<em>William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings</em>, by Caroline Arscot

Abstract

Reviewed by: William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings Kathleen O’Neill Sims (bio) William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings, by Caroline Arscott; pp. 260. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008, $75.00, £40.00. Caroline Arscott, Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, offers students of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones an engaging, if eccentrically speculative, study of the aesthetic relationship between the two artists. Arscott opens her introductory chapter by articulating a dialectic between the artists’ timeless “lyrical” images and the time-bound textual “narratives” in which those images have their contexts. She posits Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s fascination with imaginary body morphologies, psychic and [End Page 152] physical spaces, and their troubled utopian desires as crucial to a full understanding of the expressive urgencies coursing through the fine arts, literature, and decorative arts of the second half of the nineteenth century. This study alternates between chapters devoted to works or clusters of works by each artist. Arscott’s first chapter, “Morris: The Gymnasium,” seeks to illuminate the convergences between Morris’s early wallpaper design and fitness theory, harkening back to his and Burne-Jones’s Oxford days when both would frequent the gym of Archibald MacLaren, who was to give Burne-Jones his first commission designing illustrations for a book of fairy ballads. Arscott argues that as Morris grew older, his designs relied increasingly on two-dimensional motifs evacuated largely of negative space. Arscott compares Morris’s practice of beefing up the patterns of his designs at the expense of the background to the tearing down and building up of soft tissue to create lean muscle mass in order to escape bodily decay and death, linking both to experiments in Aesthetic art. In this same vein, chapter 3 examines Burne-Jones’s unfinished Perseus series (1875–88), undertaken in response to Morris’s robust designs. Arscott deploys the under-appreciated Didier Anzieu’s psychoanalytic theory of the “skin ego,” which, in both pre- and post-Oedipal dispensation, experiences the overwhelming external world of reality effects across its fragile and permeable surface. Whereas the alarmingly stout Morris creates strapping acanthus vines and loud chrysanthemums, the painfully thin Burne-Jones paints a vulnerable, thin-skinned hero who appears to have forgotten his shoes. The armor he creates for Perseus provides a much-needed exoskeleton for his mythological protagonist. Arscott’s elaborations on this seeming half-man-half-machine says a lot about Burne-Jones’s forlorn and feeble construction of masculinity. But then she overshoots her lovely insight that Perseus is a time traveler (psychic or art-historical, she does not say). Her comparison of Perseus to the Terminator is modestly entertaining, but only just—while her illustrations do intrigue, correlation is not causation. Arscott also fails to provide any convincing evidence that Burne-Jones drew his inspiration for armature from Victorian weapons manufacture. Perseus’s metallic skin owes far more to the Hermes of Andrea Mantegna’s Parnassus (1497) than to a proto-cyborgian vision. Moreover, much of his armor features avian elements, as if the magic of Hermes’s slippers had enchanted even his most obsidian of garments. Designed for Arthur Balfour’s dining room, this series was to have included, like The Legend of Briar Rose series (1870–95), in situ panels encased in wooden frames with gilded gesso ornamentation and set off by text. Chapters 4 and 5 continue to explore the dialogue between the two artists by analyzing Morris’s wallpaper designs from the 1870s onwards alongside Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose series. Here Arscott explores how and why these artists (Morris more than Burne-Jones) chose to erase the boundary between foreground and background, as well as between fine and decorative arts, in seeming anticipation of modern concerns with space, image, and function. She also examines dead space in Morris’s textiles and wallpaper designs, describing how their interlocking patterns, color blocking, and strong vertical repetitions convey the harmonies of the natural world and promote a green vision of a human community, while simultaneously reminding the spectator of his mortality and subjection to the cycles of life and...