| This dissertation proposes a new paradigm for approaching the work of painter and decorative artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833--1898) by arguing that the artist was engaged in a fundamentally radical defiance of the artistic, social, and economic hierarchies of the age. Challenging the accepted characterization of Burne-Jones as the "artist-dreamer," this dissertation contends that he was a provocative visionary actively seeking to promote awakening on the part of the viewer through a revelatory, embodied encounter with decorative materiality. By reexamining the nature of Burne-Jones' profound collaborative partnership with William Morris and questioning the validity of their supposed schism over socialist politics, this dissertation asserts that they remained united in aims, if not methods, throughout their lives. The first chapter explores Burne-Jones' iconic woodcut frontispiece, When Adam Delved and Eve Span (1892), elucidating the artist's personal relationship to socialism and politics and demonstrating how he addressed his art specifically to a working class audience. The second chapter centers upon the unique reception of Burne-Jones' monumental painting, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884) at the Parisian Universal Exposition of 1889. Set against the backdrop of this concentrated and frenzied microcosm of urban modernity, industrial consumerism and imperialist propaganda, King Cophetua achieved a striking air of immediacy, proving confrontational and epiphanic. The third chapter takes under consideration Burne-Jones' mosaic cycle for the American Episcopal Church of St. Paul's Within the Walls, Rome, examining how the decorative scheme as a whole presents the viewer with an image of an ecological apocalypse. The dissertation concludes with the great collaborative achievement of Morris & Co., the San Graal tapestries (designed 1890--1, woven 1891--5), demonstrating how the work functions in subject, symbolism, and mode of production, as a visual exemplar for a captive audience of the British elite. More than just a liberation of Burne-Jones's oeuvre from the constrictions of the artist-dreamer characterization, this dissertation presents his work and practice as an alternative approach to the demands of modernity on art, thereby opening up the possibility of new networks of radical response and exchange beyond the teleologically bounded canon of nineteenth-century art. |
