For the past 150 years or so, the story of art has been one of artists taking things out and putting things back in. For every artist who believed in stripping art down to its elegant bones, there was another who believed, just as passionately, that art was being ransacked.
The battle was more complex than one of revolutionaries vs. reactionaries. No less an innovator than Picasso complained in later years that pure abstraction drained art of its “drama.”
“The Beguiling of Merlin” cemented Burne-Jones’s fame. The model for the temptress was his mistress.
In the mid-19th century, even before impressionism started the series of upheavals that have characterized modernism, a group of English painters decided that art had taken a wrong turn back in the late Renaissance with the idealized art of Raphael, grounded in perfect circles and arcs. This, they decided, was artificial, not true to nature. They took as their models the artists of the earlier Renaissance, and called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
It’s a little hard to see all this today. At times, the works of the Brotherhood’s founders, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, can have a photographic verisimilitude, but just as often, their works look, well, like those of the Italian Renaissance. They had a fondness for a certain kind of Italian beauty – women with full, bow mouths and large wide-set eyes – that can make their work look stylized, the opposite of naturalistic.
Edward Burne-Jones, who lived from 1833 to 1898, is considered a second-generation Pre-Raphaelite. Whatever attracted him to the Pre-Raphaelites, it wasn’t naturalism, for what we find in his work is, instead, the other-worldliness of early Italian painting, a mood he evoked in paintings of classical and medieval legends, particularly the tales of King Arthur.
His romantic symbolist style made him immensely popular in Victorian England. Unfortunately, it went totally against the grain of reductive modernism, which, as it gained ground, totally eclipsed this kind of art until about 25 years ago.
The work of Burne-Jones and other, more traditional artists, has been dusted off and put back on museum walls. And now, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted a show marking the centenary of Burne-Jones’ death, the first such American retrospective devoted to his art. To call this a curious exhibit wouldn’t quite be fair, for one can’t help but be impressed by the reach of the artist’s imagination and the breadth of his accomplishment. His art is poetic, but odd, in that it seems to spring from no particular time.
The novelist Henry James probably put his finger on it when he called Burne-Jones’ work “a museum,” a term he used with admiration. A museum it is, in the sense of art history on parade, of an art that draws so much from the past. Of course, the Victorians were like that. They were eclectic in their tastes and robust in their appetites, eager to try everything on the menu. Victorian architecture is a mish-mash of historic references, but done so earnestly and energetically that it seems to triumph over its own bad taste, and that’s not a bad description of Burne-Jones.
His period of greatest accomplishment, the 1860s and 1870s, are remembered for what happened in France, not England, and for a style called impressionism, not the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
The otherworldliness of Italian Renaissance art was a reflection of its religious subjects, and struck the right note. But, when Burne-Jones invokes a similar mood in the service of Arthurian legends – a less profound subject matter – the results can seem trumped up. What impresses us about these paintings, in fact, is not their otherworldliness so much as their psychological power.
In the painting that cemented his fame, “The Beguiling of Merlin” (1874), the legendary magician has been rendered powerless by the beautiful Nimue, who is leading him to his doom. Her hair is entwined with snakes, like the Gorgon Medusa, and Merlin, who knows the future, is portrayed as curiously passive, acquiescent.
The painting resonates with the artist’s personal life. The model for Nimue was the exotically beautiful Maria Zambaco, who became Burne-Jones’ mistress; the affair caused a great scandal before he broke it off and saved his marriage.
It’s hard to say if Burne-Jones’ treatment of these legends is served by having the figures look so much like real people, such that we are made aware that models must have posed for them. When it comes to Merlin we might prefer a little more mist or smoke. The same holds true for his treatment of the classical myths, like the Pygmalion story. Having a statue turn into a real woman is the kind of subject that can look awfully hokey if it’s handled with too much realism.
The hallmark of Burne-Jones’ art – what made it seem modern, though with mixed results – was the mood of nervousness, anxiety, and uncertainty. His characters often look lost, bereaved, or deeply melancholy. The lovers of classical legends seem, like Merlin, to have a foreshadowing of their doom. At times, in fact, they seem conscious that they are in a painting, the way that actors sometimes look conscious of being on a stage. They seem to carry the weight of legend and myth on their shoulders, to know that these stories have been told many times, have deep and complex meanings, and the burden of that has made them weary.
Without the redemption of religious subject matter, Burne-Jones art seems to carry a fatalistic message. It’s there in one of his last, unfinished paintings, a powerful, ominous picture called “The Sirens.” Based on no particular story, it shows a big-bellied ship sailing into a dark cove, in which sirens – those who lure sailors to their death with songs – stand, like pillars of rock, with deceptive passivity. The sailors peer over the railing of the ship, too charmed perhaps by the songs to know their fate. It’s a ghostly evocation of sexual tension, or perhaps, something closer to emotional dread. Its unfinished quality seems a virtue here, in that the characters seem less self-conscious of the roles they are cast in, and the illusion of art is better served.
