The Nineteenth Century
In the 19th century aesthetics ceases to be a matter for philosophers and academies and becomes a battle fought in the street, in the newspapers and in the home. Should art depict the present as it is, exist for its own sake, or make work and everyday life more beautiful? The answers diverged so sharply that they still shape how art and architecture are discussed.
Once the great systems of Romanticism had been completed by Schelling and Hegel, a generation followed that no longer primarily wrote philosophical treatises on beauty. The new voices were critics, poets, designers and novelists. They wrote Salon reviews, newspaper articles, lectures and prefaces, and they took sides in concrete disputes over particular paintings, buildings and objects. Aesthetics moved out of the lecture hall and into a public sphere that was growing rapidly with the press, the great exhibitions and the new middle class. Behind these disputes lay two major changes: industrialisation, which made objects cheap, uniform and machine-made, and an art world in which the artist no longer had a prince or a church as patron but had to sell work on a market and be judged by an anonymous public.
The first battle concerned what art may show. In Paris the official Salon was still governed by the academy’s hierarchy, in which history painting, with subjects from antiquity, the Bible and history, stood at the top. Gustave Courbet broke with that order when he exhibited A Burial at Ornans at the Salon of 1850–1851: an ordinary provincial funeral on the vast scale reserved for historical and religious scenes. When two of his works were rejected for the Exposition Universelle of 1855, he built his own pavilion and called it “Le Réalisme”. Realism was as much a social as an aesthetic programme: the artist should paint his own time and his own surroundings, not ideal figures from a distant past. This called into question the classicist doctrine, from Bellori to Winckelmann, that art should raise nature towards an ideal.
The sharpest theorist of the new was Charles Baudelaire. As early as his review of the Salon of 1846 he called for an art that could see “the heroism of modern life”, and in the essay The Painter of Modern Life (Le Peintre de la vie moderne), published in 1863, he gave the concept of modernity its classic formulation. Beauty, according to Baudelaire, has two halves: one eternal and unchanging, and one transitory and fleeting that belongs to its own age, its clothes, gestures and streets. Whoever seeks only the eternal arrives at an abstract and lifeless beauty. In the same year, 1863, his friend Édouard Manet painted Olympia, which caused a scandal when it was shown at the Salon of 1865. Manet took a subject from the tradition, Titian’s reclining Venus, and moved it to contemporary Paris. It was exactly the link between the eternal and the transitory that Baudelaire had called for, but the public saw only a prostitute looking back at them. It was another writer, Émile Zola, who came to Manet’s defence in 1866–1867 and in doing so shifted attention from the subject to the painting itself, to its bright fields of colour and firm contours.
At the same time a quite different line emerged, drawing the opposite conclusion from the same situation. If art no longer had a self-evident task in society, it might just as well free itself from all tasks. As early as the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), Théophile Gautier wrote that only what can be put to no use is truly beautiful. The slogan l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake, became a defence for poets and painters against demands for moral usefulness, bourgeois respectability and political tendency. It rested on a simplified reading of Kant’s idea of disinterested pleasure, which the philosopher Victor Cousin, among others, had disseminated in France. What Kant had described as a property of the judgement of taste became, for Gautier and his followers, an entire way of life.
In Britain aesthetics took a quite different direction. John Ruskin, who began as the defender of William Turner’s late painting in Modern Painters (1843–1860), held that art and architecture were inseparable from morality and society. His position had a clear architectural side. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) he argued that Gothic was superior to the regularity of the Renaissance and classicism, not because it was more harmonious but because it bore the marks of free men’s work. He saw the same moral problem in the modern factory: where the worker merely performs one task over and over, without being allowed to think and choose, the result is dead, however perfect it may be. It was an aesthetics that started from how an object came into being, not only from how it looks.
