Bikini Asian Wallpaper
“The Cult of Beauty”: ‘The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900’
This exhibition was in its final week when I caught it, and was consequently thronged with tourists and the generally curious. Aestheticism, or ‘Art for art’s sake’, was in part a reaction against the moralising and doctrinaire nature of much of early Victorian art – though the idea of individual creative ‘genius’ was born earlier in the Romantic movement. Although initially somewhat elitist in nature, with the opening of the Grovesnor Gallery, in 1877, the artists were able to exhibit for a large section of the public, and increasingly to influence design styles in furniture, interiors and fashion. It was only in the 1890s, when the ‘aesthete’, epitomised by Oscar Wilde, became an increasing object of satire, that the term gained its more negative connotations. Yet even to the end the leaders of the movement continued to produce grand and sumptious works of art that have not dated.
Origins and initial success
The most well-known of its founders include Edward Burne-Jones, Whistler, Frederick Leighton, Rossetti and Aubrey Beardsley. They had in common a highly sensualised style of painting, whose themes – principally, classicism and exoticism, or orientalism – were subjected to the overall objective of creating a spectacle that was pleasing to the eye. Leighton’s 1865-6 painting, ‘The Syracusan Bride leading Wild Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana’ is typical, transplanting an Asian ceremony, its protagonists’ dark arab features at odds with its Greek setting. Leighton’s 1885 sculpture ‘The Sluggard’ portrays an Olympian figure in aesthetically pleasing repose; the title conveys the sensory enjoyment, and the knowing self-awareness that the movement sought to promote. Edward Burne-Jones’ ‘The Peacock’, a lacquered painting, utilises one of Aestheticism’s most prolific motifs, the symbolism of which need not be elaborated on. It is, for example, the title of one of Rossetti’s paintings of his muse Elizabeth Sidel; ‘Pavone’ (1858-9) is Italian for ‘peacock.’ Medieval and Arthurian scenes were also common, evoking an age of bygone chivalry. Slightly anomalous stylistically is Whistler’s ‘Nocturnes’ painting series, a darker, sketchier set of portrayals of the London cityscape. Many contemporary critics were unimpressed with his unconventional style, with Ruskin accusing him in 1877, on the exhibit’s opening, of ‘charging two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’