Art for Art’s Sake Simplified
Art for the sake of art, a phrase derived from the French l’art pour l’art, was created by the French philosopher Victor Cousin in the early nineteenth century. Many authors and artists, particularly those connected with Aestheticism, believe that art does not require justification, that it does not need to have any political, didactic, or another purpose.
Summary of Art for Art’s Sake
The expression “l’art pour l’art,” (Art for the Sake of Art) comes from the French and represents the concept that art has intrinsic worth regardless of its subject matter or any social, political, or ethical relevance. Art, on the other hand, should be assessed only on its own merits: if it is beautiful and capable of producing pleasure or revery in the observer through its formal features (its use of line, colour, pattern, and so on). The notion became a rallying cry across nineteenth-century Britain and France, partially as a reaction against much academic art and wider society’s suffocating moralism, with Oscar Wilde arguably its most renowned proponent.
Despite the fact that the word hasn’t been used much since the early twentieth century, its influence lives on in numerous twentieth-century notions about art’s autonomy, particularly in various forms of formalism.
The concept of art for the sake of art can be traced back to nineteenth-century France, where it was popularised by Parisian artists, writers, and critics such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire. These and other figures advocated for art to be free of all thematic, moral, and social concerns, which was a significant departure from the post-Renaissance artistic tradition represented by contemporary academic painting, which favoured historical and mythical scenes and believed that art should have a clear ethical message often linked to religion or state power.
Despite the fact that Art for Art’s Sake shied away from any political and ideological issues, it was a trailblazer in its rejection of the moralising norms of the day. Aubrey Beardsley, for example, took pleasure in upsetting polite taste with pictures that had sexual or obscene connotations. In this sense, Art for Art’s Sake was frequently implicitly radical, and its mission of creating controversy influenced later groups like Dada and Futurism in their more politically charged activities.
Although the slogan “Art for Art’s Sake” had fallen out of popularity by the end of the nineteenth century, the concept it represented – that art had a value apart from its subject matter, based only on formal characteristics such as line, colour, and tone – remained vital. For example, all abstraction is founded on some such concept. The work of painters such as Wassily Kandinsky and the Abstract Expressionists may thus be regarded as foreshadowed by Art for Art’s Sake.
Why is it Called Art for Art’s Sake
Art for the sake of art, a phrase derived from the French l’art pour l’art, was created by the French philosopher Victor Cousin in the early nineteenth century.
Everything About Art for Art’s Sake
The Beginnings
In an 1804 journal post, Swiss writer Benjamin Constant is considered to have been the first to use the term “art for art’s sake,” However, Victor Cousin, a French philosopher, is credited with popularising the phrase in his 1817-18 lectures. The concept of Art for Art’s Sake, which states that art should not be assessed on its link to social, political, or moral ideals, but rather on its formal and aesthetic characteristics, was popularised by French novelist Théophile Gautier. “nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly.” Gautier said in the prologue to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835).
Gautier studied painting before moving on to writing, and he went on to become a prominent art critic, influencing both the literary and visual arts sectors. Gautier was referred described as “a perfect magician of French letters.” by poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, who dedicated his landmark poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) to Gautier. By a board that included Édouard Manet, Eugène Delacroix, and Gustave Doré, Gautier was chosen head of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (National Society of Fine Arts) in 1862.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, an American painter, is often credited with establishing the notion of Art for Art’s Sake in the visual arts. “The Red Rag” he said in his unique art manifesto “art should be independent of all clap-trap – should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like.” (1878).
Whistler compared visual art to the totally abstract world of music because he believed it should not promote any particular subject matter. He referred to his “nocturnes,” such as Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872-75), as “pure music,” noting that “Beethoven and the rest wrote music, they constructed celestial harmonies, pure music,” and that “Beethoven and the rest wrote music, they constructed celestial harmonies, pure music.”
Whistler aided the establishment of both the Aesthetic and Tonalism movements by emphasising the importance of art for its own sake; the former was popular in Britain, while the latter was popular in North America. In his book Modern Painting, published in 1893, critic George Moore said, “Mr. Whistler’s effect on English painting has been felt more than that of any other painter. Mr Whistler has done more than anybody else to rid art of the sin of topic and the notion that the artist’s purpose is to reproduce nature.”
By 1860, the Aesthetic movement had formed in the United Kingdom, consolidating around the important notion of Art for Art’s Sake. The movement became linked with depictions of female beauty contrasted against the decadence of the classical world, as demonstrated by the work of painters like as Albert Joseph Moore and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who were influenced by Whistler’s pioneering work and Gautier’s critique.
