The aesthetic adventure

by Wlliam Gaunt

1945. No Edition Remarks. 269 pages. No dust jacket. Grey cloth. Binding remains firm. Pages are lightly tanned throughout. Previous owner's inscriptions to endpapers and rear pastedown. Water staining to some pages, text remains unaffected. Boards have moderate shelf-wear with bumping to corners and rubbing to surfaces. Light tanning to spine and edges with crushing to spine ends. Staining overall.

Genres: Art, British Literature

224 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1945

Reviews

[Isidore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful introduction to artistic ideologies of the late nineteenth century. Emphasis is on English developments, although the French background to these ideas is sketched in. A number of representative individuals are singled out for closer examination, but this is a history of ideas, not personalities; similarly, there is little here about individual works of art, the focus being on what artists thought. Although the visual arts are central to the discussion, Gaunt does not slight literature, with Swinburne, Wilde and a few others getting special scrutiny. He does not discuss the Symbolist movement or Art Nouveau in any detail.

In a previous volume Gaunt had covered the Pre-Raphaelites; here they are seen as an appealing but waning force, bested by the advent of "aestheticism", a package of attitudes ranging from the obvious ("art for art's sake") to the less well-known (contempt for the masses, self-absorption, social cruelty). Gaunt does a splendid job of explaining why the aesthetes were seen as repulsive by both progressives and conservatives. Since most historians blindly favour the aesthetes, I found this a fascinating corrective. The book is vividly written, and nearly every page furnishes insights which provide invaluable context to artistic creations of the period.

Parenthetically, I've been copying out an important letter from Lovecraft to the publisher of
Weird Tales which surfaced recently, and it's startling to note that the artistic credo he lays out therein reflects almost verbatim the pronouncements of English aesthetes of the 1880s and 90s. It seems to me that Lovecraft cherished those ideals in the abstract more than he successfully applied them in his writings. But it's interesting that (according to Gaunt) later practitioners of aestheticism developed an intentional crudity, even savagery, in their work, as they relinquished their predecessors' focus on atmosphere in favour of penetrating to a Truth behind surface appearances; Is it reasonable to consider Lovecraft as representing a similar sort of transitional figure, between the subtle Edwardian masters of atmosphere and the philosophical bleakness and visceral horror of modern weird fiction?

[Evan Milner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Aesthetic Adventure could hardly be bettered as an account of the Aesthetic Movement and adjacent artistic trends (the pre-Raphaelites, impressionism, post-impressionism, etc.) Gaunt depicts the many intersecting communities and schools of art as part of a broader cultural movement that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. While the narrative’s dominant figure is probably James Whistler, all the major and minor personalities of the aesthetic scene make an appearance. 
Furthermore, despite being an art critic by trade, Gaunt is just as interested in the contributions of critics, novelists, and poets: thus Swinburne, Ruskin, George Moore, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Roger Fry are just as central to his story as Whistler, Manet, Degas, Walter Sickert, and Aubrey Beardsley.

Gaunt is a knowledgeable and entertaining guide. His wry tone is the perfect backdrop for his colourful cast of misfits, charlatans, deviants, and self-proclaimed geniuses to display their charm, viciousness, affectation, pretentiousness and, not least, their very considerable talent.

It is worth remembering that, when The Aesthetic Adventure was written, many of the artists and movements it deals with had been out of vogue for a considerable time and had yet to be reevaluated by posterity. That said, the only thing that dates the book (it was originally published in 1945) is the occasional racial epithet and the moral conventions of 1940s Britain which, while far advanced from those of fifty years earlier, nevertheless allow for such formulations as "the repulsion that the normal person feels towards unnatural behaviour", the unnatural behaviour in question being Wilde's sex life. Still, the author himself is no moralist and his sympathetic treatment of Wilde's persecution is deeply moving.

The final result is a book that, better than any other I know, recreates the cultural climate of a time when seemingly innocuous paintings like Whistler's Nocturnes aroused visceral anger and disgust; when a phrase like "art for art's sake" evoked sinister implications of sin and transgression; and when a flamboyant choice of hat was interpreted by many as something akin to a call for revolution.

Exceptional.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun and insightful; and I finally found out what drove Monet to London... of course, it was the Franco-Prussian war. Gaunt tracks the people who visited Paris in the late 1800s, searching for something more, and their return to London having seen Degas, Monet - having read Gautier, Huysmans... and the challenges they then mounted against to Victorianism, and the establishment's outrage. It interesting how many of those were somewhat rootless, somewhat adrift - such as Moore, the Irish landlord; Wilde; Whistler, the unhappy American. Of course, it ends with the new art of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin - and inspiring the old revolutionaries' outrage, in turn. The destabilising shock of the new.

[Juan Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

De escándalo es la traducción. :-S