The Philosophy of Art for Arts Sake Is Basically
Beginnings
The Literary World and Théophile Gautier
The Swiss writer Benjamin Constant is thought to take been the outset person to use the phrase "art for fine art's sake," in an 1804 diary entry. Just the term is near oft credited to the French philosopher Victor Cousin, who publicized it in his lectures of 1817-18. The thought of Art for Art's Sake - that fine art should non be judged on its relationship to social, political, or moral values, but purely for its formal and aesthetic qualities, beginning became popular amongst writers, encouraged by the French novelist Théophile Gautier. In the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), Gautier wrote that "aught is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly."
Gautier had offset studied painting before turning to literature and, subsequently, he became a leading art critic, so that he influenced both the literary and visual-fine art worlds. The poet Charles Baudelaire, a famous art critic in his own correct, dedicated his groundbreaking poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) to Gautier, whom he called "a perfect wizard of French letters." In 1862 Gautier was elected chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (National Society of Fine Arts) by a board that included Édouard Manet, Eugène Delacroix, and Gustave Doré amongst others. Gautier's view that aesthetic beauty was central to the value of art, and that thematically suggestive or didactic work often lacked this quality, became widely influential in securing the reputation of the Aesthetic motion.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
The American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler is generally credited with pioneering the concept of Fine art for Art'due south Sake within the visual arts. In his idiosyncratic art manifesto "The Blood-red Rag" (1878) he wrote that "[a]rt should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand solitary [...] and entreatment to the creative sense of center or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely strange to it, as devotion, pity, beloved, patriotism and the like."
Whistler'southward exclamation that visual fine art should not promote any item subject-affair led him to compare it to the purely abstract domain of music. With reference to his "nocturnes," such as Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872-75), he described painting as "pure music," noting that "Beethoven and the rest wrote music [...] they constructed celestial harmonies [...] pure music."
In emphasizing the value of art for its own sake, Whistler helped to establish both the Artful movement and Tonalism, the erstwhile movement having great currency in Britain, the latter in North America. In 1893, the critic George Moore, in his book Mod Painting, wrote that, "[m]ore than any other painter, Mr. Whistler'due south influence has made itself felt on English language art. More than any other human, Mr Whistler has helped to purge fine art of the vice of bailiwick and belief that the mission of the artist is to copy nature."
Aesthetic Movement
By 1860 the Aesthetic movement had emerged, coalescing around the influential idea of Fine art for Art's Sake, with its base in the United kingdom. Informed by Whistler'southward pioneering work and Gautier's criticism, the movement became associated specially with images of female beauty set up confronting the decadence of the classical world, as exemplified by the work of artists such as Albert Joseph Moore and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
Aestheticism also overlapped with the worldview of the Pre-Raphaelite Alliance, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris. These artists were wrapped up with what has been dubbed the "Cult of Beauty," a concept closely connected to the ethics of Art for Fine art'south Sake, and suggesed that the formal ability of the art piece of work mattered above all else. Yet, many Pre-Raphaelites, such equally Morris, were likewise invested in utopian politics, informed by an idealistic notion of the social structures of the medieval era. This suggests that the ideas of Art for Fine art'due south sake informed a slightly wider range of artistic philosophies than is sometimes imagined.
The canonical art critic Walter Pater became a leading proponent of Aestheticism. In his influential book The Renaissance: Studies in Fine art and Poetry (1873) he stated that "art comes to you proposing bluntly to give nil but the highest quality of your moments as they pass, and simply for these moments' sake." In so doing, he extended the concept of Art for Art's Sake to define the kind of experience that a viewer should derive from a particular artwork, rather than merely applying it to the artist's intentions.
The illustrator and pen-and-ink creative person Aubrey Beardsley, who died in 1898 at the age of merely 25, played several important roles in the development of Aestheticism - beyond his connection with the more famous Oscar Wilde. Beardsley's sketches, disquisitional commentaries, and editorship of The Yellow Book, a literary magazine published in London from 1894 to 1897, all left their marking on the emergence of formalistic and Decadent strains during the British fin-de-siècle (the terminate of the nineteenth century). In fact, the literary content of The Yellow Book frequently represented adequately traditional veins within art criticism, while in terms of visual layout, equally the fine art historian Linda Dowling writes, "[the] asymmetrically placed titles, lavish margins, affluence of white space, and relatively square page declare The Yellow Book's specific and substantial debt to Whistler." Nevertheless, the journal's garish color - which associated it with illicit French novels - and Beardsley'southward frequently uncanny and grotesque illustrations, made the journal widely influential and ensured its scandalous reputation.
