Page 49 - Studio International - May 1972

vindication, and so on. The trappings look good for instance, are on the water, not at the top of work to make it come out so dazzlingly right.
too; the bohemianism or non-bourgeois life the canvas. This was a bizarre thing to attempt, One of his problems was that he had little to
style, the quick-folding little group magazine, and Millais brings it off well. Poor old Ophelia, start with apart from his own prodigious talent.
the scorn of the press, the one critic who stood meanwhile, is sinking down out of sight, and out What painters did he admire ? He could out-
up for them, the desperately small circle of of mind. There is no purchase here on any paint his teachers while in his teens (and out-
discriminating collectors. However, all this is feelings one might have about the play, or her painting people, as Turner demonstrated, was a
beside the point, for the major credential is still fate. One does not consider them. The painting lively tradition in the Royal Academy, a minor
lacking; the pictures aren't good enough. There does not meaningfully illustrate Shakespeare. reason why the place wasn't as dead as all that).
weren't more than ten really good paintings (There is a recent theory that the picture is So who should he bother to study ? If the
from the whole lot of them, probably fewer; and loaded with sexual connotation—a young girl accepted old masters were a bore, neither were
not all of these are to be seen at the 4
Whitechapel. A proto avant-garde view breaks
down on the issue of quality. But since there are
periods in the history of modern art (we're in
one now) where rapid change is effected without
the production of a lot of good work, acute
historians have more chance than stringent
critics of digging out what mattered.
The best work belongs to the early to mid-
fifties, when the movement became independent
of its initial historicist ploy, grappled rather than
groped, when each new painting was a new
move, not a repetition, as happened later on.
The assumption of a realist mode by Millais
and Brown, and in a vitiated form by Hunt,
was bold and imaginative. It stands up well to
comparison with French Realism. The realist
impulse was a complicated one, and differed
from artist to artist. Only with mechanical
minds was it merely a question of looking around
for new 'subject matter' and then getting it into
the picture. In Millais, the most gifted of the
artists, one has the sense of someone working
(albeit sporadically) as if wanting to use Realism
and technical demands differing from his
academic training (demands in his case to do
with managing detail, perfectionism of drawing,
clear lighting and high colour with a minimum
of modelling) to make better paintings; not,
like Hunt, to make points of a literary or moral
type which could be reasonably extrapolated
from the figurative contents. And since he was
very bright indeed and not in the least
thoughtful, what we begin to find in Millais
at his best is that the vivid expertise of his
technique glitters over the import with such
brilliance that the subject is lost. This already
happens very early on, in Lorenzo and Isabella
and Christ in the House of his Parents, which were
both deliberately meaningful when designed.
It reaches a high pitch in Ophelia, for which the
preliminary drawings were either partial or
desultory. This is Millais's best painting. It on her back, in a bridal dress, etc.—but my own the pre-Renaissance painters sufficiently
almost has a shimmer over it; and it is so feeling is that if it takes more than a hundred exciting to give him more than a hint or two early
minutely painted, from edge to edge, with a years to discern sexual matters in a painting on in his historicist phase. He didn't trouble to
needle-pointed verve, that the surface qualities then they can't have been very sexy in the pursue them, never thought of going to Italy,
have a paramount role. There is another reason first place, and secondly, where did pseudo- even at the pressing invitation of Mr (and Mrs)
for this. Why people often have the feeling in psychiatry ever get the appreciation of art Ruskin. Unlike Turner, the best English painter
front of the picture that they would like to look anyway ?) before his time, he was too precocious to be
at it laid on the ground rather than hung on the Millais's youthful production had a special able to understand artistic ambition, and he had
wall is that, as far as he dared, Millais got above kind of bravura: something one normally no sense of history. A streak of caution quickly
his subject and cut out the horizon, and thus associates with broadness of effect, a dashing emerged in him, as if to guard his gifts
the sky, and thus any aerial perspective. It way with the brush, but which in his case was an protectively, not as if to nurture them against a
begins to feel as if one is looking down upon appealingly egotistical impulse to display in subsequent exposure to risk. Canniness soon
water outside on a summer's day, when what close-up what he, and no-one else around, could succeeded brilliance. Ophelia was his
one sees is not what is beneath the surface but do. This doesn't mean to say that he was flashy. most risk-taking work.
what is above it. The intense sky-blue patches, Painting like that still took a lot of laborious After that, he undertook nothing of which
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