Cult of beauty - Minerva

Museum exhibitions
Cult of Beauty: The
Aesthetic Movement
1860–1900’ includes
‘The
many of the best known
paintings of the 19th century, together
with sculpture, design, furniture and
architecture, as well as fashion and
literature of the era. The movement
drew much of its inspiration from
the art, history, myths and legends of
ancient Egypt and the Graeco-Roman
world, and also absorbed influences
from medieval Europe and contemporary
Japan. The exhibition at the V&A
traces the evolution of the movement
through more than 250 objects, set
out in four broadly chronological sections
spanning the four decades: ‘The
Search for a New Beauty’, ‘Art for Art’s
Sake’, ‘Beautiful People and Aesthetic
Houses’, and ‘Late Flowering Beauty’.
The exhibition traces the development
42
Fig 1. Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, The
Blue Closet, 1857.
Watercolour. © Tate,
London.
Fig 2. Albert Moore, A
Musician, 1865–6. Oil
on canvas. Yale Center
for British Art (Paul
Mellon Fund), New
Haven.
Fig 3. Frederic
Leighton, Syracusan
Bride leading Wild
Beasts in Procession
to the Temple of
Diana, 1865–6. Oil
on canvas. private
collection.
1
2
A comprehensive exhibition on the
Aesthetic Movement in Britain is
being staged at the V&A this spring.
Curator Stephen Calloway told
Minerva more about the inspiration
3
the movement drew from Classical art
The cult of beauty
of Aestheticism from the romantic
bohemianism of a small avant-garde
circle in the 1860s to a cultural phenomenon,
concluding with the Decadent
phase at the end of the 19 th century.
In the 1860s a novel and exciting
‘cult of beauty’ united, for a while at
least, artists such as Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and his ‘second-generation’
pre-Raphaelite followers – including
William Morris and Edward Burne-
Jones – maverick figures such as James
Mcneill Whistler, and the ‘Olympians’,
the painters of grand classical subjects
who belonged to the circle of Frederic
Leighton and G.F. Watts. These painters
created entirely new types of female
beauty, portraying their models with
an unconcealed and often frank sensuality.
The aesthetes aimed in their various
ways to write ‘pure’ poetry; to paint
beautiful pictures that had no need to
tell stories, preach sermons or rely
upon sentimental cliché; and to create
sculptures that simply offered visual
and tactile delight and dared to hint at
sensuous pleasures. The art of the aesthetics
was self-consciously absorbed
in itself, aware of the past but created
for the present, and existing only in
order to be beautiful. The style permeated
all areas of life, and many leading
manufacturers of furniture, ceramics,
metalwork, wallpaper and textiles,
such as Liberty’s of London, capitalised
on public interest by commissioning
prominent designers. Coinciding with
the growth in domestic markets in
industrial Britain, the resulting products
were among the first that were
widely accessible to the middle class.
The term ‘aesthetics’, coined from
the Greek aesthesis, denoting simply
‘perception of things by the senses’,
Minerva May/June 2011