I should add something about the intentional
fallacy. Nobody's made the argument yet, but
someone surely will. It goes like this: "you have
no way of knowing what the artist felt. Maybe he
was being completely dishonest, his statement the
purest contrivance, and you believe him. On the
other hand, maybe the artist was being completely
straightforward emotionally and you don't believe
him." To which one might answer, "so what?" It's
entirely possible that Millais or Thomas at their
most bathetic were trying to appear bathetic for
the fun of it, and it's entirely possible that
they were really 15 years old and felt as they
write/paint. There's an issue of honesty of craft
still to be dealt with. But of course it still comes down to taste and trust.
And to who the appropriate audience is. I had a
brief Thomas fling at about fifteen, decreasing
interest/trust since. And the pre-Raphaelites,
given our shared fascination with red-haired
women, were sometimes the nearest thing to
pornography available to me in those days, tho
considerably less honest than pornographers tend to be.
Mark
At 06:52 PM 10/25/2007, you wrote:
>Statement seems a bit broad. I don't think that
>it's the accuracy of rendering (in any case not
>so simple a thing to define) that makes his work
>seem so mawkish (which I think is what you mean
>by "artificial" here). A few blocks from me are
>the Cloisters and its Unicorn Tapestries. The
>rendering of vegetation is extraordinary. I
>doubt that the first (or second or third) thing
>that comes to mind for most viewers is a sense
>of artificiality--rather, one's response is
>overwhelmedness, ecstasy. The same might be said
>of the vegetation in Botticelli's Primavera. The
>sense, I think, is that we believe the artist is
>presenting an experience much like our own,
>whereas Millais is standing apart, manipulating us.
>
>Maybe sentimentality could be defined as the
>formulaic presentation of sentiment with an end
>in mind, even if the intended recipient is the artist her/him/it/self.
>
>Mark
>
>
>At 06:27 PM 10/25/2007, you wrote:
>>Matthew Reynolds in the current tls online notes, inter alia:
>>
>>
>>It is a paradox of Pre-Raphaelite art that the more accurately natural forms
>>are rendered in oils the more artificial they appear. Millais was the
>>painter who most noticed this peculiarity and turned it to advantage. In
>>³Mariana², leaves from the detailed autumn trees outside have come into the
>>interior, perhaps through the window or a door out of shot, or perhaps
>>gathered by Mariana to serve as models for the leaf-and-flower embroidery
>>with which she is passing the time (this piece of womanıs work shows that
>>Millais was responding to ³The Lady of Shalott², with its weaving, as well
>>as to the other poems by Tennyson that were his main sources, ³Mariana² and
>>³Mariana in the South²).
>>etc
>>
>>
>>On 26/10/07 3:40 AM, "Roger Day" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> > consider John Everett Millais, the founder of the pre-Raphaelite
>> > Brotherhood, and 'Bubbles'. Or any pre-Raphaelite painting.
>> > Sentimentality seems to drip from their pores yet stay just the right
>> > side of kitsch.
>> >
>> > Roger
>> >
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