伯恩-瓊斯 伯恩-瓊斯 | 荊棘薔薇 1890

我們在Tate Britain 展覽了伯恩·約翰斯的作品 我們在一間房間裡 展示了一系列繪畫 叫做The Briar Rose 故事是關於一位睡眠美女 一位女王陷入惡魔之中 她和整個皇宮都睡了一百年 直到皇帝來親吻她 她和整個皇宮都睡了一百年 但這並非我們現在所看到的 這位藝術家似乎集中在一瞬間 在第一幅畫的開始 我們看到一位女王 她是整個系列中唯一清醒的人物 她穿著鎧甲,手握著劍 從繩索周圍的繩索中掩護自己 但我們會感到猶豫 他掩護眼睛 從他面前的一切 前來的其他女王 卻失敗了 被困在棺材裡 然後陷入惡魔之中 然後睡著了 一百年過去了 在那一瞬間 The Briar Rose 這些厚厚的木柴 從棺材中拋棄了棺材 從女王身上拋棄了墊子 人類的時代停止了 但自然的時代持續了 The Rose,一般來說是美麗的物品 它看起來有種迷惘的感覺 它好像把不成功的夜晚的墊子 掛起來,就像是獎牌一樣 在第一幅畫中 William Morris寫 The fateful slumber floats and flows about the tangle of the rose But lo, the faded hand and heart to rend the slumberous curse apart Let's turn to the second canvas Here we see the king's court Morris' line reads The thread of war, the hope of peace The kingdom's peril and increase sleep on And by the latter day when fate shall take her chain away I love the king having nodded off on his throne with a pointer in his scroll as if he was in the midst of discussion with his ministers We see a scribe at his feet with a book open And the scribe is holding the place in his book as if after a hundred years passes he'll pick right up where he left off And just in case we miss the whole point an hourglass that is a reminder that time has stopped All of the figures are compressed in all four of the paintings to the very foreground And that helps us read this as a decorative pattern And the paintings are filled with decorative patterning from the cape that the king wears to the tile work where we see reflections of the sleeping figures Let's turn to the third panel We've moved to what seems to be an inner court within the palace For this panel Morris penned these lines The maiden pleasants of the land Knoweth no stir of voice or hand No cup the sleeping waters fill The restless shuttle lieth still We see on the right a large loom And what we're presented with is a place where craft is made where art is made It reminds me of the kind of medieval workshop that Burne-Jones and Morris idealized They rejected what they saw as the ugliness of mass-produced goods and looked back to a time when works of art were made in workshops by hand Again we see them reflected in this brilliantly polished floor But these women are slightly more upright And the briar itself has not quite infiltrated this interior courtyard The last canvas in the series finally shows the princess But not taking us to that moment the kiss And that's what the Disney movie is all about It's all about that kiss And the palace is reawakening We don't see the action unfolding Everything remains frozen And Morris wrote Here lies the hoarded love The key to all the treasure that shall be Come faded hand The gift to take And smite the sleeping world awake Here we see the long figure of the princess layed out Under this beautifully delicate cloth Every surface is highly decorative We can see peacocks in the carpet The gems in the crown on the floor A treasure box Highly ornamented Almost Islamic tiles in the floor Jewels encrusted in the bed that she's lying on And my favorite The silver bells around the hem of that cloth And so we have this sense of sounds that could be made Look at the way that the thorny vines of the rose are here more delicate than in the panels that we saw before This is the inner courtyard It's as if the rose is only just reaching this inner sanctum And we see its tendrils almost as if they're fingers just reaching into the treasure box just beginning to surround the head of the princess I want to go back to a word you used a moment ago which is the decorative That became a dirty word in the 20th century with the rise of what we often call modernism If we think about modern architecture, for example wanting to strip away what was seen as the incrustation of history Modernism saw the decorative as empty, as superficial But it's anything but that here From Burne-Jones the decorative is about looking back to the medieval It's about the political and social problems of modern life And so Burne-Jones is, in a sense trying to bring poetry back into modern life And he's doing that through the visual Burne-Jones said When shall we learn to read a picture as we do a poem to find some story from it some little atom of human interest that may feed our hearts with awe lest the outer influences of the day crush them from good thoughts So as we stand in this room surrounded by these paintings they become a refuge a refuge from the world outside the world of factory life the world of mass production a world that was speeding up I think more than a refuge I think something that will not just give us a place to escape to but a place that will bring us back to something that is deeply human that we've lost