Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext (review)

In this intelligently edited collection, the quality of individual essays is high, and the editors have a clearly articulated agenda. Noting that art history, as an academic discipline, has been slow to take account of the rhetorical structures, local arguments, and ideological motivations that shape textual accounts of Pre-Raphaelitism, Michaela Giebelhausen and Tim Barringer have invited the essayists to participate in a project of critical historiography. Hence their title: the object of study is the long history of the "writing" of Pre-Raphaelitism not only by contemporaries and participants but by scholars, critics, and biographers.

Opening essays by Deborah Cherry and Julie Codell suggest the volume's principal historiographic narrative. Codell documents a late-nineteenth-century effort among British critics to refashion the once rebellious Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood into exemplary figures of British artistic modernity. Though contested and incomplete, the undertaking was nonetheless effective: not only William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais but Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones were recuperated as national artists, exemplars of heroic masculinity and hence fit, morally and physically, to represent Britain as a European cultural force and an imperial power. The grounds of their modernity were, however, debatable: for some it was their realism and engagement with modern, urban, industrial life; for others (including most Europeans), it was their early contribution to late-century modern art of the irrational and strange, of dream and symbol. Not only reviews but the studio visit, the memoir, the life-and-letters biography, the posthumous exhibition, and the single-artist monograph contributed to what Codell characterizes as the nationalization, sanitization, and domestication of Pre-Raphaelitism.

For Cherry this first moment of "writing the Pre-Raphaelites" shaped the iconic moment of their late-twentieth-century return to popular and scholarly attention, the 1984 Tate Gallery exhibition. In a lively and pointed reading of that exhibition's installation, its catalog essays, and the affiliations of the authorizing Committee of Honour, Cherry notes their conservative return to the high-art biographical approach of the earlier textualizing moment, with its commitments to nationalism, manliness, and bourgeois individualism. In fact, in Cherry's account, this much-publicized exhibition sparked the reaction that has since thoroughly shifted the meaning of the modernity claimed for things Pre-Raphaelite. She points to revisionary critiques first offered by feminist critics and later by scholars who broadened the scope of the adjective Pre-Raphaelite from an exclusive focus on the artistic vision of individual male painters (and their sexually as well as artistically progressive lives) to include collaborative, materially experimental, and commercially savvy arts like design, photography, and the arts of the book. These developments, she suggests, participate in the belated emergence of a more critical art-historical scholarship: while "Pre-Raphaelite" has remained central to British claims for a robust nineteenth-century modernism, the understanding of what it means to be modern has dramatically changed.

Few of the other contributions adopt the same synoptic historiographic approach. Most are focused on individual figures: Rossetti (David Peters Corbett), Hunt (Giebelhausen), Ford Madox Brown (William Vaughan), Simeon Solomon (Colin Cruise), Millais (Malcolm Warner), and William Michael Rossetti (Julie L'Enfant). While the best of these expand and complicate the master narrative, their focus suggests that Pre-Raphaelite scholarship remains—for better or worse—rooted in the intensive study of particular artists and continues to respond to the polarizing claims of earlier advocates of either a realist Pre-Raphaelitism centered on Hunt or a visionary Pre-Raphaelitism centered on Rossetti. As Cherry notes, such scholarship reflects an abiding tension in textual representation of Pre-Raphaelitisms from their beginnings in 1848. Social and professional collaborations were central to Pre-Raphaelitism, permitting (though also occluding) the participation of women artists and designers and an expansive involvement in high and low art and design. These group activities are particularly important to contemporary ideas of what makes them modern. Yet such collaborations were contentious and temporary, not least because individual artists...