The Commentary

Apart from a few fascinating lectures with colour slides from Quentin Bell at Sussex University back in the mists of time, and reading Rookmaaker’s classic book Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, I am not much versed in the visual arts.

However, for my birthday this year I found myself being taken along to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum to view a special exhibition. It is titled ‘The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900’ and remains open until July 17. It proved an interesting jaunt, not least from seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber with a couple of friends shuffling along with the rest of us punters past the exhibits.

Taming the beasts

The period covered by the exhibition is the 40 years following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which, along with German higher criticism, had done much to undermine Christianity among the English middle-classes. Perhaps the Aesthetic Movement can be seen as an attempt to create some kind of non-religious ‘faith’. It was a coming together of artists like Rossetti from the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris of the Arts and Crafts Movement and others like James MacNeill Whistler to create a cult of beauty. Beauty was seen as carrying the possibility of lifting mankind out of barbarity and bringing meaning to life. I suppose that vision is best articulated by a very wide painting which you meet early in the exhibition entitled ‘The Syracusan Bride leading wild beasts in procession to the Temple of Diana’ by Frederic Leighton, painted in 1865/6. Here the gorgeous bride and her bridesmaids are seen walking with leopards, lions and tigers fawning on them as if their bestial instincts have been pacified and tamed by the presence of feminine beauty.

The social impact of the Aesthetic Movement was to bring art and style into the homes of people. They created artistic furniture and decoration of rooms. ‘Artists’ houses and their extravagant lifestyles became the object of public fascination and sparked a revolution in architecture and interior decoration of houses that led to a widespread recognition of the need of beauty in everyday life.’ The roots of Homebase and Ikea?

But this gospel of beauty was a failure. First, though the exhibition guide touts the movement as a reaction against materialism, it obviously led people back into materialism. What else could ‘the ideal home’ do? Second, the artistic / poetic temperament which it sought to promote was inherently foppish and was rightly satirised by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience and caricatured by Punch. We smiled at a brilliant poster of a young moustachioed effete observing sunflowers and exclaiming, ‘Quite too, utterly, utterly!’ (imagine the accent). Third, art cannot cure the sinful psyche of man. Just 14 years after 1900, the horrors of WWI burst upon Europe. Hearts which can manufacture such destruction require a much deeper redemption than that which the arts might effect.

Bunyan’s church

In one cabinet was a copy of The House Beautiful by the American Clarence Cook, published in 1877. It consists of a series of articles about tasteful home furnishings. I thought of House Beautiful in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, where the weary traveller found refreshing spiritual converse with Prudence, Piety and Charity and was armed for the fight with Apollyon. It is Bunyan’s allegory of a good local Christian congregation. We decorate our homes. But do we make our churches beautiful? Not by way of interior design but by way of Christian virtues? Christian people full of love, assurance, humility and joy in Christ are very attractive.

But too many congregations are sadly dour and bitterly divided.

The house beautiful

Taming the beasts

Bunyan’s church

John Benton

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