The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900V&A, from 2nd April to 17th July
Sometime in the 20th century, “beauty” and “art” stopped speaking to each other. Art ascended to lofty intellectual heights where concept trumped execution. Beauty sulked in the shadows, reminding everyone of earlier days when one could speak of an artwork’s beauty as an end in itself.
We might think that a bedizened skull made by Damien Hirst is beautiful, but discussion quickly turns to his harnessing of beauty to the service of a greater idea. We no longer concern ourselves with old-fashioned dictates governing the elegantly executed “finish” of an artwork or the craftsmanship of an objet d’art. Beauty today resolutely remains in the eye of the beholder.
Why, then, consider the idea of artistic beauty at all? A good place to begin is “The Cult of Beauty: 1860-1900,” an extensive new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum. Tracing the aesthetic movement from its start in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to its late bloom in the decadents of the century’s end, this show invites us to consider, and perhaps revive, our appreciation for the influence of beauty. For these artists, beauty was not just a completed painting or poem. They worked in the confidence that beauty performed a function—even a saving function—not on our ideas or morals, but on our abilities to feel. The dramatic expansion of industrialisation during the 19th century led, in these artists’ eyes, to the pervasive ugliness of the city, the home, and even the person. Despairing in the face of the mass-produced, machined object, the aesthetic movement recovered the skills of the artisan that they felt had been lost in the machine age.
The Grovesnor Gallery’s opening in 1877
Drawing inspiration from the bohemian artistic circles of Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, painters and poets in London grew increasingly dissatisfied with the traditional formal strictures of beauty. During the 1860s, the Pre-Raphaelites seemed almost systematic in their dismantling of conventions: in equal measures they angered and enchanted audiences with their insouciant disregard for establishment tastes and conventions. The sideburned gentlemen of the Academy prescribed ideas of artistic beauty with rules inherited from the Greeks and the Renaissance. Defiantly, the Pre-Raphaelites found models not from marmoreal antiquity but from the London streets. In the place of the veiled eroticism and formal mechanics of the Academy’s strictures, these artists privileged passion and deep feeling. What was initially avant-garde quickly became a national rage. The Pre-Raphaelite’s interest in beauty led to a national obsession two decades later. This show is a virtual masterclass on that period of Whistler and Wilde, of Leighton and Liberty, of the House and the Book Beautiful. It is worth a visit to relish, for a moment, the once-shared belief among artists, writers, and thinkers in the redemptive quality of a beautiful object. Salvation is not far from the mark, either. Brimming with evangelical zeal, the movement was a broad church of many denominations. It boasted its prophets (Walter Pater), its high priests (Frederick Leighton, GF Watts, and JM Whistler), its heretics (the Royal Academy and contemporary philistinism), its temples (left: The Grosvenor Gallery, founded in 1877), and even its sacrificed martyr, the disgraced Oscar Wilde who, after two years of hard labour in Reading Gaol, died in a squalid Paris hotel in 1900. The followers of the aesthetic movement shared a mantra, “art for art’s sake,” and dressed in the attire of the dandy—a uniform of velvet jackets and short trousers, accompanied by the omnipresent sunflower or lily.A greeting card from 1882
As “The Cult of Beauty” demonstrates, such caricatures fall short of the complexities of the aesthetic movement. The show brings together the many art forms and artefacts—from lofty paintings to humble teapots—that populated this age. Divided into four sections, the exhibition commences with “The Search for New Beauty,” which shows the aesthetic movement’s revolutionary origins, and charts its development through “Art for Art’s Sake,” “Beautiful People and Aesthetic Houses,” and “Late-Flowering Beauty.” Complementing the exhibition itself is an illuminating and exhaustive catalogue with essays on subjects as diverse as aestheticist architecture and photography, and the Book Beautiful. It was at this point in the Victorian period that the modern concept of a unified “lifestyle” appeared. The aesthetes not only showed us how to hang our elaborately framed paintings, but also provided lessons in taste on matters as wide-ranging as which wallpaper to select, which furniture to buy, which clothes to wear, and which binding to protect our books. By the 1870s and 1880s, the aesthetic movement had become less of a novelty than an ever-increasing attraction. Working to blend all aspects of a spectator’s experience, the artists openly crossed the boundary between fine and decorative art. Artists such as Albert Moore, George Aitchison, William Morris, and Philip Webb worked to create an entire experience of a room or of a house. Their emphasis on the total sensation of a room led to a redefinition, as well, of the relationship between the artist and the marketplace. No longer was the