Halfway through Tate Britain’s loving homage to the Victorian “visionary” Edward Burne-Jones I was startled to see a painting I gave a damn about. It’s a portrait of William Graham, colonial businessman, Liberal MP and art collector. His emaciated, sick-looking face stares straight at you from a small dark canvas. Two mad sweeps of white hair sprout from either side of his balding crown. His eyes are gelid and numbed. He looks utterly tortured.
Why is this small, unpretentious portrait so much more interesting than the depictions of mythology and legend that fill this exhibition? Because it looks real. Graham was Burne-Jones’s patron and there must have been true intimacy between them. For once, Burne-Jones paints with a raw simplicity that gives you the awkward and irreplacable sense of being confronted by life, not art.
Almost everything else in the exhibition is art that disdains life. Burne-Jones was one of the last artists to adopt the archaic style of the pre-Raphaelite movement that started in 1848, when he was 15. The pre-Raphaelites preached a return to the craft ethos of medieval art, a flame Burne-Jones would keep burning up to the eve of the 20th century. After embracing the style of Dante Gabriel Rossetti when he was in his 20s, he carried on ploughing the same dreamy furrow until his death in 1898. What he added to the pre-Raphaelite love of long-haired beauties and Arthurian poesy was an ideal of art for art’s sake that makes his paintings strangely dessicated.
For his enthusiasts, this makes him a forebear of modern art whose dream paintings have a lot in common with European symbolists such as Munch and Moreau, and point the way to pure abstraction. The quintessential illustration of that is Burne-Jones’s 1880 painting The Golden Stairs. A procession of maidens in long blue-grey dresses make their way in a serpentine parade down a spiralling staircase. They seem to belong nowhere except this moment, this cold and lovely otherworld that is Art – even though actual women, including the daughter of prime minister William Gladstone, modelled for this fey concoction.
There is a twisted line that connects The Golden Stairs with modernism, for in 1912 Marcel Duchamp would echo it in his machine-like flutter of repeated movements Nude Descending a Staircase No 2. But Duchamp was a prankster mixing up the latest Cubist style with a hokey Victorian sentimentalisation of beauty. He was joking, guys. It doesn’t make Burne-Jones the inventor of modern art.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
