ART CHRONICLE
97
orological phenomena but also a romantic wonder before the infinite,
formless expanses of the sky.
If
the sheer painterly sensuousness of these Constables and Turners
had sufficient impact to make many spectators forget that their creators
were basically concerned with values foreign to the School of Paris,
the Pre-Raphaelites could offer no such deception. With only seven can–
vases, they assaulted contemporary attitudes and visual sensibilities with
unparalleled violence and, as such, comprised the major revelation of
the show. It was no accident that their gallery was invariably more
crowded than the others. This was not only a question of the close
scrutiny their work demanded, for the Blakes and the watercolor land–
scapes of the preceding gallery required this, too, and were passed over
with little attention. It was rather that by flagrantly and passionately
denying every premise of the twentieth-century aesthetic, the Pre–
Raphaelites provoked spectators into looking and thinking.
Moral purpose, scrupulous realism, bourgeois pathos, intricate nar–
rative, shrill color and space relations-these were the heresies which
outraged modern eyes. But these outrages were so forceful and so genu–
inely felt that once one was willing to accept their alien language, they
could easily become a positive vocabulary in the same way that Kline's
or Still's recent pictorial iconoclasms suddenly looked familiar and be–
came art. Like the living avant-garde, the Pre-Raphaelite experience,
largely unknown to American eyes, incited spectators to either extreme
antipathy or adulation, but never indifference. Holman Hunt's "Awak–
ening Conscience" was a prime offender, for it was easy enough to scoff
at the jungly, Victorian density of this St. John's Wood interior, at the
explicit drama of spiritual redemption, at the meticulously painted
strands of unraveled wool, at the acidulous cerises and greens. But with
a rearrangement of prejudices, one could just as easily have been
rewarded with a work of gripping visual and literary intensity, a work
which far transcended its incontestable value as an historical document.
The searing, febrile anguish of this drama of sin could convince; the
disguised secular symbolism could take on the intellectual fascination
of a Renaissance iconographic puzzle; the pious insistence on literal fact
could acquire the magical flavor we admire in the early Flemings;
and, most paradoxically, the incredibly crowded two-dimensional pattern,
which offered a multiplicity of pictorial incident rarely equaled in the
history of art, could even begin to provide those values of a labyrinthine,
over-all surface activity which the investigations of a Tobey or a
Pollock have taught us to enjoy.
These qualities-and positive qualities they are-were consistently
evident in the works of Dyce, Millais
1
H unt
1
and Brown
1
if not of