Decadent Move
The Decadent movement, which began in the 1880s, developed alongside the Aesthetic movement and shared roots in the mid-nineteenth, with Beardsley a significant figure in both schools. The Decadent movement, however, was particularly associated with France, notably with the work of the French-based Belgian artist Félicien Rops. Rops was a peer of Charles Baudelaire, who had proudly declared himself a "decadent" in his Les Fleurs du Mal ("The Flowers of Evil") (1857), after which fourth dimension the term became synonymous with a rejection of nineteenth-century banality, puritanism, and sentimentality. In 1886, the publication of the magazine Le Décadent in France gave the Decadent movement its name.
Théophile Gautier, for his part, saw the principles of decadence every bit reflecting a point of advanced artful and cultural evolution - not to say fatigue and decay - within Western societies. "Art [has] arrived at that indicate of extreme maturity that determines civilizations which have grown erstwhile; ingenious, complicated, clever, full of frail hints and refinements [...] listening to translate subtle confidences, confessions of depraved passions, and the odd hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness." In the Decadent motion, Art for Art's Sake meant not so much an emphasis on pure formal beauty as an ostentatious rejection or mockery of the ideologies and social positions for which fine art might have been expected to stand.
The Decadents, arguably led past Aubrey Beardsley in Britain - who was also central to the Aesthetic movement - emphasized the erotic, the scandalous, and the agonizing. The Yellow Book pioneered the trend of decadence in art, with Beardsley's drawings rumored in the press to be filled with hidden (or not then hidden) erotic and lewd references, emphasizing his defiance of Victorian moralism. As the art historian Sabine Doran writes, "from the moment of its conception, The Yellow Volume presents itself every bit having a close relationship with the civilization of scandal; information technology is, in fact, ane of the progenitors of this culture."
Tonalism
The art of Tonalism, mainly based in North America, held no truck with the scandal-seeking decadence of Beardsley and his peers. However, with their glowing, mist-filled, atmospheric landscapes, the Tonalists pioneered a way that was, in its ain mode, equally committed to the notion of Fine art for Art's Sake.
Whistler was a lodestar for these artists. Equally the fine art historian David Adams Cleveland notes, Tonalism'due south "accent on balanced design, subtle patterning, and a kind of otherworldly equipoise came straight out of the Aesthetic motion and the work and artistic philosophy of Art for Art's Sake promoted past its greatest exponent, James McNeil Whistler." In works such every bit Nocturne: The River at Battersea (1878), Whistler emphasized mood and atmosphere while exploring a simplified, almost abstruse landscape in terms of its colour tonalities.
Art critic Grace Glueck describes Tonalism as "not really a movement, merely a mix of tendencies that began to migrate together around 1870." "[I]t remained a mode without a proper noun," she adds, "until the mid-1890s." Tonalism became a touchstone within US fine art, associated in detail with the North-American painters George Inness and Albert Pinkham Ryder, too equally the photographer Edward Steichen.
Whistler vs. Ruskin
Many of the principles of Art for Art's Sake were publicly exclaimed by James Abbott McNeill Whistler during a famous libel instance, which pitted his views against those of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. The roots of the dispute were in the founding of the Grosvenor gallery in London in 1877. The gallery promoted the Aesthetic motion, and, equally Fiona MacCarthy notes, became a "fashionable talking store. The gallery's proximity to the Majestic University polarized opinion nearly the techniques and purposes of art."
It was this polarization of opinion which led Ruskin, a proponent of more traditional technical and moral values within fine art, to dismiss Whistler'southward Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875), shown in the first Grosvenor exhibition, as the equivalent of "flinging a pot of pigment in the public's face." Never shy of publicity, Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, and the example came to courtroom in 1878.
During the legal proceedings, Ruskin used a portrait of Vincenzo Catena's Portrait of the Doge, Andrea Gritti (1523-31), then thought to be painted by Titian, equally an case of "existent fine art" meant to counter Whistler'southward painting. By arguing his right to freedom from pre-imposed creative standards, Whistler won the case. However, he was awarded only a unmarried farthing in amercement, and his legal expenses and the public controversy which the episode had acquired severely impacted on his career, to the extent that he was forced to declare bankruptcy, subsequently moving to Paris.
Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement Teapot
Post-obit Whistler's trial, the British public, too equally a number of powerful cultural figures, turned against the Artful move, and what they perceived as the indulgence and immorality of Art for Fine art's Sake. In 1881, the English dramatist W.Southward. Gilbert premiered Patience, a musical satirizing the leading Aesthetes, while cartoons lampooning Aestheticism appeared oft in Punch, the leading British magazine of satire and humour.
