Beauty-and-Art.1750-2000-Oxford-History-of-Art

225 Pages·2007·16.94 MB·English

Beauty and Art
1750–2000
Oxford History ofArt
Elizabeth Prettejohn is Professor of Modern and Rome in the Nineteenth Century; author of
Art at the University of Plymouth, and was The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites,Interpreting
formerly Curator of Paintings and Sculpture Sargent, and Rossetti and His Circle; and
at Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery. She editorof After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and
is co-author of the exhibition catalogues Aestheticism in Victorian Englandand (with
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,Sir Lawrence Alma- Tim Barringer) Frederic Leighton: Antiquity,
Tadema, and Imagining Rome: British Artists Renaissance, Modernity.
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OOxxffoorrdd HHiissttoorryy ooffAArrtt
Beauty and Art
1750–2000
Elizabeth Prettejohn
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© Elizabeth Prettejohn 2005
First published 2005by Oxford University Press
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0‒19‒280160‒0
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Prettejohn, Elizabeth
Beauty and art 1750‒2000 / Elizabeth Prettejohn.
p. cm. — (Oxford history of art)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Art—Philosophy. 2. Aesthetics. I. Title. II. Series.
n66.p74 2005
701'.17'0903‒dc22 2004061707
isbn0‒19‒280160‒0
Picture research by Elisabeth Agate
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Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 9
Chapter 1 Eighteenth-century Germany: Winckelmann and Kant 15
Chapter 2 Nineteenth-century France: From Staël to Baudelaire 65
Chapter 3 Victorian England: Ruskin, Swinburne, Pater 111
Chapter 4 Modernism: Fry and Greenberg 157
Afterword 193
Notes 205
Further Reading 211
List of Illustrations 215
Index 219
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Acknowledgements
I should like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Oxford University
Press, Stephen Bann, Tim Barringer, Colin Cruise, Joan Esch, Chris
Green, Shelley Hales, John House, Sally Huxtable, Katy Macleod,
Anna Gruetzner Robins, Debbie Robinson, and most of all Charles
Martindale, the best of critics and most devoted lover of beauty. Elisa-
beth Agate has been a creative and resourceful picture researcher, and I
should like to thank my editors, Katharine Reeve, Penny Isaac, and
Matthew Cotton, as well as David Williams at The Running Head,
whose work has improved the book in countless respects. This book is
dedicated to the members of the Art History Research Seminar group
at the University of Plymouth, who prove that disinterested intellec-
tual enquiry may still be possible even in the instrumentalist world we
now inhabit.
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Introduction
Since the eighteenth century philosophers have explored the human
faculty of taking pleasure in the beautiful. During the same period the
historical study of works of art has grown steadily in range and sophis-
tication. Surprisingly, these two areas of enquiry have remained largely
separate. Philosophical aesthetics has concentrated on the human
subject’s experience of the beautiful in general terms: what do we mean
when we call something in nature or art ‘beautiful’? Art history, on the
other hand, has attended to the particular class of objects that societies,
past and present, have designated ‘art’: what are the characteristics of
the historical artefacts that have been valued aesthetically? This book
brings together human subjects and crafted objects. It aims to juxta-
pose the abstract question of beauty, as it has been posed since the
beginning of modern philosophical aesthetics in eighteenth-century
Germany, with the concrete objects that have been made or enjoyed
inthe same period. How have artists responded to speculations on the
beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why?
What are wesaying about these works when we call them beautiful,
rather than finding them useful or informative, morally edifying or
politically progressive?
These questions mark a significant departure from the recent con-
cerns of academic art history, which since the 1970s has focused pre-
dominantly on questions of historical, social, and political context.
During the past thirty years the beauty of the work of art has seemed
secondary to the work’s ideological functions in negotiations of class
and power, gender and politics. The love of beauty has seemed at best
an evasion or escape from the problems of social reality, at worst a
wayof shoring up the status of the rich and powerful. Judgements of
aesthetic value have been seen as tainted by association with the art
market, or with the self-interest of the wealthy and patrician. In the
same period, many practising artists have felt themselves under pres-
sure to choose between aesthetic pleasure and political engagement. To
choose the former was effectively to court a reputation as a reactionary;
thus many artists have felt that, in practice, there was no choice at all.
As we shall see in the Afterword, the late-twentieth-century view
Detail of 31 of beauty as irrevocably opposed to any form of responsible politics has
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