Can a 19th Century British Art Movement Solve the Modern Global Jobs Problem?

“Workers of the world, unite!” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels bellowed in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, largely in response to the Industrial Revolution (and Second Industrial Revolution) threatening not just the livelihoods but the very lives of many workers as profit reigned mercilessly over people. Marx even put the slogan on his tombstone, long before the Soviet Union adopted it as their official mantra. Workers of the world today facing the double whammy of technological revolution and systemic economic collapse wonder what, if anything, they should unite around. Although she doesn’t take the idea as far as I’d like to, Yvonne Roberts in The Guardian offers a possible solution in 19^th century British artist and designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement. Morris “esteemed craftsmen and women, unlike today when they are seen are second-besters,” Roberts writes, but I think you can extend that “second-best” label to nearly all the “99%” facing underemployment or non-employment around the world. Can a 19^th century British art movement solve the modern global jobs problem? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of  "Can a 19thCentury British Art Movement Solve the Modern Global Jobs Problem?"

[Image: William Morris. The Strawberry Thief, 1883. Textile design for walls or furnishings.]

[ANNOUNCEMENT: I will be presenting a lecture titled “Art Made Personal: Chris Sanderson and the Wyeth Family” at the Christian C. Sanderson Museum in Chadds Ford, PA, on Sunday, June 23^rd, from 1 to 3 pm. Please come out to support a great museum with a great collection of art and historical artifacts.]

Green Party

When Al Gore wrote An Inconvenient Truth, he most likely never envisioned his ecological ideas spawning a stepchild such as Dame Darcy’s Gasoline: A Graphic Novel. Billed as “a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by faeries, pirate lasses, zombie sailors, mermaids, arrow-splitting prarie dogs, Native American trackers, and plenty of good witches!”, Gasoline brings Dame Darcy’s unique take on the world’s addiction to fossil fuels to the public in weirdly wonderful words and imaginatively inventive illustrations. Illustrator, writer, fine artist, musician, filmmaker, and animator, Dame Darcy, best known for her comic Meatcake, also offers a soundtrack to Gasoline with her group Death by Doll and is currently adapting Gasoline for film. (Gasoline: The Cookbook and Gasoline for Wii aren’t ready yet, I guess.) As fellow comics artist Gilbert Hernandez says of Dame Darcy: “Love and imagination and a little madness (in the best sense of the word) inform her highly original and eccentric comics.” By definition, any statement about Dame Darcy can only be an understatement. She is a force that must be experienced to be believed, and Gasoline delivers a high-octane dose.

Gasoline follows the path of the Armbuster family as they scavenge gasoline from the ravaged landscape and explore alternative fuels and means of transportation, specifically an electric car. The leader of the Armbuster pack is Amity, the Queen Witch, and wife of King Witch, Dain. Amity serves as a doppelganger for Dame Darcy herself. “She was currently writing her songs, music, and combination dialogue-spell-prayer, as well as embroidering a white velvet knight’s tunic with fleurs-de-lis,” Darcy writes of a typical day for Amity (shown above multitasking in her garden). Gasoline sets up a clear opposition between the Armbusters and their archenemies, the Nihilists, who “are one with the darkness and evil that consumed Earth.” Darcy’s artistic utopia centers on the Armbusters. “Everyone in the community was an artisan, a craftsperson who fused socialism with nostalgia,” Darcy writes of her Arts and Crafts Movement gone nuclear in creative energy. In this respect, Darcy channels William Morris in her belief that art can truly change the world for the better. In Meatcake, Darcy generates a Victorian era atmosphere, and Gasoline follows suit with an apocalyptic future superimposed on that Victorian past.

