Socialization of the Beautiful and Valorization of the Useful: The Decorative Arts in France, from the Utopias of 1848 to Art Nouveau

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century, “l’art social,” a campaign to extend aesthetic values throughout French society, found its clearest application in the field of the decorative arts and manufactured goods for the domestic interior. The institutional context of this debate was the Union centrale des arts décoratifs, whose publications and exhibitions presented differing views on the status of the decorative arts and on the standards of design education. The debate engaged many prominent intellectuals and figures in French public life, including Georges Berger, Antonin Proust, Pedro Rioux de Maillou, Charles Henry, Paul Souriau, Sully Prudhomme, Gabriel Tarde, Jean-Marie Guyau, and Eugène Grasset, laying the basis of an approach to both aesthetics and training in the decorative arts based upon geometry that had an impact on design values into the twentieth century.