The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones by Andrea Wolk Rager
Yale University Press (Paul Mellon Centre for British Art), 2022
When it comes to art history, the Pre-Raphaelites are easy prey. For some they represent the great wrong turning in English art during the nineteenth century, particularly in comparison to what their Impressionist counterparts were producing across the Channel at roughly the same time. For others they have come to be an artistic comfort blanket; easy on the eye, tastefully dramatic, and readily digestible. With his penchant for languorous, haunted maidens and catatonic sub-Botticelli heroes, Edward Burne-Jones is perhaps the epitome of all that can irritate about Pre-Raphaelitism, although his many admirers remain endlessly fascinated by his curiously tenebrous vision. The original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) may have ruffled a few mid-Victorian feathers in their first, 1848 incarnation, but they hardly constituted a fundamental threat to society with their well-mannered denunciation of most art produced after the late mediaeval and early Renaissance periods. Yes, the leader of the pack Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a turbulent, chloral-fuelled private life. Even so, and despite the occasional tempestuous romantic intrigues within their ranks, for the most part the changing personnel who over the years constituted the PRB were hardly a subversive mob of artistic desperados. Perhaps the one obvious exception to that rule was William Morris, whose ultra-left activist politics have seen him enshrined as an attractively maverick figure in Socialist history — unlike his boringly orthodox mate, Burne-Jones. This traditional characterisation of Burne-Jones is challenged by Andrea Wolk Rager in her latest book The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones. Here was, instead, an artist who “embraced the revolutionary possibility of embodied aesthetics” – which might be news to those who treasure the Burne-Jones coasters and tea towels from the latest Pre-Raphaelite exhibition.
The familiar pigeonholing of Burne-Jones as the premier artist of dreamy escapism is based on a much-quoted statement of his. In defining what he meant by “a picture,” the artist described it as “a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be – in a light better than any light ever shone – in a land no one can define or remember, only desire – and the forms divinely beautiful.” However, Wolk Rager points out that this description has been shortened and lifted out of the context of the full letter in which it is contained. It was, in fact, part of a longer passage in which Burne-Jones also referred to the necessity of waking from such romantic dreams in order to experience truly revelatory moments, a process seen as having parallels with the literary critic and postmodern theorist Frederic Jameson’s concept of “utopian form” capable of generating “a revolutionary ‘pocket of stasis’ from which to disrupt dominant power structures and elicit the desire for revolutionary change.” This analysis, which occurs early on in the book, sets the scene for the author’s attempts to show that her subject was engaged in “a fundamentally radical defiance of the artistic, social and political hierarchies of the modern age” – which seems, at first sight, like a mighty big claim to substantiate.
If the likes of John Ruskin and William Morris railed against the evils of industrialised modernity in print, Wolk Rager portrays their friend and associate Burne-Jones as taking a similar stance but channelling his opposition through his art. Not that, according to Wolk Rager, this take on Burne-Jones is a particularly innovative approach: an 1894 essay on the artist claimed that “the art of Burne-Jones from first to last has been a silent and unconscious protest against the most striking tendencies of the modern world.” The author, then, sees it as her task to strip away the accreted layers of veneer which over many decades have situated Burne-Jones as the high priest of the cloyingly fey, in order to rediscover his essentially radical vision. She intends to achieve this by interrogating certain key examples of his art for what they reveal of his perspective.
The labours of Adam and Eve was a theme to which Burne-Jones returned, in different media, for a number of years. Indeed, this subject arose at the intersection of his oft-avowed devotion to mediaeval —and more particularly Gothic — art and his lifelong friendship with Morris. The epiphanic experience which he and Morris underwent when, as young men, they visited the great cathedrals of Beauvais, Chartres, and Rouen in 1855, witnessing not only the soaring, heavenly architecture but also the way in which mediaeval artists had articulated Biblical stories in stained glass, would form a source of enduring wonder for both of them. In Burne-Jones’s case his chance to emulate those artists arrived when, in 1857, he was commissioned to design a stained-glass window for St. Andrew’s College, Bradfield, in which he depicted Adam and Eve after the Fall. An angel with a flaming sword is shown blocking the entrance to heaven, whilst below this figure a suitably Victorian image of a contrite Eve with a baby at her breast turns away mournfully. Meanwhile a muscular Adam attempts to weed their garden in the wilderness. As accomplished as this image is, it remains firmly confined by the religious orthodoxy that determined nineteenth-century popular moral culture. An altogether more heterodox depiction of Adam and Eve’s labours by Burne-Jones would first appear many years later and go on to become one of his best-known images. Serving as the frontispiece for the Kelmscott Press Edition of Morris’s novel A Dream of John Ball (1892), Burne-Jones’s When Adam Delved and Eve Span serves to illustrate the reported rhetorical question by Ball, a leader of the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt, “when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?”
That this image has become synonymous with Morris’s brand of socialism is, according to Wolk Rager, a “negation of Burne-Jones’s agency in creating an indelible image of anti-capitalist protest” —which, in turn, might serve to reinforce the notion that the artist had difficulties with his friend’s political views. Not so, according to no less dependable a witness than Burne-Jones’s wife Georgiana, who claimed that “they only parted company about the means to be employed for one and the same end.” To substantiate the assertion that Burne-Jones was, in his own unobtrusive way, a left-leaning political activist, the author goes on to reference the artist’s correspondence with William Gladstone and his daughter Mary decrying imperialist aggression and supporting Irish Home Rule. Echoing Georgiana Burne-Jones, Wolk Rager is at pains to emphasise that it was a case of two politically engaged friends following parallel paths of self-expression, with one choosing to use the spoken and written word to deliver his message, whilst the other chose visual art. It is perhaps true that Burne-Jones’s frontispiece is more enduringly resonant than the novel for which it was created, despite the reverence in which Morris continues to be held for his humanitarian philosophy and importance in the late nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement. Does this support the contention that an astute Burne-Jones was radically invested in challenging perennial social evils and found a way to articulate this in ways which would outlast the discursive political ructions of his day? Well, perhaps.