Aestheticism influenced the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s worldview, which included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris. These painters were engulfed in a notion known as the “Cult of Beauty,” which was strongly linked to the principles of Art for Art’s Sake and suggested that the formal force of the art piece was more important than anything else. Many Pre-Raphaelites, like Morris, were also interested in utopian politics, inspired by an idealised view of mediaeval social systems. This implies that Art for Art’s Sake concepts influenced a broader spectrum of aesthetic ideologies than is commonly assumed.
Walter Pater, a classic art critic, became a major proponent of Aestheticism. “art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality of your moments as they pass, and simply for these moments’ sake.” he said in his seminal work The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873). In doing so, he broadened the definition of Art for Art’s Sake to include the sort of experience that a spectator should have when seeing a piece of art, rather than limiting it to the artist’s objectives.
Beyond his link with the better renowned Oscar Wilde, the illustrator and pen-and-ink artist Aubrey Beardsley, who died in 1898 at the age of 25, played many key roles in the development of Aestheticism. Beardsley’s drawings, critical commentary, and editorship of The Yellow Book, a literary journal published in London from 1894 to 1897, all influenced the rise of formalistic and Decadent elements during the British fin-de-siècle period (the end of the nineteenth century).
In fact, the literary content of The Yellow Book often represented fairly traditional veins within art criticism, while the visual layout, as art historian Linda Dowling writes, “declares The Yellow Book’s specific and substantial debt to Whistler” through “asymmetrically placed titles, lavish margins, an abundance of white space, and relatively square page.” The journal’s gaudy colour, which was associated with illegal French books, and Beardsley’s frequently eerie and grotesque drawings, however, made it immensely influential and secured its scandalous image.
The Decadent movement, which began in the 1880s and had roots with the Aesthetic Movement in the mid-nineteenth century, included Beardsley as a key character in both schools. The Decadent movement, on the other hand, was closely linked with France, particularly with the work of Félicien Rops, a Belgian artist residing in France. Rops was a peer of Charles Baudelaire, who in his book Les Fleurs du Mal (“decadent”) (1857) boldly called himself a “The Flowers of Evil” a title that became synonymous with a rejection of nineteenth-century dullness, puritanism, and sentimentality. The Decadent movement was named after the debut of the periodical Le Décadent in France in 1886.
The principles of decadence, on the other hand, were seen by Théophile Gautier as representing a stage of advanced artistic and cultural growth – not to mention weariness and decay – in Western cultures. “Art has arrived at that point of extreme maturity that determines civilizations which have grown old; ingenious, complicated, clever, full of delicate hints and refinements, listening to translate subtle confidences, confessions of depraved passions, and the odd hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness.”
The Decadents stressed the sexual, scandalous, and unsettling, and were probably led by Aubrey Beardsley in Britain – who was also key to the Aesthetic movement. With Beardsley’s paintings alleged in the press to be packed with hidden (or not so hidden) sexual and obscene undertones, underlining his defiance of Victorian moralism, The Yellow Book pioneered the movement of decadence in art. “from the moment of its conception, The Yellow Book presents itself as having a close relationship with the culture of scandal; it is, in fact, one of the progenitors of this culture.” argues art historian Sabine Doran.
Tonalism, which was mostly rooted in North America, had little to do with Beardsley’s and his contemporaries’ scandal-seeking decadence. The Tonalists, on the other hand, pioneered a style that was equally dedicated to the concept of Art for Art’s Sake, with their luminous, mist-filled, atmospheric landscapes.
For these artists, Whistler was a beacon. 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 artistic philosophy of Art for Art’s Sake promoted by its greatest exponent, James McNeil Whistler.” according to art historian David Adams Cleveland. Whistler emphasised mood and atmosphere in paintings like Nocturne: The River at Battersea (1878), while exploring a simplified, almost abstract environment in terms of colour tonalities.
During a famous libel lawsuit pitting his ideas against those of Victorian art critic John Ruskin, James Abbott McNeill Whistler publicly proclaimed many of the concepts of Art for Art’s Sake. The controversy began with the establishment of the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1877. As Fiona MacCarthy points out, the gallery supported the Aesthetic movement and became a centre for it “Talking shop in style. Because of the gallery’s closeness to the Royal Academy, opinions on art techniques and objectives were divided.”
This polarization of opinion led Ruskin, a supporter of more traditional technical and moral values in art, to dismiss Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875), which was shown in the first Grosvenor exhibition, as the equivalent of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler, who was not afraid of the limelight, sued Ruskin for libel, and the matter went to court in 1878.
Ruskin cited a portrait of Vincenzo Catena’s Portrait of the Doge, Andrea Gritti (1523-31), considered to be painted by Titian at the time, as an example of “real art” to oppose Whistler’s picture during the court procedures. Whistler won the lawsuit by arguing for his right to be free of pre-determined aesthetic norms. However, he was only given a single farthing in damages, and his legal fees, as well as the public outcry that the event had sparked, had a significant negative influence on his career, forcing him to declare bankruptcy and go to Paris.
