Pre-Raphaelites: Salvation and Beauty [Part 2 of 2]

Part 1 of the article is here

A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge (1852)

To signal their wholesale rejection of the stiffness and trivialities of Academic art, the Pre-Raphaelites completely moved away from classical history and mythologies. Instead they preferred their Shakespeare, Dante, Boccaccio, and scenes from contemporary life, though they also carried on painting religious themes as Christianity was at the heart of their project, at least in the earlier days.

Millais’ A Huguenot (above) depicts a Catholic girl and her Huguenot lover who refused to avoid persecution by declaring his allegiance to Roman Catholicism on the day when Huguenots were massacred in France. For the PRB, art has to be truthful and genuine, and their paintings are more about intimate emotions and intricate human relationships than the glorification of monarchs and nobles, or exemplary virtues conveyed through grand narratives taken from Greco-Roman history.

Rossetti’s unfinished canvas Found depicts a scene of great emotional intensity. A man recognises his former sweetheart, who is now a prostitute and sinks to her knees in shame. Paintings like this one, as well as Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852-1865) and William Holman Hunt’s Awakening Conscience (about a fallen woman who recognises her mistake) reflect their engagement with their own times and their concern about the social malaise of their society. They were staunch believers in the moral purpose of art, but morality had to be relevant to the people of their days.

Awakening Conscience (1853)

Found (1854-1881)

As the Pre-Raphaelite painters were the direct precursors of the Aesthetic Movement which championed the slogan ‘Art for Art’s Sake’, it was surprising for me to learn that in the 1850s they were so absorbed by the question of morality. Some of them tried to reinvent religious paintings in order to bring them closer to the people. Thus Millais painted the Holy Family as unglamorous labourers in the controversial Christ in the House of His Parents (picture in part 1), and Dyce situated Christ in the Scottish Wilderness in his Man of Sorrows. The deeply devout Hunt even travelled all the way to the Holy Land to collect topographical and ethnographical details for his religious paintings, resulting in several works including The Scapegoat.

Man of Sorrows (1860)

The Scapegoat (1854-6)

The movement was teeming with contradictions right from the beginning. While the artists took Medieval and early Renaissance works as their models, most of their paintings have a decidedly modern outlook. Their emphasis on lines and bright colours may have their roots in Quattrocento paintings, but the effect they created using these elements are completely different, I think most importantly because of their modelling of the human figure (perhaps closer to the Romantic tradition?), and their detailed depiction of the natural world, which benefited from the scientific knowledge of their times.

They depicted prostitutes in a sympathetic light (as in Awakening Conscience), but most of the time they saw women either as sexualised objects (such as the female figures by Rossetti) or hapless victims (Mariana, Ophelia, Sylvia, Isabella, Andromeda and so on). Worse still they eroticised these women as victims: take for example the emphasis on the curves of Mariana, the parted lips of Ophelia, and not to mention the highly titillating nude figure of Andromeda in Edward Burne-Jones’ Perseus cycle. Interestingly Rossetti also painted a femme fatale in Lady Lilith (1866), preceding the explosion of Judiths and Salomes in the fin de siecle – thus moving from sexualising women to vilifying them. But that’s another story…

Monna Vanna (1866)

Isabella (1868)

Edward Burne-Jones, The Doom Fulfilled (1884-5, from the Perseus cycle)

Even more striking is their distance from Realism with a capital R, that is the movement originating in France, despite the Pre-Raphs’ commitment to depict nature in microscopic details. Their prolonged and painstaking effort might be interpreted as an obsession with the material world, yet for the Pre-Raphaelites, realism was the means to reflect the moral presence of God in nature. Their art is idealistic and spiritual, not materialistic despite all the material details.

There were also differences within the movement. From the 1860s, Rossetti became one of the leading figures of the Aesthetic movement, together with William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Turning away from historicism, realism and the social and moral purposes of art, he championed beauty as the highest value. This proto-Symbolist strand of the Pre-Raphaelite movement came to eclipse the realist strand represented by Millais and Hunt. But ultimately, whether the goal was the abstract realm of beauty or a return to an obscure past, the art of the Pre-Raphaelites was their attempt to rebel against the machine age, to revive medieval chivalric values and to search for truthfulness in art – it really was an epic and perhaps even heroic quest, all started in 1848, by a few bold and rebellious 20-or-so-year-olds.

Pre-Raphaelites: the bad boys who painted en plein air [Part 1 of 2]

Mariana (1851)

I still remember my first encounter with John Everett Millais’ Ophelia at Tate Britain. The first thing that struck me about the painting was its size: it was surprisingly small, probably because I was too accustomed to the blown-up image of the painting used in advertising.

