[Author’s note: This was originally published on my blog, The Hyacinth Girl, on 02/02/18. I am currently attempting to migrate my archive to this site, and will be posting older pieces periodically.]
So I’m still thinking about this Waterhouse situation and how the SJW/left has completely lost its moorings. Of all the artists out there, Waterhouse is the least offensive to me. I don’t have much time for contemporary art, because it’s so awful, on the whole, but I do like John Currin, who is cartoonishly offensive sometimes and yet so talented, it’s impossible not to like him.
And that’s about it. I’ve exhausted my list of contemporary artists that are worth my time. But the Pre-Raphaelites are another story altogether. The movement was the first I had ever studied on my own, and I spent months in the library one summer just learning as much as I could. (I also met Camille Paglia in those stacks, in a literary sense, which is apropos.)
But regardless of my personal feelings toward this artist and his movement, there’s something more that’s been bothering me, and I may have figured out what it is.
The thing about the movement, (although Waterhouse is a bit late to be considered a proper Pre-Raphaelite, from what I’ve read), is that it preserved more than arbitrary beauty standards of the time. The Waterhouse painting in question, Hylas and the Nymphs, is the rendering of a Greek myth about Hercules. Waterhouse also painted Circe from the Odyssey, Ulysses and the Sirens, Boreas (wind), Jason and Medea, Echo and Narcissus, and so on. He envisioned scenes from Shakespeare: Miranda, Ophelia. He created a visual representation of the famous line from Herrick: “Gather ye rosebuds.” The movement loved beautiful women, classic literature, and mythology. They preserved more than beauty. They preserved major themes and ideas from throughout Western history and culture. Their paintings recall the best and most beautiful milestones of a culture that has shaped the world for the better. But this culture is one we are taught to despise.
So the censorship of Hylas, and similar censorious acts throughout the art world, are about more than naked nymphs, (although they are quite lovely). They are about the censorship of cultural memory, and the attempt to erase our contributions to civilization as a whole, in order to create a historical narrative more in line with the revisionist SJW worldview. You can’t have art students asking what happens to Hylas after those pretty girls get done with him. You can’t have indoctrinated youth looking up King Cophetua after viewing the all-consuming longing with which he gazes at the beggar maid captured by Burne-Jones. You can’t have them asking about Millais’s Ophelia and her madness. Just as the Renaissance painters are capable of starting conversations about the Christian Bible, the Pre-Raphalites draw you into their worlds of myth, fairy tales, and unparalleled works of literature that the SJW community has long fought to erase.
Liberty allows the creation of art like Waterhouse’s. Like Caravaggio’s. Like Klimt’s. There is a freedom of thought and expression in Western culture that terrifies the authoritarian, as well as those weak souls who desire subjugation and its absolution of personal responsibility.
There is more here at stake than some third wave feminist’s half-formed thought about “conventional beauty standards and the male gaze.” To paraphrase my friend Quent, “This is my Church. This is war.”
Let me warn you, SJWs, if you’re coming for art, we’re ready for you. We have the benefit of being able to think for ourselves and more nimbly than your monolithic partisan groupthink allows you to maneuver.
Bring it.
