Dr. Elizabeth Helsinger
Pre-Raphaelite Modernism
Recent re-evaluations of the British Pre-Raphaelites of the later nineteenth century have radically changed our understanding of their romance with the past. The young painters, poets, and designers who came together 150 years ago to repudiate contemporary arts (and social conventions) were also pioneers in "making it new" (to borrow Ezra Pound's resonant battle-cry for twentieth-century modernism).
This presentation will re-visit some of the diverse strands of Pre-Raphaelitism for signs of the new -- from the detailed naturalism of rebellious teenagers Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti circa 1850 through the increasingly anti-realist, non-narrative painting and innovative decorative arts and architecture produced in bohemian circles around Rossetti.
Other figures to be discussed might include painters Edward Burne-Jones and James McNeill Whistler, architect Philip Webb, and designer-poet William Morris; Christina Rossetti (a superlative poet), poet-provocateur Algernon Swinburne, amateur musician Georgianna Burne-Jones, painter-poet-model (and Rossetti's wife) Elizabeth Siddall, skillful needlewomen Bessie and Jane Burden (Morris) and May Morris -- and a host of talented others who gathered briefly in Morris's Red House, Kent or Rossetti's Tudor House, London, in the decades after 1850.
Elizabeth Helsinger is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, where she has taught since 1972. Her publications include Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (1982), Rural Scenes and National Representations, Britain 1815-1850 (1997), Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (2008), and numerous essays and talks on Victorian literature, art and culture. She co-authored The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883 (1983) and is a co-editor of the journal Critical Inquiry. She has also served as chair of the Department of English at the University of Chicago (1998-2005). Recently she organized the exhibition The Writing of Modern Life and the Etching Revival, 1850-1940 on view at the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago (November, 2008-April, 2009). She is currently working on a new book about figures of song in later Victorian poetry and painting.
When and where to enjoy this lecture: Thursday, December 11, 2008, at Lakeview Museum, 1125 W. Lake Ave., Peoria, Illinois.
Other programs in the Fine Arts Society's 2008-2009 Lecture series: "The Genius of Mark Twain" with Dr. Elliot Engel, "Inspired by the Louvre: American Artists and the Louvre" with Dr. Elizabeth Kennedy, "A Journey through the Art of India" with Kristan McKinsey, "Now Your Colors Sing: Chagall and the School of Paris" with Miranda Hofelt, "Munch's Modernity" with Dr. Peter Chametzky and "Contemporary Native American Art" with Joe Baker.
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