“The Cult of Beauty”
Paintings of velvet-swaddled damsels, with fiery hair and mournful pouts, fraternized with blue-and-white china, japonaiserie costumes, and gilt-edged tomes of illustrated fairy tales in “The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900.” Plush rooms (decorated with projections of peacock feathers and wispy, floral patterns) traced the movement’s various phases. The esoteric quest of a few in the 1860s, it was given a boost by the Grosvenor Gallery’s patronage in the 1870s, exultantly exalted as a lifestyle choice in the 1880s (with the flourishing of the “house beautiful” aesthetic), and was arguably on the decline by the 1890s, when it morphed into its “decadent” phase, exemplified by the dandified musings of Oscar Wilde. Visitors’ meanderings through the late nineteenth century were punctuated with reminders (in the form of wall text) of the centrality of the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A, to the movement’s artistic blossoming. At least, this was the argument that the show’s curators—Stephen Calloway of the V&A, and Lynn Federle Orr from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco—put forward in their sumptuous exhibition, which will travel to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the de Young Museum, San Francisco.
Given the vastly varying attitudes of its key figures, what constitutes the Aesthetic Movement is still passionately disputed by art historians. Here, the busty beauties of Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones nudged the neoclassical maidens of G. F. Watts and Frederic Leighton. In Burne-Jones’s painting The Beguiling of Merlin, 1870–74, the long-limbed Vivien, Lady of the Lake, tempts the aged sorcerer within a leafy enclave, while Leighton’s The Bath of Psyche, 1890, shows a statuesque goddess coolly admiring herself in a pool. Elsewhere, Aubrey Beardsley’s spidery-black woodcuts of wicked, attenuated characters (such as Salomé, 1894, gloating over the decapitated head of John the Baptist) competed with Albert Silver’s peacock-patterned fabric. The curatorial narrative proposed that all these works rallied to the cry of “art for art’s sake”; i.e., art that existed “only in order to be beautiful” and hence eschewed stories and morals.
The show made much of Wilde’s quip about finding it difficult to “live up to” his exquisite china, and if his collection was as fetching as the blue-and-white oddments here, one could empathize. But unfortunately, most of the artifacts told a different tale. It is true that Burne-Jones’s big-bosomed ladies “hint at sensual pleasures,” but less believable that they espouse no morals and imply no stories. His affection for all things medieval (evinced by his allusion to the King Arthur legend in The Beguiling of Merlin) brought with it the evocation of a preindustrial era in which, so he thought, life, art, and craft coexisted in harmony. His championing of “art for art’s sake” was not always echoed elsewhere. William Morris’s Arts and Crafts aesthetic similarly celebrates the overlapping of daily life, artistic production, and nature. Just as Burne-Jones’s images are filled with lush greenery, Morris’s Design for Fruit Wallpaper, 1862, in which fruit and flowers are magically intertwined as if to suggest the Garden of Eden, laments the passing of the idyllic old ways and undertakes to revitalize them, if only fleetingly, through interior decoration. Of course, the nineteenth century encompassed both the love of beauty for its own sake and an understanding of its impact on daily life. But to argue that deliberately antifunctional art is an easy ideological fit with home decor is untenable, no matter that a wall text insisted that the “same spirit” motivated both. Perhaps the curators should have reveled in the contradictions of the age instead of papering them over.