  In existentialist aesthetics, artistic activity and its products have external aims: to reveal the world to others, both in a metaphysical and political sense. As noted, this aesthetic theory therefore conflicts with the notion that the artwork is an end in itself, or that style and form are self-justified. Thus, the existentialists were deeply suspicious of some of the main artistic movements of the time, particularly Surrealism, even if some of them admired its rebellious spirit (Camus 1951, 88–100); or, later on, the Nouveau Roman (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon) and the literature that was developed around the post-structuralist journal Tel Quel (de Beauvoir, in Francis and Gontier, 226, 233–234). Compared with Dadaism, Surrealism, and the literary avant-gardes that immediately followed the existentialist era, existentialist aesthetics has an outdated, almost conservative air to it. It unabashedly calls for a new classicism somewhere between formalism and realism (either in its naturalist or socialist versions), and beyond romanticism (Camus 1944 and 1951, 268–271), on the grounds that the moral and political dimensions of literature consist not just in a rebellion against everyday language and the social-political order of the day, but also in the more demanding (yet modest) task of properly naming the world in order to unveil the immense injustice reigning in it, while also retrieving its fleeting and inhuman beauty (Camus 1951, 272–279). In his prolific work as literary critic, Sartre consistently rejected formalism and “art for art’s sake,” even in the case of illustrious French writers such as Mallarmé or Flaubert. However, it can also be argued that, from the perspective of the relation between politics and arts in the 20th century, the existentialist demand that art retain a strong connection to everyday reality (so as to fulfil its moral and political roles) is also completely of its time.