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    Burne-Jones
    Burne-Jones
    Burne-Jones
    Ebook118 pages43 minutes

    Burne-Jones

    By Patrick Bade

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    Burne-Jones’ oeuvre can be understood as an attempt to create in paint a world of perfect beauty, as far removed from the Birmingham of his youth as possible. At that time Birmingham was a byword for the dire effects of unregulated capitalism – a booming, industrial conglomeration of unimaginable ugliness and squalor.
    The two great French symbolist painters, Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, immediately recognised Burne-Jones as an artistic fellow traveller. But, it is very unlikely that Burne-Jones would have accepted or even, perhaps, have understood the label of ‘symbolist’. Yet he seems to have been one of the most representative figures of the symbolist movement and of that pervasive mood termed “fin-de-siecle”.
    Burne-Jones is usually labelled as a Pre-Raphaelite. In fact he was never a member of the Brotherhood formed in 1848. Burne-Jones’ brand of Pre-Raphaelitism derives not from Hunt and Millais but from Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
    Burne-Jones’ work in the late 1850s is, moreover, closely based on Rossetti’s style. His feminine ideal is also taken from that of Rossetti, with abundant hair, prominent chins, columnar necks and androgynous bodies hidden by copious medieval gowns. The prominent chins remain a striking feature of both artists’ depictions of women. From the 1860s their ideal types diverge. As Rossetti’s women balloon into ever more fleshy opulence, Burne-Jones’ women become more virginal and ethereal to the point where, in some of the last pictures, the women look anorexic.
    In the early 1870s Burne-Jones painted several mythical or legendary pictures in which he seems to have been trying to exorcise the traumas of his celebrated affair with Mary Zambaco.
    No living British painter between Constable and Bacon enjoyed the kind of international acclaim that Burne-Jones was accorded in the early 1890s. This great reputation began to slip in the latter half of the decade, however, and it plummeted after 1900 with the triumph of Modernism.
    With hindsight we can see this flatness and the turning away from narrative as characteristic of early Modernism and the first hesitant steps towards Abstraction. It is not as odd at it seems that Kandinsky cited Rossetti and Burne-Jones as forerunners of Abstraction in his book, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParkstone International
    Release dateDec 22, 2011
    ISBN9781781606384
    Burne-Jones

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      Book preview

      Burne-Jones - Patrick Bade

      Author: Patrick Bade

      Layout: Baseline Co Ltd

      61A-63A Vo Van Tan

      4th Floor

      District 3, Ho Chi Minh City,

      Vietnam.

      © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

      © Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

      Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

      ISBN : 978-1-78160-638-4

      Patrick Bade

      Edward

      Burne-Jones

      TABLE OF CONTENT

      1. King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1880-1884

      2 .The Annunciation ( The Flower of God), 1863

      3. Sidonia von Bork, 1860

      BIOGRAPHY

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

      1. King Cophetua and the

      Beggar Maid, 1880-1884.

      Oil on canvas, 290 x 136 cm.

      Tate Britain, London.

      When Burne-Jones’ mural sized canvas of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (p. 4) was exhibited in the shadow of the newly constructed Eiffel Tower at the Paris Exposition universelle in 1889, it caused a sensation scarcely less extraordinary than the tower itself. Burne-Jones was awarded not only a gold medal at the exhibition but also the cross of the Légion d’honneur. He became one of those rare Anglo-Saxons who, from Constable in the early nineteenth century to Jerry Lewis in the late twentieth century, have been taken into the hearts of the French intelligentsia. For a few years while the Burne-Jones craze lasted, fashionable French women dressed and comported themselves à la Burne-Jones, cultivating pale complexions, bruised eyes and an air of unhealthy exhaustion. The two great French Symbolist painters Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes immediately recognised Burne-Jones as an artistic fellow traveller. In 1892, the cheer leader of the Decadence Sâr Joséphin Péladan, announced that Burne-Jones would be exhibiting at his newly launched Symbolist Salon de la Rose-Croix alongside Puvis de Chavannes and other leading French Symbolist and English Pre-Raphaelites.

      Burne-Jones wrote to his fellow artist George Frederick Watts I don’t know about the Salon of the Rose-Cross — a funny high-fallutin’ sort of pamphlet has reached me — a letter asking me to exhibit there, but I feel suspicious of it. Like Puvis de Chavannes (who went so far as to write to Le Figaro denying any connection with the new Salon), Burne-Jones turned down the invitation.

      It is very unlikely that Burne-Jones would have accepted, or perhaps even have understood, the label of Symbolist. Yet, to our eyes, he seems to have been one of the most representative figures of the Symbolist movement and of that pervasive mood termed fin de siècle.

      Symbolism was a late-nineteenth-century reaction to the positivist philosophy that had dominated the mid-century.

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