[under
construction 7-08-07 -- this entry owes much to a variety of sources, many cited below]
The Aesthetic Movement emerged out of
the design reform movement during the 1860s and 1870s,
in which the chief impulse was "Art for Arts Sake".
I admit that while I had heard the
phrase, "Art for Art's Sake" all my life, I had not given it
much consideration as a phrase with a history. Wrong again, of
course! It has a history, but how much to give here, merely
to help others who -- like me -- don't know about the background of
this phrase. Understanding the phrase, though, seems to help in
understanding about the workings of the Aesthetic Movement, so --
sometime -- I will give some. In the meantime, Dorothy Richardson, "Saintsbury
and Art for Art's Sake in England", PMLA
59, No. 1 March 1944, pages 243-260, writes about the phrase's meaning
during the Aesthetics Movement in England.
I also admit that while I have
NEVER heard the phrase, "aesthetic craze" before, until recently I
encountered the term in a book by William Dean Howells, --
Annie Kilburn -- page 717 of the Library of America edition.
My suspicion aroused, intuitively, I looked further and soon found
that, yes, the Aesthetic Movement was satirized by many critics in the
1880s: for one,
Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience (1881). Another clue is the
article, "The Aesthetic Craze," in the Jeweler's
Circular and Horological Review 13, no 3 (April
1882), page 65 -- have yet, though, to actually read this gem. Still
another is Regina Lee Blaszyzk's "The Aesthetic Moment: Chain
Decorators and Consumer Demand, and Technological Change in the Pottery
Industry,"
Winterthur Portfolio 29, no 2/3, pages 121-153 --
subscription needed.
A fever developed for
collecting artistic works, and home interiors became expressions of
artistic taste, generating the term, "Household Art".
(Martha Crabill McClaugherty, "Household Art: Creating the Artistic Home,
1868-1893" Winterthur Portfolio
18, No. 1 Spring, 1983), pages 1-26) The underlying
principles of the movement emphasized "art in the production of
furniture". A reaction to the highly elaborate products of
mainstream Victorian taste, aestheticism stressed simple forms and
uncluttered surfaces. Often, ornament was placed
asymmetrically.
At the Philadelphia Centennial
Exposition in 1876, Americans were exposed to art objects from a
variety of nations and times, thus style was much influenced by
Japanese decoration, late 17th- and early 18th-century English domestic
design, and blue and white Chinese porcelain. Where they could,
designers included examples from Greek, Persian, Moorish,
Egyptian and other exotic styles. Elaborately, for those who could
afford it, homes were designed and decorated through the collaborative
efforts of designers, architects and craftsmen. Typical
motifs included sunflowers, fan shapes, peacock feathers, and bamboo.
As a movement, Aestheticism was seen
as a reaction to the excesses of mid-century revivals. The aim was to
reunite the beautiful and useful. Surface decoration became important,
using motifs from nature. Natural forms -- simplified, stylized and
flattened into patterns -- were combined, leading to the use of
contrasting materials in marquetry and other flat surface decoration.
While detail of surface decoration was intricate, color schemes were
more subtle, so that the whole became a unified form when viewed from a
distance. Furniture tended to be rectilinear?
Noel Riley Aesthetic Movement the
elements of design, New York: the free press,
2003, pages 254-261.
A
British and American phenomenon of the 1870s and 1880s, the Aesthetic
Movement was a cult of beauty which sought to elevate the
status of all objects to works of art.
Designers re-interpreted and
combined sources, including historical periods and cultures, and
exploited industrial processes, both new and established, to create an
entirely new style.
The
Movement began in Britain, where in the 1850s and 1860s the designers
Owen Jones (1809-1874)
The Grammar of Ornament: all
100 color plates from the folio edition of the great Victorian
sourcebook of historic design London : Day and Son,
1856; reprinted New York : Dover Publications, 1987 and Christopher
Dresser (1834—1904) Rococo
revival furniture, illustrated in Christopher Dresser's
Principles of Decorative Design. London. 1873 codified the
theories which were to lie behind much Aesthetic design.
(The
image on the left comes originally from Christopher Dresser,
Principles of Decorative Design London:
1873.)
Following
the prescriptions of such public philosophers about taste as
John Ruskin , Jones and Dresser embraced Nature as a central
component of their aesthetic ideals. Central to their
philosophy was the idea that nature, together with the
best designs of different eras and cultures (increasingly accessible
through public collections and exhibitions, and studied in design
schools), should serve as models to be
appropriated and adapted by the modern designer for contemporary use.
Jones's The
Grammar of Ornament (1856) illustrated various
design sources, including. Greek, Egyptian, Islamic, and Chinese; and
Dresser, a botanist fascinated by plant structure, developed
a form of conventionalized plant-based ornament expressive of dynamic
growth.
