BOOK OF THE MONTH
Representations of G.F. Watts: Art making in Victorian culture
Edited by Colin Trodd
Ashgate (0754605981)
Reviewer: JOSEPH HARVEY (Bibliographer, Lindsay and Croft)
You only have to put "G.F. Watts" as a subject heading into the Library of Congress collections search engine to see how little critical material has been written on him over the last century. (About twenty odd hits come up). Like the small Watts Gallery, hidden away in a village beneath the A31 motorway, about twenty minutes from the Lindsay and Howe's office, his legacy as one of the Victorian heavyweights has been left to fend for itself, rooms cold and empty, roof only just intact.
For a painter who once had the equivalent of the Tate's Rothko room in the National Portrait Gallery, this is quite a shock. Deemed unfashionably as the St George of Victorian classicism he is now hidden behind increasing amounts of dusty Arcadian foliage, so much so that in the 21st century we can't really make him out any more as anything but a curious relic.
As E. Prettijohn says in the opening essay of this new collection, "If early modernism disdained classicism because it seemed artistically reactionary, late 20th century art historians added the charge that it was politically and culturally reactionary as well".
Although Victorian painting may still be popular with the likes of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, it's favour in critical circles has indeed gone from bad to worse, and although Watts' work may not be the garish tea towel fair of other Victorian greats, it has suffered just as badly, for its supposed imperialistic tendencies, inconsistencies, and being, well confusing and altogether rather gloomy. George Frederic Watts' lights have gone out, these essays attempt to stoke the critical fires a little.
We can't really say he's been totally forgotten, his monumental sculpted horse back rider, 'Physical Energy', still dominates Kensington Gardens in London, a selection of portraits still hang prominently in the National Portrait Gallery, but this in a way is Prettijohn's point. Where Watts' grand Victorian vision is still visible it's glimpsed through the strictures of a National (and in Victorian terms Imperialistic) frame.
The remnants of the Wattsian epic exist only in a secluded part of the establishment. (Physical Energy looks out over the Princess Diana memorial walk!!).
These essays argue that the artist's work is far more complex and modern than many of his Victorian brethren and insists that though Watts may have been entombed as an establishment figure he was far more individual an artist who's epic vision of humanity was hijacked by history and misplaced in the process.
Paul Barlow's essay argues that the collection of portraits that the National still holds close to it's heart has been contextualized and nationalised to the extent that Watts' original vision of a 'House of Life', a selection of pictures that would in his words declare a 'message to the age' and 'transform humanity', has been lost altogether.
Watts' portraits may be of leading establishment figures of the day, but tellingly his focus is intensely on the individual's form and facial expression, more interested in the spiritual union of subject and viewer than conveying the subject's social status, like so many Victorian portraits.
The charges that his work is inconsistent, a ramshackle collection of pseudo Ovidian symbolist paintings, and imperialistic statues are also tackled by the essays in this book.
Although Watts "inherited a culture of visual rationality" from the Royal Academy of Joshua Reynolds, the defining urge to imitate ideal forms, Watts saw this as rather than a game in copying, playing with ideas of time, light and symbol. Watts' paintings, like 'Hope' and 'Time, Death and Judgment', rather than dustily updating the classics are more a complex and modern form of 'translation', indeed his obsession with repainting and reinterpreting the same themes in his paintings, many of his works could be seen as the precursors of expressionist 20th Century work.
This is a fascinating collection of essays that will hopefully fuel future critical debate in shedding light on this much maligned and misunderstood of 19th century artists.
