The Victorians: British Painting 1837-1901 by Malcolm Warner, Anne Helmreich, and Charles Brock
1998; Scriptoriun Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/art.1998.0045
ISSN1934-1539
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Art and Culture Studies
Resumo112ARTHURIANA insistence on the importance ofpopular adaptations ofscholarly material and critical debate, adaptations ranging in intellectual level and in audience appeal from the stolidly edifying Bibliothèque bleue to the studiedly cosmopolitan Revue des deux mondes. His thorough exploitation ofperiodical literature and his assiduous integration ofthose results with the grand themes ofof modern French historiography may well be this book's prime contribution to continuing scholarship. The style ofthis book will not appeal to all; it struck this reviewer as more wooden in the earlier chapters than toward the end, which does seem to have engaged the authot more than his earnestly elaborated prolegomena to the central argument. Some readers may object to the evidently Francophile author's tendency to quote his French sources both frequently and at length; a reader not at ease with literary French might find this useful study frustrating. This reviewer tried his hand at some English renderings of key quotations, but found in each case that the translation traduced the message excessively. Glencross doesn't merely love the French language and its distinctive critical tradition; he has a keen eye for its riper nuances, and feels committed to reporting them faithfully. As a result, the mental world of Edgar Quinet and his fractious intellectual confrères, paradoxically enchanted at once by Ccltomania and classicism, has come alive once more in these careful pages. JEREMY JuQUF-SNAY ADAMS Southern Methodist University Malcolm warner, Anne helmreich, and Charles brock, The Victorians: British Painting 1837-1901. New York: Harry N. Abrams/Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1996. Pp. 256. isbn: 0-81096-342-6. $49.50 (cloth), isbn: 0-89468-263-6. $29.95 (paper). 'The Old has passed away,' lamented Thomas Carlyle, 'but, alas, the New appeals not in its stead.' That age of transition and doubt is the focus of The Victorians: British Painting 1837-1901, the superlative catalogue of the Spring 1997 exhibition at Washington's National Gallery of Art—astonishingly, 'the first major survey of Victorian art to be mounted in the United States' (p. 7). Compared to similar blockbuster shows, The Victorians is an anomaly. The choices are ridiculously easy for Vermeer (get every painting you can!) and not that much more difficult for Cezanne. But Malcolm Warner and his colleagues could pick from hundreds ofVictorian painters and tens of thousands of their works, all execured in the swirl ofeconomic, political, social, and aesthetic ideas characteristic of a nation then the most powerful in the world. To their credit, the organizers opted not for 'representative examples' nor for 'diversity,' choosing instead the best sixty-eight paintings they could assemble. The thirty-five artists range chronologically from J.M.W. Turner to Walter Sickert and alphabetically from Lawrence Alma-Tadema to Franz Xaver Winterhalter. But nine painters produced over half the works in the exhibition, thus calling the roll of the present consensus on the Victorian pantheon: John Everett Millais (nine paintings); Edward Burne-Jones (five); George Frederic Watts and James McNeill Whistler (four REVIEWS113 each); William Holman Hunt, Edwin Landseer, Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and James Tissot (three each). The prominence of Frederic Leighton would certainly have stunned art buyers of thirty-five years ago, who could have purchased his most famous painting (Flamingjune, included in the exhibition) for a mere fifty pounds. Malcolm Warner's fine introduction traces this fall and rise ofVictorian painting, which sank to the depths—like most things 'Victorian'—early in the twentieth century, when impressionism, post-impressionism, and the various '-isms' ofmodernism (fauvism, cubism, etc.) made Victorian art seem, at best, ornamental illustration. Works such as Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) stigmatized the new generation's hapless Victorian parents and grandparents as priggish boors who set in motion whatever subsequently went wrong, including World War I. Ironically, it took another war—with the attendant surge ofnationalism and pride in all things British—to revive interest in Victorian painting, beginningwithWilliam Gaunt's The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (1942). In valuingthose paintings, so manyechoingthe medieval past, a nation re-discovered its necessary heroic codes. In the 1997 National Gallery exhibition and its legacy in this catalogue, Victorian painting has achieved its apotheosis. This beautifully produced catalogue is a...
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