Romantics: Desperate and Otherwise

The ABC has just finished screening Desperate Romantics here. In the UK, it seems to have set off a mini Pre-Raphaelite revival with its apogee being a exhibition of their art during the London Olympics in 2012. The serial announces itself as "inventive" so of course it takes remarkable liberties with the lives of the artists (principally Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt), with a great emphasis on their sexual lives. But all in all it's impish, high spirited and good natured in tone and a great deal of fun to watch. And of course it's got people talking about the artists - though one may question if a revival is required after all. The Pre-Raphaelite manifesto may sound idealistic but the art itself is largely middling, though they were sort of the avant garde of the day.

My own knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelites before watching the series was ancillary at best. In an over heated phase of my life I read a great deal of poetry by Christina Rossetti (Promises still remains a favourite), of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems I had read only "The Blessed Damozel". I had seen many reproductions of Millais' Ophelia. And I knew a great deal about Ruskin, in part because he was one of the Mahatma's influences and a few decades back one paid more attention to the great man's reading list. As it happened, Ruskin was one of few portrayed in a rounded way in the series, helped along by Tom Hollander's portrayal.

I can't say that the series in any way prompted me to explore more of their work though I did find myself liking Millais' A Huguenot on Bartholomew Day and Rossetti's painting of Jane Morris (both below), the first intentionally medieval in tone, the second very much Victorian. As an aside, I have a feeling the Pre-Raphaelites were associated with the Artistic Dress Movement and the use of vegetable dyes, but the costumes in some paintings as well as in the series appear to be infleuenced by the brilliantly coloured synthetic dyes that followed the discovery of mauveine.

Both paintings have an element of kitsch to them. But both also suggest why kitsch/pop culture - whatever one may call it - is more likely to resonate and repeatedly find expression through the decades than high art. They both possess the "hook", something that reels us in ineffably even if the head is theorising otherwise.

The "inventiveness" of the series also extended to William Morris. I possess a book on the man and he is by all accounts nowhere close to the buffoon of the series. Morris' prints are in fact sublimely beautiful. They err neither on the side of excessive sentiment nor on the avant garde and edgy. Instead they possess a timeless, organic beauty. There is a seriousness to Morris' work and thought which is completely absent in his representation in the series and arguably his work has survived better than that of the Pre-Raphaelites. Then again, the series is a bit of a lark and nothing much should be read into it.