Art pour l'art, L'. The theoretical origins of ‘art for art's sake’ lie in late 18th-c. German aesthetics and idealist philosophy. In France, anti-mimetic theories of the ‘beau idéal’ were relayed by Quatremère de Quincy, Cousin, and Jouffroy. But the expression ‘l'art pour l'art’ is most strongly associated with the aggressive aestheticism that emerged in France after the 1830 Revolution, in opposition not only to the utilitarianism and philistinism of the new bourgeois regime, but also to the growing insistence from utopian socialists and humanitarians that literature and art should serve the interests of the repressed and immiserated majority and work for the progress of humanity. Gautier's preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) is the key text, but its militant aestheticism was to underpin avant-garde culture through the fin de siècle and into modernism. The notorious separation of form content was also destined to become an obsessive preoccupation in 20th-c. literary criticism.
[Brian Rigby]
