Whimsical world proves intoxicating
More than a century on from his death, the last of the Pre-raphaelites remains an oddly controversial figure. No artist more potently embodies our ambivalent feelings towards this most British of art movements – and Victorian art in general – than Sir Edward Burne-jones. Yes, Pre-raphaelite works such as Millais’s Ophelia and Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott regularly top lists of the nation’s favourite paintings, but there’s a lingering sense of embarrassment towards this retro-obsessed band of brothers who fetishised a fauxmedieval past at the very moment when Monet and co were blasting art into the future on the other side of the Channel. And where the likes of Millais, Rossetti and Holman Hunt allowed themselves an occasional look at the High Victorian world around them, Burne-jones lets not the faintest hint of the ugly, industrialised 19th century world into his airless fantasy world.
With their whey-faced maidens and mood of slightly creepy, hypnotised rapture, Burne-jones’s paintings have provided – not entirely paradoxically – both the ultimate escape-art for dreamy teenage girls and a glimpse into an uncomfortable world of submerged Victorian desire. Yet experts will argue that with his uncompromising belief in beauty above all else – and undeniable influence across Europe – Burne-jones was one of the first modern artists.
This handsome exhibition – the first in more than four decades – provides a welcome opportunity to look again at this problematic figure: to decide whether his desire to paint worlds that “never were or never will be” dooms him to permanent irrelevance, or if his “beautiful romantic dreams”, as he called them, are just what our troubled times need.
Born in Birmingham in 1833, Burne-jones seems to have recoiled against industrial-suburban mundanity practically from birth, and we meet him in the show’s first room in his mid-20s with his signature aesthetic already almost fully formed, under the influence of his close friend, the utopian designer William Morris, and his mentor, the Pre-raphaelite founder Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The crowded compositions in which every element appears pushed towards the surface – apparent in the show’s poster image Laus Veneris – derive from medieval art, while the refined figure-drawing looks to great Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo; a fusing that feels odd to us today, but suited the Victorians’ pick-and-mix approach to past cultures. The impassive expressions on the tousle-headed androgynous figures evoke both classical sculpture and, weirdly, the Victorian tea room. The sultry woman’s profile in Desiderium might at a glance be by Raphael, but when the model turns towards us in the adjacent drawing, and looks at us with the incongruous directness of someone you might encounter today on a bus, you’re brought thumpingly into the modern world.
From the start, there are eccentric compositional touches that mark Burne-jones out as more than just another wistful Victorian dreamer.
A near life-size oil sketch in which the white-clad narrator of Chaucer’s The Romance of the Rose surveys turquoise statues of the
“four vices” is so wacky it’s positively proto-surreal. The looping lines of a stainedglass window design of St Luke bring to mind the much later art nouveau posters of Alphonse Mucha, backing up the show’s claims for Burnejones as a powerful influence on European artists of the following generation.
Having established his characteristic mood and key stylistic tropes so early, all that was left for Burnejones to do was to keep ratcheting up the intensity, which he proceeded to do – unremittingly – in a progress the exhibition captures quite brilliantly.
While my heart sank on hearing this show would take place in Tate Britain’s underground Manton Street Galleries, this tomb-like ambience perfectly suits the hermetic feel of Burne-jones’s art. In the third and largest room a selection of his major paintings glow in massive gold frames on walls of funereal purple. Any one of these works might be written off as examples of the kind of cranky Victorian narrative painting we tend to walk past in our provincial municipal galleries without a second look. Yet the effect en masse is quite intoxicating. It’s hard not to succumb to the mood of transcendent yearning that suffuses every painting, from the biblical The Morning of the Resurrection to the slightly sinister erotica of The Beguiling of Merlin.
The show argues that Burne-jones was “in essence a decorative artist”, who bridged the gap between the finearts and crafts, but it was as a painter that he was most himself. It’s good to be shown a selection of impressively large tapestries, stained glass and an extraordinary gilded and painted grand piano, all made to his designs. Yet they feel a footnote to the show’s two climactic sequences of paintings, reunited specially for the exhibition.
The large gouache sketches for the Perseus series, intended for the sitting room of the future Conservative prime minister Arthur Balfour, have a rawness and vigour you’d never expect from this supposedly genteel artist.
Even more extraordinary, the Briar Rose paintings, created for the artist’s own interest between 1874 and 1890, illustrate a tale from the Brothers Grimm, in which the hero discovers a realm whose inhabitants are all immersed in enchanted sleep – which provides a perfect metaphor for Burnejones’s art. Surrounded by paintings of dreamers sprawled in the arms of Morpheus, letting your eye run over the interweaving patterns of sleeping figures and enveloping foliage, you may feel in a state of near-somnambulism yourself. It’s hardly surprising Burnejones underwent a huge surge in popularity in the psychedelic era.
It’s hard not to succumb to the mood of transcendent yearning that suffuses every painting
This exhibition is a trip – in all senses. While the inclusion of a collection of sketches shows Burnejones had a sense of humour, he kept that out of his paintings. Their strength lies in an unremitting earnestness that seems very much of its time and an ambient-immersive quality that feels disconcertingly modern and brings to mind phenomena as diverse as Rothko’s colour-field painting and acid house raves.
This exhibition may just catch something in the spirit of the times, triggering a trend for romantic clutter and magical whimsy that flies in the face of the recently prevailing taste for clean-lined modernism – though I hope not. It was a privilege to spend an afternoon in Burne-jones’s world, but I certainly wouldn’t want to live there.