The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

I threw out last week the fact that the Delaware Art Museum has the biggest collection of PRB works in the country. The image on the left is a screenshot from an image search of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the movement's founders. If you're unaware off the top of your head what the PRB is, looking at that should settle it for you.

The first time I really came into contact with the PRBs was a big exhibition that happened to be in Montreal a couple of decades ago. You look at this stuff, and it strikes a chord. The point of the work is to create images of beauty that transcend narrative, and I'm no art historian, but it's safe to say that the birth of the PRB was the period when art was at its most narrative. A good painting was not only technically good, whatever that means, but also told a story in aid of moral uplift. Art was intended to improve the viewer. This is a hifalutin aesthetic development of the 19th Century that one can easily see roots of in the art of centuries before, which was aimed at the edification of illiterate masses: to wit, religious art. Churches did not display their art because they had bare walls they wanted to decorate: that art told the story behind the religion. The purpose of art, a question that has yet to be settled, seems to have been particularly at sixes and sevens in its earliest years of release from religious patronage. As artists get to paint what they want because it's no longer the church paying for it, what artists want to paint becomes very interesting. At some point they still have to sell the stuff, for one thing. But then again, artists tend to be extremely opinionated, even if those opinions are inchoate.

By the time we get to the nineteenth century, we seem to have a set academic idea of what art is supposed to do, at least in culturally trend-setting France, and most famously, the Impressionists rejected that idea and, well, the success of that rejection can be easily measured by the number of Monet postcards, t-shirts and doilies that are available in the gift shop. The PRBs rejected it another way, and a hundred and fifty years later these works are far from bank-busters at the auction houses, but they have a healthy following. In their exaltation of a very particular sort of female beauty they also carry a lot of anti-feminist baggage. That they didn't move the needle of art, so to speak, also works against them. They lead fairly directly to the Whistlers and Sargents of the world, regarded as something like art dandies rather than art giants (although, personally, they're at the top of my fave list, and I can't get enough of either and love discovering new caches of their work hidden off in places like Glasgow or, more accessibly in D.C. recently, the Freer and the Corcoran).

Still, I find so many of the PRB paintings haunting, which is what they were meant to be, and the fact that they still succeed at it a century and a half later is a tribute to their inherent strength as art, I don't care what the critics say.

The Delaware Art Museum has a fine walk-through of their exhibit. If you're interested in any of this, check it out.
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