THE AESTHETIC ADVENTURE—William Gaunt—Harcourt, Brace ($3).
When Commodore Perry sailed into the harbor of Yokohama in 1854, he had no idea that he was contributing to a new esthetic movement in Europe. The pottery and ornaments which the Japanese began to export after Perry's visit were often wrapped in the Japanese equivalent of old newspapers—sheets of popular prints engraved by native artists. Within a few years, Parisian poets and painters were ransacking Japanese packing cases as though the crumpled prints inside were an accidental answer to an occidental prayer. For the prints were a pat expression of a slogan that was sweeping France: art pour l'art—art for art's sake.
What this slogan meant, how it took root in France and invaded England, is the theme of this witty, intelligent history. Packed with anecdotes and character sketches of 19th-Century French and British bohemians, The Aesthetic Adventure is a fine companion piece to Author Gaunt's earlier, excellent account of The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (TIME, Sept. 21, 1942).
Art for art's sake reached Britain at the height of her prosperity. Painters, buyers and art critics were flourishing as never before (or since) in a happy bond of mutual agreement. On the broad walls of well-to-do Victorian homes hung immense canvases which told stories that were easily understood and appreciated—the capture of a dishonest bank clerk at a crowded railroad station, Derby Day, a bearded doctor's vigil at the bedside of a sick child, a sailor's sweetheart gazing across the ocean. Most of these painted short stories had a helpful moral.
"Don't Bother Me!" Such forthright esthetic aims filled the new generation of esthetes with scorn and contempt. By 1870, a furious, no-quarter battle was under way that lasted until the century's end. To the artistic rebels, the oldtime Victorian painter kowtowed to an ignorant, over-sentimental public. He also debased the sanctity of art by making line and form play second fiddle to maudlin subject matter and moss-backed morality.
The Japanese, said the rebels, were among those who knew better. Their exquisite prints had no truck with either nature or morals. Drawn with "uncanny delicacy," they were "as strange and detached from everyday life as if they had dropped from the moon." The figures in them were black-haired dolls" ... expressionless, self-satisfied, self-sufficient. This was art for art's sake—in which the painter recognized that natural subjects simply existed. "No poem," declared Poet Charles Baudelaire, a pioneer in the new movement, "is so great, so noble ... as that which has been written simply for the pleasure of writing a poem." "Don't bother me!" snapped the great Edouard Degas when he was asked to exhibit his work. "Is painting meant to be looked at?"