Aestheticism: The Aesthetic Movement

“There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of the real evil” (Wilde,115). The author reveals pleasure as the driving force of many characters within Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, but this search for pleasure becomes fatal once taken into the hands of Dorian Gray. Throughout the novel Dorian Gray changes his opinion on pleasure based on what he requires in order to escape reality. With each death and misdeed he is responsible for; Dorian must search harder for a more drastic form of release. His path declines from his innocent beginnings with Sybil Vane, to the pleasure he finds in corrupt relations, and finally his need to escape the reality of killing a former

Wilde also was famous for his leading of the aesthetic movement and his imprisonment for propagating homosexuality. The Picture of Dorian Gray tells a story about a degradation of a young man Dorian Gray. At the beginning, an artist Basil Hallward paints a portrait of the kind and innocent Dorian Gray and, after seeing the artwork, Lord Henry Wotton - a vain and snobbish class man - requests to meet him. Influenced by eccentric Henry Wotton’s philosophy, Dorian begins to become vain and cruel but while his external appearance remains unchanged, his appearance on the painting alters every time he commits a sin. The novel explores many issues, one of them is aestheticism - exaltation of art and beauty, leading to the eternal question - can a beautiful person be moral and a moral person be beautiful, which always have and will stir society’s curiosity. Oscar Wilde once said that "All art is quite useless" and in The Picture of Dorian Gray, he tends to juxtapose various expressions of art with the routine of Dorian Gray and a shallow life in the nineteenth century. As a tool to reveal the concept of a life at the end of the 19th century Wilde uses art of pretty - but meaningless - things used to please one’s vanity and create a mundane environment. This raises the question: what did Oscar Wilde want to imply by and how does he use art to develop the theme of morality in The Picture of Dorian Gray? It was impossible to avoid art in any of its expressions (parties, theatre, clothes, etc.) in even the most regular lives in the 19th century and of course it influenced the way of thinking, created the social status and the image of oneself, so, after all, art had a huge impact on the individuals of the 19th century. And, as often beauty does, art encourages greed and vanity, which Oscar Wilde demonstrates through the usage of art in the novel.

Most people are taught from a young age what is right, and what is wrong. These teachings set up the basis for later discovering one’s personal values. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, these same principles are applied and challenged by Wilde. Not only does he question morality and human nature, but also the ideas of the Aesthetic movement- which influenced the ideals and behavior of Dorian Gray. Through Dorian’s morally ambiguous character, Wilde asserts that one is not purely good or evil, but a mixture of the two; Wilde establishes this theme when Dorian breaks up with Sibyl Vane, murders Basil Hallward, and stabs his decaying portrait.

Wilde’s novel is an obvious evidence of the pervasiveness of main values of Victorian society. According to Wilde, “Aesthetic tendencies have to be taken with prudence and have reasonable limits that imply moral responsibility.” According to the critic Alex Ross, “ Wilde’s aestheticism, his fanatical cult of beauty, was the deepest and most lasting of his passions, and it is now the most radical about him” (Ross 2011).

Art has evolved and regenerated itself many times during our human existence. These differences are defined through changes in styles under various theories. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a style known as Expressionism became popular. During this movement the artists were trying to use their artwork as a tool of expression toward life. It was mainly dominant in the nonrepresentational arts, such as abstract visual arts and music. It also was probably one of the most difficult movements to understand because the whole point of the piece lay within the artist. Not only was it a movement, it defined the act of art as a whole. From the beginning of time, each work of art, excluding replicas, show a way of expressing

The Arts and Craft movement was a social and artistic movement, which began in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth spreading to continental Europe and the USA. Its adherents-artists, architects, designers and Craftsmen sought to reassert the importance of and craftsmanship in all arts in the face of increasing industrialization, which they felt was sacrificing quality in the pursuit of quantity. Its supporters and practioners were united not so much by a style rather than the common goal- a desire to break down the hierarchy of the arts and to revive traditional handicrafts and make art that could be affordable to all.

In The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde explores the importance of physical appearances, and its relations to success in society. “Dorian experiences the psychic transformation and gradually ends up in self-destruction after alienating his self-identification” (Zhang). Wilde writes about how his main character, Dorian Grey, explores and learns about the philosophical elements of life and mortality. “To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead” (Wilde 150). Oscar Wilde is able to create a fictional world that explores many controversial issues present in real life. Wilde uses the development of his characters to discuss his opinions on several different matters relating to beauty, mortality, and the supernatural.

