Victoriana: How 19th-century art fueled the aesthetic of the 1960s
Hedonistic, sexually liberal, rebellious: the ethos of the 1960s seems a world away from the prim and proper 19th century. The truth is, of course, that the aesthetics of the decade owe a huge amount to the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Consider the outfits The Beatles wore for the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Jimi Hendrix’s penchant for Art Nouveau-inspired clothing. Still, the question remains: where did this obsession with the art of the 19th century come from, and how did it fuel the aesthetics of the 1960s?
In the early ’60s, London was changing. Post-war gloom had given way to a desire to reconstruct and modernise the city. As John Davis notes in his new book Waterloo Sunrise: London From The Sixties to Thatcher, after the war, Victorian buildings came to be viewed with scepticism by promoters of the newly-introduced listed buildings program, many of whom believed that only the most outstanding buildings – those constructed between 1850 and 1914 – should be saved from the wrecking ball. By the 1960s, central London was a mass of what Davis calls “cliffs of concrete” and “glass-caged” towers. Much of London’s early Victorian architecture was gone – replaced by brutal high-rises. In reaction, hostility to modernism began to flourish. Suddenly, Victoriana was back in fashion.
But it wasn’t just the British. In America, too, the art of the 19th century was going through something of a resurgence, especially the work of art nouveau and pre-Raphealite artists. In 1965, a gallery just outside San Francisco launched the Jugendstile Expressionism exhibit. Countless designers who would go on to pioneer the hippy aesthetic visited the exhibition. Poster designer Wes Wilson, for example, would later tell Time Magazine that he’d been inspired by expressionist and art nouveau artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, who he respected for “really putting it out there.” His posters took the aesthetics of such artists and injected them with vibrant technicolour. Hippy designers also drew on art nouveau’s depiction of sultry feminine figures surrounded by abstract curves and floral illustrations. Sometimes, they’d even pull images directly from art nouveau and add high-contrast colours to make them even more eye-catching. The now iconic poster for The Grateful Dead’s concert at the Avalon Ballroom, Oxford, is the perfect example.
Clearly, the 1960s relied on the art and architecture of the 19th century more than you might expect. So, the next time you hear someone asks, “what did the Victorians ever do for us?” you’re perfectly entitled to inform them: “only the most enduring aesthetic of the 20th century.”
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