Beginning with the late -18th to the mid -19th century, new Romantic attitude begun to characterize culture and many art works in Western civilization. It started as an artistic and intellectual movement that emphasized a revulsion against established values (social order and religion). Romanticism exalted individualism, subjectivism, irrationalism, imagination, emotions and nature - emotion over reason and senses over intellect. Since they were in revolt against the orders, they favored the revival of potentially unlimited number of styles (anything that aroused them).
Romantic artists were fascinated by the nature, the genius, their passions and inner struggles, their moods, mental potentials, the heroes. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the occult, the diseased, and even satanic. Romantic artist had a role of an ultimate egoistic creator, with the spirit above strict formal rules and traditional procedures. He had imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth.
The German poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel first used the term 'Romanticism' to label a wider cultural movement. For the Schlegel brothers, it was a product of Christianity. The culture of the Middle Ages created a Romantic sensibility which differed from the Classical. Christian culture dealt with a struggle between the heavenly perfection and the human experience of inadequacy and guilt. This sense of struggle, and ever-present dark forces was allegedly present in Medieval culture.
While this view partly explains Romantic fascination with the Middle Ages, the actual causes of the Romantic movement itself correspond to the sense of rapid, dynamic social change that culminated in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.
Romantic artists were fascinated by the nature, the genius, their passions and inner struggles, their moods, mental potentials, the heroes. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the occult, the diseased, and even satanic. Romantic artist had a role of an ultimate egoistic creator, with the spirit above strict formal rules and traditional procedures. He had imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth.
The German poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel first used the term 'Romanticism' to label a wider cultural movement. For the Schlegel brothers, it was a product of Christianity. The culture of the Middle Ages created a Romantic sensibility which differed from the Classical. Christian culture dealt with a struggle between the heavenly perfection and the human experience of inadequacy and guilt. This sense of struggle, and ever-present dark forces was allegedly present in Medieval culture.
While this view partly explains Romantic fascination with the Middle Ages, the actual causes of the Romantic movement itself correspond to the sense of rapid, dynamic social change that culminated in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.
French Romanticism:
- Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
- Eugene Delacroix
- Theodore Gericault
- Jacques-Louis David
- Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson
- Antoine-Jean Gros
- Adelaide Labille-Guiard
- Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun
- Francois Rude
- Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
- Antoine-Louis Barye
Hudson River School (1835 - 1870)
Hudson River School was the first American school of landscape painting active from 1835-1870. The subjects of their art were romantic spectacles from the Hudson River Valley and upstate New York. The artist Thomas Cole is synonymous with this region and first leader of the group. Other famous artists of the group are George Caleb Bingham, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, George Inness, John Frederic Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade...
Hudson River School was the first American school of landscape painting active from 1835-1870. The subjects of their art were romantic spectacles from the Hudson River Valley and upstate New York. The artist Thomas Cole is synonymous with this region and first leader of the group. Other famous artists of the group are George Caleb Bingham, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, George Inness, John Frederic Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade...
- American Romanticism:
- John Singleton Copley
- Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze
- Edward Hicks
- Gilbert Stuart
- John James Audubon
- George Catlin
The Hudson River School: - Albert Bierstadt
- Thomas Cole
- George Caleb Bingham
- Asher B. Durand
- Thomas Moran
- Frederic Edwin Church
- George Inness
- John Frederick Kensett
- Martin Jonson Heade
Inundated Ruins of a Monastery, ca. 1824
Karl Blechen (German, 1798–1840)
Pen and black ink, watercolor washes, sgrafitto
Source: Karl Blechen: Inundated Ruins of a Monastery (2008.109) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Karl Blechen (German, 1798–1840)
Pen and black ink, watercolor washes, sgrafitto
Source: Karl Blechen: Inundated Ruins of a Monastery (2008.109) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Romanticism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 38.58 × 29.13 inches, 1818, Oil on canvas, Kunsthalle Hamburg
Romanticism (or the Romantic Era) was a complex artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.[1] In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,[3] education[4] and natural history.[5]The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.
Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the mores of contemporary society.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.[6] Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.
Théodore Chassériau, Othello and Desdemona in Venice, 1850, oil on wood, 25 x 20 cm, in the Louvre, Paris, (inspired by Shakespeare). Chassériau was an influence on the Symbolists.
