The three museums that hosted The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900 appeared to be staging three different exhibitions. Curators Stephen Calloway at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and Yves Badetz at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris championed the late blooming “decadent” aspect of the Aesthetic Movement that the Victorians derided, contending that it was the definitive expression of an aesthetic disposition. Calloway’s curatorial selections and catalogue essays highlighted sensuous works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, and Aubrey Beardsley, among others. Unlike Badetz, however, he recreated period rooms and crowded the V&A’s exhibition galleries with the wares of designers mined from its rich store of decorative and applied arts (see his essay in the exhibition catalogue, “‘Tired Hedonists’: The Decadence of the Aesthetic Movement,” 224–35; see also Stephen Calloway, Divinely Decadent, London: Mitchell Beazley, 2001; and Aubrey Beardsley, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998).¹ Badetz chose to give even more prominence to the provocative expressions of the Decadence, setting the tone with Frederic Leighton’s homoerotic sculpture, The Sluggard (1882–85), at the entry to the exhibition and sprinkling the gallery walls with quotations by Oscar Wilde. Accordingly, he changed the name of the Paris exhibition to Beauté, morale et volupté dans l’Angleterre d’Oscar Wilde and issued a separate catalogue with essays on Wilde and Beardsley.² Lynn Federle Orr at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, on the other hand, took issue with this position, arguing that the decadent phase of the Aesthetic Movement was “self-indulgent and self-destructive . . . tainted the Aesthetic project,” and hindered “its role as a crucial step in the late-nineteenth-century movement toward modernity” (exhibition catalogue, 36 and 37). Trained as a scholar of seventeenth-century classicism, she stressed the formalist elements in Aesthetic Movement paintings and designs as precursors to modernism and emphasized its innovations in the context of Victorian social and cultural reforms. The result was three very distinct installations that shared most of the same objects but altered their effect according to the individual agendas of the curators at each location.

The Cult of Beauty was eight years in the planning. It was initiated by Orr who first became interested in the Aesthetic Movement long before when she was a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Although her dissertation was entitled “Classical Elements in the Painting of Caravaggio” (1982), she did an independent study course on the Pre-Raphaelites and was struck by their similarity to Baroque artists in regard to technique and evocative mood. In her subsequent role as curator of European art at the Legion of Honor, she developed a wish list of loans and was finally given the opportunity to stage a major exhibition when the Victoria and Albert Museum agreed to participate. With Calloway acting as co-curator, The Cult of Beauty was launched in London in April 2011.

Orr, however, opted not to recreate the V&A’s multimedia presentation of recorded poetry and wall-projected design motifs. She was more interested in integrating Aestheticism’s various media rather than singling out individual designers as at the V&A. Orr linked visual elements in paintings to fabric and furniture motifs and wall coverings, taking her cue from William Morris’s wallpaper sample book (author interview with Lynn Federle Orr, June 11, 2012). For instance, in the gallery “Artistic Workmen: Rossetti, Morris and Friends,” the entry wall was papered with Morris’s Willow pattern whose olive green shade was repeated on the remaining walls and in the peacock feather fans in two paintings: Frederick Leighton’s Pavonia (1858) and George Watts’s Study with Peacock Feathers (ca. 1862–65). In an arrangement titled “Aesthetic Classicism,” an armchair with Greek motifs designed by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was placed near Leighton’s enormous Syracusian Bride (1865–66). This pattern was echoed in the other galleries where Orr continued to focus on formal relationships. Colors or lines in paintings resonated with those of furniture, ceramics, screens, or other objects throughout the ten galleries of the San Francisco exhibition.

Formal associations were only part of a larger agenda in San Francisco. In attempting to make a case for the incipient modernism of Aestheticism, Orr also addressed the societal changes in Great Britain that enabled its artistic advances. This was made clear in the entrée foyer where a photo blowup of a bleak Victorian industrial scene was contrasted with James Tissot’s Spring (1878), a painting featuring a woman in a loose-fitting Aesthetic gown holding a Japanese fan who represented the Movement’s reforms: the rejection of moralizing and the celebration of beauty in art and life. The second gallery reinforced Aestheticism’s reformist goal where a large photograph of the stodgy displays at the Great Exhibition in 1855 was a foil for Owen Jones’s and Christopher Dresser’s innovative designs. Rather than appearing pedantic, these pairings underlined the extent to which the modernizing efforts of the designers represented in the succeeding galleries deviated from the Victorian norm.

Modernism, as I have argued elsewhere, was the product of the interplay of indigenous values with criteria internal to its own artistic practice and should be assessed in relation to its own time and place (Dianne Sachko Macleod, “The Dialectics of Modernism and English Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 35, no. 1 [January 1995]: 1–14). The prevailing modernist narrative gives preeminence to France, yet when the Pre-Raphaelite artists, who laid the foundation of Aestheticism, were invited to exhibit their paintings at the Exposition Universelle in 1855, they received rave reviews for their “originality of thought—originality of tint—originality of treatment” (Journal l’Union, May 25, 1855; cited in Macleod, 5). Rather than opting to reject academic tradition as the Impressionists were soon to do, they chose to mediate between past and present. The Pre-Raphaelite painters adopted the simplified form, detail, and highly finished surfaces of early Renaissance artists such as Fra Angelico, unlike their French colleagues who chose to express their dissatisfaction with their Beaux-Arts masters by disrupting the pristine picture plane with painterly facture. Whereas in France the avant-garde perceived the work ethic as the enemy of inventiveness and originality, in England artists such as William Holman Hunt extolled its virtues. Thus the modernist enterprise in both countries was based on entirely different cultural fields and set of values.

It was the visible evidence of labor in the paintings of the English avant-garde that attracted a devoted coterie of middle-class collectors who financed their experiments. As businessmen they were reassured by the evidence of highly finished surfaces that the artists they supported shared their work ethic. Yet at the same time, these anxiety-ridden merchants and manufacturers welcomed the opportunity to escape from the pressures of the marketplace into a world of beauty and aesthetic contemplation. Given the important role they played in keeping Aesthetic artists afloat, it is surprising that these collectors were barely acknowledged at any of The Cult of Beauty’s locations or in its exhibition catalogue, despite the fact that much ado was made about the beneficial influence of the Aesthetic Movement on middle-class taste. Only Frederick Leyland is represented by a photo blowup of the Peacock Room in his home which James McNeill Whistler painted in his absence and without his permission. Missing in action were the numerous collectors who had more harmonious relationships with artists: the lead manufacturer James Leathart, banker George Rae, and cotton and tea merchant William Graham were all devotées of Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and several of the younger painters in their circle who all relied on their steady support.

This quibble aside, The Cult of Beauty was a landmark exhibition, one that brought together an impressive selection of Aesthetic paintings and artifacts that are rarely displayed together. The project also provides a fascinating insight into how curatorial prerogatives can shape the viewer’s experience. This is not simply a matter of individual subjectivity but points to the subjectivity of modernism itself, which remains a work in progress and still open to constant redefinition a century and a half after its inception.