Following Whistler’s conviction, the British people, as well as a number of influential cultural leaders, turned against the Aesthetic movement and what they saw as the immorality and excess of Art for Art’s Sake. W.S. Gilbert, an English dramatist, died in 1881. Gilbert presented Patience, a musical satirising the major Aesthetes, and Aestheticism was regularly lampooned in Punch, the main British satire and comedy magazine.
Oscar Wilde, who was already a well-known writer and cultural figure at the time, was frequently the subject of homophobic insults. He was “the most famous Aesthete of them all at that time dressing in velvet breeches, lecturing on the topic of Art and supposedly quipping that he was ‘finding it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue and white china’.” according to art historian Sally-Anne Huxtable. In 1882, the designer James Hadley, employed at the famed Royal Worcester Porcelain Factory, produced his so-called Aesthetic Movement Teapot, based on the success of W.S. Gilbert’s Patience, which included a character based on Wilde called Bunthorne.
This poem mocks aestheticism’s principles, especially what was perceived as the blurring of traditional gender roles. The phrase “Fearful Consequences Through The Laws of Natural Selection & Evolution of Living up to One’s Teapot,” appears on the base of the pot, a reference to Wilde’s remark and the public’s inference that the Aesthetes believed they could make themselves beautiful by surrounding themselves with beautiful objects. (The phrase also makes fun of Darwin’s freshly published but unaccepted natural selection theory.)
The work’s theme mirrored “the self-styled ‘sensible’ and ‘manly’ world of the Victorian mainstream press” which “saw Aesthetes as effete poseurs.” according to Huxtable. She does, however, say that the piece became “the most iconic design object associated with British Aestheticism.”
However, the aesthetic discussion that Hadley alluded to concealed a more obnoxious animosity toward gay inclinations considered to be tied up in concepts of Art for Art’s Sake.
Concepts in Art for Art’s Sake
The concept of aesthetic experience that underpins Art for Art’s Sake may be traced back to the work of eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who believed that real art appreciation was a process apart from all other concerns. Kant’s theories were elaborated upon by later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists and intellectuals such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Thomas Carlyle.
Inspired by Kant, Schiller’s Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795) (“On the Aesthetic Education of Man”) developed the idea that appreciating art diverted the viewer’s attention away from social, political, or other ‘non-artistic’ concerns: “beauty cajoles from man a delight in things for their own sake.” As a result, when Benjamin Constant coined the expression “art for art’s sake” in 1804, he was capturing an already significant philosophical tendency.
A number of nineteenth-century art critics, especially Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater, contributed significantly to the development of Art for Art’s Sake concepts. “to burn always with a hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” Pater famously said of having an artistic sense. “such an elevated, if the 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.” writes art historian Rachel Gurstein.
Gautier and Pater impacted not just the appraisal of modern art, but also the Renaissance and ancient work that informed it, with their impassioned critique. These two critics rediscovered the work of painters such as Botticelli after rejecting the story-telling technique and moral subject matter of classical historical painting, as typified by Raphael and favoured by the old schools.
“Although many writers associated with the art-for-art’s-sake movement in France and England paid enthusiastic tribute to the painting, Theophile Gautier and Walter Pater are now best known for launching it on its modern path to what is now inelegantly called ‘iconicity,” writes Rochelle Gurstein of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503-19).”
“Strange, almost magic charm which the portrait of Mona Lisa has for even the least enthusiastic natures.” Gautier wrote. Pater named Mona Lisa “the symbol of the modern idea,” in his book The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), in a poetic phrase that continues to shape our understanding of the picture. “in an incantatory paragraph, Pater portrayed the Mona Lisa in language that eclipsed Gautier’s rhapsody and would consign Giorgio Vasari to history,” writes Rachel Gurstein.
Indeed, no one – from Oscar Wilde to Bernard Berenson to Kenneth Clark – could talk about the Mona Lisa without mentioning in the same sentence that he, like everyone else of his time, had committed Pater’s dazzling words to memory.”
A number of artists and philosophers have fought the concept that art should be assessed purely on a set of discrete aesthetic or formal criteria from the start. Academic artists dismissed work linked with Art for the Sake as frivolous, lacking the moral meaning given by the Academy’s preferred classical topics. Some parts of this perspective are included in Ruskin’s critique of Whistler’s work.
Art for Art’s Sake, like it was chastised by traditionalists, eventually ran afoul of growing avant-garde movements in the arts. In 1854, Gustave Courbet, the founder of Realism, which is widely regarded as the first modern art movement, consciously distanced himself from Art for Art’s Sake while also rejecting academy standards, presenting them as two sides of the same coin: “I was the sole judge of my painting I had practised painting, not in order to make Art for Art’s Sake, but rather to win my inte.
