The Rossettis, Tate Britain review: Art, sex and death, Pre-Raphaelite style
1 year, 8 months ago

The Rossettis, Tate Britain review: Art, sex and death, Pre-Raphaelite style

The Independent  

The Pre-Raphaelites don’t go away. Those hyper-religious, medievally fixated Victorian death-obsessives may seem perennial candidates for the dustbin of history, but iconic Pre-Raph works such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix and John Everett Millais’s Ophelia are regularly listed among the nation’s best-loved paintings. Tate Britain’s latest Pre-Raphaelite blockbuster focuses on the illustrious Rossetti family, which produced the movement’s de facto leader Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti. Yet Maria and Michael barely figure, and it’s difficult to make even Christina feel present in what rapidly establishes itself as a Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhibition with only occasional incursions from other artists. Having abandoned pure Pre-Raphaelitism with its implicit Christian morality, Rossetti – an atheist – threw in his lot with the Aesthetic Movement and its philosophy of “art for art’s sake” and pure visual pleasure.

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