V.

Aesthetics and Art

Traditional aesthetics in the 18th and 19th centuries was dominated by the concept of art as imitation of nature. Novelists such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in Britain and dramatists such as Carlo Goldoni in Italy and Alexandre Dumas fils (the son of Alexandre Dumas père) in France presented realistic accounts of middle-class life. Painters, whether Neo-Classical, such as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Romantic, such as Eugène Delacroix, or Realist, such as Gustave Courbet, rendered their subjects with careful attention to lifelike detail.

In traditional aesthetics it was also frequently assumed that works of art are useful as well as beautiful. Paintings might commemorate historical events or encourage morality. Music might inspire piety or patriotism. Drama, especially in the hands of Dumas and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, might serve to criticize society and so lead to reform.

In the 19th century, however, avant-garde concepts of aesthetics began to challenge traditional views. The change was particularly evident in painting. French Impressionists, such as Claude Monet, denounced academic painters for depicting what they thought they should see rather than what they actually saw—that is, the surfaces of many colours and wavering forms caused by the distorting play of light and shadow as the Sun moves.

In the late 19th century, Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh were more concerned with the structure of a painting and with expressing their own psyches than with representing objects in the world of nature. In the early 20th century this structural interest was developed further by Cubist painters such as Pablo Picasso, and the Expressionist concern was reflected in the work of Henri Matisse and other Fauvists and by the German Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The literary aspects of Expressionism can be seen in the plays of August Strindberg, a Swede, and Frank Wedekind, a German.

Closely connected with these relatively non-representational approaches to art was the principle of “art for art’s sake”, which was derived from Kant’s view that art has its own reason for being. The phrase was first used by the French philosopher Victor Cousin in 1818, and this doctrine, sometimes called aestheticism, was espoused in England by the critic Walter Horatio Pater, by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and by the expatriate American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In France it was the credo of such Symbolist poets as Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, the “art for art’s sake” principle underlies most of avant-garde Western art of the 20th century.