Said the Avantgarde Is About Lart Pour Lart Art for Arts Sake

Ancestry

The Literary World and Théophile Gautier

The Swiss writer Benjamin Abiding is thought to have been the first person to use the phrase "art for art'due south sake," in an 1804 diary entry. Just the term is most often credited to the French philosopher Victor Cousin, who publicized it in his lectures of 1817-18. The idea of Art for Fine art'due south Sake - that art should not be judged on its relationship to social, political, or moral values, but purely for its formal and aesthetic qualities, first became popular amidst writers, encouraged by the French novelist Théophile Gautier. In the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), Gautier wrote that "nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly."

Gautier had first studied painting earlier turning to literature and, subsequently, he became a leading fine art critic, and then that he influenced both the literary and visual-art worlds. The poet Charles Baudelaire, a famous art critic in his own right, dedicated his groundbreaking poetry drove Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) to Gautier, whom he chosen "a perfect sorcerer of French letters." In 1862 Gautier was elected chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (National Guild of Fine Arts) by a lath that included Édouard Manet, Eugène Delacroix, and Gustave Doré among others. Gautier'southward view that aesthetic dazzler was key 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 movement.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

The American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler is generally credited with pioneering the concept of Art for Art's Sake within the visual arts. In his idiosyncratic art manifesto "The Ruby Rag" (1878) he wrote that "[a]rt should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, honey, patriotism and the similar."

Whistler's assertion that visual art should not promote any particular bailiwick-matter led him to compare it to the purely abstruse domain of music. With reference to his "nocturnes," such every bit Nocturne in Blue and Golden: Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872-75), he described painting every bit "pure music," noting that "Beethoven and the residuum 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's influence has fabricated itself felt on English language fine art. More than any other man, Mr Whistler has helped to purge art of the vice of subject field and belief that the mission of the creative person is to copy nature."

Aesthetic Movement

By 1860 the Aesthetic movement had emerged, coalescing effectually the influential idea of Art for Art's Sake, with its base in the Uk. Informed by Whistler's pioneering work and Gautier's criticism, the motion became associated particularly with images of female person beauty set against the decadence of the classical world, as exemplified by the work of artists such as Albert Joseph Moore and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Aestheticism too overlapped with the worldview of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 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 ideals of Art for Fine art's Sake, and suggesed that the formal ability of the art work mattered above all else. All the same, many Pre-Raphaelites, such equally Morris, were also 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 Art's sake informed a slightly wider range of creative 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 Art and Poetry (1873) he stated that "fine art comes to you proposing frankly to requite cypher but the highest quality of your moments as they pass, and but for these moments' sake." In so doing, he extended the concept of Art for Art's Sake to ascertain the kind of experience that a viewer should derive from a particular artwork, rather than but applying it to the creative person's intentions.

The illustrator and pen-and-ink artist Aubrey Beardsley, who died in 1898 at the age of only 25, played several of import roles in the evolution of Aestheticism - beyond his connectedness with the more famous Oscar Wilde. Beardsley'southward sketches, critical commentaries, and editorship of The Xanthous Volume, a literary magazine published in London from 1894 to 1897, all left their mark on the emergence of formalistic and Decadent strains during the British fin-de-siècle (the end of the nineteenth century). In fact, the literary content of The Yellow Volume ofttimes represented fairly traditional veins within art criticism, while in terms of visual layout, as the art historian Linda Dowling writes, "[the] asymmetrically placed titles, lavish margins, affluence of white space, and relatively foursquare folio declare The Xanthous Volume's specific and substantial debt to Whistler." Nonetheless, the journal's garish color - which associated it with illicit French novels - and Beardsley's ofttimes uncanny and grotesque illustrations, made the periodical widely influential and ensured its scandalous reputation.

