Word: sakes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...years, Parisian poets and painters were ransacking Japanese packing cases as though the crumpled prints inside were an accidental answer to an occidental prayer. For the prints were a pat expression of a slogan that was sweeping France: art pour l'art-art for art's sake...
...sake reached Britain at the height of her prosperity. Painters, buyers and art critics were flourishing as never before (or since) in a happy bond of mutual agreement. On the broad walls of well-to-do Victorian homes hung immense canvases which told stories that were easily understood and appreciated-the capture of a dishonest bank clerk at a crowded railroad station, Derby Day, a bearded doctor's vigil at the bedside of a sick child, a sailor's sweetheart gazing across the ocean. Most of these painted short stories had a helpful moral...
...truck with either nature or morals. Drawn with "uncanny delicacy," they were "as strange and detached from everyday life as if they had dropped from the moon." The figures in them were black-haired dolls" ... expressionless, self-satisfied, self-sufficient. This was art for art's sake-in which the painter recognized that natural subjects simply existed. "No poem," declared Poet Charles Baudelaire, a pioneer in the new movement, "is so great, so noble ... as that which has been written simply for the pleasure of writing a poem." "Don't bother me!" snapped the great Edouard Degas when...
...sake shocked both conservative and radical Victorians-"its foredoomed end," said Socialist William Morris, "must be that art at last will seem too delicate a thing even for the hands of the initiated to touch." What added to the horror of the Victorians was that some of the new artists themselves were as amoral, antisocial and perverse as their works. The artist, the disciples of art for art's sake pointed out, was not a reformer, not a teacher, and certainly not a creature bound by ordinary laws. He was the last of the aristocrats in a world being...
Death Agony. But if art for art's sake triumphed in Whistler v. Ruskin, it came a cropper in the private lives of most of its British disciples. Unlike their more adaptable, more original French contemporaries, who made Paris the authentic, though wicked, art center of the world, the Britons founded no school. They simply faded out in the squalid romanticism of the "Naughty Nineties." Oscar Wilde's brilliant career came to a catastrophic end in the world's most sensational vice trial. Poet Francis Thompson, an opium addict, was reduced to destitution, and died leaving behind...