The variety of characters Darcy introduces is as dizzying as the story itself. Imagine Gulliver’s Travels on fast forward, or an even more uninhibited Lewis Carroll. The illustrations to the text more than keep pace with the words. The illustration of a house with a face (above) perfectly combines the naïve style Darcy strives to maintain with the sophisticated sense of design and execution. It’s not easy to make adult literature look like children’s literature, but Dame Darcy maintains the magic while keeping an eye on the serious issues of the environment and the need to pursue alternative means of energy. It’s easy to dismiss Dame Darcy and her whole world woven of bits and pieces of fable and myth as a lot of New Age zaniness, but perhaps it takes such an alternative view of the world to get at the heart of the world’s problems. Al Gore never seemed as cool as when he talked passionately about global warming.

The marriage of Dame Darcy’s writing with her illustrations made me think of what William Blake would have been like as a woman. Darcy conducts the same restless energy that Blake did in his poetry and designs, but charges it with her uniquely feminist power. When Amity presides over a raucous voodoo ritual (above) that mixes the twenty-third psalm, snake handling, rooster sacrifice, and tribal dancing, Dame Darcy concocts her own private religion with woman as the central doctrine: “The Black Madonna, the human symbol of the primal goddess from whom all life originated, the embodiment of Mother Nature; she who had been there when women had been robbed of their birthright to power through intuitiveness and nature; the vessel and the giver of life, the conduit from the ether to this Earth.” You don’t fool with Dame Darcy’s Mother Nature. This all-inclusive “religion,” for lack of a better word, achieves a primal sense of imperativeness when it comes to ecology and just how high the stakes are for humankind.


“Boredom is the source of evil,” says one of the characters in Gasoline, which is many things, but never boring. When Amity dons a Joan of Arc costume (above), you truly get a sense that she, and by extension, Dame Darcy, are on a mission from God, or the gods. Darcy gets her most Blakean in a final coda featuring an illustrated single-page poem titled “Atom,” which puns on Adam and Eve. “The human race,” Darcy writes, “perceived/ their being/ and each other/ an alien universe/ unconnected/ with the source/ The Mother.” Gasoline will reconnect you with your wild side, your feminine side, and sides you never imagined you had, all while opening your eyes to an abundance of imagination and creativity. Like all utopias, Dame Darcy’s is unattainable, of course, but that never makes it less attractive or less an ideal to strive towards. In the eighteenth century, William Blake toiled in relative obscurity, a victim of closed minds that could never admit his uniqueness into their consciousness for a single second. In Gasoline, Dame Darcy asks us for a moment of our time with the promise of eternity, if not an eternal fuel source, in a single hour of reading.

[Many thanks to Merrell Publishers for providing me with a review copy of Dame Darcy’s Gasoline: A Graphic Novel and for the images above.]

Dreams No Longer Deferred

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). LadyLilith, 1866-68 (altered 1872-73). Oil on canvas, 38 x 33 1/2 inches. Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935.

After a long absence, the Delaware Art Museum welcomes back the renowned Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art after a long tour of the United States and England. In addition to a series of exhibitions and programs and a special website to celebrate the return, the Delaware Art Museum now reissues the 2004 catalogue, Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Delaware Art Museum. In addition to presenting beautiful reproductions of the art itself from the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art anywhere outside Britain, the catalogue analyzes the all-encompassing passion of Samuel Bancroft in his pursuit of the art and the stories and people behind it. Works such as Lady Lilith (above) fascinate Bancroft not only for their beauty and the artistry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but also for the history and life of the model, Fanny Cornforth, who evolved from model to mistress of Rossetti after the death of his wife, model, and fellow artist Elizabeth Siddal in 1862. Bancroft found Fanny and hounded her and others for the romantic, often lurid, and even macabre tales of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the most soap opera-esque of all art movements. Through these works, Bancroft relived the Pre-Raphaelite dream of pure imagination, a dream now returns to the Delaware Art Museum in its fullest sense.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, (1828-1882). Found, begun c. 1869. Oil on canvas, 30 x 35 inches. Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935.

