The Aesthetic Movement was indeed nothing but a beauty thing, wholly dedicated to producing and extolling things of beauty. Perhaps fed up with the drudgery of late Victorian life and the smog of industry, this loose grouping of artists, poets, writers, designers and architects looked back to ancient Egypt, the last days of Greece and Rome, the Tenaissance and the Far East for their inspiration – an eclectic scattershot approach that favoured the decorative, the symbolic, the patterned and the impassioned.
A peacock rises from a Burne-Jones memorial, oriental fans adorn Whistler’s walls, while azaleas, roses and sunflowers cascade from every painted, printed or woven surface. So prone to whimsy were the aesthetes that any gust of exotic influence – the more arcane the better – seemed to blow them from Arthurian legend to blue-and-white Chinoiserie, seemingly without reason. All this transition – not least between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau – adds up to an era of flouncing and prancing through styles and disparate thoughts.
It’s better to let the V&A’s survey wash over you than search for strands of meaning or coherent impulses, a frustration that was shared by contemporary commentators who lampooned the movement for amorality, aloofness and non-narrative frippery. However, keen-eyed critics, such as aesthetic champion Walter Pater and celebrated wit Oscar Wilde, countered any perceived lack of seriousness, while John Ruskin and Whistler went toe to toe in court, no less, over art’s higher purpose – so intellectual debate was once at this movement’s heart, even if it now seems missing in this shadow-less, opium-free version of events. Such complexities are not entirely ironed out here – the commercialisation of the aesthetic ‘look’ by Liberty & Co, William Morris and the delightful Christopher Dresser is handled well, as is the popularisation of aesthetic affectations in interior design and fashion.
Cult is the right word for the instinctive, near-religious fervour that justified such foppish enslavement to the pursuit of beauty, but to enjoy these displays is also to succumb to the senses, to escapist fantasies and to a thin slice of beyond-bourgeois bohemian posturing.