Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design ed. by Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, and: The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites ed. by Elizabeth Prettejohn (review)

In 2013, as the blockbuster exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art traveled from Tate Britain to Washington’s National Gallery to museums in Tokyo and St. Petersburg, the Guggenheim produced a massive groundbreaking exhibition of Futurism, that important Italian modernist movement the reception of which has been distorted by its association with fascism as much as by the general tendency in art history to neglect modern movements with roots outside of France. These two revisionary shows succeeded splendidly in bringing new recognition to the intellectual drives and art-historical achievements of movements and of individual artists that have not always received their due. They also provided an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which temporality itself can become a measure of achievement, or perhaps something that camouflages or stands in for other forms of judgment. For both Futurism and Pre-Raphaelitism, it is not just a matter of a particularly valued period, in the way we find written into Neoclassicism, or even the Renaissance—names that are in any case retrospective impositions on art and artists, not categories claimed by the makers in order to identify their aspirations. Futurism participates sometimes to the point of parody in that characteristic modernist drive to make it new, to refuse the past. Indeed, the movement was kept alive in culture, even when its art objects were disdained, by the charm of a set of amusingly self-conscious manifestos making with gleeful hyperbole a claim for art that is more often assumed than supported: that art’s real moment is some time beyond today. Much like Pre-Raphaelitism’s aspiration to find its future in the past, in a time before Raphael (or sometimes more precisely, before late Raphael or Raphael’s followers), Futurism bears evidence to the power to organize and motivate aesthetic ambition of the kind of period markers that came to proliferate in the nineteenth century, though the aspirations of Futurism are bound to look more modern.

That the Victorians kept warning themselves about the limitations of an obsession with historical locatedness is an indication of the contrary currents shaping the desire to place oneself in time. It is an important theme of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1857 ars poetica in Aurora Leigh: “I do distrust the poet who discerns / No character or glory in his times, / And trundles back his soul five hundred years” (edited by Margaret Reynolds [Norton, 1996], 5.189–191). But the aspiration to make out the future may itself be a manifestation of a broader cultural crisis, as Thomas Carlyle argues in “Signs of the Times” in 1829: “Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them” (The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. xxvii, edited by H. D. Traill [Chapman and Hall, 1899], 56). The Pre-Raphaelites themselves would not have disagreed with either of these two writers (both of whom they admired). It was precisely the ability to catch and give significance to the moment in which they were living that they felt they had discovered in painting before Raphael.

The Pre-Raphaelite movement, like a number of other continental developments with which it is often contrasted (such as Impressionism), is very much about being contemporary. The name notwithstanding, the representation of actual lived life—urban, rural, and even suburban—is very much a key element in what the Pre-Raphaelites aimed to do, both because of their commitment to minute examination of the world around them, and because of their sense of an ethical mission to address themselves to contemporary circumstances.

Modern taste has for the last couple of hundred years found itself yoked to an historical argument. If we...