In History What Is the Concept of Art for Arts Sake
Beginnings
The Literary World and Théophile Gautier
The Swiss writer Benjamin Constant is idea to have been the first person to use the phrase "art for art's 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 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, starting time became popular amidst writers, encouraged past the French novelist Théophile Gautier. In the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), Gautier wrote that "zippo is actually beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly."
Gautier had first studied painting before turning to literature and, after, he became a leading art critic, so that he influenced both the literary and visual-art worlds. The poet Charles Baudelaire, a famous art critic in his ain right, 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) past a board that included Édouard Manet, Eugène Delacroix, and Gustave Doré among others. Gautier's view that aesthetic beauty was primal 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 more often than not credited with pioneering the concept of Art for Fine art's Sake within the visual arts. In his idiosyncratic art manifesto "The Red Rag" (1878) he wrote that "[a]rt should be contained of all handclapping-trap - should stand lone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, compassion, dear, patriotism and the like."
Whistler's assertion that visual art should not promote whatsoever particular subject-matter led him to compare it to the purely abstruse domain of music. With reference to his "nocturnes," such as Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872-75), he described painting equally "pure music," noting that "Beethoven and the rest wrote music [...] they synthetic angelic harmonies [...] pure music."
In emphasizing the value of art for its ain sake, Whistler helped to institute both the Aesthetic move and Tonalism, the former movement having neat currency in Great britain, the latter in Due 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 fine art. More whatsoever other human, Mr Whistler has helped to purge art of the vice of subject area and belief that the mission of the artist is to copy nature."
Aesthetic Movement
Past 1860 the Aesthetic movement had emerged, coalescing around the influential idea of Art for Art's Sake, with its base in the United Kingdom. Informed by Whistler's pioneering piece of work and Gautier'south criticism, the movement became associated particularly with images of female beauty set confronting the decadence of the classical earth, 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 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 Fine art for Art'southward Sake, and suggesed that the formal power of the art piece of work mattered above all else. However, many Pre-Raphaelites, such every bit 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 Fine art for Art's sake informed a slightly wider range of artistic philosophies than is sometimes imagined.
The approved art critic Walter Pater became a leading proponent of Aestheticism. In his influential volume The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873) he stated that "art comes to yous proposing frankly to give nothing just the highest quality of your moments as they pass, and simply for these moments' sake." In and then doing, he extended the concept of Fine art for Art's Sake to define the kind of experience that a viewer should derive from a particular artwork, rather than only applying it to the artist's intentions.
The illustrator and pen-and-ink artist Aubrey Beardsley, who died in 1898 at the age of just 25, played several important roles in the evolution of Aestheticism - beyond his connexion with the more than famous Oscar Wilde. Beardsley's sketches, critical 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 Corrupt strains during the British fin-de-siècle (the end of the nineteenth century). In fact, the literary content of The Yellow Volume often represented fairly traditional veins within art criticism, while in terms of visual layout, equally the art historian Linda Dowling writes, "[the] asymmetrically placed titles, lavish margins, abundance of white space, and relatively square page declare The Yellow Book'due south specific and substantial debt to Whistler." Yet, the journal's garish color - which associated it with illicit French novels - and Beardsley's frequently uncanny and grotesque illustrations, made the periodical widely influential and ensured its scandalous reputation.
Corrupt Move
The Decadent motion, which began in the 1880s, developed aslope the Aesthetic motion and shared roots in the mid-nineteenth, with Beardsley a significant figure in both schools. The Corrupt movement, however, was particularly associated with French republic, 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 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 Corrupt movement its name.
Théophile Gautier, for his part, saw the principles of decadence as reflecting a point of advanced artful and cultural evolution - non to say fatigue and decay - inside Western societies. "Art [has] arrived at that point of farthermost maturity that determines civilizations which have grown old; ingenious, complicated, clever, full of fragile 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 movement, Art for Art's Sake meant not so much an emphasis on pure formal dazzler as an ostentatious rejection or mockery of the ideologies and social positions for which art might take been expected to stand.
The Decadents, arguably led by Aubrey Beardsley in Britain - who was also cardinal to the Aesthetic motility - emphasized the erotic, the scandalous, and the disturbing. The Yellow Book pioneered the tendency of decadence in art, with Beardsley's drawings rumored in the press to exist filled with hidden (or non so 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 Yellowish Book presents itself as having a close relationship with the civilisation of scandal; it is, in fact, one of the progenitors of this culture."
