Met Museum: The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy

The current exhibit at the Met Museum, The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy: British Art and Design, is extremely limited in its scope.  That the entire show takes up only one small gallery on the museum's main floor should perhaps come as no great surprise.  Victorian art has long been out of fashion and these days is usually described in such disparaging terms as "quaint" and given short shrift by historians.  Even in its own time, the movement exerted a good deal more influence on the development of the decorative arts in Great Britain than it did on the course of European art history.

The concept that informs the Pre-Raphaelite vision is ultimately unworldy.  It looks back longingly to the Quattrocento period before the "corrupting" influence of Raphael had yet made itself felt and helped lead to the glories of the High Renaissance.  There is a certain naivete at work here insofar as a long ago period has been remembered nostalgically by artists who have turned their backs on the modern world - Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris had actually once been theology students at Oxford - and who have then attempted to recall this earlier time, not as it was, but as they would like it to have been.  It is no accident that the greatest aesthetic influence on the movement should have been the writings of John Ruskin whose idealization of the past and exaltation of the Gothic can most clearly be seen in The Stones of Venice.  The results of any such attempts to recreate the spirit of a vanished era must necessarily strike the viewer as artificial.  They become cleverly executed tableaux rather than living works of art.

The centerpiece of the current exhibit is clearly Burne-Jones' The Love Song (1868-1877), a large-scale oil on canvas that the museum refers to on its website as "its greatest Pre-Raphaelite acquisition."  It is an extremely mannered painting that is imitative of Botticelli's style but contains nothing of that artist's genius.  Arranged around it are a number of other paintings and drawings of which the three most interesting - perhaps because the sitters had such close relationships with the artists that they bring these works to life almost in spite of themselves - are The Convalescent (1872), a study of the artist's dangerously ill wife by Ford Madox Brown, an 1868 portrait of Jane Morris by Dante Gabriel Rossetti that clearly shows the artist's growing infatuation with his married subject, and Lady Lilith (1867) in which Rossetti depicts his mistress Fanny Cornforth as the infamous Biblical character.  Another work, the painting Lachrymae (1894-1895) by Frederic Leighton, whose association with the Pre-Raphaelites is tenuous at best, is no more than a colorful exercise in sentimentality.  Notable by its absence is the work most often associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti's Beata Beatrix (1870), the painting that is usually considered the artist's masterpiece.

As far as photography is concerned, there is only one example on view, an illustration by Julia Margaret Cameron commissioned by her neighbor Tennyson for his Idylls of the King.  Cameron was an exceptional photographer - I posted last fall a review of an exhibit of her work also held at the Met Museum - and it is a shame that she should be represented here by such a mawkish piece.  (Curiously, the photo on display is not that shown on the museum's website.)  Much more interesting are two portraits which are not hung at the show but are contained in the museum's printed flyer for it.  These are a dual portrait from 1890 of Morris and Burne-Jones taken by Frederick Hollyer and an evocative 1863 portrait of a seated Rossetti taken by Lewis Carroll.

The works on display that deserve the greatest attention are those related to the Arts and Crafts movement.  Among these are Burne-Jones' tapestry Angeli Laudantes (1898), two ceramic plates by William de Morgan and the textile hanging Bird (1878) by William Morris.  The show would have benefited greatly by the inclusion of more such craftwork.

The exhibit continues through October 26, 2014.