Pictures from a Lost England

By ROBERT HUGHES

In London, Victorian curios

People make noises about "Victorian morality" as a synonym for all those repressive forces that denied humanity its natural evolution toward Hustler magazine and Laurel Canyon group-gropes, but Victorian culture is still somewhat enigmatic. Nowhere is this truer than in painting. Modernism, the art of the past hundred years, defined itself in opposition to 19th century "bourgeois" painting: the art of the Salon in France, of the Royal Academy in England. Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse were everything that Sir Edwin Landseer, Sir Edward John Poynter and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema were not and could not be. There was no way of judging the academicians by the standards of postimpressionism. You either execrated them and were on the side of history, or enjoyed them and missed the bus. The art the Victorians liked fell victim to the revolutionary mind. After Cezanne and Matisse were exhibited in London, the Royal Academicians complained about "Bolshevism in art." They were in a sense right. Within 20 years the Victorian subject-pictures had ceased to be the glory of English collections; they had become a storage problem, a social embarrassment, like certain White Russian exiles.

But nostalgia (plus an educated sense of cultural relativity) will bring anything back, and last week a fascinating exhibition entitled "Great Victorian Pictures: Their Paths to Fame," organized by Michael Harrison and Art Historian Rosemary Treble for the Arts Council of Great Britain, opened at the Royal Academy in London. There they are, together at last --John Everett Millais's Bubbles, Sir Edwin Landseer's Stag at Bay, George Frederick Watts' Hope, John Collier's The Prodigal Daughter and dozens more. Nothing could have seemed more secure than the fame and popularity of their authors; painters like Lord Leighton or, especially, Alma-Tadema (who, while working on one of his Imperial Roman story-pictures, had fresh roses shipped to him from the south of France weekly for four months to get the petals right) made untaxed fortunes, lived on a scale of grandeur that makes Picasso's seem ascetic, and attracted huge audiences. They were the grandfathers of the old-fashioned Hollywood spectacular: Watts' 1884-85 exhibition in New York was seen by half a million people.

The Victorians produced the last genuinely popular form of contemporary art. They were also the last allegorists. When Leighton and Alma-Tadema painted antiquity, the comparison to Imperial England was never far away. In a didactic and moralizing culture, their pictures provided the last opportunity for people to extract information about history, and instruction as to conduct, from painting. The quintessence of such moralities was Augustus Leopold Egg's Past and Present, 1858, a triptych showing the results of adultery. The Victorians found the picture gamier than we would. "There must be a line drawn," trumpeted the art critic of the Athenaeum, when it went on view at the Royal Academy, "as to where the horrors that should not be painted for public and innocent sight begin, and we think Mr. Egg has put one foot at least beyond this line." It is hard to see how the century could have produced a more perfect combination of prudery and puzzle-painting, and generations of nostalgists have furtively enjoyed the profusion of symbolic detail that Egg crammed into his canvas. The prostrate wife's bracelets look like handcuffs, the chains of vice; the print on the wall above the children, those luminous Victorian innocents, depicts the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise; their house of cards, emblematic of the frailty of domestic bliss, is falling down -- for, close inspection reveals, it is constructed on top of a novel written by that suspect foreign realist Balzac.

Felicity undermined by France: it was not, after all, a bad metaphor of the fate of Victorian painting itself. But if the style -- serenely served by its institutional support system of museums and dealers and critics, immensely popular, manifestly the voice of its time -- could come apart so quickly and look like a curio so soon after Victoria's death in 1901, what will Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art and the culture it represents look like a hundred years from now? That, perhaps, is the real riddle posed by these votive objects of a lost England.

-Robert Hughes

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