“It would be ‘Rossettianism’ that intrigued and seduced Samuel Bancroft from the moment he set eyes on Fiammetta in 1880,” writes Stephen Wildman in his essay, “A Vision Realized: Pre-Raphaelitism in the Bancroft Collection.” Rossetti rightfully takes center stage in the Bancroft Collection with works ranging from his early 1848 painting Bottles to the late Mnemosyne of the 1880s. In between, works such as Found (above), the only “modern moral subject” Rossetti painted, trace the trajectory of Rossetti’s amazing career. Rossetti’s lighter side appears in the drawings he sent to Fanny Cornforth, the model for the woman in Found, in which he draws her as an elephant in a play on the name “Fanny.” Bancroft collected letters and personal effects of Rossetti in his relentless drive to “penetrate the surface of Rossetti’s disarming and frustrating personality” and “vicariously enter the personal world of the Pre-Raphaelites.” Rossetti died in 1882, just as Bancroft began collecting the Pre-Raphaelites, and this near miss haunts all his efforts.

Marie Spartali Stillman (1844-1927). Love's Messenger, 1885. Watercolor, tempera, and gold paint on paper mounted on wood, 32 x 26 inches. Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935.

Although Bancroft had rough, sometimes condescending encounters with some of the female Pre-Raphaelites, his collection allows a glimpse into that forgotten aspect of the movement. Examples of Elizabeth Siddal’s work allow us to see her as not “purely in the role of an attendant figure to Rossetti, as his model and pupil, mistress and wife,” but also as “a significant poet and artist, and in her determination to lead a life independent from the circle into which she was drawn, a laudable rather than a tragic figure.” In “Dreaming Awake: Marie Spartali Stillman and Pre-Raphaelite Images of Women,” Deborah Cherry contrasts the women of Rossetti and the male Pre-Raphaelites, “enfolded in reverie or rapt in contemplation, … dreaming awake,” with the women painted by Marie Spartali Stillman and other female artists of the movement. Stillman modeled for and studied under Edward Burne-Jones, developing her conception of the ideal woman within that of the Pre-Raphaelite circle itself. In this essay, Cherry recovers the lost feminism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was a Sisterhood as well, going all the way back to Rossetti’s support for women’s suffrage and his “innovative” insistence on a balance of male and female artists in exhibitions of the 1850s. In works such as Love’s Messenger (above), Stillman takes the stereotypical “stunner” of the Pre-Raphaelite images and adds an introspective touch, a mind stirring beneath the idealized exterior.


Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). Lancelot and Guinevere, 1873. Photograph, 13 3/4 x 11 1/4 inches. Acquired through the Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1979.

The Bancroft Collection at the Delaware Art Museum reveals the Pre-Raphaelite movement in all its variety and complexity. The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites on the nascent field of children’s book illustration rises in the works of Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, among others. Julia Margaret Cameron’s Pre-Raphaelite photography (such as Lancelot and Guinevere, above) opens up a whole new conception of the school as an early modern movement, something often forgotten in their fascination with medievalism. Stained glass, pottery, tiles, silverware, and even furniture (such as the chair painted by William Morris and Rossetti, titled The Arming of a Knight, below) display how Pre-Raphaelitism became an all-encompassing way of life for these artists and their patrons. Looking at the magnitude and variety of these artworks, one easily understands how Samuel Bancroft fell in love with this world and longed to join it in every way possible.

William Morris (1834-1898); Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). The Arming of a Knight, 1856-57. Painted deal, leather, and nails, 55 5/8 x 18 3/4 x 19 1/2 inches. Acquired through the bequest of Doris Wright Anderson and the F. V. du Pont Acquisition Fund, 1997.

The Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Collection at the Delaware Art Museum testifies not only to the passion and vision of one collector but also to the stewardship of an institution entrusted by heirs to keep that passion and vision alive. Waking Dreams brings the Pre-Raphaelite world to life in a way that Bancroft himself would have loved. Between the festivities of this homecoming and Tate Britain’s current exhibit Millias, the fires of Pre-Raphaelite passion are still burning strong.

[Many thanks to the Delaware Art Museum for providing me with a review copy of Waking Dreams and the images from the exhibition above.]

