This wanders. Bear with me for a bit.
When I was in college, I took a class in 19th and 20th Century art that used as its text a book called Mainstreams of Modern Art by John Canaday. About halfway through the semester, the professor went off script. We spent a week and a half on the Pre-Raphaelites and their descendents and most of the material came from other sources. "Canaday isn't very good with the Pre-Raphaelites," she said. "Around the time of the Impressionists, Canaday acquires a plot, in which modern art marches inevitably to its summit mid-Twentieth with the abstract expressionists and post-modernists. It woefully neglects movements like Art Nouveau and Art Deco because it doesn't feed the narrative. A more honest text might make note of the fact that there's a divergence that happens in art around 1870, or so, in which art history bifurcates, with one stream of history valuing form and with the other valuing content. For a long period, Canaday's narrative--the one valuing form--has been the dominant one. But there's another history, in which the Pre-Raphaelites give way to the Symbolists who give way to Art Nouveau who give way to Art Deco. Virtually all commercial art from 1880 until the 1980s was descended in one way or another from this secret history. Occasionally, these two streams would reunite in artists like Andrew Wyeth (whose father was the great illustrator, N. C. Wyeth). This secret history is beginning to prod into the art mainstream, with the work of illustrators like Maxfield Parrish and Virgil Finlay commanding prices previously only seen on works from the dominant narrative. The last time I was in the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, N. C. Wyeth was hanging next to Charles Scheeler. The worm is turning. I mention all of this because there was a post over on Jim Emerson's excellent Scanners blog a few months ago called "Thomas Kinkade has won and we, all of us, have lost." Its thesis is that in an era of CGI, the light in filmmaking is more and more resembling the kitsch of Kinkade's sofa art. Kinkade is a descendent of the Pre-Raphaelites, though one would think that he's a descendent of the Impressionists were you to take his trademark as the "painter of light" seriously (and I don't suggest you do). All this is on my mind right now, having just seen Snow White and the Huntsman (2012, directed by Rupert Sanders). Both that blog post and the movie itself tell me that this bifurcation of the histories of art is ongoing.
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