Author: The Mighty Reptile | Submitted: Mar 8 2004 at 11:57:27 PM The Pre-Raphaelites Recently, between my extended periods of drunken hallucination I noticed the appearance on the walls of the London Underground of posters advertising exhibitions of paintings by members of the Victorian artistic movement the Pre-Raphaelites some of which were taken from the private collection of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.
It honestly does not surprise me that such a conduit of the sentimental demiurge as Sir Lloyd Webber should be a patron of what is without doubt the most sentimental of all artistic movements this side of the back pages of the Mail on Sunday Magazine but it does rather surprise me that any one else would be.
The Pre-Raphaelites for those blessed readers who do not know are a movement founded in 1849 by a group of particularly self absorbed British artists who in that particularly Victorian way had decided that the world of art had been going to pot since the middle of the 16th century (one of the reasons perhaps that, unlike Victorian engineering and social theory Victorian painting is almost all total and utter SHIT!). The pre-Raphaelites believed (or so I am told) that the Academic arts movement had erred too far on the side of formality and they proposed a return to a form of realism based on real landscapes and real models, not a bad idea I hear you say, but wait! Had these people ever visited the real world? Their paintings are characterised by “soft focus” representations of classical or courtly idylls populated by decorative ladies who represent nymphs, princesses or even sometimes abstract concepts and while I myself see there a being nothing enormously strange with seeing Guinevere having a little chat with the personification of charity on a bench on Wandsworth Common I am reliably informed that it is not, strictly speaking happening and therefore is not, as such real. These ladies are without exception devastatingly beautiful and engaged in poses of un-paralleled passivity, reclining or simply hanging out.
This is Chauvinistic art at its most crass, the artists, under the guise of romanticism use women as symbols of high concepts, they are not people rather they have become a kind of intellectual wank rag that works on the theory that its Ok to objectify women as long as you attach them to some kind of high and unattainable myth state.
Take for example this picture:
This woman’s name is Psyche (Fredrick Leighton 1830 – 1896) and she was a nymph written of by the Roman poet Apuleius and while I agree that she certainly lovely and though I like many would certainly “give her one” I would like to draw the readers attention to her facial expression. What is she thinking? “mmm those are some silky smooth pits” perhaps or maybe “Ah, I like my breasts.” Maybe she is even engaged in contemplation on the ramifications of the Stability and Growth pact and its effect of Germany’s budget deficit but one thing is clear; THE ARTIST COULD NOT GIVE LESS OF A SHIT, he is in essence telling her to shut up and get her tits out. This combination of chauvinism and sentimentality gets my goat like nothing else and what’s more they then dress this titillation up as some kind of high minded contemplation which in itself denies the woman even the role of pornographic model “I am painting this picture not because I like looking at pretty women with no tops on” says the artist “I am capturing a moment of great romantic and metaphorical significance.” NO YOU AREN’T YOU SELF DELUDING COCK!!!!!!!! say I.
But it doesn’t stop there, even in the works that are not directly exploitative the weight of chauvinistic romanticism bears down on the hapless female subjects; The Lady of Shalott (probably the most famous pre Raphaelite subject and obviously a firm favourite at the time as there are no less than three paintings of her by the “brotherhood” extant) is a particularly unfortunate lady who in the work of that other great romantic chauvinist Alfred, Lord Tennyson was cursed by her unrequited love for Sir Lancelot du Lac to look at the world through a mirror and when she finally does pluck up the courage to look at her love she is irrevocably blinded. The Pre-Raphaelites Aesthetisisation of her predicament is essentially an approbation of her enforced passivity: it’s a moral tale warning women not to take too active a part in their own lives otherwise god knows what will happen.
Were the men who painted this dross around today they would be upper-middle class Express reading hypocrites, the kind of people who express opinions along the lines that victims of sexual assault were asking for it while letching over young women in bars, the kind of men who stifle their wives’ aspirations while expressing the opinion that men were not “built for monogamy” in short; cunts. I urge anyone with the opportunity to burn this trite, offensive shit.
P.S. I don’t object to pornography (I hope I haven’t given any one this impression) I object to hypocracy, especially hypocracy of this overarchingly self justifying nature.
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