"The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900," at the Legion of Honor (San Francisco), is the first major exhibition to explore the British Aesthetic Movement. The exhibit traces the Aesthetic movement from the early beginnings to its broad impact on fashion and the middle-class home.
Over 180 works express the manifold ways that their attitudes permeated Victorian material culture: the traditional high art of painting, fashionable trends in architecture and interior decoration, handmade and manufactured furnishings for the “artistic” home, art photography and new modes of dress.
In the mid 19th century, seven young Englishmen formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as a reaction against what they saw as the hypocrisy, industrial grime and artistic vulgarity of the day.
Cultivating a self-conscious medievalism, their group attacked what they saw as the slick, the sentimental, and the sanctimonious moralizing in Victorian art.
They were the bad boy art stars of mid-Victorian England, with their sexual scandals, their lower class women, drugs and a serious hair fetish.
Choosing unconventional models, such as Rossetti's muse Lizzie Siddal or Leighton's sultry favorite 'La Nanna', these painters created entirely new types of female beauty, fusing languid melancholy with sexual repression.
The group included poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (and his younger Pre-Raphaelite followers William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones), sharp tongued, American born iconoclast James McNeill Whistler, and the 'Olympians' - the painters of grand classical subjects who belonged to the circle of Frederic Leighton and G.F.Watts.
The Pre-Raphaelite painters had their own dedicated showplace, the Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street, which opened in 1877. The Grosvenor was a sensuous experience in itself with its palatial décor.
Rossetti and his friends were also the first to attempt to realize their imaginative world in the creation of 'artistic' furniture and the house beautiful.
The artistic honors of the exhibit belong to Whistler. His 1862 Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl (notorious for its inclusion in Paris’s famed Salon des Refusés of 1863), showing his paramour and muse Jo Hiffernan, was another shock to the Victorian art viewing public. A suite of his landscape etchings still resonates with a timeless beauty.
There’s plenty of red and gold to offset the Pre-Raphaelite reputation for preferring “greeny yallery” tones. Edward Burne-Jones’s monumental ode to Laus Veneris (1873–1878) sings with rich orange and red. Rosetti’s women glow with rich color while Stanhope’s ambitious Love and the Maiden (1877), which reintroduced the tempera medium to modern audiences, references mythology, classical art and the paintings of Botticelli. A sonnet on temporality featuring a sycamore tree accompanies one of Rossetti’s final works, The Day Dream (1880), a hymn to his muse, Jane Morris.
A suite of beautiful black and white Beardsley drawings looks as modern today as when they were made, and far less scandalous.
Avant-garde designers made tables, chairs and cabinets worthy of the name ‘Art Furniture’ and created ceramics, textiles and wallpapers. A number of set pieces within the exhibition evoke some of the interiors of the day such as Whistler’s Peacock Room. Fashionable dress, accessories and jewelry are shown in relation to portraits of key figures from the period.
During its heyday, the Aesthetic Movement was satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Patience and in the pages of Punch. Oscar Wilde, their spokesman, was pilloried relentlessly as the preposterous poet, Jellaby Postethwaite.
Some of the wittiest pieces in the show are cartoons from Punch showing that character assassination and mockery certainly predates 21st century politics.
Aestheticism could result in the exotic and overblown - witness the overstuffed chairs at the exhibit, the ornate fireplaces with their painted tiles, pottery set pieces surrounding even more decorative elements. The followers of Aestheticism had their own version of Victorian horror vacui.
The complete recreation of the Peacock Room has so many vases, wall decorations and swirling designs as to give the viewer claustrophobia.
But another offshoot was a love of Japanese influenced simplicity and purity.
Designer Godwin's pared-down furniture has a startling modernity. His famous black sideboard could have come from an Art Deco movie set. Similarly, Christopher Dresser's beautiful angular aesthetic movement teapots could have emanated from the Bauhaus metalworking school.
This sumptuous exhibition is set out in four chronological sections: The Search for a New Beauty, Art for Art’s Sake, Beautiful People and Aesthetic Houses and Late Flowering Beauty.
The curators have done justice to the paintings by removing them from the overblown domestic clutter of the Arts and Crafts home, and hanging them against walls painted in subtle period colors, and reproductions of period wallpapers.
Originating curator Dr. Lynn Federle Orr explains in her catalogue essay, “Like a fine Victorian novel, the story of the Aesthetic Movement is one centered around serious social debates—shifting class structures, the confrontation between science and religion, art’s place in society, the impact of new market forces and a unique emphasis on the middle-class home.”
The exhibition debuted at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is currently on view at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The Legion of Honor is the exclusive U.S. venue.
The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860-1900: Sat.-June 17. $10-$20. Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 100 34th Ave, S.F. (415) 750-3600. www.famsf.org.
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