Aestheticism

Aestheticism, or the Aesthetic Movement,
was a European phenomenon
during the latter nineteenth century that had its chief headquarters in France.
In opposition to the dominance of scientific thinking, and in defiance of the
widespread indifference or hostility of the middle-class society of their time to any art that was not useful or did not teach moral values, French writers developed the view that a work of art is the supreme value among human products precisely because it is self-sufficient and has no use or moral aim outside
its own being. The end of a work of art is simply to exist in its formal
perfection; that is, to be beautiful and to be contemplated as an end in itself.
A rallying cry of Aestheticism became the phrase "l'art pour l'art"--art for
art's sake.
The historical roots of Aestheticism are in the views proposed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790) that the "pure" aesthetic experience consists of a "disinterested" contemplation of an object that "pleases for its own sake," without reference to reality or to the "external" ends of utility or morality. As a self-conscious movement, however, French Aestheticism is often said to date from Théophile Gautier's witty defense of his assertion that art is useless (preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin,1835). Aestheticism was developed by Baudelaire, who was greatly influenced
by Edgar Allan Poe's claim (in "The Poetic Principle," 1850) that the supreme work is a "poem per se," a "poem written solely for the poem's sake"; it was later taken up by Flaubert, Mallarmé, and many other writers. In its extreme form, the aesthetic doctrine of art for art's sake veered into the moral and
quasi-religious doctrine of life for art's sake, with the artist represented as a priest who renounces the practical concerns of ordinary existence in the service of what Flaubert and others called "the religion of beauty."
The views of French Aestheticism were introduced into Victorian England by Walter Pater, with his emphasis on high artifice and stylistic subtlety,
his recommendation to crowd one's life with exquisite sensations, and his advocacy of the supreme value of beauty and of "the love of art for its own sake." (See his Conclusion to The Renaissance, 1873.) The artistic and moral
views of Aestheticism were also expressed by Algernon Charles Swinburne
and by English writers of the 1890s such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and
Lionel Johnson, as well as by the artists J. M. Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley. The influence of ideas stressed in Aestheticism--especially the view of the
"autonomy" (self-sufficiency) of a work of art, the emphasis on craft and artistry, and the concept of a poem or novel as an end in itself and as invested with "intrinsic" values--has been important in the writings of prominent twentieth-century authors such as W. B. Yeats, T. E. Hulme, and T. S. Eliot, as
well as in the literary theory of the New Crìtics.For related developments, see decadence and ivory tower. Refer to: William
Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (1945, reprinted 1975); Frank Kermode, Ro-
mantic Image (1957); Enid Starkie, From Gautier to Eliot (I960); R. V. Johnson,
Aestheticism (1969). For the intellectual and social conditions during the eighteenth century that fostered the theory that a work of art is an end in itself.