Speaker A
The way in which the aesthetic movement emerged is really fascinating and complicated.
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Speaker A
You have to think back to the Great Exhibition in 1851, and a lot of people at that time felt that what was on show there was somehow ugly and meretricious.
Speaker A
A lot of goods made by machinery, artists somehow felt that beauty had got lost.
Speaker A
The prime movers in the aesthetic movement are absolutely artists, poets and designers.
Speaker A
We're thinking of people like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who'd been one of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Speaker A
But who by the 1860s had moved on, was exploring, looking for a new kind of beauty.
Speaker A
Painters like Lord Leighton with his grandiose ideas of classical imagery.
Speaker B
Leighton was born in 1830 and he rose to become the President of the Royal Academy.
Speaker B
And probably the most eminent artist of his day.
Speaker B
He lived here for 30 years.
Speaker B
He started building in the mid-1860s and he was still working on it.
Speaker B
Almost at the time of his death.
Speaker B
So what started off as quite a modest house became what was described as a private palace of art.
Speaker B
And I suppose what is also so noticeable about it as a piece of architecture.
Speaker B
Is that it draws its influences from such a wide range of sources.
Speaker B
So it's partly Italian Renaissance, partly the architecture of the Near East.
Speaker B
So it was a very eclectic set of sources, but brought together as this one artistic or aesthetic statement.
Speaker A
The key thing about the aesthetic movement is that it didn't just present a single picture on one hand.
Speaker A
A single piece of furniture.
Speaker A
The key to it was the way in which things were brought together, the assembling of the complete room with all its decorative elements.
Speaker A
All the beautiful objects in it became an expression of taste and of cultivation.
Speaker A
And we still have that.
Speaker A
I think as a basis of how we live.
Speaker A
Another fascinating thing about the aesthetic movement is the way it develops over the few decades from the 1860s.
Speaker A
From the first group of friends, it extends out to include painters like Burne-Jones.
Speaker A
But other figures come in like Oscar Wilde.
Speaker C
Oscar Wilde was really the pin-up boy for the aesthetic movement.
Speaker C
He was an Oxford undergraduate at the time that aesthetic ideas were starting to infiltrate public consciousness.
Speaker C
And he immediately sort of turned himself into the celebrity who was associated with aesthetic ideas.
Speaker C
And I think all that early experimentation in the 1860s and 70s with aesthetic ideals allowed Oscar Wilde to become the man who so celebrated and so famous and infamous today.
Speaker A
I think one of the intriguing things is that the aesthetic movement actually looked back to the art of the past.
Speaker A
And particularly perhaps to Renaissance painting where manly beauty was every bit as important as female beauty.
Speaker A
It had this extraordinary effect of creating a new kind of fashion in which the peacock male could dress flamboyantly.
Speaker C
I think people argue about what the characteristics of a dandy are.
Speaker C
It's about an attitude towards life that that's based on an understanding of elegance.
Speaker C
So that surface, the way you behave, the way you appear to others becomes much more important than what you actually do.
Speaker C
I think men involved in the aesthetic movement who tended to be artists or people associated with the artistic life.
Speaker C
The way they dressed was a sort of badge of belonging, belonging to the aesthetic gang.
Speaker C
So it was a very bohemian way of dressing.
Speaker A
One of the fascinating things is the way in which painters had enormous effect, not just on their art.
Speaker A
But on the way people looked because people wanted to look like the pictures.
Speaker A
Painters like Leighton particularly and Rossetti especially sought out models of very unconventional beauty.
Speaker A
So Rossetti's early paintings of Elizabeth Siddal, for example, with her very pale skin but red hair.
Speaker A
Was an extraordinary choice at that time.
Speaker A
She would have been considered not just not beautiful, she would have been considered possibly even ugly.
Speaker A
By the standards of the day.
Speaker A
It's the the power of art which transforms the look.
Speaker D
The history of red hair for both men and women is complex.
Speaker D
But really the change in attitude towards them.
Speaker D
Came about with the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
Speaker D
Who was very important in that was Elizabeth Siddal, you know, really erroneously called the first supermodel.
Speaker D
But she was certainly the first in in Britain famous artist's model.
Speaker D
At a time when their their their role was ambiguous really.
Speaker D
By the time we begin the the 20th century, the the idea of red hair as being beautiful.
Speaker D
And socially and morally acceptable is established.
Speaker D
And that really begins with Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal.
Speaker A
I think that in fact actually many of the ideas and styles continued with some degree of popularity.
Speaker A
Probably up until the First World War.
Speaker C
As the 20th century moves on after the Second World War, we get a re-emergence of ideas of peacock dressing in the 1960s.
Speaker C
When men again, young men feel comfortable with their sexuality, with expressing their identity through flamboyant clothes.
Speaker C
So it's almost a hundred years later that we get a new interest in the aesthetic movement.
Speaker C
And that's reflected in new ways of dressing.
Speaker A
In a much more broad way, it's really intriguing that the ideas of the aesthetic movement, the idea that art is of great importance.
Speaker A
The idea that art should be as it were severed from notions of morality, that pictures don't have to preach or tell stories.
Speaker A
Is actually fundamental to the whole development of the 20th century.
Speaker A
And and remains with us today.
Speaker A
The aesthetic movement gave us an absolutely lasting legacy of suggesting the primacy of art.
Speaker A
The importance of art in everyday life.
Speaker A
This notion that beauty should inform everything we do, all the ways in which we live.
Speaker A
Is absolutely crucial, you can say effectively that the aesthetic movement was the first lifestyle revolution.
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