Art
Victoriana
John McEwen
It's rather a shock to go into the Victoria and Albert Museum these days and find exhibitions called The Making of the Womb/es and The Pack Age, though it must be admitted that neither of them is quite as vulgar as their titles or the lettering of their billing suggest. There's a suitcase perfectly fitted with jars of boiled sweet samples in The Pack Age, for instance, and the sets of the Wombles, apart from a slick use of newspaper, are well up to Victorian standards of taste and workmanship. Nevertheless it's a relief to come across the exhibition devoted to Arthur Boyd Houghton (till February 14), which confirms that scholarship is still welcomed in the place. But the question remains: for how long? There were serious doubts from the start about the suitability of Roy Strong for the Directorship of such an august museum, doubts which were greatly increased for me when I tripped over an artificial rock in the darkness of The Land exhibition (reviewed November 6). The infiltration of the Wombles utterly confirms them. The models in themselves are acceptable, but presented along with an EMI golden disc in a showcase and photographs of the programme's production team, the exercise becomes insupportably commercial. It is not the duty of a great museum to promote television series.
Arthur Boyd Houghton was one of the best of the many illustrators who found ready employment in the magazine boom of the eighteen-sixties. In 1869 he was sent by the newly launched Graphic to record a sevenmonth tour of the US in words and pictures. This he did with a forthrightness that was to prove impossible once British imperialism had
, established itself. Then 'special artists' were sent to scribble on-the-spot sketches of imperial wars which were altered back in London into patriotic propaganda. Houghton had complete freedom. He drew the crowded discomfort of the crossing, the callousness of the New York police, maimed Civil War veterans begging in Boston and other unpalatable truths to such good effect that they caused a scandal in both countries. Bot travelling West his depictions of the inherent romanticism of the wilderness and the plains restored him to public favour. Graphic Amenca freed Houghton from the grind of the illustrative routine he had had to undergo, to the detriment of his work, for the Dalziels publications of the 'sixties. It reveals that relieved of pressure he can at times rival Dore and even Goya, as Van Gogh pointed out, but it was a rare moment. Only in his details of children — no one has drawn the humorous inconsequence of their behaviour with greater skill is such a standard maintained with anY consistency in the rest of his work.
Houghton's life was a train of disaster and he died of drink, unrecognised by the Royal Academy and convinced of his own failure, at the age of thirty-nine. Paul Hogarth's perseverance in championing the artist's work to the culmination of this exhibition should be rewarded with a more generous assessment of houghton's worth in future.
Recently there has been a lot of publicity _about Romaine Brooks, whose centenary exhibition is at the Fine Art Society till February 14. Poor little rich girls often become 'artists' and Romaine Brooks was no exception,
the only wonder being that reviewers as i i influential as Hilton Kramer still persist n
taking her seriously. The fact is her pictures are of an exhibitionist turn, stylistically a progression from Whistler via Munch to 'twenties chic owing a little but not enough to the Academie Colarossi. 'Here remains Romaine, who Romaine remains' as she wrote for her epitaph.
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