The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Explores the development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid 19th century; and works which figure amongst the most lasting and generally propular in British art. Renowned writer and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith contributes a study of the individual artists, their interconnection and previously unpublished material of their intricate links with the social establishment of the time. James Cahill has a special interest in the movement, having studied Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Holman Hunt. He reviews the major exhibition of 150 works at Tate Britain launched in September 2012. ‘I think what I want to do is to follow a trail that leads, through many twists and turns, from the religious revival of the early 19th century to Blue Period Picasso, then to Surrealism. It may take in the Children of the Raj and the discovery of Japan along the way. It leads from rather rigid moralism, to conscious immoralism, and then at last to Freud/Dali.’ Edward Lucie-Smith 05/2012

Author Biography

Edward Lucie-Smith has published more than more than sixty books about art, chiefly but not exclusively about contemporary work. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945 , Visual Arts of the 20th Century, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world. Movements in Art since 1945, first published in 1969, has been continuously in print since that date. He has been curator of a number of exhibitions, including three Peter Moores Projects at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, (surveys of contemporary British art), The New British Painting and two artist retrospectives, Lin Emery and George Dunbar, both for the New Orleans Museum of Art. He was curator of ‘New British Art’. at the Orion Gallery in Ostend (April-June 2001), of ‘New Classicism: Artists of the Ideal’, at Palazzo Forti, Verona (April-September 2002), and of ‘Gods Becoming Men’ at the Frissiras Museum, Athens [July-September 2004). He has recently become the curator of the new Bermondsey Project Space in London S.E.1 James Cahill combines writing, research and painting with a role at one of London’s leading contemporary art galleries. He studied at the Courtauld Institute, where his research focused on British twentieth-century artists’ explorations of crucifixion and obscenity. He is the co-author a monograph on British artist Angus Fairhurst (2009), and has written catalogue essays for a number of contemporary art exhibitions, as well as reviews for various publications. He has lectured at the Architectural Association London, on the paintings of Francis Bacon, and at Oxford University on Renaissance iconography in contemporary art. His current research looks at the afterlife of ancient Greece and Rome in contemporary visual culture.