#Aestheticism

[classicarte]

Détail de « Le Divertissement Musicale », par Hans Makart, ca. 1874.

Detail of "Musical Entertainment", by Hans Makart, ca. 1874.

[dark-longings]

Dante's Inferno, 1967. Ken Russell.

[lionofchaeronea]

The Lady of the Lake Telleth Arthur of the Sword Excalibur. Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley for Book I, Chapter III of Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, published by J.M. Dent and Co. in 1893.

[lucidloving]

Janet Fitch, White Oleander // Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye // Gail Carson Levine, "Fairest" // Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters // Hieu Minh Nguyen, "Pig" // Valentina-Remenar on DeviantArt // Ashe Vernon, Not A Girl

[verademialove]

“I guess when you are young, you believe that you will meet many people with whom you'll connect with, but later in life you realize it only happens a few times.”

Before Sunset (2004)

[7pleiades7]

Acme and Septimius (c. 1868) by Sir Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, PRA (British, 1830-1896), oil on canvas, diameter: 99 cm, The Ashmolean Museum of Art, Oxford

[oscarwildin]

the weather is starting to feel like estranging myself from society and sleeping in a warehouse and walking miles into town until my classmate who i’m secretly in love with and obsessed to a point of unrealistic idealization saves me from dying of hypothermia

[crimson-and-clover-1717]

‘Stede Bonnet, lover of Beauty’

Stede rocks the Aestheticism ideal 150 years before it exists. The movement sought to place beauty for beauty’s sake at the centre of art and literature. It also influenced attitudes towards clothes, furnishings and food as extensions of artistic beauty.

Stede weaves beauty into every aspect of life. His clothing speaks for itself. A library, not just arranged practically, but adorned with both gossamer and red velvet curtains. A ship, not just well-constructed with the finest cherry wood from Brazil, but with secret passageways, chandeliers (two!) and hanging artwork.

Yes, the beauty aesthetic is made possible through wealth, but Stede also finds beauty in the small things. A near-dead plant flourishes in its beauty under Stede’s care. ‘Old food’ is the ‘perfect paperweight’. Even Ed’s modest fish is deemed beautiful. We also see Stede’s influence on Frenchie and Wee John as they explore the aesthetic possibilities for their nook. It’s as much about attitude as money. Ed has ‘more riches than you can shake a stick at’ yet struggles to recognise the necessity of finding and celebrating beauty in everyday life. Self-esteem and class consciousness playing a huge part in this.

A moment on deck exemplifies further beauty found in small things. Stede, a parody of an Edwardian lady in a birds-of-paradise tea-gown. Impractical china tea-cup in hand. This isn’t pageantry. It’s ritual as beauty. Creative self-care. Food as art. And Ed understands the assignment with his milk dollops and excessive sugaring.

We see Ed cling desperately to the beauty of food, clothing and music as creative self-care after Stede’s departure, before eschewing the aesthetic altogether in favour of self-imposed austerity as he enters the Kraken spiral. The removal of beauty and its associated softness, a soul death.

And Stede again. He’s so steeped in Beauty for Beauty’s sake, any attempt at practical cartography gives way to artistic licence (‘Is that Cuba? It’s hard to tell. I’ve drawn it myself’), love poetry and daydream-doodled miniatures. Whilst an abacus is a percussion instrument (‘musical’).

We joke about Ed as the ultimate in Stede’s quest for beauty. But I don’t think Stede ever includes Ed personally in aestheticism (I say more about the objectification of Ed here). It’s not how Stede views people. Ed’s purpose isn’t to be beautiful, he just happens to be beautiful. Ed’s purpose is to be Ed.

Other than that, for Stede, art is everywhere. Beauty in the big and the small things. And ultimate meta? That’s what OFMD is. A whacking great fuck-off piece of beautiful art. It’s creative self-care we can indulge in daily like overly-sugared tea. The cult of Beauty is alive and well, and we’re not going anywhere. Stede would so be a fan of our show. I think Ed would grow to like it too.

[sadsongbird]

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

[noovorous]

I'm lucky to be experiencing prose of Edgar Allan Poe for the first time those days and it strikes me how precise his macabre tales are. How much they are like an essence of a novel, crystalised form of prose just like haiku is of poetry. A complete story, each with it's own characteristic mood, atmosphere, feel, all within more or less ten pages. I know immediately that I will be returning to individual short stories when under influence of a certain caprice, something that is much harder to achieve when looking for a specific paragraph of a novel.

[dark-longings]

Self-Portrait as a Distressed Poet, 1858. Augustus Leopold Egg. 

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Hope Artist: George Frederick Watts (English, 1817-1904) and assistants Date: 1886 Genre: allegory Period: Victorian Movement: Aestheticism Dimensions: 142.2 cm (55.9 in) high x 111.8 cm (44 in) wide Medium: oil on canvas Location: Tate Britain

[chloepiphany]

[The Picture of Gray by Oscar Wilde / Rêverie dans l'atelier by Émile-Louis Foubert]

[verademialove]

“It will rain tomorrow. Then as you wait until the rain stops, live another day. If you keep this up, there might come a day when life doesn’t seem so miserable.”

Lovely Runner (2024)

[goatsandgangsters]

Today's art/literary history lesson is on: Aubrey Beardsley

Beardsley's illustration forms the background for A Power Unbound, which is a cool moment of historical connection and intertextuality

Aubrey Beardsley was a turn-of-the-century artist who was part of the Aesthetic/Decadent movements that challenged Victorian social norms in art and literature. Queerness and eroticism were significant components of these movements, which often incorporated sensation, transgression, and sexuality.

Beardsley's art was considered provocative for its use of the grotesque, the sexual, and the androgynous. (Notably, he drove his editors bonkers by always hiding dicks and other phallic silhouettes in his art.)

Beardsley was the art editor for The Yellow Book, a literary journal printed in the 1890s. It was so named because of its intentionally garish yellow cover, which was meant to mimic the style of lewd French texts.

However, Beardsley is probably best remembered today for his illustrations that accompanied Oscar Wilde's controversial play Salomé. Although Wilde himself was not involved with The Yellow Book, his association with Beardsley through Salomé was so well known that The Yellow Book forced Beardsley out of his position as art editor following Wilde's trial; The Yellow Book did not last much longer after that. Aestheticism overall suffered in the wake of Wilde's trial specifically because of its association with Wilde and queer, transgressive artists.

But, given Beardsley's artistic ethos and the inextricable queerness of those movements as a whole, Beardsley's Decadent art is a fitting choice for the cover of A Power Unbound—which is itself a celebration of unapologetically queer and sexual art (and features its own lewd publications with notably colored covers 😉).

--

If you're interested in Beardsley or Decadence/Aestheticism and want to read more, here's a reference list (I'm happy to share PDFs—just let me know!): 

Kaye, Richard. 2019. “Aestheticism and Decadence, Nineteenth-Century.” In Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History: A-F.

Glick, Elisa. 2014. “Turn-of-the-Century Decadence and Aestheticism.” In The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature, 325–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139547376.023.

Brake, Laurel. 2013. “Aestheticism and Decadence: The Yellow Book (1894–7), The Chameleon (1894), and The Savoy (1896).” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199654291.003.0006

Denisoff, Dennis. 2007. “Decadence and Aestheticism.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, 31–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521850636.003

[oscarwildin]

i am nothing in my soul if not obsessive