Ophelia (1851-52)

And then the painting was so much more brilliant in the flesh. Millais imagined the moment just before Ophelia dies, as she passively waits for death to overcome her after she has fallen into the river accidentally. Her complexion is still pinkish, but life is slowly draining from her face. The soon-to-be-dead body of the heroine is contrasted by the lushness of the vegetation surrounding her. The colours are intense, brilliant and jewel-like, and everything is depicted with such clarity, giving the painting an almost hyperreal effect. It was a transfixing experience to behold Ophelia.

But because the painting conforms to the most conventional ideas of beauty of our days, we hardly ever associate it with avant-gardism. The same goes with most paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their associates, except perhaps Millais’s slightly earlier work Christ in the House of His Parents – it attracted many criticisms for being blasphemous, and has been famously accused by Charles Dickens of depicting Mary as a hideous and ugly alcoholic.

Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50)

In most cases, when we speak of the artistic avant-garde, we think Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism… Ophelia, Mariana, or Rossetti’s pictures of beautiful women from the 1860s and 1870s rarely come to mind. But then the Pre-Raphaelites do sound like a bunch of bad boys in Victorian England. When Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and four others first founded the brotherhood in 1848 (in Millais’ family home on Gower Street, where I went to university!), they decided to sign their paintings with the initials PRB and then refused to explain the meaning of the mysterious alphabets for a while. And they hated the muddy effect in the paintings of their predecessors in the Academy (e.g. Joshua Reynolds) so much that they decided to use white porcelain tablets as palettes, so that they could get rid of dried paint completely and keep the ‘pristine purity’ of their colours.

An example of Reynolds’ work (Lady Elizabeth Foster, 1787)

Aside from that, the Pre-Raphaelites count among the earliest advocates of painting en plein air, as the brotherhood was formed more than a decade before Monet, Renoir & co. started painting outdoors (though of course the PRB was later than the Barbizon School). To go back to Millais’ Ophelia, the river and the riverbank was painted from life along the banks of the Hogsmill River in Ewell, Surrey. It took him 5 months (11 hours everyday) to complete the landscape in impressive details, leaving centre blank to paint the figure later on. William Holman Hunt was also in Ewell at the time, similarly painting the landscape of The Hireling Shepherd.

The Hireling Shepherd (1851)

On the other hand, both figure and landscape in Ford Madox Brown’s The Pretty Baa-Lambs was painted entirely outdoors, in Stockwell and Clapham Common in South London. In fact I am completely in love with some of the landscapes in the show, like William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, Kent, A Recollection of October 5th 1858 and Millais’ Chill October.

Pegwell Bay, Kent, A Recollection of October 5th 1858 (1858-60) 

Chill October (1870)

My thoughts on their choice of subject matter and the later development of the movement to come in the second part!

From Russia with a Woof

Oleg Kulik, From The Mad Dog, 1994

The tendency in Russia to see primitiveness as an ideal dates back to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. From the Populists who tried to ‘go to the people’ to Ballets Russes’ conscious emphasis on its folk roots (think The Firebird, The Rite of Spring and Stravinsky’s music), the simple and primitive life of the peasant has been seen as the root of Russianness, the potential catalyst for spiritual rebirth, and a key element in the invention of Russia’s national identity in the 19th-century.

The Ukranian-born curator-turned-artist Oleg Kulik has taken this obsession with primitiveness to its extreme by literally reverting into the animal state – he ‘transformed’ himself into a dog. The dog is the most in/famous persona (zoosona?) that he has adopted, but in the past he has also turned himself into a bird, cockerel, a bull, and even a disco ball.

The works on show at the Regina Gallery at the moment are mostly from the 90s. Near the entrance are several photographs that document the artist’s The Mad Dog performance from 1994, when he went on all fours naked with a collar and a leash around his neck, growling, barking, menacing random passers-by and pouncing on moving cars. A video footage from the same performance is shown in the basement. In a later performance, I Bite America and America Bite Me (1997, of which two photographs are shown in the show), again as a dog he interacts with participants within an enclosed space. Further inside there is the Deep into Russia series (1993), consisting of photographs showing Kulik apparently copulating or performing various kinds of sexual acts with animals.

Some say that his caninisation is a commentary on the animalistic side of all human beings, a concern which grew out of the brutality of post-Soviet Russian society. But while his live performances directed at a viewing public are aggressive and sometimes downright violent, the more record-driven works like Deep into Russia, although no less shocking, seem to embrace primitive instincts and urges. Rather than criticising our latent and inherent animality, the set of photographs are more about searching for a new kind of relationship between man and nature.

For Kulik, becoming an animal is not a counter-evolutionary regression, it is the next stage of human development. Extreme primitiveness in the form of animal-like behavior is the means to counteract the over-sophistication of contemporary culture. The doggedness with which he pursues this goal of returning to nature adds a spiritual dimension to the project – and zoophrenia (zoophilia + schizophrenia) is the new faith that this high priest strives to promote.

Pavlov’s Dog (1996)

From I Bite America and America Bites Me (1997)