Evelyn De Morgan might not be a household name now, but you get some sense of the clout she must have had in 1907 when Wolverhampton Art Gallery sought her out for the one-woman-show which is being recreated here. Not only was De Morgan a successful artist, but she was a lucky one. Her sister, Wilhelmina Stirling, championed her work, gathering together as much as she could and bequeathing it to what is now the De Morgan Foundation. The Foundation, with no dedicated exhibition space of its own has agreements with three venues, including Wightwick Manor, an Arts and Crafts property on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, now under the care of the National Trust. If you're making a trip to the area to see Painted Dreams, I would definitely advise a stop there, not only has it a gallery dedicated to De Morgan and her husband, the ceramicist, William, but there are fine examples of Evelyn's work in the house collection. It is the existence of the De Morgan collection which has made it possible to gather most of the 1907 pieces together again for this exhibition.
Painted Dreams, a phrase taken from a 1907 review, well describes the curatorial mood-music. You push your way in through a closed doorway and find yourself cocooned within dark walls and bright pools of spotlit colour. It's a clever hang which shows off De Morgan at her best. As an artist who loved intense, modern pigments and iridescent complimentary shadows, and who used gold throughout her career, her works can seem too gaudy in natural light. Here they glow with an inner, ethereal beauty. Yet at the same time, every detail of the Pre-Raphaelite-precise draughtsmanship is crisply visible, from the goldfinch's plumage in Flora to the tapestry weave in the background of Crown of Glory. Pre-Raphaelitism seems the influence too in the abundance of expressionless beauties, the Italianate details of landscape, architecture and costume, the Botticellian weightlessness and sway, the surface finish. There are works which seem to slot seamlessly into the extended canon of art for art's sake Pre-Raphaelitism - full length figures like Helen of Troy, female nudes like the Sea Maiden - and De Morgan's work is often compared to that of Edward Burne Jones. But it is too easy to get lulled into a dream by her art. On the one hand, she was a dedicated workaholic, who learnt her trade at the Slade and continued to ply it throughout her career with a rigorous process of preliminary drawings, some of which are displayed very illuminatingly alongside the finished oils here. On the other, she is less interested in beauty for its own sake than as a means to symbolic and often highly moralising ends.
The curators attempt to push this narrative through labelling which consistently emphasises De Morgan's suffragist and pacifist sympathies, and by using the second room to explore these 'Painted Themes'. The connections are often tenuous - Cassandra as a symbol of women's rights - but the most obvious (although perhaps less fashionable) impulse behind De Morgan's art - religion - is largely ignored. Earthbound, features a miserly old king, dressed head to toe in shimmering gold, oblivious of the barren landscape around him and and the angel hovering above, as he grasps pathetically at his hoard of gold. It seems a profoundly religious work, a classic memento mori that underlines gulf between worldly and spiritual wealth, yet the label treats it only as an illustration of patriarchal power. And Earthbound is no outlier. De Morgan returns repeatedly to the theme of mortality (she dabbled, like many of her contemporaries, in spiritualism) and was profoundly uneasy about wealth and inequality.
The exhibition ends anticlimactically, with a bright, brisk 'tying up the loose ends' display which illustrates, with reproductions, alternatives and new interpretations, the 1907 paintings which couldn't be shown here. The pedant in me appreciated the honesty and the comprehensiveness of the curators but it is an unsatisfactory end, not least because one of De Morgan's glorious gold drawings is wasted in a corner, as a mere illustration of a lost oil painting. The room also underscores the two competing aims of the show. Arguably, a full recreation of 1907 would not attempt a modern reinterpretation of the artist's 'socio-political' themes. Yet the curators are keen to show this well-to-do Victorian as a woman with relevance today.
Painted Dreams is an exhibition full of beauty, but the title implies a kind of emptiness, an insubstantiality. De Morgan's work is the opposite of that. Her labour and skill is visible everywhere: there is a strength and self-confidence in every line she produces, and every colour she chooses. Whether one reads feminism into her work or not, her subjects were carefully chosen and deeply meaningful, exhibited with quotations, references and poems, some of which were inscribed on the canvas. Inevitably, the exhibition provides only a snapshot of the artist's career, which continued for another ten years, but is is a rare chance to see her works, well-displayed, en masse. It is tribute to her work that you leave wanting to see more and know more about her. Evelyn De Morgan is not just a 'woman artist' (even a trailblazing one) but a painter who commands your attention and demands (albeit rather politely) to be taken seriously.
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