Tonalism
The art of Tonalism, mainly based in Due 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 fashion that was, in its ain fashion, equally committed to the notion of Art for Art's Sake.
Whistler was a lodestar for these artists. Equally 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 creative philosophy of Fine art for Art'due south Sake promoted by its greatest exponent, James McNeil Whistler." In works such as Nocturne: The River at Battersea (1878), Whistler emphasized mood and atmosphere while exploring a simplified, almost abstract mural in terms of its color tonalities.
Art critic Grace Glueck describes Tonalism as "not really a movement, but a mix of tendencies that began to drift together around 1870." "[I]t remained a mode without a name," she adds, "until the mid-1890s." Tonalism became a touchstone within US art, associated in particular with the North-American painters George Inness and Albert Pinkham Ryder, besides as the photographer Edward Steichen.
Whistler vs. Ruskin
Many of the principles of Art for Fine art'south Sake were publicly exclaimed by James Abbott McNeill Whistler during a famous libel case, 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 Artful movement, and, equally Fiona MacCarthy notes, became a "fashionable talking store. The gallery's proximity to the Purple University polarized opinion about 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 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 paint in the public's face." Never shy of publicity, Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, and the instance came to court 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 exist painted past Titian, as an example of "existent art" meant to counter Whistler'due south painting. Past arguing his correct to freedom from pre-imposed artistic standards, Whistler won the instance. Withal, he was awarded only a single farthing in amercement, and his legal expenses and the public controversy which the episode had caused severely impacted on his career, to the extent that he was forced to declare bankruptcy, subsequently moving to Paris.
Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Motion Teapot
Following Whistler's trial, the British public, equally well as a number of powerful cultural figures, turned against the Artful movement, and what they perceived as the indulgence and immorality of Art for Art'southward Sake. In 1881, the English language dramatist W.S. Gilbert premiered Patience, a musical satirizing the leading Aesthetes, while cartoons lampooning Aestheticism appeared frequently in Punch, the leading British magazine of satire and humor.
Oscar Wilde, by this fourth dimension already an established writer and a cultural celebrity, was often the target for attacks with homophobic overtones. As 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 Fine art and supposedly quipping that he was 'finding it harder and harder every solar day to live up to my blue and white communist 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 Imperial Worcester Porcelain Factory, created his and so-called Artful Movement Teapot.
This piece mocks the ethics of aestheticism, particularly what was seen as its blurring of traditional gender roles. On the base of the pot appears the phrase "Fearful Consequences Through The Laws of Natural Pick & Evolution of Living up to Ane's Teapot," an allusion to Wilde's comment and to the thought - inferred by the public - that the Aesthetes thought they could make themselves beautiful past surrounding themselves with cute objects. (The line too mocks Darwin's recently published and not yet accepted theory of natural selection.) Equally Huxtable notes, the bulletin of the piece of work embodied "the self-styled 'sensible' and 'manly' world of the Victorian mainstream press", which "saw Aesthetes as effete poseurs." Nevertheless, she as well adds that the piece of work became "the most iconic design object associated with British Aestheticism."
This said, the artistic debate that Hadley alluded to, masked an uglier hostility towards the homosexual tendencies seen to be wrapped upward in ideas of Fine art for Art's Sake. Presenting a young man on one side and a immature 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 about the effects that effeminacy and the blurring of gender roles might have on the future British population." These fears placed figures similar Wilde in the spotlight, and in 1895, after two trials and much public scandal, he was sentenced to prison and ii years' hard labor later being bedevilled of "gross indecency" for homosexual acts.
Concepts and Trends
Philosophy
The thought of aesthetic feel that informed Art for Fine art's Sake arguably has its roots in the work of eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who held that the true appreciation of fine 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's Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795) ("On the Aesthetic Education of Man"), inspired by Kant, developed the idea that appreciating art took the viewer away from social, political, or otherwise 'non-creative' 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 of import philosophical trend.
Art Criticism
A number of nineteenth-century fine art critics, particularly Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater, did much to institute the ideas of Fine art for Art's Sake. Pater famously described the possession of an artistic sensibility as meaning "[t]o burn down always with [a] difficult, gem-similar flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." As 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 own." She adds that "proper Victorians idea such a view of art and criticism immoral and irreligious. They were appalled by what they perceived every bit its decadence."