Both
believed that design should be appropriate to function, expressed
dramatically in Dresser's starkly geometric electroplated silver
tableware; and also in fitness of purpose — for example, that
the decoration of flat surfaces, such as textiles and wallpapers,
should reject the illusion of depth in favor of two-dimensional
patterning.
Japanese design profoundly influenced Aesthetic Movement designers
(Dresser himself visited Japan in 1876-7). After the invasion
of Japanese territorial waters by the American navy in 1853, interest
in Asian materials, especially artistic, soared. Japanese artistic
creations, especially blue-and-white ceramics, the Willow
design, cloisonnés, ivories,
bronzes, lacquers, and textiles, were shown at the international
exhibitions in London (1862), Paris (1867), and Philadelphia (1876),
and were available from retailers such as Liberty & Co., in
London (around 1875).
Manufacturers and craftsmen were drawn to the high
quality of workmanship, and designers to Japanese geometry and
abstraction, novel to Western eyes. Western design tradition was
challenged by devices such as the apparently arbitrary cropping of
shapes and asymmetry, with the result that, as Clarence Cook declared
in his book What Shall We Do With Our Walls? (New York, 1880), even
"the classic laws of symmetry and unity are no longer to be considered
the absolute rulers of the field of decorative art." Japanese and
Chinese forms were Westernized, as seen in the Japanese architectural
elements adapted by E.W. Godwin (1833—86) to create his
Anglo-Japanese furniture. Oriental shapes were adapted for use in
ceramics, as were straight-sided vessels or shapes derived from Chinese
metalwork.
Conversely, Western forms were orientalized, usually by the
addition of Japanese motifs. Silver and plated wares were particularly
strongly influenced by oriental motifs, led by Tiffany & Co. in
New York. The influence of Japan was felt in Europe, particularly
France, where Japonisme flourished in ceramics, glass, and metalwork.
The horror vacui (fear of emptiness) characterizing most later
19th-century design was occasionally tempered by blank areas of space
opposite an asymmetrically arranged motif, although taste often favored
objects embellished with a profusion of designs associated with the
Orient. These included animals (frogs, bats), birds (cranes, storks),
insects (butterflies, dragonflies), plants (bamboo, pine branches,
cherry blossom, chrysanthemums), objects (fans and circular family
crests known as coons), and wave patterns. Other motifs were lilies,
bulrushes, artists' palettes, easels, peacocks and peacock feathers,
and sunflowers, which came to epitomize the movement.
The Aesthetic Movement
reached a wide audience at the international exhibitions held between
1871 and 1878 in London, Vienna, Philadelphia, and Paris, and at the
showrooms of furnishers such as Morris & Co. in London and
Cottier & Co. in New York.
The movement was popularized by a series of
house-decorating manuals aimed at the public, such as Hints on
Household Taste (London 1868; Boston 1872) by the British writer
Charles Locke Eastlake (1836-1906), which encouraged consumers to
discriminate when furnishing an artistic interior while taking into
account their individual means. Eastlake helped to popularize the
reforming design principles of A.W.N. Pugin, Street, Shaw, and Seddon
(see p.254) by advocating truth to materials and honest construction.
Bruce Talbert (1838-81), in his Gothic Forms Applied
to Furniture (Birmingham 1867; Boston 1873),
provided the furniture trade with designs inspired by 17th-century
Jacobean furniture, utilizing straight wood and revealed construction,
and emphasizing surface decoration of inlays, low-relief, or incised
carving which were taken up by the trade in both Britain and the United
States. This Art or, as it became known in the US, Eastlake furniture,
was often ebonized and included cabinets with a profusion of shelves to
display Art objects. In the 1870s, Gothic and Jacobean designs were
gradually supplanted by the English Queen Anne style and its American
equivalent, known as the Colonial Revival, which predominantly drew
inspiration from English 18th-century prototypes.
An unprecedented urban
expansion, together with an increase in mechanized manufacture at all
levels, created a strong demand as well as capacity for Art objects of
all types. Even manufacturers not traditionally associated with
advanced design employed freelance designers, or opened Art departments
for the production of artistic furniture, ceramics, and metalwork, to
mention a few. New or revived manufacturing techniques encompassed
every sphere of production, and included an interest in artistic glazes
in ceramic manufacture and the emulation of the oriental technique of
cloisonné by metal manufacturers. New materials came into
vogue: cast iron and rattan were increasingly used for furniture, and
media such as stained glass and ceramic tiles were incorporated into
domestic settings on a scale never seen before or since.