Corrupt Movement

The Corrupt movement, which began in the 1880s, developed alongside the Aesthetic motility 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 piece of work of the French-based Belgian creative person Félicien Rops. Rops was a peer of Charles Baudelaire, who had proudly alleged himself a "decadent" in his Les Fleurs du Mal ("The Flowers of Evil") (1857), after which time the term became synonymous with a rejection of nineteenth-century banality, puritanism, and sentimentality. In 1886, the publication of the magazine Le Décadent in French republic gave the Decadent motion its name.

Théophile Gautier, for his part, saw the principles of decadence as reflecting a point of advanced aesthetic and cultural evolution - non to say fatigue and decay - inside Western societies. "Art [has] arrived at that point of extreme maturity that determines civilizations which have grown former; ingenious, complicated, clever, total of frail hints and refinements [...] listening to translate subtle confidences, confessions of depraved passions, and the odd hallucinations of a fixed thought turning to madness." In the Decadent movement, Art for Art'due south Sake meant non 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 take been expected to stand.

The Decadents, arguably led past Aubrey Beardsley in United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland - who was also central to the Aesthetic movement - emphasized the erotic, the scandalous, and the disturbing. The Yellow Book pioneered the trend of decadence in fine art, with Beardsley'due south drawings rumored in the printing to be filled with hidden (or non so hidden) erotic and lewd references, emphasizing his disobedience of Victorian moralism. As the art historian Sabine Doran writes, "from the moment of its conception, The Yellow Book presents itself as having a shut relationship with the culture of scandal; it is, in fact, one of the progenitors of this culture."

Tonalism

The art of Tonalism, mainly based in Northward 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 mode that was, in its own manner, equally committed to the notion of Art for Art's Sake.

Whistler was a lodestar for these artists. As the art historian David Adams Cleveland notes, Tonalism's "emphasis on balanced design, subtle patterning, and a kind of otherworldly equipoise came directly out of the Aesthetic movement and the work and artistic philosophy of Art for Art's Sake promoted by its greatest exponent, James McNeil Whistler." In works such equally Nocturne: The River at Battersea (1878), Whistler emphasized mood and temper while exploring a simplified, most abstract landscape in terms of its color tonalities.

Art critic Grace Glueck describes Tonalism as "not really a move, just a mix of tendencies that began to drift together effectually 1870." "[I]t remained a mode without a name," she adds, "until the mid-1890s." Tonalism became a touchstone within United states of america fine art, associated in particular with the North-American painters George Inness and Albert Pinkham Ryder, as well as the photographer Edward Steichen.

Whistler vs. Ruskin

Many of the principles of Fine art for Art'south Sake were publicly exclaimed by James Abbott McNeill Whistler during a famous libel instance, which pitted his views against those of the Victorian fine 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 movement, and, every bit Fiona MacCarthy notes, became a "fashionable talking shop. The gallery'southward proximity to the Regal University polarized stance about the techniques and purposes of fine art."

Information technology was this polarization of opinion which led Ruskin, a proponent of more than traditional technical and moral values within fine art, to dismiss Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gilded: The Falling Rocket (1875), shown in the first Grosvenor exhibition, as the equivalent of "flinging a pot of paint in the public'due south face." Never shy of publicity, Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, and the case came to court in 1878.

During the legal proceedings, Ruskin used a portrait of Vincenzo Catena'due south Portrait of the Doge, Andrea Gritti (1523-31), so idea to exist painted by Titian, as an example of "real fine art" meant to counter Whistler'southward painting. By arguing his right to freedom from pre-imposed artistic standards, Whistler won the case. However, he was awarded but a unmarried farthing in damages, 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 Move Teapot

Following Whistler'due south trial, the British public, equally well as a number of powerful cultural figures, turned against the Aesthetic movement, and what they perceived as the indulgence and immorality of Art for Art's Sake. In 1881, the English dramatist Due west.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. As the art historian Emerge-Anne Huxtable writes, he was "the nigh 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 information technology harder and harder every day to alive up to my blue and white people's republic of china'." In 1882, playing off the success of West.S. Gilbert's Patience, which had included a character based on Wilde chosen Bunthorne, the designer James Hadley, employed at the famous Majestic Worcester Porcelain Manufacturing plant, created his so-called Artful Movement Teapot.