artist’s work simply a canvas or a sculpture. Works by leading artists in textiles, wallpaper, jewellery, and ceramics became both available and fashionable to a middle-class consumer who wished to become, themselves, a bit “artistic,” thus securing the increasing cachet for individual taste. Mary E Joy wrote what amounted to primers on the inclusion of art into everyday life: The Art of Decoration (1881) and The Art of Beauty (1883), and The Art of Housekeeping (1889). Many of the readers of these books were women who enjoyed a newfound mode of self-expression through the decoration of their domestic interiors. An example of the aesthetic desire to unify all aspects of a living space is the exhibition’s reconstruction of a frieze. In 1872, businessman Frederick Lehmann approached George Aitchison, one of the cynosures of the aesthetic movement, for guidance on interior design. Aitchison arranged with the painter Albert Moore to complete a lavishly detailed seven-metre frieze to decorate the house’s front room. Recreated through drawings from Moore and Aitchison, the frieze features an intertwining pattern of peacocks, one of the movement’s most cherished motifs. Symbolic in Greek and Asian religions, the peacock had feathers that resisted deterioration and its iridescent plumage suggested both eternity and transcendence.A detail from Henry Treffry Dunn’s 1887 painting of pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (left) with critic Theodore Watts-Dunton
At the start, the artists of the aesthetic movement despaired at what they saw as a dangerously mercantile nation that ranked utility over elegance and reserve over subjective taste. However, their efforts to reshape—or redefine—taste away from the mass-produced resulted in a commodification of the very lifestyle they espoused. Artists’ studios could be visited or formally toured. Blue-and-white china and luminous peacock wallpaper were now readily available from many purveyors, most notable among them, Liberty—a shop that secured its reputation as the source of “Art Fabrics.” Originally a refuge from the mercantile world, “beauty” became an essential component of it. Such popularity could not dodge criticism for long, and its attackers found a welcome audience in the readership of Punch. There, the pen of many satirists, notably George du Maurier, parodied the “stained glass” attitudes of these lovers of beauty, as well as the rage for such decorations in the middle-class home. In his many drawings of the artist “Maudle” (both muddled and maudlin) and the arriviste family, the “Cimabue Browns,” du Maurier struck severe blows at the seriousness of the artists’ endeavours. On the stage, Gilbert and Sullivan entertained audiences with Patience, their satire of the aesthetes’ “unseriousness.” What such attacks found so ridiculous, of course, was the decidedly self-absorbed nature of the aesthetes. They read—or, as many scholars are quick to point out, misread—Walter Pater’s ideas almost as licence for hedonism. For example, Pater wondered in one of the aesthetic movement’s foundational texts, The Renaissance: “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?” These are not the words of a quibbling scholar; these are the words of beauty’s prophet. “Art for art’s sake” was the credo of the aesthetic movement, but it jarred in many a moraliser’s ear. This is not, they protested, a social conscience; this is the voice of solipsism, lacking in meaning as much as morals. The idea that art had no other use or meaning beyond itself corrected the Victorian taste for moralising literature and art: for “improving” works that dulled rather than sharpened the senses. In the face of this Victorian moralising, the arch-aphorist Oscar Wilde insisted that exposure to beauty and to beautiful things was itself improving—not because art had morals, but precisely because it didn’t. On his 1882 lecture tour of the US (arranged by Richard D’Oyly Carte to drum up interest in the American production of Patience), Wilde explained the urgency of art: “Bring a boy up in the atmosphere of art, give him a mind before trying to teach him, develop his soul before trying to save it.” This hope may have seemed archaic but it was precisely the aesthetic movement’s aim to listen to those voices of the past for the ideas that might have facilitated understanding of their time. These artists’ fascination with medievalism, their orientalism, their love of all things “Queen Anne-y,” their nose-thumbing at Victorian values of piety and industry—all combined to create a utopia that, by its very definition, was unreachable. The aesthetic movement belongs to the age of empire, in which every aspiring home in the kingdom displayed the spoils of invasions and occupations from around the world. What remains distinctive is their sense of the redeeming power of the beautiful. This show traces the many threads of the late 19th century that form the pattern of today’s world. The aesthetic movement redefined the relationship between the artist and viewer as a question of feeling and emotion—thus anticipating defining art movements of the 20th century, including abstraction and expressionism. As a precursor of the arts and crafts movement, it showed the direction to later groups: the Bloomsbury Group—even Bauhaus—are inconceivable without understanding the ground first broken by the aesthetes.
