The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860-1900

by Lynn Federle Orr (Editor), Stephen Calloway (Editor)

The Cult of Beauty focuses on a period at the end of the nineteenth century when a group of artists, architects, and designers found themselves linked by the search for anew Beauty. The Aesthetic Movement, as it came to be known, united romantic bohemians, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones, with maverick figures like James McNeill Whistler. The Cult of Beauty brings together the finest pictures, furniture, and decorative arts of this extraordinary era, setting them in the context of this glittering cast of characters. This beautiful book also reveals how artists’ houses and their extravagant lifestyles became the object of public fascination. The influence of the “Palaces of Art” created by Rossetti and Morris, Lord Leighton, and others led to a widespread revolution in architecture and interior decoration, while Oscar Wilde made his name promoting the idea of “The House Beautiful.”

Genres: Art, History, Nonfiction, Research, Victorian, Historical, British Literature

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Telyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fantastic catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name that is currently on display (May 2012) in San Francisco as I write this review. The book contains an impressive collection of paintings ( highlights include some rarely seen works by G.F. Watts and John Millais), sculpture, illustration, furniture, jewelry and decorative arts of all types produced during the height of the British decadent/symbolist/Pre-Raphaelite period. Well worth the price and a good consolation prize for those of us who missed the actual show!

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous book. Gorgeous photos and an interesting period--British aestheticism, a time to enjoy beauty for beauty's sake, without the oppression of Victorian mores.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting book focused on a shift in Victorian art in 1860-1890. It was published in association with an exhibition in Victoria and Albert museum and the museums of San Francisco. The book presents a somewhat “integrated” prospect of Victorian Avant-Garde . Under the motto “cult of beauty” it brings together several streams of Victorian art that tend to be classified in different piles - late Pre-Raphaelites like Rosetti, “Olympians” like Leighton and Alma-Tadema, “art for art sake” movement associated with Whistler, and aesthetic movement that was a broad phenomenon represented in art by such artists as Burne-Jones and Moore. The book is organized into many small sections, each devoted to a specific topic and illustrated with relevant plates from the exhibition. Altogether, the book paints a consistent and convincing picture of a gradual shift from traditional Victorian art, where each painting should have a hidden message or moral to "art for art’s sake". The book traces the aesthetic movement from its roots to its slow decline.

[Bethanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book accompanying the exhibit, originally presented by the V&A, later shown in San Francisco. Essays by a variety of scholars with specialties in the ouvres displayed: paintings, furnishings, textiles, clothing, decorative objects. Very informative, and hopefully, leading interested people to reconsider the British Aesthetic movement as being important in it's own right as Impressionism in France. When artists move beyond the boundaries of what is accepted in traditional academic juried exhibition, yet do not demonstrate a linear progression in the Greenburgian sense toward modernity, is it something to be dismissed or something to be studied? This exhibit demonstrated the link between the high art of painting, as well as the applied arts/crafts of design in quotidian object. Indeed, the William Morris quote of "have nothing in your home that you do not find to be both useful and beautiful" could be the slogan for the show. In another work, art historian Elizabeth Prettijohn made the argument that study should be done linking not only painting and craft, but literature as well. In this 19th century movement, I see the foundations of lifestyle brands. Indeed, Liberty of London, featured in some of the fashions and crafts, is still in business. Laura Ashley, Ralph Lauren, even Giorgio Armani (and his Casa Armani line) all owe a debt of inspiration to this movement for integrating philosophy, fashion, decoration, and art into a seamless whole for a targeted audience with not only taste but money to burn in recreating the look of the original artists and designers in upper middle class and avant guarde homes. Will have to read again to think about how all these areas relate to each other.

[William West · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, if unexhilarating, exhibit on the British Aesthetes. They championed art (by which they meant their conception of the “beautiful”) for art's sake. Instead of the religious or narrational role art had previously been sequestered to in British society, the Aesthetes felt that art should seduce the viewer into a state of contemplative meditation on the purely aesthetic. To further this end, they utilized the erotic, disguised as the “Classical” and indeed popularized some profoundly eroticized nudes in the height of Victorian society.
The exhibit should be commended for its materialistic tracing of the Aesthetic impulse. As the British middle-class expanded in the second half of the nineteenth century, more of the children of the bourgeoisie, such as Aesthete artists like Whistler, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones, were entering into artistic careers. They carried with them the sensibility that the middle-classes coveted objects that conveyed sophistication (illusions to the Classical, but also to the “oriental”) while also being affordable and utilitarian. Thus, there was an explosion of furniture that referenced Japanese panel-painting and Anatolian textiles. Much of the exhibit was devoted to such domestic pieces. I admit that I usually skip over such offerings in museums but some of the objects on view here struck me as much as any of the paintings.

[Saralee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Big beautiful book. The articles are short, lively and interesting, and connect all the different threads of art and criticism with their effect on popular culture.

I wish I could have seen the exhibit that it is the companion to.

[Maryellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

reference/des.

[Mills College Library]

745 C9683 2011