Pre-Raphaelites Victorian Avant-Garde Tate Britain

The Tate has tackled the hugely populist subject of the Pre-Raphaelites and has certainly come out on top. Their exhibition takes the starting point of the mysterious arrival and grouping of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and turns the exhibition into a story that unravels into a cullimination of how the Pre-Raphaelites dominated the Victorian aesthetic world and still leave the modern day viewer with a sense of mythical awe.

Telling the story of the artists that combined ‘rebellion, beauty, scientific precision, and imaginative grandeur’ (Tate) this is a story of the industrial advances that were shaping the Victorian world and led to an artistic harking back to an England of legends and chivalry. The Tate manages to beautifully combine the a variety of mediums to enhance the impression of the Pre-Raphaelites domination on every part of life, including, paintings, furniture  ceramics, sculpture, stained glass, and textiles to illustrate the evolution and influence of the movement.

The exhibition itself is split up into seven rooms, each of them helping to define a significant process of the artistic movement.Room one introduces you to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and gives historical context to the birth of the movement, a rebellion against the industrial advances. The harking back to the early-Renaissance art with a modern twist reflects the movements desire to be both historical and contemporary to juxtapose with the industrial revolution that surrounded them. Room two, depicts the pre-Raphaelite honesty towards history, ensuring a realist style and accuracy in such things as dress, with a particular focus on biblical scenes and medieval tales.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti Lady Lilith 1866–8 Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial 1935

Room three concentrates on the emphasis on nature in the pre-Raphaelite work, with the majority of paintings and work being adorned with natural imagery, again focusing on the tension from the increasingly compromised vast green and open spaces of the countryside. Room four demonstrates the ever domineering presence of religion in Victorian life. Though religion was becoming increasingly contested it was still a powerful tool, and many artists sought salvation through their work and attempted to make the biblical moral stories relevant to a wider audience once more. In contrast to the ideological imagery of these salvation paintings, room 5 shows the obsession with beauty and the exploration of purely aesthetic paintings. This obsession with beauty soon overshadowed the morality and truth expressionism that can be seen in the earlier works of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This room particularly focuses on the enchanting work of Rossetti and his ‘art for arts sake’. Moving away from paintings and human beauty, Room 6 shows the establishment of the decorative arts movement within the pre-Raphaelites, William Morris’s work features heavily here as his wallpaper, tapestries and rugs adorn the room. These meticulously crafted pieces of work are laced with a search for truthful forms of production against the mass, cheap goods made so widely available by the industrial revolution. To finish the exhibition, Room 7 is entailed with the theme of mytholigies, which captures the poetic nature of the final pieces of pre-Raphaelite work, a rejection of the modern world, seeking refuge in idealised versions of the past.

Peacock and bird carpet c.1800s © William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest

The exhibition moves clearly and with determination, you do not feel it stagnates at any point. There is a clear chronological and thematic point of the exhibition that transports you through the many stages of the pre-Raphaelite movement with ease. Although the amounts of work on display can be overwhelming at times, as there is often just too much to gaze at when you initially enter any of the seven rooms, you are able to be enraptured by every piece without noticing the piece of work next to it. It is a triumph of an exhibition and one I wish I had time go back and visit again and again, it tells a brilliant story with ease and brings the pre-Raphaelite message into the modern world.

The exhibition is running until the 13th of January 2013: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/pre-raphaelites-victorian-avant-garde