aestheticism and decadence

The philosophical foundations of Aestheticism

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that studies the principles of beauty, especially in art. Artists and writers of the aesthetic movement believed that art should provide pleasure to the senses instead of moral messages.

The aesthetic movement greatly influenced Oscar Wilde’s life and Dorian’s life. In the 1800s, during the Victorian era, the aesthetic movement became a popular social

attitude opposed to traditional Victorian values which saw art as a tool to educate and

teach principles and morals, instead of being only for the purpose of enjoyment.

Wilde became a major proponent of the Aesthetic and Decadent movements.

"I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things; there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction. I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me. I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy; a man of fashion. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others, I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has someday to cry aloud on the house-tops. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.” (De Profundis, 1897)

"ART FOR ART'S SAKE"

the artist and his task

The Aesthete believed that Form was the essence of Beauty and Beauty was the highest perfection of human endeavours. The Aesthetic writers broke away from the confining conventions of their time and led very unconventional lives, pursuing pleasure and new sensations and devoting themselves to the cult of beauty and art.

The task of the artist was to feel sensations, to be attentive to the attractive, and to the beauty. The artist was seen as a transcriber "not of the world, the mere fact, but of his sense of it". The main implication of this new position was that art had no refernce to life, and therefore had nothing to do with moralit and did not need to be didactic.

The English essayist Walter Pater, an advocate of "art for art's sake"; helped to form

Wilde';s humanistic aesthetics in which he was more concerned with the individual, the

self, than with popular movements like Industrialism or Capitalism.

Art was not meant to instruct and should not concern itself with social, moral, or political

guidance.

Like Baudelaire, Wilde advocated freedom from moral restraint and the limitations of

society.

This point of view contradicted Victorian convention in which the arts were supposed to

be spiritually uplifting and instructive.

Wilde went a step further and stated that the artist's life was even more important than

any work that he produced; his life was to be his most important body of work.

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THE BIRTH OF THE

AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

The aesthetic movment developed in the universities and intellectual circles in the last deccade of the 19th century. It began in France and it reflected the sense of frustration and uncertainty of the artist, his reaction against the materialsm and therestrictive moral code of the society, in particular the artist's need to redefine the role of art. As a result, artists withdrew from the political context and "escaped" into aesthetic isolation, and into whatTheophile Gautier defined "ART FOR ART'S SAKE"

Dorian's death

OSCARD WILDE

"Half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was. He had often told the girl whom he had lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. He had told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him and answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly."

"It seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped--blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. Confess? Did it mean that he was to confess? To give himself up and be put to death? He laughed. He felt that the idea was monstrous. Besides, even if

he did confess, who would believe him?"

THE PAINTER'S STUDIO

-Born in Dublin in 1854.

-He won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford.

-He was attracted by the Aesthetic Movement.

-He won the reputation of the most refined and provoking of the ‘aesthetic young men’ in London.

-He became the leader of the Aesthetic Movement.

LITERALY SUCCESS:

-The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)

-A House of Pomegranates (1891)

-The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

"In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures."

"It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done"; said Lord Henry languidly.

";A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and

make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion"

"I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it"

THEPICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

The Picture of Dorian Gray, moral fantasy novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde, published in an early form in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. The novel, the only one written by Wilde, had six additional chapters when it was released as a book in 1891. The work, an archetypal tale of a young man who purchases eternal youth at the expense of his soul, was a romantic exposition of Wilde’s own Aestheticism.

AESTHETICISM AND DECADENCE