Volume 48, Number 2 · February 8, 2001
Back to the Future
By Sanford Schwartz
The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites
by Elizabeth Prettejohn
Princeton University Press,304 pp., $49.50
Elizabeth Prettejohn's study of Pre-Raphaelitism is both heroic and outlandish, but then so was her subject. Prettejohn, who teaches at the University of Plymouth and has written on Sargent and Leighton and worked on exhibitions at the Tate Gallery and the Royal Academy, believes this movement is a triumphant affair that offers something to celebrate no matter what element of it you turn to. More than that, she sees these nineteenth-century London painters, whose hyperrealist images and pictures of pensive young women in historical settings have for decades constituted the essence of un-modernity, as nothing but modern artists. In their work, she believes, we can find ideas and techniques that run 'parallel' to approaches held in later decades by the Impressionists, the Fauves, the German Expressionists, the Cubists, the Surrealists, the American postwar painters—by all the traditionally admired schools of progressive thinking right up to the present. Prettejohn is so head over heels in love with the idea of her artists as brilliant avant-gardists that her book, which happens to be lavishly illustrated with reproductions that are very true to the original works, comes across as a fantasy. It has the same boyishly all-or-nothing, irony-free fervor that fueled, and ultimately limited, the Pre-Raphaelites.
Review, 4853 words
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