By Elizabeth Prettejohn, Ph.D. Professor of History of Art, University of York, UK
Elizabeth Prettejohn is Professor of History of Art and Head of Department, History of Art, at the University of York (UK). Her books on the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement assessed the achievements of Victorian artists and placed them in relation to European Modernism. Her work on the critical fortunes of Victorian art has led to a more general interest in taste and aesthetics, explored in her books Beauty and Art 1750-2000 (2005) and The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso (2012). Her most recent book, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (2017), argues that Victorian artists were, paradoxically, at their most original when they imitated the Old Masters most faithfully. Liz is an active guest curator and has co-curated exhibitions on Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John William Waterhouse, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 2011 she gave the Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery, London, on ‘The National Gallery and the English Renaissance of Art’.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Liz studied American art and architecture at Harvard University, before moving to London to study British and French art at the Courtauld Institute.
Winckelmann’s thought and writing are routinely acknowledged to have had a profound influence on the artistic practices of the half-century after his death, known under the label ‘Neoclassicism’. Standard accounts of modernism in the arts, however, assume that this influence came to an abrupt end around 1815. According to such accounts, the anti-classical reaction that followed the Battle of Waterloo and the demise of Neoclassicism was itself a motive force in the generation of modern art and modernism. This paper argues, on the contrary, that Winckelmann’s ideas not only remained relevant, but gained in power through the generations after the fall of Napoleon. Mediated by critics and artists among whom Walter Pater and Frederic Leighton serve as the principal examples, Winckelmann’s thought made a decisive contribution to twentieth-century modernism. In particular, the articulation in both criticism and artistic practice of ideas about classical form, indebted to Winckelmann, had a subtler and more complex impact on the modernist doctrine of ‘formalism’ than literary or art historians have acknowledged. A renewed attention to classical form will help future scholars to write a more nuanced account of modernism in the visual arts. More importantly, it will call attention to artistic projects that have been excluded from histories of modern art due to reductive assumptions that classicism and modernism are inherently contradictory. The paper concentrates on Frederic Leighton as a case study of an artist whose historical importance and aesthetic merit have been occluded by reductive thinking of this kind.
Frederic Leighton, Elijah in the Wilderness, 1878, oil on canvas, 234.3 x 210.4 cm, National Museums Liverpool (Walker Art Gallery).
