PRE-RAPHAELITES: Seminal Reactionaries, 1848

"The more important question is whether The Love Song is the nostalgic, wistful kind of painting that only a kitsch-lover, hopeless romantic, or deep reactionary could really love."

The Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau were taught to me in art history class  as a reaction to modern industrial capitalism.  I missed the designated bromide: create art from the seminal early Italian Renaissance before Raphael, viewed as the purest high artistic and moral achievement. 

Now, I'm a Raphael fan; I think he's neglected because he died too young and his synthesis of Renaissance values has a balance that escapes modern viewers.  Much easier to find Da Vinci's scope and Michelangelo's power than consider Raphael's summative celebration of Italian humanism (the Raphael Stanze). 

When I went to the Sistine Chapel I waded through crowds being warned to hold silence (hopeless) and moved into Pope Julius II's magnificent library.  No one there.  All to the good for me, as I spent hours reading and looking. 

Morgan Meis writes in his blog about the Met's exhibit, "the Pre-Raphaelite Rebellion and It's Legacy", and discusses the artistic rebellion against stultified academic art values at its core.

I'm interested in this because I'm still hopeful that someone will let me live guiltlessly in what's seen as escapist genre kitsch.

It's valuable to have the accomplishment of the pre-Raphs describe so fully.  But I just can't drink the kool-aid. I have to put them into my category of attempted recovery art.  They're like a space capsule that is returned from the sky with the people intact, but missing the propellant rocket that took them there.  You get the nugget, not the chicken.

It's heroic to stand against the magnitude of historical atrocity. But all those brave positions remind me of the futility. German Expressionism and Kathë Kollwitz summon better.  

I'm done here; I'm going to declare genres to be my eternal fadeless summer.   



  

FILM: Witness for the Prosecution, directed by Billy Wilder

Tyrone Power, Marlene Deitrich, Charles Laughton in a film based on a Broadway play by Agatha Christie. It's got a "spoiler alert" at the conclusion to the wonderful plot twist.  

The film is like a lot of play-to-movie adaptations, talky and now dated; we're so familiar with courtroom procedural drama now that the trial, set in the famous Old Bailey London courtroom, seems improbable.

Tyrone Power was in his 40's when he made this film; his last - he died of a heart attack soon after. It's poignant to see this performance. In this film, he looks sleazy and unhealthy.  His face is fleshy and carved with lines, and his presence is disturbing.  Is he a whimsical charmer or a clever and evil criminal? 

Charles Laughton is the perfect curmudgeon, blustering and yet poignant, as the lawyer who defends Power at the risk of his own health. He's a kind of caricatured Churchillian Brit.

Marlene Dietrich plays the truly clever yet unsympathetic wife who schemes to testify to prevent her lover-husband from conviction for murdering a rich widow.  Her face is glowing, iconic, and polished, her eyes seem all-knowing in her Germanic iciness. 

It's Billy Wilder, but I find it off; Agatha Christie's powerful writing and plotting really muffle and dilute the themes that haunt me after seeing a great Wilder film. It's the fully complex ambiguous characters that are best about the film. The war has drained any moral blood left in them, and it's shadow is long.  It's up the Brits to restore a lawful world, not the old central European nexus.