Dec 3, 2015 06:18 PM
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm...orum--8281
EXCERPT: [...] The sudden and unexpected rehabilitation of Victorian culture is one of the great, unstudied phenomena of recent history. One cannot accurately speak of a Victorian Revival so much as the abrupt lifting of a mighty taboo, which had a galvanizing effect on scholarship, fashion, museology, contemporary art and design, and even urban planning. But the neo-Victorian moment is now as much a closed chapter as its anti-Victorian predecessor, although it has faded away so gently that most have forgotten how vital it once was. It is worth a backward glance, if only to see what it got right and what it got wrong.
[...] the modern movement condemned the entire Victorian era as one long cultural disaster. Its buildings were laughable failures, tainted by their specious historicism; its paintings wallowed in pedantic and sclerotic academicism. At a certain point, reasonable aesthetic criticism boiled over into an irrational revulsion, for which the late Australian philosopher David Stove coined the useful term Horror Victorianorum
But it is no easy matter to dismiss the collective achievement of a mighty industrial civilization that had brought the modern world into being. Those same decades that brought forth the detested Pre-Raphaelites and the High Victorian Gothic also brought forth the Crystal Palace, the transatlantic cable, and the Brooklyn Bridge. This posed a vexing intellectual problem: how to acknowledge the technological achievements of the nineteenth century while condemning the tastes, values, and even the sanity of the society that created them.
[...] The wholesale discrediting of Victorian culture had tangible consequences. In polite museums, whole categories of painting fell into disfavor—Victorian genre scenes, Hudson River landscapes, anything Pre-Raphaelite; much went into storage or, in a few cases, onto the street.
[...] But paintings are rarely destroyed, unlike buildings, on which the Horror Victorianorum fell cruelly. The life cycle of every building brings periodic danger points at which its owners must choose whether to repair and renovate, or else to demolish. Unfortunately, the moment of truth for Victorian buildings came when their reputations were at their lowest ebb, when their custodians found it convenient to excise an offensive carbuncle and replace it with something more “tasteful” (although almost never as solidly built). The saturnalia of destruction climaxed in 1964 with the demolition of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station in New York, which was hardly a Victorian monstrosity but rather a brilliantly planned and exquisitely realized monument to civic decorum. The demolition was a cultural catastrophe, and it brought the American historic preservation movement to life, although to a large extent the damage was already done. Victorian architecture was swept not only from the street but from historical memory as well.
[...] The strange effect of this ignorance was to make the objects of the Victorian era far more mysterious and inscrutable than they actually were. [....] The high-waisted mansarded house with its stilted tower, once proud and now fallen on hard times, became the emblem of the Victorian age. It shows up again and again, in Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad, acquired in 1930 by the Museum of Modern Art, of all institutions; in the mansion chosen by the cartoonist Charles Addams to house his ghoulish family, created in 1938; and as late as 1960 it was where Alfred Hitchcock decided to place Psycho’s murderous Norman Bates—the physical expression of wide-eyed staring derangement.
But Hitchcock’s gawky tower skated on the edge of irony, and by this time the Horror Victorianorum was beginning to subside. Already the rehabilitation of Victorian cultural and intellectual life, in England and America, was underway.
[...] Several factors eased this massive rehabilitation. One was a shift away from formalism, the doctrine that works of art are to be judged primarily—or even exclusively—according to their aesthetic property. In its place came a new stress on the social history of art, and issues such as patronage, marketing, education, and professional status. To write a dissertation on an artist no longer implied aesthetic approval. Another factor was the collapse of authority and prestige of modernism, especially after the convulsive emergence of Pop Art around 1962. Once Pop had embraced the despised world of advertising and commercial packaging, the injunction against Victorian vulgarity no longer carried any force. If anything, vulgarity was one of its chief features of interest, certainly in the case of architecture.
[...] Such was the heady moment when the taboo against Victorian art was lifted. It shows that a taboo is not necessarily a bad thing. By holding the entire Victorian era in brackets, as it were, and then revisiting it after a long interval, it became possible to see it with fresh eyes, to discover it as a vast and dazzlingly new continent. Its pariah status forced its defenders to examine its principles and to struggle to justify them. All this unleashed a furious creative energy. Its signs are everywhere, on the walls of museums, on the mighty corpus of international studies on Victorian art and architecture, and on the streets themselves. It is a prodigious achievement, but the spark that brought it into being, it is now clear, is extinct.
[...] But scholarship, like tobacco farming, exhausts the soil and then moves on. This is the nature of things. Victorian studies once carried with it the allure of the not quite respectable. This was that frisson or rebellion that is the great spur to youthful research. But that frisson is now gone. [...] Decades from now, historians will puzzle over Victorian historiography: a half-century of neglect, a generation of frenzied scholarship, and then a slow withdrawal. All this will be incomprehensible without some understanding of the strange emotional power of the Horror Victorianorum....