In his influential
manual The House Beautiful(1878), the American Clarence Cook
(1828–1900) stressed the importance of selecting from
different periods and harmoniously combining disparate elements to
create a coherent, beautiful whole. The remarkable stylistic unity
which resulted was partly because many of the key designers produced
work for the whole gamut of decorative arts such as Walter Crane
(1845–1915), who designed furniture, ceramics, glass,
metalwork, textiles, wallpapers, and book illustrations. Ceramic and
metalwork design showed a typically eclectic approach and often blended
different themes, so that a vase with a Persian shape may have had
decoration of Japanese, Renaissance, or Egyptian origin – or
all three. Unity was nevertheless also achieved because the
appreciation of the sensory qualities of materials encouraged a new
freedom in the mixing of media, resulting in painted panels, stamped
leatherwork, ceramic tiles, and cloisonné panels being
incorporated into furniture and clock cases, for example. Textiles and
wallpapers benefited from the emphasis on flat patterning and the use
of a variety of sources. They were produced in subtle secondary or
tertiary colours, particularly green and gold, which aimed at a subdued
and rich effect. The flat, flowing, and curvilinear naturalism of some
wallpaper and textile designs were precursors to the French Art
Nouveau, while a reaction against the rich density of Aesthetic
interiors contributed to the reactionary simplicity and minimalism of
much early Modernist design.
During the Aesthetic movement the laws
of the market economy affected the production and promulgation of
designs. Firms such as Morris & Co. built up archives of
stained-glass cartoons which could be adapted to new commissions.
Paintings by artists with Aesthetic leanings such as Albert Moore
(1841–93) were copied from engravings and appeared on
ceramics, stained glass, and other media in Britain and America, often
without acknowledgment or permission. In an attempt to prevent copying
of the designs for which they had paid, manufacturers often registered
their designs at the Patent Office, indicated by a diamond-shaped
registration mark on their goods. The cult of the industrial designer
was bolstered by Christopher Dresser, whose name or facsimile signature
appeared on a number of the pieces of metalwork and ceramics he
designed.
Art Furniture of the 1870s developed from the Reformed Gothic of the
1850s and 1860s, a style advanced by a number of innovative
architect-designers in England who "Reformed" or re-interpreted the
Gothic style. The seeds were sown in the 1840s by A.W.N. Pugin
(1812-52), whose simplest furniture designs show an understanding of
the underlying principles of Gothic form and construction, ideas which
were encouraged in the publications of the French architect Eugene
Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79). In England the Ecclesiological Society
advocated a return to early Anglican church ritual, leading architects
including George Edmund Street (1824-81), William Butterfield (1814-1900),
and William White (1825-1900)
towards the massive forms of 13th- and 14th- century Gothic in their
ecclesiastical and secular furniture. Often large in scale - it is
sometimes called Muscular Gothic - this furniture featured revealed
construction, architectural elements such as sturdy stump columns and
chamfering, inlaid geometric decoration, and prominent hardware. At the
London International Exhibition (1862), furniture designed or decorated
by Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912), William Burges (1827-81), John
Pollard Seddon (1827-1906), Philip Webb (1831-1915), and William Morris
(1834-96) showed the revived interest in medieval painted furniture.
By the late 1860s the
Reformed Gothic style had laid the foundations for the Art Furniture of
the 1870s. Two seminal publications, published and circulated widely in
Britain and the United States, set the tone. Charles Locke Eastlake's
Hints on HoUsehold Taste (1868) was aimed at a wide audience and
addressed the importance of practicality in the design, construction,
and decoration of furniture in the context of an artistic interior.
Even more influential were the illustrations provided by Bruce James
Talbert in his Gothic Forms Applied to Furniture (1867), which
successfully drew on 17th-century English vernacular prototypes to
reduce the massiveness of Reformed Gothic to a more domestic - and
commercially successful - scale. Both publications paved the way for
the popularity of Art Furniture.
In the 1870s a fashion
developed for ebonized and painted furniture, stemming partly from the
much-exhibited versions of a cabinet designed c.1871 by Thomas Edward
Collcutt (1840–1924; see p.257). This cabinet boasted a
Talbert-derived architectural framework with Gothic details, such as
the canopy over the upper structure. The cupboard doors were inset with
painted figurative panels and complemented by profuse shelves, one
backed with a bevelled mirror to reflect the Art objects placed on it.
There was none of the heavy carving that Talbert and Eastlake rejected,
and much of the decorative effect was derived instead from mouldings.
These features were to
be found on much Aesthetic cabinet furniture over the next fifteen
years, when other items suitable for showing off objects, such as
overmantles incorporating numerous shelves, and hanging cabinets also
became popular.
