Art for Arts Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (review)

In Art for Arts Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting Elizabeth Prettejohn has produced an erudite, solidly researched volume devoted to painters and critics who contributed to Aestheticism—a term whose embrace she has enlarged to include truly diverse practices. Early on, she explains her approach. In discussing "Two Early Aesthetic Pictures" (John Everett Millais's Autumn Leaves [1855–56] and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blue Closet [1856–57]), she "deploy[s] two quite different methods to explore the genesis of Aestheticism, which might be called aesthetic and historical, respectively, or Kantian and Hegelian" (34). Indeed, Kantian and Hegelian approaches generate much, if not all, of the book's progress.

Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790) provides, with qualifications, one source of aestheticism. "In the founding text of modern Western aesthetics," she writes, "statements of the kind 'x is beautiful' are entirely subjective. They refer to the feeling of pleasure in the judging subject when she is contemplating x. . . . It follows that judgements of taste are always singular and can never be generalized" (17–18). It follows also that they are "free" judgements.

Yet it is seldom in practice that we respond to an object without moral, political, or social considerations. Moreover, from the artist's point of view, "the very intention to make a work of art . . . constitutes a guiding concept" (18). Kant's way out of this impasse was "to invoke the notion of 'genius,' a quality innate in creative artists that . . . supersedes the premeditated quality of art making" (19). Prettejohn, however, is uncomfortable with the "limited Kantian notion of 'genius,'" and suggests "we might see it as a kind of open term for what it would take to make that unmakeable thing, the undetermined or 'freely beautiful' work of art" (19). Downplaying the word "genius" enables her to pursue one thread in her exposition.

But Prettejohn's aim is to develop the concept "British Aestheticism," and she notes how early British Aesthetic painters and critics affirmed "art for art's sake" as the aim to which art should aspire. Algernon Charles Swinburne's 1868 study of William Blake is central to this development. The term "art for art's sake" first appeared "in a context related to English art" in this book, which depicted Blake's work "as an English source for ideas about art" (37–38). Swinburne wrote, "art for art's sake first of all and afterwards . . . all the rest shall be added to her (or if not she need hardly be overmuch concerned)" (qtd. in Prettejohn 50).

After the Blake study, however, Swinburne ran into difficulties that work themselves into Prettejohn's discussions. In 1872 he reviewed an unequivocally political verse cycle by Victor Hugo, "one of his greatest heroes" (65). According to Prettejohn, the review conveys his "opposition to the forces of reaction in the French political upheavals of 1870–71" (65). Moreover, in 1871 Swinburne dedicated Songs before Sunrise to Giuseppe Mazzini, placing them "at least tangentially in the service of Italian political independence" (65). "Swinburne is caught in something approaching a lie," Prettejohn observes, "as he attempts to convince the reader that his new enthusiasm for engaged art is consistent with his former insistence on art as an end in itself" (68).

In the chapters that follow, Prettejohn introduces a variety of approaches to art, all of which she explains as aspects of Aestheticism. Simeon Solomon's work from the 1860s shows "that the connection between same-sex desire" and Aestheticism "was alive in the earliest stages of thinking about art for art's sake" (72). Albert Moore's use of the grid contributes not only to the overarching concept of British Aestheticism but also looks forward to Modernism. Frederic Leighton's classicism contributes to the ongoing expansion of the meaning of Aestheticism in a manner that Prettejohn sees as a kind of Kantian inversion of Hegelian historicism. She argues that James Abbott McNeill Whistler's...