This piece mocks the ideals of aestheticism, particularly what was seen as its blurring of traditional gender roles. On the base of operations of the pot appears the phrase "Fearful Consequences Through The Laws of Natural Selection & Evolution of Living up to One's Teapot," an allusion to Wilde's comment and to the idea - inferred by the public - that the Aesthetes idea they could make themselves beautiful by surrounding themselves with beautiful objects. (The line also mocks Darwin's recently published and not nonetheless accustomed theory of natural pick.) Equally 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." However, 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 upward in ideas of Art for Art's Sake. Presenting a young human being on one side and a immature adult female 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 near the effects that effeminacy and the blurring of gender roles might have on the future British population." These fears placed figures like Wilde in the spotlight, and in 1895, after ii trials and much public scandal, he was sentenced to prison and ii years' difficult labor after being bedevilled of "gross indecency" for homosexual acts.

Concepts and Trends

Philosophy

The idea of aesthetic experience that informed Art for Art's Sake arguably has its roots in the work of eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who held that the truthful appreciation of art was a procedure disconnected from all worldly concerns. Subsequent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists and thinkers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Thomas Carlyle, built upon Kant's ideas. Schiller'south Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795) ("On the Aesthetic Education of Human"), inspired past Kant, developed the thought that appreciating art took the viewer abroad from social, political, or otherwise 'non-creative' concerns: "dazzler cajoles from [man] a delight in things for their own sake." As a result, when Benjamin Constant first used the phrase "art for art'southward sake" in 1804, he was coining a memorable phrase that captured an already of import philosophical trend.

Art Criticism

A number of nineteenth-century fine art critics, particularly Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater, did much to establish the ideas of Fine art for Art's Sake. Pater famously described the possession of an artistic sensibility as pregnant "[t]o burn always with [a] hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." As art historian Rachel Gurstein writes, "[s]uch an elevated, if improvident, ideal of art demanded a new kind of criticism that would match, and fifty-fifty surpass, the intensity of the impressions that a painting evoked in the sensitive viewer, and the aesthetic critic responded with agog prose poems of his ain." She adds that "proper Victorians thought such a view of art and criticism immoral and irreligious. They were appalled by what they perceived equally its decadence."

Upshot on Art History

With their passionate criticism, Gautier and Pater influenced the evaluation not only of gimmicky art but also of the Renaissance and classical piece of work that influenced it. Rejecting the story-telling style and moral subject-matter of classical history painting, exemplified by Raphael and favored by the traditional academies, these ii critics rediscovered the piece of work of artists such as Botticelli. Additionally, every bit Rochelle Gurstein writes of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (c. 1503-xix), "[a]lthough many writers associated with the art-for-art'due south 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 modern path to what is at present inelegantly chosen 'iconicity.'"

Gautier described the "strange, most magic charm which the portrait of Mona Lisa has for even the least enthusiastic natures." In his volume The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Verse (1873), Pater called Mona Lisa "the symbol of the mod idea," in a lyrical passage that continues to inform our idea of what the painting represents. Equally Rachel Gurstein notes, "[i]n an incantatory paragraph, Pater portrayed the Mona Lisa in language that eclipsed Gautier's rhapsody and would relegate Giorgio Vasari to history. Indeed, this unmarried passage so completely formed the imagination and the vision of fine art lovers who read it that no one - from Oscar Wilde to Bernard Berenson to Kenneth Clark - could speak of the Mona Lisa without uttering in the aforementioned breath that he, like everyone else of his generation, had committed Pater'due south luminous words to memory."

Opponents of Art for Art's Sake

From the beginning, the thought that art should be judged solely on a set of isolated aesthetic or formal criteria was opposed by a range of creatives and thinkers. Academic painters rejected the work associated with Art for Art's Sake as frivolous, lacking the moral purpose offered by the classical subjects which the Academy favored. Ruskin'southward criticism of Whistler's work encapsulates some aspects of this position.

