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The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900. Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2 April-17 July, 2011; Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 12 September 2011-15 January, 2012; de Young Museum, San Francisco, 8 February-17 June, 2012. Curated by Stephen Calloway (Victoria & Albert Museum) and Lynn Federle Orr (de Young Museum).
The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900. Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr, eds. London: V&A Publishing, 2011. Pp. 296. $65.00 (cloth).
In the pamphlet he co-wrote with William Rossetti on the Royal Academy exhibition of 1868, A. C. Swinburne declares, "No good art is unbeautiful; but much able and effective work may be, and is." "The worship of beauty," he states, "though beauty be itself transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be simple and absolute." He quotes Victor Hugo as an ally: "Beauty is perfect, beauty can do all things, beauty is the only thing which does not exist by halves."1 Swinburne was writing when the doctrine of art for art's sake was developing in opposition to conventional moral and commercial imperatives for British art and was championed by a small but growing number of artists and writers as well audiences. Billed as the first comprehensive exhibition about aestheticism, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 is a stimulating and impressive examination of the spread of the questions, principles, and productions of this movement across late-Victorian cultural fields.
The Cult of Beauty provides a broad view of the movement. The show asserts aestheticism's major role in the period's debates about how art relates to everyday experiences within and beyond the individual mind, and to substantial cultural innovation. Stencils of peacocks and William Morris patterns are projected on walls that are painted teal, sapphire,...