The cult of beauty

The Aesthetic Movement in Britain from 1860 to 1900 is the subject of this exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The aim of the Movement was to escape the ugliness and materialism of the early Victorian age and find a new beauty. Their aim was ‘art for art’s sake’. I was interested in the exhibition because the models used by the artists (Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Morris and Leighton) seemed to be at odds with conventional ideas of mid-Victorian demure femininity. However, it was not until the 1880s that the Aestheticism became mainstream, until then the movement was still seen as the ‘preserve of self-regarding and possibly immoral cliques’ according to the brochure accompanying the exhibition. It may also be relevant that the themes most of these painters followed were of an imagined past, medieval in the case of Burne-Jones and Greek in the case of Frederick Leighton, rather than the contemporary. While James McNeill Whistler, who did paint contemporary women in their homes, produced more demure images. The final part of the exhibition showing the development of furnishing fabrics, wallpaper and furniture shows that the artists of the Aesthetic Movement were successful in their quest for ‘art for art’s sake’ and that their aesthetic design have stood the test of time, and are still sold today.