After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (Critical Perspectives in Art History) - Softcover

What happened in Victorian painting and sculpture after the pre-Raphaelites? Aestheticism has been called the next avant-garde movement but attention has centred on literary figures such as Algernon Charles Swinburn, Walter Peter and Oscar Wilde. This volume overviews parallel trends in the visual arts, including the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeil Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, Simeon Solomon and Albert Moore among others. Victorian Aestheticism has often been treated as a fivolous elevation of art above the concerns of political and social life. It is reinterpreted here as a significant exploration of what it might mean to produce works of art in the modern world. The chapters address not only "art for art's sake" but linkages with the realms of science and morality. A major concern is the relationship between art and sexuality, from the experiments of the Rossetti circle in the 1860s to the male nude in late-Victorian sculpture. Both homosexual and heterosexual eroticism emerge as key issues in the artistic debates of the late-Victorian period.