Furniture designed during the 1870s also reflected the wide variety of
influences to which designers were exposed. The marquetry devised by
Owen Jones adapted elements from an eclectic range of sources including
Moorish and classical prototypes. A knowledge of ancient Egyptian
prototypes was demonstrated by the painter William Holman Hunt
(1827–1910), who in 1857 designed a Thebes stool (named after
the site of Egyptian excavations); similar designs were produced by
Ford Madox Brown (1821–93) for Morris & Co. and were
patented by Liberty & Co. in 1883.
An interest in Japanese art prompted
W.E. Nesfield (1835–88) to design a folding screen with
Japanese motifs in the late 1860s. Thomas Jeckyll, who incorporated
Japanese motifs in his Jacobean oak furniture, exploited both Japanese
and Hispano-Moresque themes in the attenuation and complexity of the
built-in shelves he designed for the Peacock Room, named after James
McNeill Whistler's (1834–1903) japanesque painted scheme.
This led to Godwin pioneering a type of furniture influenced by
oriental sources, published by the London cabinetmaker William Watt in
Art Furniture (1877). Godwin's Anglo-Japanese style adapted decorative
and constructional devices gleaned from Japanese prints illustrating
domestic fitments and woodwork to create a series of highly rectilinear
deal buffets. They were ebonized to resemble oriental lacquered
furniture and were constructed from symmetrical arrangements of
straight horizontal and vertical lines, achieving their effect, as he
put it, "by the grouping of solid and void and by more or less broken
outline." In these, and in his other Anglo-Japanese designs, surface
decoration was minimal and confined to panels of embossed leather paper
and geometric, incised gold lines.
By the mid-1870s the Queen Anne style,
an inaccurate title referring to architecture inspired by 18th-century
English design as well as other sources, had begun to influence
furniture. Neo-Georgian pediments and complex glazed fronts appeared on
display cabinets by designers such as Thomas E. Collcutt.
The revival of interest
in 17th-century ornament, sometimes known as the Wrenaissance after the
architect Sir Christopher Wren, led firms such as Collinson &
Lock to produce delicately scaled ivory-inlaid rosewood cabinets.
Godwin designed polished mahogany and walnut furniture with attenuated,
curving lines and slender, tapering legs, lending objects an
increasingly lightweight appearance. Meanwhile, the work of commercial
firms, such as James Lamb of Manchester, produced furniture reflecting
the latest fashions.
From the 1860s, furniture detailing became even finer and the
complexity of cabinets increased, with more and more elaborate panels
appearing in the work of H.W. Batley and Thomas Harris. Commercial
firms such as James Lamb of Manchester blended the fashionable designs
into their work. From the 1860s, the birth of the Adam Revival style,
named after the 18th-century architect-designer, led many manufacturers
to re-interpret or re-introduce forms of that period, often veneered
with satinwood. The style gathered momentum in the 1870s and remained
popular until beyond the turn of the 19th century.
I n the United States,
the British design reforms of Talbert and Dresser were expressed in the
designs of Frank Furness executed by Daniel Pabst in Philadelphia.
Eastlake furniture, the American version of Art furniture, with its
rectilinear forms, panelled construction, turned uprights, and spindled
galleries, continued in popularity throughout the 1870s and 1880s.
Renaissance decorative elements were also popular in the US, employed
by firms such as John Jelliff (1813–90) in Newark, New
Jersey. More innovative was the furniture produced by George Hunzinger
(1835–98) in Brooklyn, New York, which played on the
ingenious massing of complex turned elements. Materials popular in the
US included bamboo furniture and imitation bamboo made from bird's-eye
maple. The technique of woodcarving, less prevalent in British
furniture, was employed in the naturalistic motifs adopted by the
woodcarving school that flourished in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Opulent materials and
skilled craftsmanship were also characteristic of much American
Aesthetic furniture.
Herter Brothers of New York adopted a restrained stylistic vocabulary
that drew on European – particularly British and French
Empire – sources, often executed in ebonized cherry or gilded
maple, with flat panels of intricate, sometimes asymmetrical, floral
marquetry. The Anglo-Japanese style popularized by Godwin flourished in
the work of A. & H. Lejambre, which manufactured tables with
asymmetrical shelves and mahogany tops inlaid with mother-of-pearl and
metal inlays. Other fashionable styles such as the Celtic and Moorish
revivals inspired the furnishing of the interior of the Seventh
Regiment Armory in New York (1879–80) by the Associated
Artists formed by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933).
The Moorish craze of
the 1880s and 1890s was popularized in Britain by Liberty &
Co., and in the US by Tiffany & Co. After the 1876 Philadelphia
Centennial Exposition, the counterpart of the English Queen Anne
movement was echoed in the US by the Colonial Revival, inspired by its
colonial heritage, which encouraged the re-introduction of 18th-century
forms.
