It’s obvious, from the very first room of Tate Britain’s overblown, baffling celebration of the “radical” and “revolutionary” pre-Raphaelites, who was the real talent in the Rossetti family: the poet Christina Rossetti. You can hear readings of her poems here, including Colour, which praises colours in almost childlike, spiritually clear images: “What is yellow? pears are yellow, / Rich and ripe and mellow.”
Unfortunately as you listen, you are obliged to look at her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1849-50 painting The Annunciation, displayed like the icon it isn’t in the middle of the space. Where Christina’s images have a crystalline exactitude that makes them pretty much timeless, this work is strictly for buffs of Victoriana. It is like some sort of taxidermy exhibit, a leaden quotation of medieval art that’s neither properly medieval, nor bitingly modern.
Although this exhibition strives to set her verse alongside his art, there’s only so far you can go with bringing literature into the gallery via poems printed on walls. Her steady quiet voice is drowned out by his lurid paintings of luscious-lipped beauties. It looks as if DG never tried to draw anyone or anything freshly from life, ever. His pseudo-Renaissance paintings are heavily worked up concoctions of symbolist erotica – and it turns out his drawings are like that, too. When he sketches his models, who are his lovers, he never sticks with what he sees but transfigures them in abstracted, simplified lines. Not that he’s an abstract artist. Just an emptily idealising one.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were a bunch of so-so male artists who got together in 1848 to dress up their art in the borrowed robes of 15th-century religious fervour and promote themselves as social saviours. But the wall text will have us believe they were “revolutionaries” who “wanted to express themselves authentically with art and poetry based on lived experience and nature”, that they were a group of “young men and women” in spite of stressing Brotherhood in their name. Thus we’re told that John Everett Millais’s 1850 watercolour A Baron Numbering his Vassals actually depicts the class conflicts of 1840s Britain. Really? It looks like a placid portrayal of medieval folk to me.
The show pushes its exaggerated political claims for the pre-Raphaelites to absurdity in an extended exploration of Rossetti’s unfinished painting Found, in which a “woman of the streets” who has collapsed against a wall is saved from death by a rustic. In a series of half-painted, half-baked canvases, Rossetti dwells on the sensual face of his model Fanny Cornforth in a way that ludicrously undermines the supposed social message of the work. The exhibition takes it all with leaden literalism as a radical, revolutionary indictment of Victorian capitalism. In reality it’s a collision between Rossetti’s erotic narcissism and his attempt to create a conscientious painting. Surely, the reason he never completed Found is because he knew it was awful.
If there was a pre-Raphaelite painter who fitted this show’s vision of a socialist-feminist critique of the Victorian social order that artist was William Morris, not Rossetti. Morris actually was a socialist. But while he was trying to design Utopia, Rossetti was having an affair with, and painting, his wife Jane. And while the morally fervent John Ruskin was praising and buying not only his art but that of his lover and eventual wife Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti was betraying Siddal with Cornforth.
In its desperation to see the Rossettis as high-minded and progressive, this exhibition makes a startling factual error. A wall text explaining Rossetti’s 1859 painting Bocca Baciata tells us it illustrates “The Decameron, a sensual medieval Italian poem by Giovanni Boccaccio”. The same claim is in the catalogue. But there is no medieval “poem” called The Decameron. It is the founding masterpiece of Italian prose: a collection of ribald stories that’s an ancestor of the modern novel.
Rossetti in fact is illustrating the seventh tale on the second day of The Decameron, in which an eastern princess on her way to marry the Prince of Algarve is shipwrecked before being pursued and in effect raped by a series of men. So this painting is very far from the “romantic radicalism” this exhibition claims for him. In portraying his lover Fanny Cornforth as Boccaccio’s princess he seems rather to be making a dirty joke, or sexual boast. What a laugh.
DG Rossetti was no radical pin-up but at least he supported Siddal to become an artist. Her paintings, like his, depict Arthurian romances with brightly hued passion. But their combination of self-taught naive drawing with pre-Raphaelite fantasy is often clumsy and inert. Then again, that’s also true of the more technically refined works of the male pre-Raphaelites.
The exhibition excludes Millais’s Ophelia, in which Siddal floats in macabre ecstasy, even though it’s owned by Tate, probably because it wants to get away from the “myth” of Siddal. She was a real person – but she quickly became a fantasy figure for Rossetti who cherished a lock of her hair – exhibited here – and later got his friends to open her grave in Highgate Cemetery, London.
Christina had her brother’s number. Her poem In an Artist’s Studio, printed on a wall here, evokes a mysterious model whose “face looks out from all his canvases”. This omnipresent “nameless girl” haunts the artist’s work. He “feeds upon her face by day and night”.
It’s the pre-Raphaelite muse, a myth this show signally fails to bust. Christina Rossetti sees the role women will always have in her brother’s art: to be fed on.
• The Rossettis is at Tate Britain, London, 6 April to 24 September