Ruskin’s most influential disciple was William Morris. He moved from poetry to design, had the architect Philip Webb build Red House in Bexleyheath outside London (1859–1860) and in 1861 founded the firm that later became Morris & Co. There wallpapers, textiles, furniture and stained glass were made by hand, with natural dyes and old techniques. The Strawberry Thief pattern of 1883 shows the programme: the motif comes from the garden, and the fabric was printed using a laborious indigo method. Over the years Morris became a socialist and realised that his handcraft was so expensive that only the rich could afford it, a contradiction he never resolved. The movement he inspired took the name Arts and Crafts from an exhibition society founded in London in 1887. Its idea that art and everyday objects, artist and craftsman, belong together had far-reaching consequences for 20th-century design and architecture. Red House also shows how architecture formed part of the programme: the house was built of red brick without rendered façades, planned from the inside according to how the rooms were used rather than around a symmetrical façade, and furnished as a whole, with furniture, murals and stained glass made by the friends themselves.
In the last decades of the century the French and British lines met in Aestheticism. Walter Pater concluded his studies in the history of the Renaissance in 1873 with the exhortation to live for intense moments, and sought in art a purely sensuous and formal value, with music as the model. The American painter James McNeill Whistler gave his pictures musical titles such as Nocturne and Symphony and maintained that a painting was an arrangement of colours and forms, not a story. Oscar Wilde took the line of thought furthest. In his dialogue The Decay of Lying (1889) it is not art that imitates life but life that imitates art. Londoners see the fog, he claims, because painters and poets have taught them to see it. It is a witty reversal of the theory of mimesis that had existed since Plato and Aristotle.
At the same time the very manner of painting changed. Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise gave its name to the group that exhibited outside the Salon in Paris in 1874, after the critic Louis Leroy had mocked the title. The Impressionists painted light at a particular moment and so took Baudelaire’s fleeting beauty literally. Photography, which Baudelaire had dismissed as mere recording in his review of the Salon of 1859, was meanwhile taking over part of painting’s old task of depiction. That made the question of what painting should then do all the more pressing, and the answer gradually became that it should show seeing itself, colour and the brushstroke. Here lies one of the roots of the formalism that modernism later articulated.
Architecture had its own crisis. Modern society built railway stations, market halls and exhibition palaces of iron and glass, such as Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. Yet the most lavish buildings were still clothed in historical styles, Gothic Revival, Neo-Renaissance or Neo-Baroque, and architects argued over which style was most fitting. In France Eugène Viollet-le-Duc read Gothic as a rational system of construction, not as morality as Ruskin did, and in Germany Gottfried Semper sought the origins of architecture in materials and techniques such as weaving and masonry. When the Eiffel Tower was to be built for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a group of well-known artists and writers protested in an open letter in 1887 against what they saw as a disfiguring iron skeleton in the middle of Paris. Modernism would answer yes to the question of whether an engineer’s construction could be beautiful.
Towards the end of the century came two entirely different attacks on the whole tradition. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Friedrich Nietzsche had described art as an encounter between the Apollonian, the principle of form and dream, and the Dionysian, the principle of intoxication and dissolution. Later he explicitly turned against Kant’s disinterested spectator and saw in art a life force, not quiet contemplation. Leo Tolstoy went in the opposite direction. In What Is Art? (1897) he dismissed both the philosophy of beauty and almost all modern art, including Wagner and his own great novels. For him art was the transmission of feelings from person to person, and good art was that which could unite everyone, peasants included, in shared feelings. Both took art with the utmost seriousness, but they drew opposite conclusions about what it was for. Between them stood Richard Wagner, whose idea of a total work of art, in which music, poetry, stage design and architecture would merge, had taken concrete form in the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth in 1876. Nietzsche first celebrated him and then broke with him, and Tolstoy mocked his operas as artificial and incomprehensible.
In Sweden the ideas of Ruskin and Morris were given their own interpretation by Ellen Key, whose Beauty for All appeared in 1899, the same year that Carl Larsson published his watercolours of his home at Sundborn under the title A Home. Key wanted working-class families too to have light, simple and practical homes, and she saw beauty as a force that shapes people. The century’s final years thus point ahead to the 20th century. Baudelaire’s modernity, Ruskin’s and Morris’s ideas about craft and everyday life, the Aesthetes’ liberation of form and Tolstoy’s demand for an art for everyone would all be taken up by modernism, which sought to unite them in a new art and a new architecture for a new age.