Having just spent a month in London falling madly in love with the Arts & Crafts Movement, I wanted to share with you a little video about the Aesthetic Movement (which flourished at the same time). I missed the exhibit at the V&A (“The Cult of Beauty”) but my books from the Victoria & Albert Museum Bookstore arrived today:
Design & The Decorative Arts: Victorian Britian 1837-1901
Michael Snodin and John Styles
International Arts and Crafts
ed by Karen Livingston and Linda Parry
The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900
ed by Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr
Death and Art: Europe 1200-1530
Eleanor Townsend
Art Deco Fashion
Suzanna Lussier
I feel very strongly that a huge part of the poverty of soul in America right now is that we are surrounded by mass-produced products and living in aesthetically depressing wastelands of strip malls and chain stores. Signage is utilitarian, our forms of entertainment are an assault on the eyes, and human beings have given up and resorted to the sloppiest, most “comfortable” forms of dress and attire.
My work with this blog and issues of clergy image are deeply connected to the visual arts as a means toward transcendence. I feel that many clergy are enamored of the literary arts (we are people of the Word) and desperately need to attune ourselves to the visual realm of beauty and help our people do the same. We are bombarded by so many manipulative images every day (images designed to get us to purchase or use particular products that are all essentially the same under their packaging), we have lost the appreciation for, and language about, art for art’s sake, and fear to be thought shallow if we speak on behalf of Beauty.
Enjoy this little video.
The best thing about it is that you get to see the interior of the Victoria & Albert Museum, more images of which I will post below.
This Green Room was the first museum cafe in the world. It was designed by the brilliant William Morris, my new hero:
I love watching people interact with art. The reverence is palpable:
The word “behold” is one of my favorite words:
Here’s a beautiful gal with a terrific sense of dressing to suit her work setting (the V&A).
She works in a gorgeous setting, very romantic and adorned, and she is following suit. This creates a beautiful sense of harmony in the environment. This is why you don’t ever wear dirty jeans and a sweatshirt into a place that has stained glass windows and exquisitely carved wood. I believe it offends the spirit of the place.
[Arts & Crafts stained glass from Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, Hampstead]
Thanks for joining me for this little tour. Now it’s time for tea.
Lovely. Thanks so much for sharing these photos with us. And it makes me a little wistful for the little house we are renting out – a 1923 arts and crafts beauty that I recognized immediately as MINE. (Odd coincidence is that my father later showed me a photo of the house he grew up in, which looks eerily like ours. I have never been in this house, and have no memory of seeing this or any such photo before. Wooooooo….) I just have always been attracted to this school of design & time period. Since chances are slim to none that I will work anywhere near Wilmington again, it will be another family’s job to love it. God bless.
I have been thinking a lot about beauty today as I drove across North Dakota (surprisingly beautiful — fields of sunflowers! Who knew?).
I’ve been mentally composing a card to a member of my former congregation who is from N. Dakota, thinking a lot about him as he lies in a rehab hospital after being in a bicycle accident which will probably leave him paraplegic.
I want to use the exquisite card I’ve been saving for just the right occasion (this is it) to encourage him to surround himself in beauty in whatever way is possible. He is a meditator with a deep and well-developed inner life. Now that his outer life is going to be so curtailed, I want to encourage him to use beauty as a way to thin the boundary between inner and outer life, so that all his inner wisdom and calm can come through and be available to him as he learns how to live without the use of his legs. I do believe that intentionally seeking out beauty and keeping it before us is a way to do that.
How lovely that you wrote about this today! [Amen. Blessings on your ministry and to your former parishioner. May beauty surround him and sustain him, may he have courage from himself, from others and from God. God who is with us always, hear our prayer. – PB]
Thank you so much for adding the prayer, PB. This wonderful man (a professor of religion at the local college) is a Buddhist through and through, and he is finding that teaching about impermanence for the past 30 years is immeasurably helpful to him now. With all the love and support he’s getting from his fellow UU’s, he also understands interconnection and interdependence in a whole new way. I am so proud of him and of my peeps.
sorry for the hijack… [Not at all, Judy! This is a huge thing, very intense. Also a serious testimony to the power of spiritual practice — and a reminder that teachings we embrace may be needed to sustain us through more harrowing rides than we imagined they would need to. – PB]
Oh, THANK YOU, PB for posting these photos! I chatted with you on FB about this tea room being the most wonderful man-made place for a simple sandwich and cuppa. The V&A is most amazing.
Terrific blog entry and vid, PB–thank you!
The ecclesiastical version of all this in the mid-19th century Church of England was the Cambridge movement (as distinct from the Oxford Movement, which was more concerned with theology.) Although they were operative a bit earlier than the Aesthetic movement as defined in the video, many of the same impulses were at work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Camden_Society