Effect on Fine art History
With their passionate criticism, Gautier and Pater influenced the evaluation not just of contemporary art but also of the Renaissance and classical piece of work that influenced it. Rejecting the story-telling style and moral discipline-affair of classical history painting, exemplified by Raphael and favored past 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 art-for-art's sake movement in French republic and England paid enthusiastic tribute to the painting, Theophile Gautier and Walter Pater are at present all-time known for launching it on its modern path to what is now inelegantly called 'iconicity.'"
Gautier described the "foreign, nearly magic charm which the portrait of Mona Lisa has for even the least enthusiastic natures." In his book The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (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. As 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 art lovers who read information technology that no one - 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 retentiveness."
Opponents of Fine art for Art's Sake
From the first, the idea that art should be judged solely on a set of isolated aesthetic or formal criteria was opposed by a range of creatives and thinkers. Bookish painters rejected the work associated with Fine art for Art's Sake as frivolous, defective the moral purpose offered by the classical subjects which the Academy favored. Ruskin'due south criticism of Whistler's work encapsulates some aspects of this position.
Just equally information technology was criticized by traditionalists, Art for Fine art's Sake also gradually roughshod afoul of emerging avant-garde trends in the arts. Gustave Courbet, the pioneer of Realism, generally seen as the first modern art movement, consciously distanced his aesthetic arroyo from Fine art for Art's Sake in 1854, while too rejecting the standards of the academy, presenting them every bit two sides of the same money: "I was the sole judge of my painting [...] I had practiced painting not in social club to brand Art for Art's Sake, but rather to win my intellectual freedom."
Courbet's position anticipated that of many forrard-thinking artists who felt, as the novelist George Sand wrote in 1872, that "Art for art'south sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the practiced and the cute, that is the faith I am searching for." Modernism and Avant-garde trends in fine art increasingly became associated non with a mere corrupt rejection of academic and Victorian morals, but with the proffer of culling social, political, and ethical ethics.
Later Developments
According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, "[t]he Aesthetic projection finally concluded following the scandal of the trial, conviction and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for homosexuality in 1895. The fall of Wilde effectively discredited the Aesthetic Movement with the full general public, though many of its ideas and styles remained popular into the 20th century." With the turn down of the Aesthetic movement, the phrase "art for fine art'south sake" cruel out of fashion, though it continued to exert a presence, ofttimes notably, in other countries.
In St. Petersburg in 1899 Sergei Diaghilev, along with Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois, founded the magazine Mir iskusstva ("World of Art"). The magazine was allied with a group of young artists in Petrograd which had formed the Earth of Fine art movement the preceding yr. Promoting Art for Art's 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 idea of Fine art for Art'south Sake had a profound if somewhat paradoxical influence on avant-garde art. As art historian Doug Singsen notes, "the avant-garde was non simply a negation of l'art pour l'art but 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's 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 'fine art for art's sake.'" Withal, the concept was often met with ambiguity. Kandinsky empathized with the concept to a limited extent, describing it equally "an unconscious protest against materialism, confronting the demand that everything should have a utilize and practical value."
The leading art critic Cloudless Greenberg, who promoted Abstract Expressionism in the post-World War II era, build his concepts of medium specificity and formalism upon the groundwork of Art for Fine art's Sake. As art historian Anna Lovatt writes, "Greenberg expanded the concept of art's autonomy as he developed his concept of medium specificity." Contemporary art historian Paul Bürger described the concept of Art for Fine art'southward Sake equally fundamental to the evolution of the avant-garde and modernism in his influential 1974 text Theory of the Avant-Garde: "the autonomy of art is a category of bourgeois society. Information technology permits the clarification of fine art'southward detachment from the context of practical life as a historical evolution."
Social historian Rochelle Gurstein notes that "Pater's style was a straw of modernity." His influence continued into the twentieth century, specially amidst noted critics and writers. Contemporary critic Denis Donoghue describes Pater's influence every bit "a shade or trace in well-nigh every writer of significance from [Gerard Manley] Hopkins and [Oscar] Wilde to [John] Ashbery." During the era of postmodernism in literary studies, many critics likewise 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 Homo that aestheticism and modern deconstruction produced similar forms of philosophical knowledge and political consequence through a process of self-questioning or "cocky-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 thought of looking at an art motion where, consciously, beauty and quality are fundamental ideas, seems to me extraordinarily timely," suggesting that Art for Art'southward Sake is an idea with ongoing currency in the data and opinion-saturated gimmicky world.
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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/art-for-art/history-and-concepts/