Dungeons and Dragons
It has
always been easy to make fun of Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), the English
Pre-Raphaelite painter and designer. How could a serious European artist, a
contemporary of Degas' and Manet's, spend his time filling medieval ghost towns
with somnambulant knights and maidens? Who are these anorexic figures with
their stoned expressions and "over-shampooed hair" (as Sir John Pope-Hennessy
once quipped)? The Metropolitan Museum of Art, never much of a showplace for
British art, has mounted a Burne-Jones exhibition that in its sheer size and
comprehensiveness--there's always one more room than you thought, including a
dining room decorated by the master--asserts the artist's importance. But
you've got to be in the mood, for this is an art that, like Wagnerian opera or
sumo wrestling (both wickedly caricatured by Burne-Jones), requires a
suspension of ordinary impatience. Henry James, who reviewed a key exhibition
of 1878, wisely advised his audience to approach Burne-Jones "good humouredly
and liberally [since] he offers an entertainment which is for us to take or to
leave."
It is easy
to laugh at Burne-Jones. It is harder to understand him. He knew exactly what
he was doing, and he did it exceedingly well. "I mean by a picture," he wrote,
"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 no one can define, or
remember, only desire." It is the piling on of negatives that is significant
here, for Burne-Jones was a profoundly reactive artist. The Impressionists have
trained our eyes to see the modern world of work and leisure in a certain way
and in a certain--natural--light and to think that it is a good thing to banish
myth from modern painting. But Burne-Jones hated that light and that world,
inventing another one from Arthurian romances and early Italian paintings. "The
more materialistic science becomes," he boasted to Oscar Wilde, "the more
angels shall I paint."
Born in Birmingham, the stronghold of British
industrialism, Burne-Jones was the son of a gilder and framer whose handicraft
traditions predated the Industrial Revolution. His mother died within a week of
his birth. The theme of recovery--of his father's craft ethos, of a mother's
soothing presence--runs through Burne-Jones' career. At Oxford he met William
Morris, another middle-class dreamer in flight from the modern world. They took
rooms together in London in 1856. Their idols were the Pre-Raphaelite
ideologues John Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose passion for medieval
Italian art before the individualizing tendencies of the Renaissance (hence
"pre-Raphael") they shared. Burne-Jones studied briefly with Rossetti, and his
early work, with its intense floral patterning--the flowers on the ground
blending with the flowers in the maidens' costumes--could easily be mistaken
for Rossetti's.
When
Morris and his associates launched a design firm in 1861, Burne-Jones joined up
as a founding member. The two close friends form an interesting contrast.
Burne-Jones, rail-thin and reclusive, had a single-minded devotion to the
visual arts and especially to drawing. The overweight Morris, caricatured in
several of Burne-Jones' witty sketches and nicknamed "Topsy," applied his
capacious mind to every aspect of culture and society: literature and art,
economics and politics, architecture and city planning. He was one of the
towering figures of Victorian Britain and remains a force--he's a darling of
the Labor Party and the academic left--in its intellectual and political life.
Morris wanted to work out the nuts and bolts of an actual socialist society to
replace the capitalist, industrial society he so hated.
Burne-Jones hated it no less, but there's little of the
social critic in his temperament. He was content to accept commissions and to
leave the arguments to Morris. He was the brilliant medieval craftsman
envisioned by Morris, turning out extraordinary designs for just about
everything--not only such Morris staples as tapestries, stained glass, tiles,
furniture, and book illustrations but also jewelry, fans, and embroidered
shoes. All but the shoes are on view at the Met. The Morris emphasis on the
handmade, the rough-hewed, and the handed-down--what Thorstein Veblen, a year
after Burne-Jones' death, wickedly called the "exaltation of the
defective"--did not reverse the Industrial Revolution. (Machines, after all,
make things more cheaply.) Like the Bauhaus and other utopian schemes to
redesign the world, however, it left a lasting and positive imprint on
international taste.
In his
paintings, Burne-Jones almost never portrays the world of the artisan (except
in a caricature of Morris, his fat ass as wide as the loom at which he works).
His languid figures lined up across the canvas do almost nothing; they can
sometimes work up the energy to idly pluck a lute, or to roll the dice on a
backgammon table (see , at the Metropolitan). Burne-Jones prefers stasis to
activity; he likes to paint people asleep, turned into stone or trees, or
chained up (like the maiden waiting to see if the dragon or King George gets
there first). In the story of Briar Rose (or Sleeping Beauty) he found a
perfect theme, with knights and maidens and kings and queens all asleep amid
the flourishing underbrush. Burne-Jones' lovers seem always in freeze frame,
like the frustrated couple in that Pre-Raphaelite touchstone, Keats' "Ode on a
Grecian Urn": "Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,/ Though winning near
the goal." The beautiful (1868-77, also at the Metropolitan), where the mood is
so lulling that even Cupid has drowsed off, is Burne-Jones' idea of bliss.
When his women unexpectedly wake up, like Galatea in his
"Pygmalion" series or the spurned lover emerging from the almond tree in
(1881-82, Merseyside), it's often disconcerting, and the men look as though
they should have let sleeping maidens lie. The culminating image in this vein
is (1873-74, Merseyside), in which Burne-Jones found biographical resonance in
the scene of the magician lured to his doom by the femme fatale Nimue.
The model for the temptress with snakes in her hair was Maria Zambaco, a
sculptress of Greek background who was in turn Burne-Jones' pupil, studio
assistant, and lover before he broke with her in 1869 and returned to his
long-suffering wife. Modern women with their sexual appetites remained in his
mind a threat as great as modern machinery. In a bizarre late painting called
(ca. 1891-98, Ringling Museum of Arts, Sarasota, Fla.), an armored boat with
oversize phallic anchors looms in a harbor, the banks of which are lined with
scantily clad women. Burne-Jones explained, with characteristic vagueness and
paranoia, that he had depicted "a sort of Sirenland--I don't know when or
where--not Greek Sirens, but any sirens, anywhere, that lure men on to
destruction."
By 1890, Burne-Jones was
among the most famous painters of Europe; his reputation, thanks to
international exhibitions and traveling critics, was as high in Paris and the
United States as in Britain. He who had painted so many knights accepted a
baronetcy in 1894. Two years later, Morris died, within a few months of the
publication of his Kelmscott Chaucer , which had illustrations by
Burne-Jones--one of their greatest collaborations. Two years after that, Sir
Edward died of a heart attack. He had spent a lifetime imagining solemn and
ritualized occasions. The Prince of Wales arranged a memorial service in
Westminster Cathedral--the first time a British artist had been so honored. It
was the one scene in his life--the right mix of ceremonial and stasis--that
Burne-Jones himself might have found visually appealing.
