For the love of art

May 21 2010 By Lorne Jackson

With a new exhibition dedicated to the work of John Brett, Lorne Jackson rekindles his love for the Pre-Raphaelites.

My first visit to Liverpool was a disappointment – and it was all the fault of The Beatles.

Well, not just The Beatles. Greggs the bakers must shoulder some of the blame as well.

This was a few years ago, before Liverpool became the City Of Culture, and when strolling round Merseyside was as bleak and grey a prospect as an amble through Alistair Darling’s eyebrows.

Every second shop on the high street was a Greggs. Every first shop was a Greggs, too.

The scenery became even more dismal when I drudged into Mathew Street, home of The Cavern, the club where The Beatles first made a name for themselves in their own town.

And it was still there. Still playing Beatles records, still snuggled safely inside the womb of the sixties.

Pathetic, really. Even worse, though, was the rest of the street. Beatles cafes, Beatles shops, Beatles bric-a-brac emporiums.

Suddenly I felt a wave of nostalgia for all those other Liverpool streets merely dotted with budget-price bakeries.

This, then, was my Liverpool experience – a city trapped somewhere between a lunchtime pasty and the lingering past.

John, Paul, George and Ringo had left their home town long ago. But their home town never had the guts to leave the Beatles.

This is not a diatribe against Merseyside, by the way. Well, only partly.

However, I do believe that every British city that is not Liverpool should concern itself with avoiding becoming Liverpool. Don’t be hypnotised by what has gone; never swap dynamism and discovery for drift and daydream.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the odd celebration of the achievements of previous generations. The danger lies in being in thrall to them.

Which brings me to Birmingham, and the city’s passion for all things Pre-Raphaelite.

We just can’t help ourselves, can we?

Birmingham Museum And Art Gallery has a mouth-watering collection of work by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including the largest collection in the world of the works of the city’s very own Edward Burne-Jones.

Celebrations of Pre-Raphaelite splendour are promoted in the city with as much regularity as there were calls for Gordon Brown’s resignation.

When it comes to Birmingham, there’s nothing pre about the Pre-Raphaelites – they are very much of the here and now.

Some will argue that this is a good thing. After all, what’s not to like? The Pre-Raphaelites were giants of the Victorian universe. They provided English art with a radical manifesto and many beautiful paintings.

The art world was shaken by their refusal to follow the traditional mode of painting, exemplified by Sir Joshua Reynolds. (Labelled Sir Sloshua by the Pre-Raphs, who abhorred his sludgy canvases.)

They fought for luminosity, clarity of vision, sharpness of execution, and faithful observations from nature.

And when they weren’t throwing shimmering light on canvas, those raffish Pre-Raphs indulged in lives of bohemian excess, which have often been dramatised, most recently in last year’s Desperate Romantics.

Actually, the BBC TV series wasn’t so much a dramatisation as a walloping exaggeration.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the rest of the brotherhood were portrayed as sex obsessed rock stars.

It was more like one of those saucy ‘Confessions movies from the seventies. All that was missing was a ladder, a bucket of soapy water and Robin Askwith staggering behind the bedroom curtains, bell-bottom denims rumpled round his ankles.

Silly as the drama proved to be, it emphasised the continuing allure of the Brotherhood, even outside of the Midlands.

Still, I do feel that Birmingham should sometimes distance itself from the movement, just a smidgen, so that it can perhaps investigate a less well farmed creative landscape.

This explains why I wasn’t exactly enthused at the first mention of Objects of Affection – Pre-Raphaelite Portraits By John Brett, now showing at the Barber Institute Of Fine Arts.

Here we go again, I sighed, back to Brum’s very own Cavern.

Yet having browsed the series of paintings, photographs and family ephemera on display, I have a shame-faced confession to make.

The exhibition is a delight, a must-see, and I found myself falling in love with the Pre-Raphs all over again. Very surprising, really,