The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900

the way in which the aesthetic movement emerged is really fascinating and complicated you have to think back to the great exhibition in 1851 and a lot of people at that time felt that what was on show there was somehow ugly and meretricious a lot of goods made by machinery artists somehow felt that beauty had got lost the prime movers in the aesthetic movement are absolutely they're artists poets and designers um we're thinking of people like dante gabriel rossetti who'd been one of the pre-raphaelites um but who by the 1860s had moved on was exploring looking for a new kind of beauty painters like lord leighton with his grandiose ideas of classical imagery layton was born in 1830 and he rose to become the president of the royal academy and probably the most eminent artist of his day he lived here for 30 years he started building in the mid-1860s and he was still working on it almost at the time of his death so what started off as quite a modest house became what was described as a private palace of art and i suppose what is also so noticeable about it as a piece of architecture is that it draws its influences from such a wide range of sources so it's partly italian renaissance partly the architecture of the near east so it was a very eclectic set of sources but brought together as this one artistic or aesthetic statement the key thing about the aesthetic movement is that it didn't just present a single picture on one hand a single piece of furniture the key to it was the way in which things were brought together the assembling of the complete room with all its decorative elements all the beautiful objects in it became an expression of taste and of cultivation and we still have that um i think as a basis of how we live another fascinating thing about the aesthetic movement is way it develops over the few decades from the 1860s um from the first group of friends it extends out to include painters like burn jones but other figures come in like oscar wilde oscar wilde was really the pinup boy for the aesthetic movement he was an oxford undergraduate at the time that aesthetic ideas were starting to infiltrate public consciousness and he immediately sort of turned himself into the celebrity who was associated with aesthetic ideas and i think all that early experimentation in the 1860s and 70s with aesthetic ideals allowed oscar wilde to become the man who so celebrated and and so famous and infamous today i think one of the intriguing things is that uh the ascetic movement actually looked back to the art of the past and particularly perhaps to um renaissance painting where manly beauty was every bit as important as female beauty it had this extraordinary effect of creating a new kind of fashion in which the peacock male could dress flamboyantly i think people argue about what the characteristics of a dandy are it's about an attitude towards life that that's based on an understanding of elegance so that surface the way you behave the way you appear to others becomes much more important than what you actually do i think men involved in the aesthetic movement who tended to be artists or people associated with the artistic life the way they dressed uh was a sort of badge of belonging belonging to the aesthetic gang so it was a very bohemian way of dressing one of the fascinating things is way in which painters had enormous effect um as it were not just on their art but on the way people looked because people wanted um to look like the pictures um painters like leighton particularly and rossetti especially sought out models a very unconventional beauty so rossetti's early paintings of elizabeth siddal for example with her very pale skin but red hair was an extraordinary choice at that time she would have been considered not just not beautiful she'd have been considered possibly even ugly by the standards of the day it's the the power of art which transforms the look the history of red hair for both men and women is complex but really the change in attitude towards them uh came about with the pre-raphaelite movement who was very important in that was elizabeth siddrel you know really and ronisly called the first supermodel but she was certainly the first in in britain famous artist model um at a time when their their their role was ambiguous really by the time we begin the um the 20th century the the idea of red hair as being beautiful um and it's socially and morally acceptable uh is established and that really begins with uh rossetti and elizabeth i think that in fact actually many of the ideas and styles continued with some degree of popularity probably up until the first world war as the 20th century moves on after the second world war we get a re-emergence of ideas of peacock dressing in the 1960s when men again young men feel comfortable with their sexuality with expressing their identity through flamboyant clothes so it's almost a hundred years later that we get a new interest in the aesthetic movement and that's reflected in new ways of dressing in a much more broad way it's really intriguing that the ideas of the ascetic movement the idea that art is of great importance the idea that art should be as it were severed from notions of morality that pictures don't have to preach or tell stories is actually fundamental to the whole development of the 20th century and and remains with us today the aesthetic movement gave us an absolutely lasting legacy of suggesting the primacy of art the importance of art in everyday life this notion that beauty should inform everything we do all the ways in which we live is absolutely crucial and you can say effectively that the ascetic movement was the first lifestyle revolution [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Victoria and Albert Museum

Views: 47,488

Rating: 4.9371257 out of 5

Keywords: beauty, Aesthetic, Movement, Aestheticism, artists, architects, designers, 19th-century, James McNeill Whistler, William Morris, Thomas Jeckyll, curator, tour, history, talk, interview, uk, london, flamboyance, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, florals, interior, flamboyant, museum

Id: X9tTGO__PnQ

Length: 7min 5sec (425 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 was the first major exhibition dedicated to Aestheticism. It highlighted the spectacular work produced by the artists, designers and architects of the late 19th-century, including James McNeill Whistler, William Morris and Thomas Jeckyll.

Lead curator Stephen Calloway and other experts lead us through 'A world of beauty, flamboyance and faint danger ...' via the work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Oscar Wilde.

This film was originally created for the Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 exhibition on display 2 April – 17 July 2011.