An Escapist's Dreamworld

By ROBERT HUGHES

Forty years ago, if any right-thinking Modernist art critic had been asked to list a few FFAs (formerly famous artists) who had not a prayer of return from the elephants' graveyard of reputation, who were buried forever without the least chance of a joyous resurrection or even a polite exhumation, the name of Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones would surely have come up. The most eminent of Victorians: by the 1880s, an absolute pillar of the British cultural establishment, admired by every connoisseur from John Ruskin on down. The leader of the second wave of that peculiarly English art movement, Pre-Raphaelitism. The man who defined the ideals of pictorial sentiment for an exceedingly pious age; whose angels and Blessed Damozels, Arthurian knights and shrinking, somewhat cataleptic virgins were the very essence of escapist painting. What could this industrious and backward-dreaming fabulist have to say to the 20th century?

Something, to its closing years at least. The fortunes of the Pre-Raphaelites, which went down the tubes after World War I, began to revive in the 1960s and were ratified by a big and hugely popular survey show at London's Tate Gallery in 1984. But the show that opened last week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer," marks the centenary of his death and is by far the most lavish treatment that any Pre-Raphaelite has received from an American museum. It is large (more than 170 works), indeed exhaustive, and fairly glutted with scholarly detail. It is also spectacular, beautiful in patches and coldly, provokingly weird in others, sometimes both at once.

The foreword to the catalog claims that it is "possible to admire Edward Burne-Jones as the greatest British artist of the 19th century, after Turner and perhaps John Constable." One may demur at this, but the show is bound to be a smash hit with the American public, not just because it is full of the yearning sentimentality that has flooded into real life today--for there is a connection between Burne-Jones' semisacrificial English virgins, each one a Flower Beneath the Foot, and the emetically mawkish victim-cult of the late Princess Diana--but because its artfulness evokes intense nostalgia.

Burne-Jones was an amazingly proficient craftsman, a one-man guild, fecund in painting, book design, tapestry, embroidery, stained glass, tiles, mosaic. He had little formal art training and always felt insecure about his figure drawing. What fired him as an artist was his early, deep and long-lasting friendship with William Morris, whom he met at Oxford in the 1850s, when both were new undergraduates. They had meant to go into the Anglican Church, but in 1855 they resolved to dedicate their lives to art and design.

It was, on the face of it, a curious partnership--Burne-Jones the dreaming aesthete who cared only about Beauty with a capital B and didn't give a straw for politics, teamed with the man who, next to Karl Marx, was the most passionate socialist thinker in 19th century England. But Burne-Jones hungered for large ecclesiastical commissions: "I want big things to do and vast spaces," he declared, "and for common people to see them and say 'Oh!'--only 'Oh!'" With their scores of stained-glass windows, he and Morris transformed the visual impact of Anglican churchgoing in their time, banishing from newly built places of worship the prim and severe look that Puritanism had foisted on the reformed church, bringing back the emotional splendors of Rome. And when it came to large-scale tapestry and embroidery, at whose collaborative design Morris & Co. excelled, they gave back to these arts a decorative complexity and clarity of design that had scarcely been seen since the late Middle Ages, the period that both men so extravagantly admired.

In doing so, Burne-Jones shepherded the English aesthetic movement into existence. Like his admirer Oscar Wilde, Burne-Jones believed the whole point of art was its artificiality. His work was the antithesis of Realism, and Impressionism struck him as boring in its attachment to mere visual fact. "Realism? Direct transcript from nature? What has that to do with art?" he demanded. Painting, he thought, was "better in a prison than in the open air always."

The growing abstraction of his work made for disagreements with his mentor, John Ruskin. Aestheticism was amoral; it didn't hew to Ruskinian axioms of morally perfect realistic truth. Yet Ruskin had presided over Burne-Jones' education as an artist, accompanying him to Italy, getting him to copy paintings. "I was born in a little city of the Apennines," Burne-Jones said archly, years later, to one of his young women friends, "and my name was Eduardo della Francesca." But the Italian artists who most influenced his roving eye were not Piero della Francesca but rather Botticelli, Michelangelo and the Venetians--Carpaccio and Crivelli for their stiff, almost heraldic execution, and Giorgione for his mellow, elusive lyricism. Le Chant d'Amour, 1868-77, is the most Giorgionesque of his paintings, a parallel to Walter Pater's famous dictum that art aspires to the condition of music; the lovesick young knight in black armor gazing at his porcelain-skinned maiden, who gazes past you with a thousand-yard stare while blind Cupid works the bellows of her organ is, for sheer formal grace, unsurpassed in English 19th century art.

The strongest early-Renaissance influence on Burne-Jones, though, was Botticelli--especially Botticelli in his later years, when religious anxiety seeps into his work from the ideas of Savonarola and expresses itself in twisting, mannered poses and a rushing intensity of line. These go undiluted into Burne-Jones' tapestries and, in a much odder way, into such images as The Doom Fulfilled, circa 1884-85, from his cycle of paintings on the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, in which the hero in his impossibly chic armor does battle with the sea monster, a whipping linear colophon of a beast, a Victorian precursor of the creature in Alien, whose skin seems to be made of black vulcanized rubber.

Burne-Jones' girls have often been ridiculed for their insipid and standardized look, but they have a way of breaking out into an obsessional character--as La Belle Dame Sans Merci. One of his best friends was Algernon Charles Swinburne, the English poet who was a votary of sadomasochism; and time and again, Burne-Jones' haughty damsels with their downturned mouths and leonine manes suggest the imperious sex goddesses of Swinburne's imagination, such as Dolores, with her "cruel/ Red mouth like a venomous flower":

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you? ... O splendid and sterile Dolores, Our Lady of Pain

Burne-Jones' marital life was blameless except for one intense affair in the 1860s with a young Greek woman named Maria Zambaco, daughter of one of his London patrons. He cast her as a full-blown Medusan charmer, snakes twisting in her hair, and himself as the weakened magician under her spell, in The Beguiling of Merlin, 1873-74--King Arthur's court sorcerer reduced to hollow-eyed impotence by a magic fiercer than his own. "Now isn't that very funny," he wrote to a friend 20 years after finishing it, "as [Zambaco] was born at the foot of Olympus and looked and was primaeval and that's [her] head and [her] way of standing and turning, and I was being turned into a hawthorn bush."

Sleep, vegetative unconsciousness, surrender of the will--Burne-Jones' art was largely about passivity, and his knights look a tad sluggish even when they are skewering dragons. He idolized Michelangelo--the year 1871 found Burne-Jones flat on his back on a traveling rug in the Sistine Chapel, minutely scrutinizing the ceiling with opera glasses--and comatose versions of the Slaves and Captives abound in his work. The dream-suffused character of the art of Burne-Jones won him a following on the other side of the Channel by connecting him to painters in the stream of French and Belgian Symbolism: Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Fernand Khnopff. Burne-Jones' morbid hypersensitivity was what made him a genuinely advanced figure in Symbolist eyes, and it is the trait that is bringing him back into popularity today, now that "heroic," confrontational Modernism is losing its mandate in our fin de siecle.