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The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Group of painters who banded together in 1848 to reform British painting Dante Gabriel Rossetti (also a poet) William Holman Hunt John Everett Millais Supported by influential art critic John Ruskin.
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Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood • Group of painters who banded together in 1848 to reform British painting • Dante Gabriel Rossetti (also a poet) • William Holman Hunt • John Everett Millais • Supported by influential art critic John Ruskin
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood • Combination of realistic and fleshly (even ugly) details and religious subjects, which scandalized critics • Interest in studying nature rather than following established rules of composition • Inspiration from medieval sources (King Arthur) • Bright colors • Protest against academic painting (e.g., that of Sir Joshua Reynolds), with its rules about contrast and form.
Aesthetic Movement, 1870s-1900 • Art for art’s sake (L’art pour l’Art) rather than for moral instruction. • Baudelaire: “Poetry has no other end but itself. . . If a poet has followed a moral end he has diminished his poetic force.” • Like the later Decadent movement, an interest in experience through the senses.
Characteristics of the Aesthetic Movement • Art: • Interest in Japanese prints, with their flat perspective • Blue and white china • Peacock feathers and peacocks • Blue and green (and gold) as colors • Artists: • Dante Gabriel Rossetti • Aubrey Beardsley (also associated with the Decadent movement) • Edward Burne-Jones • James McNeill Whistler
Walter Pater, conclusion to The Renaissance • At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions -- colour, odour, texture -- in the mind of the observer.
Pater, continued • To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
Tenets of the Aesthetic Movement • Living intensely (Pater, Baudelaire) • Idealism and living for the ideal • Emphasis on the soul (as a philosophical rather than religious concept) • Sensitivity to beauty and artistic experiences • Placing beauty above other values (valuing church rituals for their sensory impact, for example) • Cultivated artificiality: life imitates art rather than vice versa (Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”
Authors • Aubrey Beardsley • Max Beerbohm • Ernest Dowson • Richard Le Gallienne • Lionel Johnson • George Meredith • William Morris • Walter Pater • Dante Gabriel Rossetti • John Ruskin • Algernon Charles Swinburne • Arthur Symons • Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde • Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience satirized the Aesthetic movement in the character of Bunthorne, who was based on Oscar Wilde. • Wilde was sent on a lecture tour of United States in 1882, in part so that audiences would understand what was being satirized.
Peacock Room • http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/peacock/1vr.htm