Burke, Doreen Bolger, et al., "In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement"

Director's Foreword by Philippe de Montebello
Contributors
Lenders to the Exhibition
Acknowledgments
Explanatory Notes

Preface

Artifact as Ideology: The Aesthetic Movement in its American Cultural Context
Roger B. Stein

Decorating Surfaces: Aesthetic Delight, Theoretical Dilemma
Catherine Lynn

Surface Ornament: Wallpapers, Carpets, Textiles, and Embroidery
Catherine Lynn

The Artful Interior
Marilynn Johnson

Art Furniture: Wedding the Beautiful to the Useful
Marilynn Johnson

A New Renaissance: Stained Glass in the Aesthetic Period
Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen

Aesthetic Forms in Ceramic and Glass
Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen

Metalwork: An Ecclectic Aesthetic
David A. Hanks with Jennifer Toher

Painters and Sculptors in a Decorative Age
Doreen Bolger Burke

American Architecutre and the Aesthetic Movement
James D. Kornwolf

An Aesthetics of our Own: American Writers and the Aesthetic Movement
Jonathan Freedman

Dictionary of Architects, Artisans, Artists, and Manufacturers
Catherine Hoover Voorsanger

Selected Bibliography
Index
Photograph Credits

Chase, William Merritt (American, 1849–1916) | Church, Frederic Edwin (American, 1826–1900) | John Ruskin | La Farge, John (American, 1835–1910) | Thaxter, Celia | Tiffany & Company (American, 1837–present) | Tiffany, Louis Comfort (American, 1848–1933) | Wheeler, Candace (American, 1827–1925)

From Publishers Weekly
Enjoying its heydey from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s, the American esthetic movement put forth "art for art's sake" as a counterbalance to materialism. The experimental spirit that set Whistler's nocturnes ablaze also spurred Louis Tiffany's abstract patterning of colors and shapes in domestic interiors. Embroiderers who wielded their needles much as painters did their brushes created ambitious wall hangings and crazy quilts. In architecture, the search for a vernacular led to a colonial revival. Some designers turned to exotic influences, for example, landscape painter Frederic Church, whose summer home, Olana, juxtaposed Moorish, Romanesque and Buddhist elements. Heated debates raged about what constituted artful surface ornament in textiles, carpets and wallpaper. The esthetic movement was eclipsed by art nouveau and the arts-and-crafts movement, yet its influence can be felt down to Frank Lloyd Wright. This catalogue of an exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art reproduces hundreds of stunning works of art, from stained glass windows to paintings by Ryder, Homer and LaFarge.
From Library Journal
This exhibition catalog's noble proportions celebrate its subject; the book combines scholarly analysis with ample visual satisfaction. The 11 essays by notable American scholars cover much ground: decorative arts (ornamentation, interior design, furniture, stained glass, ceramics, metalwork); painting; sculpture; and architecture. Opening and concluding essays offer challenging assessments of the Aesthetic movement's impact on American culture and literature. The dictionary to the exhibited artists and the selected bibliography are well prepared. Presenting a massive amount of information on a vital period in this country, the book is an important acquisition not just for art collections but for libraries serving programs or interests in American studies. Paula A. Baxter, Museum of Modern Art Lib., New York
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.