Search results for "Aestheticism"

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Kassner and English Art: A Viennese Look at English Aestheticism

2009

'Aesthetic Controversies?'

2017

International audience; My presentation will be devoted to the study of one remarkable Aesthetic controversy, the ‘Fleshly School of Poetry’ opposing Robert Buchanan, poet and, at the time, literary journalist, and some aesthetes including William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The controversy erupted when Buchanan published a violent attack, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland in the Contemporary Review in 1871, and lasted, I’ll argue, until the early 1880s. This case study is part of a larger project retracing the history of British Aestheticism through the many controversies, scandals and polemics the movement elicited fro…

« ‘Strange Old Italian Dress’: Walter Pater, Victorian Fashionista? »

2017

International audience

‘Strange old Italian dresses’: Walter Pater, Victorian fashionista?

2019

This article discusses Aesthetic dress as conceived by Walter Pater. Indeed in “Leonardo Da Vinci” (1869), the unfinished Gaston de Latour (1888-1894?), “The School of Giorgione” (1877) and “A Prince of Court Painters” (1885), Pater mentions and describes dress with special emphasis on details. Such descriptions belong to a series of writings on Aesthetic dress, admittedly a core component of British Aestheticism. Pater’s descriptions should therefore be contrasted to the 1870s portraits of Whistler, and to the 1880s-1890s writings of Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, along with the caricatures of Aesthetes by George du Maurier and Sir Leslie Ward. Pater responds by progressively deli…

The Politics of Utopia: Walter Pater’s “Lacedaemon”

2016

Walter Pater is not usually considered as a politically committed writer, neither is Aestheticism of which he was the gifted theoretician with The Renaissance (1873). Although the political commitments of the Aesthetic movement have been questioned over the last two decades, both by including women aesthetes, and by re-evaluating the movement’s dissemination among the middle classes, discussion of Pater’s political ideas is almost non-existent. His Plato and Platonism (1893) is however not so remote from politics since it discusses Plato’s political philosophy. In particular, “Lacedaemon”, the chapter devoted to Sparta, enables Pater to intervene in the political debate from an original sta…

‘Georges Duthuit’s Le Rose et le noir : Disseminating Walter Pater’s The Renaissance in the 1920s’

2023

My proposal presents a lesser-known study of Walter Pater published in 1923 (?) by a young undergraduate named Georges Duthuit (1891-1973). Hovering between different subjects, arguments, portraits, and disciplines, Le Rose et le noir was the first book-length publication of Duthuit, at the time having just obtained his Licence d’anglais (BA) in 1921, and about to embark on a career as a distinguished art historian specialized in Byzantine studies. Duthuit soon stood as a distinguished Franco-British mediator in art matters, a committed scholar and administrator and, later in the 1940s, an editor of Transition. He remains arguably an outstanding art historian but I would like to focus on hi…