Just as it was criticized past traditionalists, Art for Fine art'southward Sake as well gradually vicious afoul of emerging avant-garde trends in the arts. Gustave Courbet, the pioneer of Realism, by and large seen as the first modern art movement, consciously distanced his artful approach from Fine art for Fine art'southward Sake in 1854, while also rejecting the standards of the university, presenting them as two sides of the same coin: "I was the sole judge of my painting [...] I had practiced painting not in club to make Art for Art'southward Sake, only rather to win my intellectual freedom."

Courbet'due south position anticipated that of many forwards-thinking artists who felt, every bit the novelist George Sand wrote in 1872, that "Fine art for fine art'due south sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the expert and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for." Modernism and Avant-garde trends in fine art increasingly became associated non with a mere decadent rejection of academic and Victorian morals, but with the proposition of alternative social, political, and ethical ideals.

Later Developments

Co-ordinate 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 Aesthetic Movement with the general public, though many of its ideas and styles remained popular into the 20th century." With the reject of the Aesthetic movement, the phrase "fine art for art's sake" fell out of manner, though it continued to exert a presence, often notably, in other countries.

In Petrograd in 1899 Sergei Diaghilev, along with Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois, founded the mag Mir iskusstva ("Globe of Art"). The magazine was centrolineal with a group of young artists in St. Petersburg which had formed the Earth of Art movement the preceding twelvemonth. Promoting Art for Art'southward Sake and creative individualism, the grouping had perhaps its greatest bear upon through the formation of the groundbreaking Ballets Russes, which Diaghilev founded in 1907, and which operated until 1927.

The thought of Art for Art'south Sake had a profound if somewhat paradoxical influence on avant-garde art. As fine art historian Doug Singsen notes, "the avant-garde was not simply a negation of l'fine art cascade l'fine art just rather both a negation and continuation of it." Many leading twentieth-century artists dismissed information technology. Pablo Picasso stated "[t]his idea of art for art'southward sake is a hoax," while Wassily Kandinsky wrote that "[t]his neglect of inner meanings, which is the life of colours, this vain squandering of artistic power is chosen 'art for art's sake.'" Yet, the concept was often met with ambiguity. Kandinsky empathized with the concept to a express extent, describing it as "an unconscious protest against materialism, confronting the demand that everything should have a use and applied value."

The leading art critic Clement Greenberg, who promoted Abstract Expressionism in the post-Earth State of war II era, build his concepts of medium specificity and ceremonial upon the groundwork of Art for Art's Sake. As art historian Anna Lovatt writes, "Greenberg expanded the concept of art's autonomy equally he adult his concept of medium specificity." Contemporary art historian Paul Bürger described the concept of Fine art for Art'south Sake equally fundamental to the evolution of the advanced and modernism in his influential 1974 text Theory of the Avant-garde: "the autonomy of art is a category of bourgeois lodge. It permits the description of art'south detachment from the context of practical life as a historical development."

Social historian Rochelle Gurstein notes that "Pater'southward style was a harbinger of modernity." His influence continued into the twentieth century, peculiarly amid noted critics and writers. Gimmicky critic Denis Donoghue describes Pater's influence as "a shade or trace in most 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 as a precursor to modern ideas of "deconstruction." In 1991, scholar Jonathan Loesberg argued in Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and de Man that aestheticism and modern deconstruction produced similar forms of philosophical knowledge and political effect through a process of cocky-questioning or "self-resistance," and through the internal critique and destabilization of hegemonic truths.

In 2011 the Victoria & Albert Museum held The Cult of Dazzler exhibition on the aesthetic motility. As curator Stephen Calloway noted, "the idea of looking at an art motility where, consciously, beauty and quality are central ideas, seems to me extraordinarily timely," suggesting that Fine art for Art'southward Sake is an idea with ongoing currency in the information and opinion-saturated contemporary world.

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/art-for-art/history-and-concepts/

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