Beyond the Victorian Modernist Divide: Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in Literature, Culture and the Visual Arts by Gillard-Estrada Anne-Florence Besnault-Levita Anne

Author:Gillard-Estrada, Anne-Florence,Besnault-Levita, Anne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

However, these values had already been a concern for many Aesthetic artists – even though they never adopted a plastic language as innovative as that of Post-Impressionism. Richmond had indeed lamented that “[n]either form nor colour in the abstract appeals directly to northern sensibilities when they are disengaged from episode” (Richmond 465–466). He in fact wanted his British contemporaries to detach themselves from the dogmas of subject and illustration. He had experimented with Aesthetic formalism in his Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon of 1874:1 the illustration of Aeschylus’s Choephori is turned into a purely Aesthetic arrangement of lines and colours. The composition is based on the rhythmic play of geometrical lines, with symmetrical female figures, two standing on and flanking a stele, and two other sitting at its base. The whole disposition emphasizes the horizontal lines of the steps and frame as well as the vertical lines of the monument, tree trunks, and figures, while this overall linearity is balanced by numerous curves. Thanks to the limited palette of secondary and complementary colours (orange, green, and brown), the general effect is therefore one of “visual music,” to take up Fry’s expression, even though the mood is one of melancholy and sadness – a feature of many Aesthetic paintings. Richmond belonged to what many contemporary art critics, reviewers, and journalists referred to as the “classical” school – which loosely regrouped a number of academic painters who revived themes and iconographical sources drawn from Greco-Roman antiquity while pursuing Aesthetic formalist experiments.

The academic valorisation of Greek models blended with the Aesthetic vocabulary of formalism. “Greek” forms, drawn from sculptures, vases, and friezes of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., were envisaged as an artistic ideal. They were noble and pure because they entailed subjectlessness and universality. Painters like Leighton, Albert Moore, Edward Burne-Jones, or George Frederic Watts believed that Greek models provided them with an idealized and decontextualized human form. They were deeply influenced by Winckelmann’s or Hegel’s discourses on Greek statuary as well as by Kant’s privileging of form.2 Thus, many contemporary artists and critics lauded the “abstract” qualities of Greek forms, which meant that they were abstracted from the contemporary and that their beauty could be appreciated for its own sake, that is, for their harmonious combination of line, shapes, and colour. The reference to the ideality of Greek forms accorded with the Aesthetic privileging of form over subject. In a letter he sent to the art critic J. Comyns Carr in 1873, Leighton evoked the abstractness of Greek forms:

By degrees, however, my growing love for Form … led me more and more to a class of subjects, or, more accurately, to a set of conditions, in which the supreme scope is left to pure artistic qualities … These conditions classic subjects afford, and as vehicles, therefore, of abstract form which is a thing not of one time but of all time, these subjects can never be obsolete.

(Carr 98)

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