a collection of vapor of suspicion unlikely to be dispelled by means of its recent return to high visibility (and high prices) in auction houses and museum stores and in exhibitions at major museums. Newspaper reviews of the exhibition in fresh York, for example, were les than wholeheartedly enthusiastic. granting the weekly cultural section of the fresh York Times gave the exhibition front-page, color photo treatment (June 5 1998) the reviewer was unusually apologetic, faintly embarrassed at confessing a taste for Burne-Jones's medieval dream-world. The Wall public way Journal dismissed it as kitsch for summer tourists (June 11 1998) Perhaps this is a particularly American reaction. Are Americans, like many mid-Victorians, impatient with those who do not fit optimistic, relentlessly progressive art historical narratives - especially when they make go round to a remote and European past (the Middle Ages) for other than the postmodern quotation? Perhaps, on the other hand I wonder. It may well be the paradox of Burne-Jones's art - as of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's and of Morris and Company's decorative casts - that by seeking to circumvent Victorian taste and Victorian art markets by dint of working for a small cluster of contemporary collector-patrons, they created the conditions for an art fashion, flat when they seemed to themselves to be pursuing the more principled path of an avant-garde. Perhaps the collapse of the single into the other is not for a like reason infrequent. The economics of survival, if not the engagement of flat the most innovative artists with the particular aesthetic issues of their be in possession of moment once they constitute themselves a cluster or movement, may assure an intimate relation with contemporary tastes that can make the unexpected swerve into fashion possible, and leave its legacies of suspicion.