Beguiling Beauty

Edward Burne-Jones, one of the most beautiful and beloved artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was born on this date in 1833. After reading Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory while studying at Oxford, Burne-Jones’ imagination churned out image after image of Arthurian lore, such as The Beguiling of Merlin (above). The beautiful ladies and romantic heroes of Burne-Jones paintings continue to beguile viewers today after a long, unjust neglect during the heyday of modernism.

Burne-Jones studied under Dante Gabriel Rossetti and counted critic John Ruskin as one of his major influences. While at Oxford, he met William Morris, a kindred spirit with whom he joined forces later on to advance the Aesthetic Movement or Arts and Crafts Movement of late 19th century England. Although linked to the Pre-Raphaelites, Burne-Jones’ vision couldn’t be limited to any label, incorporating elements of Romanticism while looking forward to future art movements such as Symbolism and even Surrealism. Love Among the Ruins (above) revels in a dreamy romanticism with hints of the Arthurian mystique Burne-Jones loved, yet also has a quasi-religious overtone to it that points forward to Surrealism.

Burne-Jones’ talents expanded to media beyond painting—book illustrations, the theater, tapestries, jewelry, and even stained glass—often with the help of his friend William Morris. Created by William Morris’ company based on a design by Burne-Jones, The Last Judgment window (above) at St. Michael and St. Mary Magdalene’s Church, Easthampstead, England provides a beautiful example of how these two talents meshed together to create greatness. In contrast to the often wild lifestyles of the other Pre-Raphaelites (such as Rossetti), Burne-Jones lived a rather conventional life and enjoyed the favor of high society. After Burne-Jones’ death in 1898, the Prince of Wales requested a memorial service for him to be held at Westminster Abbey, the first time any artist had been so honored. Looking at Burne-Jones creations today they still seem fresh and vibrant, free of any associations with Victorian fussiness and repression. When I see how the excesses of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood led so many artists astray, I always try to remember how those same excesses led Burne-Jones to such heights.

The Importance of Being Caricatured

Max Beerbohm, born on this date in 1872, poked fun at and took part in the most exclusive circles of Victorian art and culture. Almost a professional partygoer, Beerbohm was the fly on the wall who could affectionately parody the great artists, all while denying his own talents. In his series of images titled Rossetti and his Friends, Beerbohm took aim at the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood surrounding Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Above, in the drawing long-windedly titled The Name of Dante Gabriel Rossetti Is Heard in for the First Time in the United States of America, Oscar Wilde promotes the merits of Rossetti before an American audience during his tour there as a dour portrait of Abraham Lincoln looks on.

“Be it remembered that long before this time there had been in the heart of Chelsea a kind of cult for Beauty,” Beerbohm once wrote of Rossetti’s circle. “Certain artists had settled there, deliberately refusing to work in the ordinary official way, and `wrought,' as they were wont to asseverate, `for the pleasure and sake of all that is fair.' Little commerce had they with the brazen world. Nothing but the light of the sun would they share with men. Quietly and unbeknown, callous of all but their craft, they wrought their poems or their pictures, gave them one to another, and wrought on. Meredith, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Holman Hunt were in this band of shy artificers. In fact, Beauty had existed long before 1880. It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who managed her de'but.” The trials and tribulations of the Pre-Raphaelites, perhaps the preeminent soap opera of art history, provided more than enough material for Beerbohm to attack. Beerbohm deflates much of the puffed-up super-seriousness of the Victorians, who were keen on grand proclamations and spat manifestos on aesthetics as easily as breathing. Rossetti’s Courtship (above) recreates the moment when the artist began his passionate pursuit of his model Elizabeth Siddal, but mercifully avoids the details of her untimely end.

Beerbohm’s omnipresence in the Victorian age always reminds me of Woody Allen’s character in Zelig. Somewhere in the picture you will always find Max, recording the quips and quirks around him for posterity. His Mr. Sargent at Work shows John Singer Sargent painting a wealthy patron to the accompaniment of string instruments, something Beerbohm himself witnessed. Beerbohm’s work gives us a glimpse at the other side of the Victorian façade, revealing the humanity and humor of these memorable artists.