The gob is smacked. Rarely have I left an exhibition feeling so fully confronted by its subject. There is much that is transfixing in the V&A’s celebration of the Cult of Beauty, and nearly as much that is silly. Rarely, too, in recent times, has so much artistic produce been unrolled for us that is so politically disastrous, let alone incorrect. Yet, if an exhibition’s task is to tackle its subject fully and atmospherically, then the V&A’s examination of the aesthetic movement must be rated a notable success. If you are not sure what the aesthetic movement was before you enter this display, trust me, you will be sure when you leave.
The task here is to understand roughly 40 years of British creativity, between approximately 1860 and 1900, during which most of the existing aesthetic values of the Victorian era were challenged. Initially, the tiny conspiracy involved a few pre-Raphaelite painters wanting to live their lives differently from those around them, and to decorate their houses differently, too. By the time the first world war took a final sledgehammer to their flamboyant hopes and outrageous tastes, those hopes and tastes were universally familiar. What began with Rossetti wanting to fill his bedroom with Chinese porcelain and his best friend’s wives ended up, a couple of decades later, as Liberty & Co.
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If you are not sure what the aesthetic movement was before you enter this display, trust me, you will be sure when you leave
Those of us who have previously had difficulty taking the aesthetic movement seriously — by which I am confident I count most people — have been put off chiefly by its decadence and its absurdity. One glimpse of the emblematic poet Algernon Swinburne, with his shoulder-length blond curls, his velvet smoking jacket and that look of adolescent rapture welded onto his unlined Victorian face, is all it ever takes to make this entire artistic effort feel ridiculous. A single line of a Swinburne poem, any Swinburne poem, persuades us that the poor man should be sent to bed with an aspirin and a cup of cocoa. “Her gateways smoke with fume of flowers and fires/With loves burnt out and unassuaged desires” springs to mind. Who is going to tell Algernon he should have gone to Specsavers, and that that is not a gateway?
The V&A show, however, understands aestheticism from the opposite bank — not from the easy-to-adopt position of the cynic, but from the altogether more useful viewpoint of the artistic historian. The argument put forward here is that Britain in the 1860s was a ghastly place to be. Soul-destroying. Pleasure-crunching. Toxic. Capitalistic. Socially rigid. Aestheticism is presented here as an enterprising mutiny mounted by beauty against repression.
The first object you see — and it is an inspired choice — is a statue by Lord Leighton, called The Sluggard, of a naked athlete languidly stretching his arms above his head as if he has just woken from a long siesta. Legend has it that the pose was struck naturally by Leighton’s favourite Italian model between sessions, and that Leighton noticed it and decided to immortalise it. Sculpturally, The Sluggard seems to challenge every ethical given of the Victorian era: the meaning of work; the pull of duty; the need to keep up appearances. None of those matters a fig if a beautiful man cannot have a good stretch after his siesta.
Leighton’s perfectly envisioned tribute to laziness is joined in the agenda-setting opening moments of the show by a cluster of artworks celebrating the beauty of nature when she is trying to prompt some immediate sexual chemistry: a plaster relief with peacock feathers by Burne-Jones, some firedogs based on sunflowers by Thomas Jeckyll and a gorgeous peacock plate by William de Morgan. Siestas and peacocks — the aesthetic movement was not so much a challenge to Victorian values as a stamping down on them. There is something brutal about this showy nay-saying, something fierce. Were this to be happening today, you feel, one of the happy-slappers would be recording the attack on their mobile.
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Unusually for a V&A show, this one includes masses of paintings alongside the more familiar clutter of plates, teapots, necklaces, settees and occasional tables. Almost all the pictures feature beautiful women, or stunners, as the pre-Raphaelites were fond of calling them. Some of the fatal femmes are so shockingly irresistible that even your critic, who is usually immune to the machinations of Victorian exploiters, found himself twitching Swinburne-ishly at the lips. This is art that has deliberately set out to be tempting. And temptation is tempting for good reasons.
The show is at its most politically incorrect while parading these femmes fatales, but also at its firmest of purpose. Art is art because it does away with the need to reason or explain. Art for art’s sake was the war cry of the aesthetic movement. And, whether you agree with these attitudes or not, you could not ask for clearer evidence of their efficacy than the double barrel of raw beauty fired at us by Leighton’s Pavonia, the swarthy Italian heart-stopper adopted as the show’s poster girl, the one holding a fan of peacock feathers in a halo above her head. Pavonia is dangerously beautiful. And what outrageous skill the artist shows, too, in capturing the shimmering pink silk of her headdress or the exciting fan of feathers.
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All the painters gathered here are male and, chiefly, heterosexual, so the fatal attractions they record are invariably feminine. Interestingly, though, none of those included in a superb cast of Victorian art lechers — Rossetti, Leighton, Millais, Alma-Tadema — favours the proper woman, round of hip, buxom of bosom, curvaceously proportioned. Big hair aside, most of the pre-Raphaelites’ stunners are boyish and flat-chested. Something is emerging here, you feel, that cannot be hidden. It’s the show’s most powerful and important message: when you open the tap of beauty, everything pours out.
Beauty would not be beauty if it were adaptable or polite, if we could select which types we prefer to respond to
All this is proposed in a fascinating mix that follows exciting stretches of painting with engrossing clusters of decorative arts. The big problem with these giant encapsulations of styles that the V&A keeps attempting is the harsh reductions that are involved: how to form a coherent narrative out of an inchoate mass of produce? This effort is the V&A’s best attempt yet to find a legible story line through a shapeless blobbage of material. By tracing the pursuit of beauty back to its ancient roots in the Garden of Eden, the show establishes a set of origins that feel entirely inescapable. Beauty would not be beauty if it were adaptable or polite, if we could select which types we prefer to respond to. Say what you want about Rossetti and his ilk, they recognised its power and knew it to be barely controllable at best, and fully uncontrollable at worst.
Having previously had little time for Albert Moore, who painted pretend Roman girls in diaphanous taffeta gowns, I found myself responding enthusiastically to him here not as a social observer — ha, ha — but as a colourist. The magnolia orange robes worn by the three girls in Midsummer are murderously alluring. So are the pale pink silks worn by the draped-about cast of Reading Aloud.
So impressive is this gallery of paintings, the decorative arts are occasionally elbowed out of the limelight. What reads on paper as a highlight — Whistler’s decorations for his famous Peacock Room, created for a house in London, but later transported to Washington DC — are a disappointment because they have been re-created as a computerised approximation, and computerised approximations cannot do beauty. Christopher Dresser teapots, however, can. And a glamorous vitrine packed with jewellery will certainly send your saliva spurting.
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Because so many of the exotic tastes celebrated here are foreign to the British temperament, it is hardly surprising that actual foreign influences played a significant part in the shift. Among aesthetes, the taste for Chinese blue-and-white porcelain was so wide-scale that it became the focus of some hilarious Punch cartoons. Another key influence, Japan, has a section to itself, too. And although Islamic influences are underplayed here, there is always the newly refurbished Leighton House to visit, in Holland Park, where that particular wrong is spectacularly righted.
While one of the show’s messages is that beauty can be scary, another is that the aesthetes were actually scarily prescient. Much of what is celebrated here reminded me forcefully of our own times. Celebrity culture is noisily prefigured by the notoriety of Rossetti, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde. Our obsession with houses and their grand design began in Rossetti’s bedroom and Leighton’s mansion. The employment of beautiful women as an advertising weapon was invented by the aesthetic movement. And that general sense we now have that life is for having fun, not for working, or doing your duty, or saving, or helping; all that, alas, is prefigured here.
The Cult of Beauty, V&A, SW7, until July 17