EXCERPT: [...] The sudden and unexpected rehabilitation of Victorian culture is one of the great, unstudied phenomena of recent history. One cannot accurately speak of a Victorian Revival so much as the abrupt lifting of a mighty taboo, which had a galvanizing effect on scholarship, fashion, museology, contemporary art and design, and even urban planning. But the neo-Victorian moment is now as much a closed chapter as its anti-Victorian predecessor, although it has faded away so gently that most have forgotten how vital it once was. It is worth a backward glance, if only to see what it got right and what it got wrong.
[...] the modern movement condemned the entire Victorian era as one long cultural disaster. Its buildings were laughable failures, tainted by their specious historicism; its paintings wallowed in pedantic and sclerotic academicism. At a certain point, reasonable aesthetic criticism boiled over into an irrational revulsion, for which the late Australian philosopher David Stove coined the useful term Horror Victorianorum
But it is no easy matter to dismiss the collective achievement of a mighty industrial civilization that had brought the modern world into being. Those same decades that brought forth the detested Pre-Raphaelites and the High Victorian Gothic also brought forth the Crystal Palace, the transatlantic cable, and the Brooklyn Bridge. This posed a vexing intellectual problem: how to acknowledge the technological achievements of the nineteenth century while condemning the tastes, values, and even the sanity of the society that created them.
[...] The wholesale discrediting of Victorian culture had tangible consequences. In polite museums, whole categories of painting fell into disfavor—Victorian genre scenes, Hudson River landscapes, anything Pre-Raphaelite; much went into storage or, in a few cases, onto the street.
[...] But paintings are rarely destroyed, unlike buildings, on which the Horror Victorianorum fell cruelly. The life cycle of every building brings periodic danger points at which its owners must choose whether to repair and renovate, or else to demolish. Unfortunately, the moment of truth for Victorian buildings came when their reputations were at their lowest ebb, when their custodians found it convenient to excise an offensive carbuncle and replace it with something more “tasteful” (although almost never as solidly built). The saturnalia of destruction climaxed in 1964 with the demolition of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station in New York, which was hardly a Victorian monstrosity but rather a brilliantly planned and exquisitely realized monument to civic decorum. The demolition was a cultural catastrophe, and it brought the American historic preservation movement to life, although to a large extent the damage was already done. Victorian architecture was swept not only from the street but from historical memory as well.
[...] The strange effect of this ignorance was to make the objects of the Victorian era far more mysterious and inscrutable than they actually were. [....] The high-waisted mansarded house with its stilted tower, once proud and now fallen on hard times, became the emblem of the Victorian age. It shows up again and again, in Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad, acquired in 1930 by the Museum of Modern Art, of all institutions; in the mansion chosen by the cartoonist Charles Addams to house his ghoulish family, created in 1938; and as late as 1960 it was where Alfred Hitchcock decided to place Psycho’s murderous Norman Bates—the physical expression of wide-eyed staring derangement.
But Hitchcock’s gawky tower skated on the edge of irony, and by this time the Horror Victorianorum was beginning to subside. Already the rehabilitation of Victorian cultural and intellectual life, in England and America, was underway.
[...] Several factors eased this massive rehabilitation. One was a shift away from formalism, the doctrine that works of art are to be judged primarily—or even exclusively—according to their aesthetic property. In its place came a new stress on the social history of art, and issues such as patronage, marketing, education, and professional status. To write a dissertation on an artist no longer implied aesthetic approval. Another factor was the collapse of authority and prestige of modernism, especially after the convulsive emergence of Pop Art around 1962. Once Pop had embraced the despised world of advertising and commercial packaging, the injunction against Victorian vulgarity no longer carried any force. If anything, vulgarity was one of its chief features of interest, certainly in the case of architecture.
[...] Such was the heady moment when the taboo against Victorian art was lifted. It shows that a taboo is not necessarily a bad thing. By holding the entire Victorian era in brackets, as it were, and then revisiting it after a long interval, it became possible to see it with fresh eyes, to discover it as a vast and dazzlingly new continent. Its pariah status forced its defenders to examine its principles and to struggle to justify them. All this unleashed a furious creative energy. Its signs are everywhere, on the walls of museums, on the mighty corpus of international studies on Victorian art and architecture, and on the streets themselves. It is a prodigious achievement, but the spark that brought it into being, it is now clear, is extinct.
[...] But scholarship, like tobacco farming, exhausts the soil and then moves on. This is the nature of things. Victorian studies once carried with it the allure of the not quite respectable. This was that frisson or rebellion that is the great spur to youthful research. But that frisson is now gone. [...] Decades from now, historians will puzzle over Victorian historiography: a half-century of neglect, a generation of frenzied scholarship, and then a slow withdrawal. All this will be incomprehensible without some understanding of the strange emotional power of the Horror Victorianorum....