The Pre-Raphaelites (2012)

Art Review from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Pre-Raphaelites exhibition at Tate Britain is sub-titled Victorian Avant-Garde, although the Pre-Raphaelites did not reflect contemporary bourgeois capitalist society in Britain but hearkened back to the early Italian Renaissance of the 1400s.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848, the year of Revolutions and of the publication of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. British industrial capitalism was booming, free trade was triumphant, the Great Exhibition showcased Britain’s superiority as the ‘workshop of the world’ but the antagonisms between the capitalist class and working class were becoming visible. Dickens and Mrs Gaskell, and Engels in the Condition of the Working Class in England, described the poverty of the working class, but the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the machine age of modern industrial capitalism, believing beauty and spirituality had been lost, and wanted to provide an alternative to the materialism of the age.

The Pre-Raphaelites brought a realism to biblical subjects such as Millais’ portrayal of the ‘holy family’ as working class in Christ in the House of His Parents which shocked bourgeois sensibilities. Holman Hunt evoked bourgeois sexual guilt when a woman sees the error of her ways in the Awakening Conscience.

Ford Madox Brown portrayed a young couple sailing from the White Cliffs of Dover in the Last of England, which highlighted the fact 300,000 people emigrated in 1852, and in Work he showed labour as a noble and sacred duty in capitalism. In contrast, The Stonebreaker by Wallis depicts the exhausting toil of an agrarian worker. Holman Hunt painted a portrait of industrial capitalist and patron of the Pre-Raphaelites, Thomas Fairbairn, who had tried to smash an early trade union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, in 1852.

This exhibition also includes the decorative arts of William Morris, Philip Webb and Burne-Jones which covers furniture, stained glass, textiles, carpets and tapestries depicting Chaucerian themes. Morris’s ‘medievalism’ revived older forms of production in protest at the cheap, mass produced goods of capitalist society, and a desire to have “attractive work” in producing objects. Later Morris, with Eleanor Marx and others, founded the Socialist League, a forerunner of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

The Pre-Raphaelites are in stark contrast to the ‘realism’ in French painting in the same period where Millet depicted Woman Baking Bread, and Courbet portrayed the Stone Breakers (a work admired by Proudhon), and the Origin of the World which depicted a woman’s genitalia (John Ruskin would have fainted). Interestingly a friend of Rossetti called Bell Scott painted an industrial scene in Iron and Coal. However this is overshadowed by the mammoth productive forces of industrial capitalism in Menzel’s the Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclops), a picture which adorns the cover of the Penguin edition of Marx’s Capital Volume 1.

Marx identified the popularity of Greek art as stemming from “the childhood of human society where it had obtained its most beautiful development”. Did the Pre-Raphaelites yearn for the adolescent phase of human history?

Steve Clayton