If you’re crossing the Channel this summer, there are two not-to-be-missed exhibitions in the English capital.
The Cult of Beauty – The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 at the Victoria & Albert Museum explores the English Aesthetic Movement, whose most famous exponent was Oscar Wilde. Described as the most comprehensive exhibition ever presented on this key movement of the late 19th century, it offers a particularly exhaustive overview, from its beginnings to its decline, through masterpieces covering all the movement’s fields of action, brought together for the first time.
The Aesthetic Movement, born in reaction to the Victorian establishment, was also the first artistic movement to extend far beyond the plastic arts. The Aesthetes placed art and the pleasure of beautiful things above all else, so their modes of expression, far from being limited to painting and sculpture, also included furniture, architecture, fashion and literature. The watchword was Art for Art’s sake, the ultimate goal being to live in an environment saturated with beauty. Interior design then experienced an unprecedented boom, in a style strongly influenced by the arts of ancient Greece and modern Japan. The influence of this aesthetic movement can be seen even on wallpaper, with its characteristic water lily and peacock feather motifs.
The exhibition explores all these facets, as well as the fascinating personalities at the heart of the movement, from William Morris to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Mcneill Whistler, Frederic Leighton, Edward Burnes-Jones, and of course Oscar Wilde. It traces the development of the movement from the romantic bohemia of a small circle of avant-gardists in the 1860s to the immense cultural phenomenon it had become, before entering its natural phase of decline at the end of the century.
Featuring over 250 works from public and private collections, the exhibition is organized chronologically into four sections: The Search for a New Beauty, Art for Art’s sake, Beautiful People and Aesthetic Houses and Late Flowering Beauty. Quite a program!
Organized in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, The Cult of Beauty – The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 will then move to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris for a few months.
The Cult of Beauty – The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 / V&A Museum / 2nd April-17th July /
www.vam.ac.uk/cultofbeauty
The second must-see exhibition this summer is, of course, the Joan Miró retrospective at Tate Modern. André Breton, leader of the Surrealist movement, once declared Miró “the most Surrealist of us all”. The poetry of Miró’s work is far beyond aestheticism or reason, and his imagination knows no bounds.
Joan Miró – The Ladder of Escape, in reference to one of the titles most often used for his paintings, brings together some of the Catalan painter’s most important works, from La Ferme, considered by the painter himself to be a key work, to the Constellations series.
Beyond the wonder of seeing works of such importance brought together in the same space, the strength of this exhibition lies in its ability to show how deeply Miró was rooted in his time, and how political events, from the Spanish Civil War to May 68, as well as changes in society and the debates of the time, had an impact on his work.
The exhibition follows the painter’s entire career, from his native Catalonia, Montroig, and his more figurative yet dreamlike canvases, to the last hours of Franco’s reign and his monumental canvases, and of course the Parisian Surrealist experience, so liberating – and foundational – to his art.
Joan Miró lived to see the fall of the Franco regime, after the dictator’s death, and Spain’s transition to democracy. When he was made Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Barcelona, in his beloved Catalonia, in 1979, he spoke of the artist’s responsibility to society:“I conceive of the artist as one who, in the midst of the silence of others, uses his own voice and makes sure that what he says is not useless, but benefits humanity.” A vision more relevant than ever. In short, run and fly to the Miró retrospective, and feast your eyes, heart and soul.
Joan Miró – The Ladder of Escape / Tate Modern / April 14-September 11 / www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/joanmiro/
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