L’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake; welcome to the world of Aestheticism!
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 3, 1865-67
“Now at last the spring
draws swiftly to its finish.
How alone I am.”
(Natsume Soseki, Kusamakura)
I bet that hearing the young Chelsea bohemians and aesthetes, such as Whistler and Rossetti, boasting about their art for art’s sake motto, was like a slap in the face to all that Ruskin had achieved in his writings and life long devotion to art. The English aesthetes continued in their paintings what the French poet and a devotee of Beauty, Théophile Gautier started. Art for art’s sake principle claims that the only purpose of art is to create Beauty; art should be its own purpose, and ought to remain detached from society, politics, philosophy or science. Perfection of execution and harmony of colours were seen as important means of achieving the Beauty. In the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) Gautier wrote: “Nothing is truly beautiful except that which can serve for nothing; whatever is useful is ugly.” This view of art having merely an aesthetic value clashed with John Ruskin’s opinion that art should convey the moral truths and influence us on a spiritual level.
Representatives of this wave of aestheticism in England, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Albert Moore, Frederic Leighton and Edward Burne-Jones, filled their canvases, in most cases, with beautiful women in sumptuous surroundings, wearing gorgeous clothes and evoking a mood of languor and sweetness smelling of violets and roses. This obsession with Beauty went in two different directions; the first was the Oriental-inspired musings, while the other went into the past and revisited the luxurious settings of Titian and Giorgione’s paintings.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Le Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine, 1863-65
“The temple bell stops –
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.”
(Basho, translated by Robert Bly)
Whistler is the representative of the first path; inspired by both his fellow painter Albert Moore and Japonism or the madness for all things Japanese, Ukiyo-e prints, porcelain and fabrics that ruined the minds of Parisian artists like plague, he created delicate, serene and lyrical paintings bathed in white and lightness. His famous “Symphonies”, the third one you can see above, were admired by his fellow painters such as James Tissot, Alfred Stevens and Edgar Degas, but also highly criticised too. Model for the girl lounging on the couch was Whistler’s mistress, model and muse Joanna Hiffernan who also posed for the Symphonies in White no. 1 and 2.
A painting needn’t always have a lady dressed in a kimono, white clothes or cherry blossom tree in it, for us to say that it was Japanese-inspired, it’s more about following the principles of Ukiyo-e prints and Japanese design by observing their use of perspective, flat portrayal of space, composition and bold outlines. This is also how Edgar Degas explored Japonism, by incorporating its interesting perspectives into his ballerina scenes, unlike Monet who opted for the simpler way: painting his wife in a colourful kimono.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Monna Vanna, 1866
Artists who took the second path, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, partly continued the Medieval reveries, but were mostly inspired by the luxurious, richly-coloured paintings of Renaissance ladies by Titian, Veronese and dreamy idyllic world of Giorgione. Ever since he painted “Bocca Bacciata” in 1859, Rossetti continually returns to the subject of a beautiful sensual and vain woman-enchantress with bloody lips of a vampire, clad in luxurious fabrics, surrounded with objects of beauty such as fans, jewellery or flowers. Her long and lustrous hair is ready to smother every man who dares to set his eyes upon her, her eyes are cold and large gemstones. “Monna Vanna” is another beautiful example of the rich-coloured dreamy splendour that Rossetti portrays, using different models but painting the same archetypal face with heavy-lidded eyes, strong neck and large lips.
Edward Burne-Jones, Le Chant d Amour (Song of Love), 1869-77
And at springtide, when the apple-blossoms brush the burnished bosom of the dove,
Two young lovers lying in an orchard would have read the story of our love;
Would have read the legend of my passion, known the bitter secret of my heart,
Kissed as we have kissed, but never parted as we two are fated now to part.
(Oscar Wilde, Flower of Love)
Edward Burne-Jones, a young admirer of Rossetti and a follower of Pre-Raphaelite ideas, also paints idealised worlds with much beauty but little content. In those reveries inspired by the Italian High Renaissance, like the “Song of Love” time stands still and figures are sinking deeper and deeper into the sweet languor that arises from imaginary sounds. Warm glowing colours are melting and draperies are heavy, as if carved from stone. Faces are strong and gazes distant. Claustrophobia and stillness almost painful, rapture captured for eternity, the height of ecstasy, the trembling of sighs, the caressing twilight that flickers in the distant sky, cold stone of the castle, eyelids closed by the intoxicating perfume of the tired tulips in the foreground.
No breeze, no movement, no bird is heard, the hand that lightly touches the keys of an instrument produces no sound, the drapery and the fine hair not dancing in the wind but stopped in the movement, the gaze is forever fixated. The figure on the right dressed in red, seems to be whispering Oscar Wilde’s lines “Had my lips been smitten into music by the kisses that but made them bleed” from “Flower of Love”. The painting itself has a mood of a flower which, unable to bloom or wither, chooses to stay crouching for eternity in the painfully agonizing stage of the bud.
Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, 1514
Just by looking at Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love” and Giorgione’s “Pastoral Concert”, it is easy to see their influence on both Burne-Jones’s “Song of Love” and Rossetti’s “Monna Vanna”. The same sweet languor pervades the air, the background reveals contours of a castle and a yellowish sky, and the draperies are similar as well. In Giorgione’s “Pastoral Concert”, people are enjoying the music and each others company as warmth and indolence hang over them like a bright soft cloud.
Giorgione, Pastoral Concert (Fête champêtre), 1508-09
So, which direction of Aesthetic movement in painting do you prefer; oriental or Renaissance? It is pretty clear that I am all for the serenity of Whistler’s Symphonies in white influenced by Japanese-influence, but both possess their beauty. Whistler’s paintings can sometimes seem distant and cold, and the intensity of Rossetti and Burne-Jones’s colours and details can sometimes be overwhelming.
Byron's Muse 
I like the Whistler, especially the “Symphony in white #3”, but the Japanese influence is a tad awkward in the other painting. Van Gogh’s attempts to copy Japanese prints were curious failures, though he eventually adopted the flattened picture plane as his own and without the odd sense that the appropriation is a mish-mash, such as trying to play Japanese music on Western instruments.
The stand-out here for me is Rossetti’s “Monna Vanna”. That is an astounding achievement in paint, and on a purely aesthetic level. For one it is very three dimensional, almost rivaling a Caravaggio. The hands, the post, the folds in the clothes and how the patterns change with the angles of the folds are all masterful. This wouldn’t necessarily be my cup of tea, but what a brilliant blend it is. The placement of those flowers in the upper right surrounded by an expanse of black is audacious.
When I think of art for art’s sake, I think the best analogy for me, personally, is a Beethoven piano sonata (ex., “Appassionata”). It is on the one hand purely abstract, and yet it has an undeniable content, eloquence, and even humanity about it. And so there is a similar element in painting, which is not the thing depicted, or the morals, or anything that can be translated via linguistics into spoken/written language.
The other day I saw a Monet and I was floored by it. It’s one I hadn’t seen before. Just some more water lilies. Despite it’s nearly syrupy beauty, or because of it, it has a jarring insistence upon “nature” about it, fused with very elaborate human aesthetics. The colors of the flowers, and his depiction of them shared a certain temerity, and presented a kind of content that is not merely beautiful, but a statement, insight, instant of clarity. I see that same sort of thing in the Rossetti, thought a very different vision.
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Thanks for commenting. I’m glad you like Monna Vanna so much, and I also love Monet’s water lilies, they remind me of Debussy’s compositions for some reason.
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