The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, and: The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 (review)

In the pamphlet he co-wrote with William Rossetti on the Royal Academy exhibition of 1868, A. C. Swinburne declares, “No good art is unbeautiful; but much able and effective work may be, and is.” “The worship of beauty,” he states, “though beauty be itself transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be simple and absolute.” He quotes Victor Hugo as an ally: “Beauty is perfect, beauty can do all things, beauty is the only thing which does not exist by halves.”¹ Swinburne was writing when the doctrine of art for art’s sake was developing in opposition to conventional moral and commercial imperatives for British art and was championed by a small but growing number of artists and writers as well audiences. Billed as the first comprehensive exhibition about aestheticism, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 is a stimulating and impressive examination of the spread of the questions, principles, and productions of this movement across late-Victorian cultural fields.

The Cult of Beauty provides a broad view of the movement. The show asserts aestheticism’s major role in the period’s debates about how art relates to everyday experiences within and beyond the individual mind, and to substantial cultural innovation. Stencils of peacocks and William Morris patterns are projected on walls that are painted teal, sapphire, and moss; dim lighting also sets the atmosphere. A small introductory space, dominated by Frederick Leighton’s large bronze sculpture, The Sluggard (1882–85), draws the audience in with pieces from the 1870s and 1880s, the period in which public interest in aestheticism began to peak.

Encompassing painting, photography, sculpture, the decorative arts, illustration and book design, fashion, and architecture, the exhibition is then split into four loosely chronological, thematic sections: “The Search for a New Beauty: 1860s,” “Art for Art’s Sake, 1860s–80s,” “Beautiful People & Aesthetic Houses: 1870s–90s,” and “Late-flowering Beauty: 1880s–90s.’” The first part of the exhibition focuses on the shifting interests of Pre-Raphaelite artists and suggests the retrospective components of this vanguard movement by highlighting Morris’s fascination with Chaucer and D. G. Rossetti’s revisioning of Dante, including Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (1864–70). Descriptions of Robert Buchanan’s attack on “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (led, according to Buchanan, by Rossetti, Swinburne, and Morris) turn attention to some of the early public controversies around aestheticism. International influences on aesthetic productions, particularly from Japan, are well represented not only through original cobalt and white porcelain vases from the seventeenth century and the watercolors of Edward Godwin’s furniture designs (c. 1875) that were part of Japonisme, but also through paintings that illustrate the growth of the Victorian public interest in Asian material cultures, such as Young Women Looking at Japanese Articles (James Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1869).

The exhibition underlines the importance of cultural institutions and commercial venues for both the creation and reception of the aesthetes’ works. The rise of aestheticism from a small group of artists and productions to a distinctly public and marketed movement is linked to the establishment of the South Kensington Museum (later Victoria & Albert museum) in 1852; the sensational opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, which aimed to counter the staid Royal Academy; and the shaping of consumer taste through new interior design magazines and the sale of textiles and other items at Liberty & Co. Napoleon Sarony’s well-known 1882 portraits of Oscar Wilde, photographed in velvet, are complemented by descriptions of the impact of Wilde’s American lecture tour on the popular imagination. The still...