In European painting, led by a new generation of the French school,[16] the Romantic sensibility contrasted with the neoclassicism being taught in the academies. In a revived clash between color and design, the expressiveness and mood of color, as in works of J.M.W. Turner, Francisco Goya, Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto the artist's free handling of paint, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.As in England with J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer, Russia with Orest Kiprensky, Ivan Aivazovsky and Vasily Tropinin, Germany with Caspar David Friedrich, Norway with J.C. Dahl and Hans Gude, Spain with Francisco Goya, and France with Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Chassériau, and others; literary Romanticism had its counterpart in the American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of an untamed American landscape found in the paintings of the Hudson River School. Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church and others often expressed Romantic themes in their paintings. They sometimes depicted ancient ruins of the old world, such as in Fredric Edwin Church’s piece Sunrise in Syria. These works reflected the Gothic feelings of death and decay. They also show the Romantic ideal that Nature is powerful and will eventually overcome the transient creations of men. More often, they worked to distinguish themselves from their European counterparts by depicting uniquely American scenes and landscapes. This idea of an American identity in the art world is reflected in W. C. Bryant’s poem, To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe, where Bryant encourages Cole to remember the powerful scenes that can only be found in America. This poem also shows the tight connection that existed between the literary and visual artists of the Romantic Era.[citation needed]
Some American paintings promote the literary idea of the “noble savage” (Such as Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak) by portraying idealized Native Americans living in harmony with the natural world.
Thomas Cole's paintings feature strong narratives as in The Voyage of Life series painted in the early 1840s that depict man trying to survive amidst an awesome and immense nature, from the cradle to the grave (see below).
In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, "all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime." In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks (2003.42.56) and other representations of man's struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault's strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner's 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate Britain, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct (1989.183), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.
Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable, whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral (50.145.8); he wrote that a sketch represents "nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time." When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as "nature itself." Constable's subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.
This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux (41.17), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.
Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron's 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch (87.15.47) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.
Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres' sinuous odalisques (38.65) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio (64.188). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix's tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca (03.30), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.
In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
Source: Romanticism | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Art Periods: ROMANTICISM |
An intellectual movement that flourished in Europe between the middle of the 18th and 19th centuries, romanticism was complexly implicated in the history of its age, an age in which philosophers, artists, writers, and composers responded with fervor to the forces of nationalism that were sweeping Europe, but rejected the notions of the Enlightenment that had dominated European thought since the early 18th century.
The European Enlightenment, stressing the normative role of reason in the conduct of social life, and universal standards for excellence in the arts, was cosmopolitan. Romanticism may be thought of as a counter-Enlightenment movement, or perhaps as an oppositional phase of Enlightenment that was grounded in difference rather than uniformity. Where Enlightenment thinkers and artists assumed that humankind is essentially similar across all ages and geographic origins (hence their emphasis on the imitation of the best of the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome), romantics generally believed in the uniqueness of individual expression as it is constituted by life experience, an important dimension of which is frequently national character.
Romantic thought often features an organic conception of individual life, society, and the interconnections of humanity, nature, and divinity. Such a view stresses origins. For a romantic political thinker like Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) opposed the Enlightenment rationalism of the French political experiment, society is an organic growth, nurtured and formed over centuries of practice in ways indigenous to a nation. For a critical romantic thinker like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poem should aspire to the fullness and wholeness of a living thing. The notion of the individual imagination as the only significant interpreter of nature and humankind motivates writers as profoundly different as William Wordsworth and George Gordon, Lord Byron.
LITERATURE
Despite having been both the country whose political events most clearly shaped European romanticism and the working home of the movement's philosophic progenitor, Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, France experienced a late flowering of romanticism, which did not reach its height until the 1830s and 40s, when its force had weakened in England and Germany. Reasons for this lie in France's having been the center of Enlightenment thought and its having served throughout the Revolutionary period as a test bed for progressive ideology.
Bitter controversies involving political and religious loyalties accompanied the emergence of romanticism in France. The main strife took place in the theater. It included disruptions of performances of William Shakespeare's plays in 1822 and culminated in the notorious battle between the warring factions on the opening night of Victor Hugo's drama Hernani (1830). Hugo, Alexandre Dumas pere, and Alfred de Musset all used Shakespeare as a model to effect their departure from prescribed classical practices. The lyric poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine, Musset, and Hugo was romantic in its pronounced personal emotionality, and led, inevitably, to Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal (1857), perhaps French romanticism's most extreme expression.
ART
As they are in literature, the hallmarks of romantic painting are nationalism and the power of individual perception. In France, J. A. Gros glorified Napoleon's victories, while in Spain, Francisco de Goya showed the horrors of war in such canvases as The Third of May, 1808 (1814). France, long dominated by the strict neoclassicism of Jacques Louis David, became the home of an impassioned school of history painting, exemplified in such powerful works as Théodore Géricault's The Raft of Medusa (1819). Géricault strongly influenced Eugène Delacroix, whose flamboyant canvases on historical and literary subjects, such as The Death of Sardanapalus (1827-28), probably best exemplify the common notion of romantic art.
Eugene Delacroix – Girl Seated in a Cemetery
No comments:
Post a Comment