As author George Sand stated in 1872, Courbet’s attitude foreshadowed that of many forward-thinking artists who believed, as did the novelist George Sand, that “Art for the sake of art is a meaningless word. That is the religion I seek: art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful.” Modernism and Avant-Garde art were more linked with the notion of alternative social, political, and ethical values, rather than just a decadent rejection of academic and Victorian morality.
The End of Art for Art’s Sake
The Victoria and Albert Museum claims that “Following the scandal of Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality trial, conviction, and incarceration in 1895, the Aesthetic enterprise came to an end. Although many of the Aesthetic Movement’s concepts and aesthetics remained popular far into the twentieth century, Wilde’s death essentially discredited the movement in the eyes of the general public.” The term “art for art’s sake” went out of favour with the collapse of the Aesthetic movement, while it persisted in other nations, often prominently.
Sergei Diaghilev, Léon Bakst, and Alexandre Benois created the journal Mir iskusstva in St. Petersburg in 1899. (“World of Art”). The journal was associated with the World of Art movement, which had begun the previous year in St. Petersburg with a group of young painters. The organisation had probably its biggest effect through the establishment of the pioneering Ballets Russes, which Diaghilev created in 1907 and maintained until 1927, promoting Art for Art’s Sake and creative independence.
Clement Greenberg, a renowned art critic who supported Abstract Expressionism after WWII, built his notions of media specificity and formalism on the foundation of Art for Art’s Sake. “Greenberg expanded the concept of art’s autonomy as he developed his concept of medium specificity.” says art historian Anna Lovatt. In his seminal 1974 work Theory of the Avant-Garde, contemporary art historian Paul Bürger defined the notion of Art for Art’s Sake as crucial to the growth of the avant-garde and modernism: “the autonomy of art is a category of bourgeois society.”
“Pater’s style was a harbinger of modernity.” writes social historian Rochelle Gurstein. His impact lasted well into the twentieth century, especially among well-known commentators and authors. Pater’s impact is “a shade or trace in virtually every writer of significance from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Oscar Wilde to John Ashbery.” according to contemporary critic Denis Donoghue. Many critics looked at Pater’s worldview as a forerunner to current concepts of “deconstruction.” during the postmodernist era in literary studies.
The Cult of Beauty, an exhibition about the aesthetic movement, was exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2011. “The idea of looking at an art movement where, consciously, beauty and quality are central ideas,” curator Stephen Calloway said, “seems to me extraordinarily timely,” implying that Art for Art’s Sake is an idea with continued relevance in today’s information and opinion-saturated society.
Key Art in Art for Art’s Sake
La Ghirlandata
By Dante Gabriel Rossetti
1873
While two angels circle pensively over her head, a woman softly plays the harp. Her stunning red hair is reflected by the garland of flowers and the angels’ auburn locks, and the rich velvet of the woman’s green robe flows into the luxuriant greenery that surrounds her. The piece was translated as “The Garlanded Lady” or “Lady of the Wreath,” by William Michael Rossetti, the artist’s brother, with Alexa Wilding, the model featured in the centre of the painting, described as the ideal of love and beauty.
Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
By James Abbott McNeill Whistler
1874
A firework show in Cremorne Gardens in London is depicted in this classic artwork. The foreground has a few shadowy people portraying the Thames River’s bank, but the majority of the canvas is taken up by the dark night sky, lighted up by the rocket’s falling gold sparkles and the explosive smoke from the firework battery on the horizon. This picture, with its dreamy wash of colour and abstracted figures, heralded the birth of a new style to painting that stressed the artist’s freedom to convey a feeling or emotion over realistic accuracy.
The Peacock Skirt
By Aubrey Beardsley
1893
The Biblical character of Salome, whose unsuccessful seduction of John the Baptist leads to his death, is shown in Aubrey Beardsley’s elegant ink sketch. Oscar Wilde’s eponymous one-act tragedy, written in French in 1891, was about Salome. The Peacock Skirt is the second of ten woodblock images based on Beardsley’s ink sketches included in the English translation, which was released in 1894. The painting depicts Salome to the left in a long, richly patterned dress with a peacock veil and headdress, evoking the values of extravagant beauty and luxury espoused by Beardsley and other Art-for-Art’s-Sake painters.
Fountain
By Marcel Duchamp
1917
Duchamp’s renowned piece, which included a mass-produced urinal on its back and was signed with the artist’s alias R. Mutt, posed a forceful challenge to the concept of Art for Art’s Sake while simultaneously taking it into new worlds. Fountain was submitted to the Society for Independent Artists in 1917 and should have been included in the Society’s annual show, as membership allowed the ability to exhibit alone. However, the job was turned down due to immorality (proving that, despite assumptions to the contrary, other judgments – in this case, morality – did indeed inform aesthetic judgment.)
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
