Well, here we are at our final meeting of the seminar. We've learned many things, perhaps most of all--following Socrates--how many more things there are to learn. Victorian England was full of contrasts: extreme wealth & extreme poverty; forward and progressive politics (both Reform bills, etc.) & repressive and regressive politics (the Contagious Diseases Act, colonialism, etc.). As for art and culture, I think they had strong influences on world culture, again for good and bad, and that we are still part of the world that they largely created: Mass media, celebrity, government policing and incarceration, mass advertising, banking, currency, mass transit, women's rights movements, organized crime, photography, electricity, recorded sound, telecommunication, etc. I could keep writing. What ideas do you have to add to the list?
The PRB wasn't all that avant-garde, but other aspects of English culture in the 19th c. certainly were. They might have been reflecting the genuinely avant-garde culture of Paris and other urban centers in Europe, but they were never imitative. This gives, to me at least, PRB art a kind of kitschy charm. It's all inappropriately earnest and more than a little escapist. What does that tell us? Keep thinking. You are free to continue your investigations after the course ends. Keep me appraised. I've really loved our Thursday mornings this semester. Thanks.
My stable email address is: smithcaseysmith@gmail.com.
Victorian Avant-Garde // A Seminar at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design at the George Washington University // Spring 2016 // Professor Casey Smith // kcs@gwu.edu // The painting above is by Sir John Everett Millais, 1829–1896, British, L'Enfant du Regiment, 1854 to 1855, Oil on paper, laid on canvas, mounted on board, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund
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