the pre-raphaelite brotherhood and the aesthetic movement

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The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

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Page 1: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

Page 2: 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

Page 3: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

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.

Page 4: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

Rossetti, La Ghirlandata

Page 5: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

Rossetti, Beata Beatrix

Page 6: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

Rossetti, Proserpine

Page 7: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shallott (1888)

Page 8: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

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.

Page 9: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

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

Page 10: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

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.

Page 11: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

Pater, continued

• To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Page 12: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

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”

Page 14: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

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.

Page 15: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

Whistler, Old Battersea Bridge