11 OCTOBER 1997, Page 54

Not mad about the boys

Martin Gayford explains why he finds the Pre-Raphaelites a terrible bore Everyone loves the Pre-Raphaelites, at any rate here in England. A book on the subject is one of those sure-fire publishing successes, like a volume of quick, low-fat cookery. This autumn they figure in a large exhibition at the Tate. It is not exactly a Pre-Raphaelite show, but features Rossetti, Burne-Jones plus the eccentric original G.F. Watts, all under the umbrella label of 'Symbolism' — The Age of Rossetti, Bume- Jones and Watts — Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910. In all probability it will be a great popular success. Rave reviews will be pouring from the presses. Am I alone in finding Rossetti, B-J and the brotherhood a terrible bore?

Not quite. A few years ago when I inter- viewed the eminent American critic Hilton Kramer, he took them as an illustration of all that is wrong with English art. 'To me,' he declared, 'the locus classicus is the sad emergence of Pre-Raphaelitism in the wake of Constable and Turner. I mean, you have these two great monuments of West- ern painting, followed by an avalanche of literary cliché.' The episode illustrated, he argued, 'the taste for literary anecdote' that had ruined British painting.

At the time I was slightly taken aback by this transatlantic broadside. About the Pre- Raphaelites, however, I have come to think that Kramer was right. But the cases of the three artists involved in the Tate show are quite different. Two were good painters led astray by a wrongheaded notion of art, the third was an artist of extremely limited tal- ent kept going by morbid obsession. I mean, of course, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is hard to think of any painter as well- known as Rossetti who was comparably limited in ability. Or, indeed, of one who produced as many paintings that are bad by any standards.

Effectively, Rossetti limited himself in later years to head and shoulders studies of pretty ladies, and the full-length figures of his early work indicate that this was a wise decision. But Rossetti's ladies just got worse and worse — nightmarish lantern- jawed creatures with staring eyes executed in a slick kitschy manner suggestive of art deco erotica. We put up with them because of Rossetti's life — the sad death of Lizzie Siddal, the obsessive romance with Jane Morris, the laudanum, the poetry. What fascinates is not the art, but the soap oper- atic life of the artist. IP Burne-Jones, Rossetti's protégé, was a much more gifted painter. His conception of art, however, is enough in itself to explain what went wrong. 'I mean by a pic- ture,' he declared, 'a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be — in a light better than any light that ever shone — in a land that no one can define or remember, only desire.' In other words, a romantic dream without any clear visual content.

Is it any wonder that he ended up with those endlessly vapid, bloodless, wistful, languorous, sexless pastiches of the Italian Renaissance? All the vigour of this talent went into the little cartoony drawings he did of fat William Morris in various fixes, and fat ladies. The problem was the Ruskinian idea that, as David Cecil put it, the Victorian age should 'cultivate the beautiful as a means of attaining the good'. That is, art as moral uplift. One trouble with that was that Bume-Jones, his reli- gious faith having faded, had no very clear idea of what the good was.

G.F. Watts was an even better painter, equally undone by a vacuously sanctimo- nious conception of what he was up to (The Utmost for the Highest' was his motto). Consequently, though by no stretch of the imagination a Pre-Raphaelite, Watts was also fatally drawn to the literary cliché. In his case, it took the form of improving allegories of vague and lofty ideas: 'Time and Oblivion', 'Hope', 'Love Steering the Boat of Humanity', 'Time, Death and Judg- ment'.

O.K. Chesterton put his finger on what was the matter with this sort of allegory in the year of Watts's death. 'To paint a figure in a blue robe and call her Necessity, and then paint a small figure in a yellow robe and call it Invention; to put the second on the knee of the first and then say that you are enunciating the sublime and eternal 'Medea', 1866-8, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti truth, that Necessity is the mother of Invention, this is indeed an idle and stupid affair. It is saying in six weeks' work with brushes and palette-knife what could be said much better in six words.' (Though, unaccountably, Chesterton excepted Watts's allegories from these strictures.) The sad thing was that, when confined to portraits, or a dead heron, Watts could be a really marvellous painter. There are won- derful bits of painting even in the allegories and mythological works, but the ideas get in the way. Even Watts himself, in his more perspicacious moments, could see the funny side of this. 'Poor Humanity has caught a terrible crab,' he observed on looking again at 'Love Steering the Boat of Humanity'.

It would scarcely be worth labouring this point, if the whole disaster weren't happen- ing all over again. At the same time as the Symbolism exhibition at the Tate, Sensation will be attracting even greater crowds at the RA. They may not look very much like one another, but there is an underlying similarity: many of the Young British Artists in Burlington House are, like Watts and Rossetti, ensnared in literary cliché.

The critic Matthew Collings, an authority 'The Golden Stairs', 1880, by Sir Edward Bume-Jones on Young British Art, writes in the current issue of Modem Painters that 'the main art today has very low aesthetic content to leave room for all the meaning'. That's exactly why I have trouble with it. It isn't the case with every single work in Sensation. There are pieces here and there, especially among the paintings, that have aesthetic interest. But most of the artists involved are concentrating on the mean- ings, the ideas.

Of course, they aren't the same as the romance and uplift of the later 19th centu- ry. They are the orthodox ideas of today: feminist politics, deconstructionist philoso- phy, the notion that being given a good shock by art masquerading as news is good for you. It's no surprise that Young British Art is rapidly turning into official art; we are told that an example will be installed in No. 10. Parties of primary school children are solemnly led into Sensation just as they once were taken to see the allegories of Watts.

The problem is that the ideas and mean- ings of artists, as soon as they cease to be strictly visual, are no more interesting than yours or mine. If you want ideas, buy a book of philosophy. If you want romance, try a novel. Visual art with 'very low aes- thetic content' — i.e. that isn't worth look- ing at — has no point at all so far as I can see. But as long as the meanings it contains are official dogma it is likely to be support- ed and encouraged. That avalanche of clichés seems set to pour down on us for the foreseeable future.

The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910 opens at the Tate Gallery on 16 October.

lieder ohne WOrte', c.1860-1, by Frederic, Lord Leighton