Ex. 1 Read the text. In a parade of sumptuous purple gowns and russet tresses, Tate Britain has brought its show “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde” to Moscow’s State Pushkin

In a parade of sumptuous purple gowns and russet tresses, Tate Britain has brought its show “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde” to Moscow’s State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Decried by some critics for what they see as kitschy excess, the emotion-soaked canvases remain a perennial crowd-pleaser, drawing swarms of eager visitors to the museum’s halls.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by a group of seven art students barely out of their teens. Reacting against the mechanized spirit of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, they alighted on the early Renaissance as the model for “a new kind of moral history painting that was relevant for people of their own time,” said Tate Britain curator Alison Smith.

The Pushkin show is a scaled-down version of last fall’s blockbuster in London, which was followed up by a popular run at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. But its set of 80 works – which contains icons such as John Everett Millais’“Ophelia,” as well as tapestries, stained glass and interior designs – still feels likes an exhaustive look at the movement.

In search of brilliant color, painters such as John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti laid thin layers of pigment over a white canvas, creating a radiant effect. Nowhere is there richer violet or more buttery gold than in works such as Arthur Hughes’s “April Love” or Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix.”

The Pre-Raphaelites’ source material was well-trodden ground: the Bible, Shakespeare, Arthurian legend. But they infused familiar tales with modern imagery and meaning. In Rossetti’s take on the classic Annunciation scene, a waifish Mary hunches on a bed with stringy red hair, looking more like Kate Moss in a trashed hotel room than the beatific virgin gracing centuries of Catholic altar paintings.

In the Pre-Raphaelite imagination, even Christ is red-haired – a subtle but significant twist.

To the happy visitors transfixed by “Ophelia,” however, whether such art was truly progressive is perhaps beside the point.

Though no Pre-Raphaelite works can be found in Russian collections, their influence can be seen on artists such as Mikhail Nesterov, whose works are currently on show at the New Tretyakov Gallery, and even the Socialist Realist style of the Stalinist period, which upheld “Work” as an iconic image.