Turning to Burne-Jones’s King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1880-1884), exhibited at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1889, Wolk Rager argues that this alluring depiction, in all its soft-focused archaism, of the king paying homage to the impoverished maiden with whom he is in love challenges the Exposition’s emphasis on the modern world’s industrial accomplishments head-on. This is not to say that this monumental painting seeks to offer spectators a consolatory romantic alternative to the cacophonous spectacle of modern manufacture. Rather, it “compellingly critiqued acquisitive, materialist capital and imperial aggression.” Furthermore, the painting “defied the nineteenth century art market, protesting against the institutions that kept art, wealth and visual beauty in captivity.” However, given that Burne-Jones’s painting was influenced by Tennyson’s poem “The Beggar Maid” along with aspects of the Cinderella story, and that leading newspaper critics of the day “found a timeless and poignant appeal in the scene, but refrained from extrapolating the overt critique of wealth disparity implicit within it,” it is questionable whether Wolk Rager’s interpretation can bear the weight of the socio-economic analysis placed upon it.
As part of a detailed discussion of the artistic origins and creation of Burne-Jones’s unfinished Perseus series in which successive canvases would illustrate the myth of the hero’s slaying of the Gorgon Medusa and rescuing of the Ethiopian Princess Andromeda, Wolk Rager pays particular attention to Perseus and the Graiae. This was the first work in the series to be completed and displayed before the public at the Grosvenor Gallery. In an unorthodox departure from his usual painterly technique, the artist presents this bas-relief with its Latin summary of events across half the pictorial plain, thereby highlighting its textural qualities “from the visible grain of the panel to the metallic brilliance of the raised and gilded gesso.” For Wolk Rager, Burne-Jones was “overtly challenging” the Gallery’s liberal policies by defying the hierarchical divisions between painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts. As far as contemporary critics and gallery-going audiences were concerned, although this mixed-media work received some plaudits, many found it “odd” and even “barbaric” and were at a loss as to how to interpret it. Similarly, consistent with this public lack of engagement with Burne-Jones’s experiments in media other than oil painting, his mosaic design for The Tree of Life, part of a cycle for the American Episcopal Society of St. Paul’s Within the Walls in Rome, was generally ignored; according to the artist “no one even looked at it when it was shewn in the New Gallery. They only saw that it wasn’t oil-painted; and yet it said as much as anything I have ever done.” With its undulating, sinuous foliage framing Christ in a crucifixion pose but free of any constraints from an actual cross, and flanked by Adam and Eve rather than the more traditional St John and the Virgin, the idea of a regenerative force in nature initiated by the toils of our earliest ancestors comes to the fore. In line with Ruskin’s ecological vision, here the ennobling of the human body in harmony with the natural world offers the key to redemption. Focusing in more closely on the relationship between labour and production, Burne-Jones’s The Mill depicts an idyllic scene complete with graceful maidens dancing against a backdrop of Renaissance-style industrial buildings, thus showing that “labour and beneficent industry can be compatible with a world of earthly beauty.” Here the unpleasantly tenebrous reality of the nineteenth-century working environment is transformed into a scene that sanctifies productive labour within a restorative vista transformed by “a thriving natural environment.” This concept was echoed by Morris in his 1881 lecture “Art and the Beauty of Earth,” in which he declared that “we must turn this land from the grimy backyard of a workshop into a garden,” the kind of statement that would eventually lead to his acclamation as the father of the Green Movement.
Wolk Rager then reverts to a closer look at the socio-economic hierarchies detectable in Burne-Jones’s work, taking as her example his watercolour The Star of Bethlehem, commissioned by the Corporation of the City of Birmingham for its new Museum and Art Gallery. The figures of the three Magi who take up over half of this nativity scene come in for a range of critical readings. They embody “a condemnation of luxury, materiality and power in the ‘Century of Commerce’” as well as “opulence, power and imperial ambition,” while their Middle Eastern identity within the context of “an English woodland also functions as a potent rebuke to imperial aggression abroad and the corresponding oppression of poverty and powerlessness within the imperial centre.” One can almost hear this large painting creaking under the weight of its multifaceted significance.
The kind of interpretive disagreement with which Burne-Jones’s later work was met is illustrated by the reception of his oil painting The Wheel of Fortune (1875 -83), in which a poet, a king, and a slave are suspended on a large golden wheel with the emblematic figure of Fortune observing them. That the position of the wheel is such that the slave is above the king, with his foot resting upon the crowned head, led some contemporaries to detect a radical political critique of class hierarchies in the piece. As much as Burne-Jones’s other works might seem to linger in a nebulous world of aesthetic escapism, needing a fair bit of dissection to reveal traces of a revolutionary socio-economic agenda beneath the surface, The Wheel of Fortune does seem to articulate this agenda in a much more conspicuous manner. Ultimately Burne-Jones himself recognised this disconnect between his artistic programme and the popular perception of where he stood, admitting that “it is a matter of just complaint…that I seem to my contemporaries to stand outside their aspirations and desires so perpetually – seem to more than I really do.”--Mark Jones