Oscar Wilde, by this time already an established author and a cultural celebrity, was often the target for attacks with homophobic overtones. Every bit the art historian Sally-Anne Huxtable writes, he was "the most famous Aesthete of them all [...] at that time dressing in velvet breeches, lecturing on the topic of Art and supposedly quipping that he was 'finding it harder and harder every day to alive up to my bluish and white china'." In 1882, playing off the success of Due west.S. Gilbert's Patience, which had included a graphic symbol based on Wilde called Bunthorne, the designer James Hadley, employed at the famous Purple Worcester Porcelain Factory, created his then-chosen Aesthetic Motility Teapot.
This piece mocks the ethics of aestheticism, particularly what was seen every bit its blurring of traditional gender roles. On the base of the pot appears the phrase "Fearful Consequences Through The Laws of Natural Selection & Evolution of Living up to One'south Teapot," an allusion to Wilde's annotate and to the idea - inferred by the public - that the Aesthetes thought they could make themselves beautiful by surrounding themselves with beautiful objects. (The line too mocks Darwin'due south recently published and non all the same accepted theory of natural selection.) As Huxtable notes, the message of the work embodied "the self-styled 'sensible' and 'manly' world of the Victorian mainstream press", which "saw Aesthetes as effete poseurs." Nevertheless, she also adds that the work became "the most iconic design object associated with British Aestheticism."
This said, the creative debate that Hadley alluded to, masked an uglier hostility towards the homosexual tendencies seen to be wrapped up in ideas of Fine art for Art's Sake. Presenting a fellow on i side and a young woman on the other, the teapot suggests the erosion of the traditional masculine and feminine qualities, encapsulating what Huxtable calls "the hysterical fears circulating in the 1880s virtually the furnishings that effeminacy and the blurring of gender roles might have on the time to come British population." These fears placed figures similar Wilde in the spotlight, and in 1895, after 2 trials and much public scandal, he was sentenced to prison and two years' difficult labor later being convicted of "gross indecency" for homosexual acts.
Concepts and Trends
Philosophy
The idea of aesthetic feel that informed Art for Art's Sake arguably has its roots in the work of eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who held that the true appreciation of art was a procedure asunder from all worldly concerns. Subsequent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists and thinkers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Thomas Carlyle, congenital upon Kant'due south ideas. Schiller's Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795) ("On the Aesthetic Education of Man"), inspired past Kant, developed the thought that appreciating art took the viewer abroad from social, political, or otherwise 'non-artistic' concerns: "beauty cajoles from [man] a delight in things for their ain sake." As a result, when Benjamin Constant first used the phrase "art for art's sake" in 1804, he was coining a memorable phrase that captured an already important philosophical trend.
Art Criticism
A number of nineteenth-century fine art critics, especially Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater, did much to establish the ideas of Art for Art's Sake. Pater famously described the possession of an artistic sensibility every bit pregnant "[t]o burn down always with [a] difficult, jewel-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." Every bit fine art historian Rachel Gurstein writes, "[s]uch an elevated, if extravagant, ideal of art demanded a new kind of criticism that would match, and even surpass, the intensity of the impressions that a painting evoked in the sensitive viewer, and the aesthetic critic responded with ardent prose poems of his ain." She adds that "proper Victorians thought such a view of art and criticism immoral and irreligious. They were appalled past what they perceived as its decadence."
Effect on Art History
With their passionate criticism, Gautier and Pater influenced the evaluation not just of contemporary art merely also of the Renaissance and classical work that influenced it. Rejecting the story-telling style and moral subject-matter of classical history painting, exemplified past Raphael and favored by the traditional academies, these two critics rediscovered the piece of work of artists such equally Botticelli. Additionally, as Rochelle Gurstein writes of Leonardo da Vinci'south Mona Lisa (c. 1503-19), "[a]lthough many writers associated with the fine art-for-art's sake movement in France and England paid enthusiastic tribute to the painting, Theophile Gautier and Walter Pater are now best known for launching information technology on its modernistic path to what is now inelegantly called 'iconicity.'"
Gautier described the "foreign, almost magic charm which the portrait of Mona Lisa has for even the least enthusiastic natures." In his volume The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), Pater called Mona Lisa "the symbol of the modern idea," in a lyrical passage that continues to inform our thought of what the painting represents. As Rachel Gurstein notes, "[i]n an incantatory paragraph, Pater portrayed the Mona Lisa in linguistic communication that eclipsed Gautier's rhapsody and would relegate Giorgio Vasari to history. Indeed, this single passage so completely formed the imagination and the vision of art lovers who read information technology that no ane - from Oscar Wilde to Bernard Berenson to Kenneth Clark - could speak of the Mona Lisa without uttering in the same breath that he, like everyone else of his generation, had committed Pater's luminous words to retention."
