ABSTRACT
The exhibition of paintings and drawings by Simeon Solomon at Durlacher's is the sort of event that signals a change in taste. To exponents of a Pre-Raphaelite revival, present or future, academic or hip, Simeon Solomon offers ideal material. The thirty works that comprise the exhibition at Dur-lacher's are sufficient to demonstrate that Solomon had some very real gifts as an artist, but they show, too, that he lacked the resources for applying these gifts with any artistic consistency. Any revival of Pre-Raphaelitism must, perforce, proceed along the same ambiguous lines—half seriously, half ironically, at once a straightforward art historical inquiry and an indulgent spoof on the pieties of modernist aesthetics. In the vicissitudes of Solomon career as well as the development of his work, he marks a transition from the lofty Victorian pretensions of the movement to that amalgam of aestheticism, religiosity, and sexual inversion that became the prevailing ideology of the nineties.
