Sofia Greaves
Edward Burne-Jones review – an endless procession of the living dead.
So says Laura Cumming, at The Observer. She has a low opinion of Edward Burne-Jones. “Edward Burne-Jones – art that shows how boring beauty can be.” So does Jonathan Jones, at The Guardian. Both give two stars. The Tate brands him a “pre-Raphaelite visionary.” Why?
The pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was established in 1848, a revolutionary year, and proposed its own revolution in British art. The trio Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais sought to restore meaning to formulaic ‘foolish faces and simpers’ with new realism. This was expressed in literary subjects, often Biblical, though innovated significantly in composition or technique. Millais’ Christ in the House with his Parents (1849) is a well-known example; here Jesus has unkempt toenails. The group took early Italian and Flemish painters predating Raphael as their inspiration and chose to reconstruct how they thought events ‘actually might have been.’
Cumming does not see this innovation in Burne-Jones’ work. She believes, ‘what Burne-Jones brings to the idiom is a strange airlessness and pallor, a stony architecture of ruined arches, columns and pediments, and the overwhelming congestion of every single backdrop.’ Decadence does figure heavily, and this exhibition makes clear the Victorian ‘cult of beauty’ with more than three rooms of dark dense botany in dark, dense frames.
Neither Cumming nor Jones talk about the way that Burne-Jones borrows from the classical tradition. This is, to me, what is exciting about his work. It doesn’t take a connoisseur to see the classical forms. Burne-Jones visited Italy in 1859, 1862, 1871 and 1873, and the visual impact is clear.
Do Burne-Jones’ classically inspired figures also look, as Cummings says, like ‘an endless procession of the living dead’?
Some certainly saw statues this way in Burne-Jones’ time – visiting the Vatican the Italian Giovanni Faldella experienced the corridor after the Belvedere as a ‘dead world’, of ‘yellow marble, like mouldy wax, the flanks of the yellow statues striped with veins of black, like a chronic disease, with broken heads, fag end arms and legs’.
What is thought provoking about these paintings is how Burne-Jones puts classical sculpture into context. The statues appear as actors with new identities. He’s not the first to do this; many artists took classical, and renaissance sculptures as models. Yet this kind of mapping is perhaps more radical than that we see in paintings by Jacques Louis-David. in Death of Medusa II, the Dying Gaul has changed gender.
Now Medusa slumps as if to flop backwards, and Perseus exits stage left, unnoticed. Jonathan Jones believes Burne-Jones’ Medusa is ‘not in the least bit scary’, in comparison to Caravaggio’s. Sure, but Caravaggio is all about the head. Here, the focus is on the wings and feet of Medusa’s sisters, panicked at seeing their recently decapitated sister. This is surely why the Gaul is in the foreground.
Jones says that the Perseus series has no impact because, the painter ‘goes out of his way to reassure us this is not a real world’. Caravaggio’s paintings were a different kind of real; they were exaggerated. Burne-Jones uses classical sculptures in his paintings to recreate myth as he imagines it ‘actually might have been.’ The paintings are other-worldly, but they are also very real. The Spinarius, now Perseus, is tying his shoes.
These are two of ten paintings which make up the ‘Perseus series’. They feature numerous classical sculptures, including the Laocoön and Aphrodite of Knidos and were intended to hang like a frieze. Burne-Jones produced his own specifications for the wooden panelling and lighting. Both reviewers claim that these are illegible images which inspire no connection, without ‘spatial or emotional depth’. Wrong; The Death of Medusa I has a very odd sense of depth.
It’s a packed painting, but this could be the point. Images are layered in a dreamlike collage depicting a strange sequence of events. This is the birth of Chrysaor and Pegasus, sprung from a now-dead Medusa. Pegasus is cropped, as if flying off canvas. Perseus stands as an armed Discobolus in the foreground. He throws Medusa’s head backwards out of the picture and looks to the figure at the centre – Chrysaor as a full-frontal nude. Beneath the chaos reclines Medusa, composed, next to the snakes falling from her own head.
Is this not approaching the uncanny? At least by Freud’s standards– the uncanny is an undefinable feeling of anxiety produced by a distortion of the familiar, and a sense of hidden presence.
These are statues and figures we know, and they have taken on unfamiliar personalities. I don’t think that these paintings are dead. Some of the Perseus series borders on the psychedelic. Even if you find the pre-Raphaelites sickening, it is worth going to see them at the exhibition – they are exciting, and not just for classicists.
Edward Burne-Jones “Pre-Raphaelite Visionary” is on show at the Tate Britain until 24th February 2019. Curated by Alison Smith (National Portrait Gallery), assisted by Tim Batchelor (Tate Britain).
Images accessed from Wikimedia Commons.