The overlooked masterpiece filled with coded messages about World War I

By: Deborah Nicholls-Lee / BBC
Translation: Telegrafi.com

On a rocky beach lit red by lava, smoke-breathing dragons surround desperate prisoners who pray to an angel to save them from their suffering. Oil painting The death of the dragon, by Evelyn De Morgan, at first glance resembles a scene from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. But, made between 1914 and 1918, it is something more personal and critical: an allegory about the misery and slavery of World War I, and the confrontation of good with evil.

This spectacular painting, measuring over a meter in height, is one of the highlights of the new exhibition. Evelyn De Morgan: Modern Painter in Victorian London, at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London. The exhibition features rarely exhibited works from the De Morgan Foundation, as well as two recently restored paintings and two re-creations made last year – of works that were destroyed in a fire at an art warehouse in 1991.

This exhibition coincides with the reopening of the De Morgan Museum in Barnsley, Yorkshire, following a complete roof restoration, and comes in response to the growing interest in this lesser-known artist. She has often been overshadowed by her husband, William – a ceramist and writer who worked with textile designer William Morris early in his career – and by the famous men in their circle: her uncle and art teacher, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, for example, and the painters William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Much of what we know about Evelyn De Morgan today comes from her sister, Wilhelmina, who founded the De Morgan Foundation and who published a biography, after the couple’s death, entitled William De Morgan and his wife.

Yet Evelyn De Morgan fully deserves the recognition she is finally receiving from the art world. A graduate of the Slade School of Art, she worked at the tail end of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and took the genre – often considered cheesy or overly sentimental – into new territory, creating visionary and energetic paintings. The women she portrayed were less passive than those of her contemporaries, and represented symbols of power and action, not objects of the male gaze. Instead of a drowned body floating in a river, as in Ofelia of Sir John Everett Millais, or figures who were worth nothing more than their looks, we meet lady sorceresses who create magical elixirs and flying superheroines who can bring rain, thunder, and lightning with their fingers.

These goddess-like figures reflect the influence of classical art that De Morgan had studied. Masterfully executed works such as Boreus and Orithyia (1896) reveal her interest in mythology and her skill in depicting the human body, reminiscent of Michelangelo.

Te The death of the dragon, in terms of composition, it is easy to see the influence of Birth of Venus (1483-85) by Sandro Botticelli, which De Morgan had seen during a visit to Florence. If De Morgan’s haloed angel embodies the idea of ​​rebirth – reflecting the artist’s belief in a spiritual life after death – then the winged creatures are its counterweight: Death, always pursuing people and threatening to overthrow them. In other of her works, Death takes on different forms: a dark angel with a sickle, sea monsters or – more indirectly – an hourglass. It is a symbolism that speaks to the transience of life that becomes even more poignant in her later works, conveying the collective trauma of experiencing a world war that claimed nearly a million British lives.

“During the First World War, they [the De Morgans] were in London, so they were directly affected,” Jean McMeakin, chairwoman of the De Morgan Foundation, tells the BBC. “Death was real to them, in a way that perhaps we have forgotten today,” she says. “Members of William’s family died of tuberculosis, and his own health was often poor. Death was, in a way, always present in the background.”

De Morgan was a pacifist and her art became a form of activism. Our Lady of Peace (1907), a reaction to the Boer Wars, a knight prays for protection and peace, while in The poor man who saved the city (1901), wisdom and diplomacy are promoted as alternatives to military intervention. Later, in Red Cross (1914-16), angels hold the crucified Christ above a withered landscape dotted with the graves of Belgian fighters – a suggestion, perhaps, that the Christian religion contrasts with the brutality of war, but offers hope for redemption. “You must never glorify war,” declared De Morgan in The result of an experiment (1909), a book co-authored by her husband. "The devil invented it, and you cannot conceive its horror."

The idea of ​​good and evil forces working on ordinary people was widespread at the time. “Spiritualism was quite popular,” McMeakin says, citing author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—the creator of Sherlock Holmes—as one of its most famous adherents. Extraterrestrial beliefs, she says, were “probably a result of the turmoil, the great changes that were happening in society at the turn of the century, and a period filled with wars that would have affected their view of the world.” No doubt De Morgan was also influenced by her mother-in-law, Sophia, a renowned spiritualist and medium. With so many lives lost, it was tempting to believe that you could reconnect with the dead.

For De Morgan, materialism was at odds with spirituality, and many of her works entwine the pursuit of wealth with death. The crowns, which are held by winged serpents, The death of the dragon, are a recurring motif that symbolizes greed and stinginess. In Related to the land (1897), a greedy king in a golden robe adorned with coins faces the angel of death, while in Closed gate (circa 1910-14), a similar figure is refused entry to Heaven.

With the future so uncertain, De Morgan places the importance of spiritual fulfillment and happiness at the center of many of her works. Blindness and greed that take joy away from the city (1897), for example, “Greed” is personified as a crowned figure holding treasures and expels “Joy” who is depicted as an angel. Here, as in The death of the dragon, the central characters are chained, suggesting captive souls.

Single The prisoner (1907-8), the barred window and the woman's chained wrists make slavery a metaphor for gender inequality, alluding to the De Morgans' support for universal suffrage. (Evelyn had signed at least two important petitions, and her husband was vice president of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage.) This theme is also repeated in Luna (1885), where the rope-bound body of the moon goddess – a mythological figure of feminine power – functions as a metaphor for a woman's attempt to influence her own destiny.

Christened “Mary,” Evelyn later chose to use her middle name, which was gender-neutral at the time, as women’s art was not taken seriously. “She wanted to be considered on the same level as her male colleagues,” says McMeakin. “We can assume a high degree of self-awareness and determination in her desire to become a professional artist,” she adds, noting that even De Morgan’s mother was against her career choice.

Technically, De Morgan was also a pioneer. She experimented with polishing and rubbing gold pigment into her paintings to give them depth and interest, and she used new painting techniques invented by her husband, which involved grinding colors with glycerin and alcohol. Stylistically, she was ahead of her time. Her unusual use of pinks and purples, and bold rainbow-colored rings of light, anticipate the psychedelic style of 70s painting, while her terrifying monsters would easily fit into contemporary fantasy art.

While art history tends to portray women as virgins, mothers, or temptresses, De Morgan's uniquely feminine perspective reimagines them as figures of hope who envision an alternative, brighter future. Light in the dark (1895), for example, the female figure holds an olive branch in her right hand, offering a path to peace. In The death of the dragon, the angel is surrounded by a magnificent rainbow: a symbol (along with the sky) of joy that signifies spiritual fulfillment and freedom, as well as the promise of an afterlife.

It is a mistake to think that works such as The Death of the Dragon are “completely bleak,” McMeakin argues, noting that “often, in her apocalyptic scenes, there is a glimmer of hope or a part of the painting that is peaceful.” In many ways, The death of the dragon is optimistic, expressing the feeling that the war – the metaphorical dragon – is coming to an end, and that good can defeat evil. In this existential battle, De Morgan saw her place through art. When she was only 17, she berated herself for not painting enough. “Art is eternal, but life is short,” she wrote in her diary. “I will make up for it now, I have not a moment to lose.” /Telegraph/