Art for art's sake is the slogan of aestheticism
in the 19th century, often given in its French form as Vart pourl'art. The most
important early manifesto for the idea, Theophile Gautier's preface to his
novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), does not actually use the phrase itself,
which is a simplified expression of the principle adopted by many leading
French authors and by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Symons in England.