Aestheticism on the Cheap: Decorative Art, Art Criticism, and Cheap Paper in the 1890s

Abstract

The interdependence of art and art journalism, particularly gallery reviews, was entrenched by the middle-nineteenth century as a result of the influential writings of John Ruskin — which claimed a vital role for the visual arts in British culture — and the founding of periodicals ranging from the Athenaeum in 1828 and Art Journal in 1839 to the Illustrated London News in 1842, which featured lavishly illustrated coverage of Royal Academy exhibitions in the form of engravings.1 With the emergence of aestheticism rather than Ruskinian moral principles as the standard applied to the visual arts, the relation of word to text, and of art to writing about art, altered because the relation of decorative to ‘high’ art also changed. Decorative arts were now seen on a continuum with painting, sculpture, and architecture, whether in a manifesto like William Morris’s Hopes and Fears for Art (1882), in the larger Arts and Crafts movement that Morris did so much to influence, 2 or in the bold interventions of James McNeill Whistler (discussed below). This new role for decorative art spurred attempts to create total aesthetic environments and also abetted the explosion in cultural industries ranging from furnishings and gardening to the book arts. The Kelmscott Press was one result, and fin-de-siecle periodicals were another, whether the Scots Observer and Scottish Art Review, given high production values by printer Walter B. Blaikie (Connell 138–40, Mavor Vol. I, 235), or the Yellow Book, which was likewise dedicated to printing as a fine art and gave equal billing (and hence stature) to its letter and art press rather than subordinating art to an illustrative function (Mix 73).