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Art for Art's Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, by Elizabeth Prettejohn; pp. xi + 343. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, $65.00, £35.00.
In Art for Art's Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting Elizabeth Prettejohn has produced an erudite, solidly researched volume devoted to painters and critics who contributed to Aestheticism-a term whose embrace she has enlarged to include truly diverse practices. Early on, she explains her approach. In discussing "Two Early Aesthetic Pictures" (John Everett Millais's Autumn Leaves [1855-56] and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blue Closet [1856-57]), she "deploy[s] two quite different methods to explore the genesis of Aestheticism, which might be called aesthetic and historical, respectively, or Kantian and Hegelian" (34). Indeed, Kantian and Hegelian approaches generate much, if not all, of the book's progress.
Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790) provides, with qualifications, one source of aestheticism. "In the founding text of modern Western aesthetics," she writes, "statements of the kind 'x is beautiful' are entirely subjective. They refer to the feeling of pleasure in the judging subject when she is contemplating x. . . . It follows that judgements of taste are always singular and can never be generalized" (17-18). It follows also that they are "free" judgements.
Yet it is seldom in practice that we respond to an object without moral, political, or social considerations. Moreover, from the artist's point of view, "the very intention to make a work of art . . . constitutes a guiding concept" (18). Kant's way out of this impasse was "to invoke the notion of 'genius,' a quality innate in creative artists that . . . supersedes the premeditated quality of art making" (19). Prettejohn, however, is uncomfortable with the...