Pre-Raphaelite show is too big, too clever for its own good

The Tate had managed to put me in a vile mood before I ever set foot inside their new exhibit.

Such was the popularity of this much-acclaimed show that we had to kill 90 minutes between buying our tickets and getting in.  So we wandered the galleries of what was once one of London's great museums.  Established to tell the story of British art, the original chronological hang is now a trendy hotch potch of rooms organised around themes.  Some work.  Some leave you scratching your head.  None fulfil the mission of a national artistic retrospective.

Inexplicably, about half the galleries seemed full of modern art.  Why, when the sister museum downriver is dedicated to the 20th century and beyond, do we have so much overspill here?  Finally, in an attempt to lure new visitors, museum management was staging a family day which turned the galleries into playgrounds of screaming tots.  I'm a passionate advocate of getting kids into museums early, and there are scores of ways to do this while having fun and educating.  (It is, after all, what my mother did for a decade at The Saint Louis Art Museum.)  But I saw no evidence of that here.

So it is possible that my mood pre-disposed me to be unimpressed.  But here's my verdict on Pre-Raphaelites:  Victorian Avant-Garde.  It's big.  (More than 200 items on display.)  It's pretty.  (You'd happily hang the great majority of this stuff in your guest bedroom.)  But it's not new, it doesn't make you think much and it sure as hell isn't avant-garde.

Let's start with my last point first.  Everything about the pre-Raphaelites looks backwards, from their name, to their origins in the German Nazarene group to their delight in medieval subject matter.  We even get William Morris thrown into the mix, who was all about rejecting the industrial revolution and going back to an idealised world of Gothic craftsmen.  These guys were the textbook definition of reactionaries (look it up).  And while the curators make a fine academic argument that reactionary philosophies, if extreme enough, are radical in themselves, it was a pedantic distraction for me.  Forget the re-positioning attempt.  This is beautiful, calming stuff.  Just come wander through it and appreciate.

Another big issue was how familiar most of this stuff is.  Many of the show's blockbusters live in the Tate anyway: John Everett Millais' Ophelia drowning in her stream and Mariana in her blue dress stretching from her letters; John William Waterhouse's Lady of Shallot.  Many of the rest you've seen reproduced on everything from tea towels to notecards to posters since your were a kid.  As a movement they've turned up in other places recently, arguably done better: the excellent Cult of Beauty show last spring at the V&A; the BBC's 2009 miniseries Desperate Romantics.

Finally, a fair handful of this stuff crosses the line from pretty to insipid.  (Or "twee", to use a marvellous British phrase.)  That's particularly true with the religious pictures like Holman Hunt's The Light of The World or Millais' The Carpenter's Shop, which offer a chocolate box Christianity you're apt to put in a children's bible, but not to linger over.

Where this show works best is when the paintings are telling stories, or magnifying the beauty of women or landscapes.  Therefore of the seven exhibition sections ... Origins and Manifesto, History, Nature, Salvation, Beauty, Paradise, Mythologies ... it's the second, third, fifth and last that get some magic going.  Indeed, here's a show where bigger wasn't necessarily better; I suspect I would have been far more impressed had I been presented with only those works.

Then, you could spend a lot more time and perhaps drop your jaw a bit at Burne Jones' Perseus series (one's pictured up top), with all the magic and drama of fantasy novel cover but done in paints so vivid, and at a size so grand, you feel you could step through the frame and into the scene.  Or at Holman Hunt's high drama Lady of Shallot, captured at the exact moment enchantment blows her world apart.

You'd linger over all the Shakespearean scenes, playing games with yourself to see if you could name the play before reading the label, then considering whether that's the way you'd seen the scene in your head.  You'd puzzle for quite a while over the multiple depictions of Keats' poem Isabella, where the eponymous heroine imortalises her slain lover by putting his detached head in a pot and growing basil over it.  (You'll never see pesto the same way again.)  If you're a woman, you'd stand in front Rossetti's Lillith and think it's no surprise the man's gone down in history as the Casanova of the art world; a man has to be a master of sensuality to paint women like that.

And if you're like me, you'd gawp for ages at John Brett's Val d'Aosta.  Here was the surprise of the show.  An artist I'd never heard of, a painting I didn't know existed ... and it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.  He has taken nature and improved on it with a hyper-realism that gives every tree and rock detail, yet taken together creates a world too beautiful to be this side of heaven.

There is plenty to love about this show, if you look at the right parts.  My advice?  Forget the typical exhibition approach, where you're ready to learn and looking for a unifying narrative.  Approach it instead like a shopping trip.  Wander through the galleries in an acquisitive frame of mind.  Unconcerned about taking in everything, but rather open to the bits and pieces that want to come home with you.  Linger over those and forget the rest.