Art had played an important role in building up civilizations from all over the world through thousands of centuries. It is and will always still the way of projecting artists’ ideas and thoughts into meaningful and tangible objects which we called “work of art”. In addition, It was the path through all these years that dug its way to reach to our current century to show us the beauty of every single era starting from the Upper Paleolithic Period of time (42,000 – 8,000 BCE) reaching to our contemporary artists of today.

Art has been a recurring part of history from the very beginning. As society changes so does the style of art. Each new style is known as a movement and one of the most prominent, long-lasting movements in recent centuries is known as Modernism. Modernism is characterized by its deviation from tradition. People who are a part of this movement found enjoyment in finding new mediums to use, creating art that revolves around feelings and emotions rather than reality. Abstract idealisms of modernism cause its viewers to need to think more critically about the art before them. In past movements, the meaning of the work was obvious as it was created to mimic reality.

In History, artistic achievements have represented cultural advancements in civilized society. The artist’s ability to express themselves on a surface plane has progressed immensely from the prehistoric era through the present. At one time, techniques were so primitive, simple handheld figures and tools were all artisans had the ability to craft. However, Mesopotamian and Greek and Hellenistic Art specifically, modernized the techniques and boundaries of sculpture and figurative art. As time goes on, an artist's ability to express themselves within their art has progressed.

Art has been a part of history before Christ was born and along the flow of time different styles and movements revolutionized what art means to the creator and audience. On the flow of time one of the branches that stood out in style, color, and expression through repetition was Impressionism. An artist that helped revolutionize Impressionism in his time was Oscar-Claude Monet, but the piece that stood out was the “Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur.”

The many technological advances made during the Victorian Era in England drastically altered the way scientists, artists, and the public viewed art and aesthetics. Aesthetics came to be a branch of philosophy that contained a set of principles concerning nature and appreciation of beauty and art. Due to this change, a European art movement, known as the Aesthetic Movement, occurred in the late nineteenth century. This movement was based on the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty and appreciation alone. Therefore, art did not need to serve any political, educational, or other purpose. It emphasized the importance of aesthetic values over moral and social themes in literature and the arts. The movement started as a reaction to the dominance of scientific thinking and the hostility of the middle class society to judge whether or not art was useful or teaching morals. One of the most prevalent values of the movement was suggestion as opposed to statement because no one could judge or try to reason the creation of any

Abstract Expressionism is making its comeback within the art world. Coined as an artist movement in the 1940’s and 1950’s, at the New York School, American Abstract Expressionist began to express many ideas relevant to humanity and the world around human civilization. However, the subject matters, contributing to artists, were not meant to represent the ever-changing world around them. Rather, how the world around them affected the artist themselves. The works swayed by such worldly influences, become an important article within the artists’ pieces. Subjectively, looking inward to express the artist psyche, artists within the Abstract Expressionism movement became a part of their paintings. Making the paintings more of a representation

At the height of his success, Oscar Wilde wrote his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which follows the life of a young man living in late nineteenth-century London. The novel shares a similar storyline with that of Wilde’s life, as Wilde wrote it in attempt to justify his homosexuality. The protagonist of the novel, Dorian Gray, enters the story an innocent man, but eventually becomes corrupt due to his need for instant pleasure. Wilde recognizes that the topic of his homosexuality brings up the importance of challenging society, but he uses Dorian’s character to depict the dangers of completely disobeying society. He does so by making Dorian succumb to the temptations of hedonism, the pursuit of instant pleasure through any means possible, in this novel. Wilde faced persecution by society, and hoped that through his novel he could show society the truly corrupt actions of people, therefore proving that his homosexuality does not compare to morally wrong actions like murder. Wilde wanted society to understand that life’s meaning involves living with some rejection to societal acceptance and morals, and that people should find a stable balance between the rights and wrongs of society and live upon that as he did.

In Oscar Wilde’s Popular nineteenth century novel, the Picture of Dorian Gray demonstrates the importance of the aesthetic movement in Victorian England. This suggests youth and physical attractiveness is emphasized and are valuable additions to society. Therefore, what matters to Dorian, is not the internal goodness an individual possesses but the appearance they present. Consequently, Dorian is able to forget the violent acts he commits as long as he appears beautiful on the outside. Since external beauty is valued, Wilde argues that people tend to lose their individualism and conform to society’s expectations. With this in mind, Dorian gray grows more corrupt, self-centered as he focuses more on the pleasure for himself as he becomes more vulnerable to his own misgivings. He loses his individualism, because he is conforming to society’s form of asethics. I agree with Wilde’s arguement about Dorian Gray, that individuals lose their sense of idenity when conforming to society’s influence, such as in today’s beauty standards portrayed on social media, racism described through facism, and LGBTQ rights violated by intolerant individuals. (too wordy)