Opponents of Art for Art's Sake
From the beginning, the idea that art should exist judged solely on a gear up of isolated aesthetic or formal criteria was opposed past a range of creatives and thinkers. Bookish painters rejected the work associated with Fine art for Art's Sake every bit frivolous, lacking the moral purpose offered by the classical subjects which the Academy favored. Ruskin's criticism of Whistler'due south work encapsulates some aspects of this position.
Merely equally it was criticized by traditionalists, Art for Art'south Sake also gradually fell afoul of emerging avant-garde trends in the arts. Gustave Courbet, the pioneer of Realism, generally seen as the kickoff modern art movement, consciously distanced his aesthetic approach from Art for Fine art'south Sake in 1854, while also rejecting the standards of the academy, presenting them equally ii sides of the same coin: "I was the sole guess of my painting [...] I had good painting non in order to make Art for Fine art'south Sake, but rather to win my intellectual liberty."
Courbet'due south position anticipated that of many frontwards-thinking artists who felt, every bit the novelist George Sand wrote in 1872, that "Fine art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the proficient and the cute, that is the faith I am searching for." Modernism and Avant-garde trends in art increasingly became associated not with a mere decadent rejection of bookish and Victorian morals, just with the proffer of alternative social, political, and ethical ethics.
Subsequently Developments
According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, "[t]he Aesthetic project finally ended following the scandal of the trial, conviction and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for homosexuality in 1895. The autumn of Wilde effectively discredited the Artful Move with the general public, though many of its ideas and styles remained pop into the 20th century." With the turn down of the Artful movement, the phrase "art for art's sake" barbarous out of style, though it continued to exert a presence, often notably, in other countries.
In Saint petersburg in 1899 Sergei Diaghilev, forth with Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois, founded the magazine Mir iskusstva ("World of Art"). The mag was allied with a grouping of young artists in St. Petersburg which had formed the World of Art movement the preceding twelvemonth. Promoting Art for Art'southward Sake and artistic individualism, the group had perhaps its greatest touch on through the formation of the groundbreaking Ballets Russes, which Diaghilev founded in 1907, and which operated until 1927.
The thought of Art for Fine art's Sake had a profound if somewhat paradoxical influence on avant-garde art. Every bit art historian Doug Singsen notes, "the avant-garde was not but a negation of fifty'art pour l'fine art but rather both a negation and continuation of it." Many leading twentieth-century artists dismissed it. Pablo Picasso stated "[t]his idea of fine art for art's sake is a hoax," while Wassily Kandinsky wrote that "[t]his fail of inner meanings, which is the life of colours, this vain squandering of artistic ability is called 'art for art'south sake.'" Nonetheless, the concept was often met with ambiguity. Kandinsky empathized with the concept to a express extent, describing it every bit "an unconscious protest against materialism, against the demand that everything should accept a apply and practical value."
The leading art critic Clement Greenberg, who promoted Abstract Expressionism in the post-Globe War II era, build his concepts of medium specificity and formalism upon the groundwork of Art for Art'due south Sake. As art historian Anna Lovatt writes, "Greenberg expanded the concept of art's autonomy every bit he adult his concept of medium specificity." Contemporary art historian Paul Bürger described the concept of Art for Art's Sake as fundamental to the evolution of the avant-garde and modernism in his influential 1974 text Theory of the Advanced: "the autonomy of fine art is a category of conservative society. It permits the clarification of fine art's disengagement from the context of practical life as a historical evolution."
Social historian Rochelle Gurstein notes that "Pater's manner was a harbinger of modernity." His influence continued into the twentieth century, particularly amidst noted critics and writers. Contemporary critic Denis Donoghue describes Pater'southward influence as "a shade or trace in virtually every writer of significance from [Gerard Manley] Hopkins and [Oscar] Wilde to [John] Ashbery." During the era of postmodernism in literary studies, many critics also took an interest in Pater's worldview every bit a forerunner to modern ideas of "deconstruction." In 1991, scholar Jonathan Loesberg argued in Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and de Man that aestheticism and modernistic deconstruction produced similar forms of philosophical knowledge and political effect through a procedure of self-questioning or "self-resistance," and through the internal critique and destabilization of hegemonic truths.
In 2011 the Victoria & Albert Museum held The Cult of Beauty exhibition on the aesthetic motion. Equally curator Stephen Calloway noted, "the idea of looking at an fine art move where, consciously, dazzler and quality are central ideas, seems to me extraordinarily timely," suggesting that Art for Fine art'due south Sake is an thought with ongoing currency in the information and opinion-saturated contemporary world.
Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/art-for-art/history-and-concepts/
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