Romanticism
|
Romanticism |
|
Romanticism (art), in art, European and American movement extending from about 1800 to 1850. Romanticism cannot be identified with a single style, technique, or attitude, but romantic painting is generally characterized by a highly imaginative and subjective approach, emotional intensity, and a dreamlike or visionary quality. Whereas classical and neoclassical art is calm and restrained in feeling and clear and complete in expression, romantic art characteristically strives to express by suggestion states of feeling too intense, mystical, or elusive to be clearly defined. Thus, the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann declared “infinite longing” to be the essence of romanticism. In their choice of subject matter, the romantics showed an affinity for nature, especially its wild and mysterious aspects, and for exotic, melancholy and melodramatic subjects likely to evoke awe or passion.
18th-Century Background
The word romantic first became current in 18th-century English and originally meant
“romancelike,” that is, resembling the strange and fanciful character of
medieval romances. The word came to be associated with the emerging taste for wild
scenery, “sublime” prospects, and ruins, a tendency reflected in the increasing
emphasis in aesthetic theory on the sublime as opposed to the beautiful. The British
writer and statesman Edmund Burke, for instance, identified beauty with delicacy and
harmony and the sublime with vastness, obscurity, and a capacity to inspire terror. Also
during the 18th century, feeling began to be considered more important than reason both in
literature and in ethics, an attitude epitomized by the work of the French novelist and
philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. English and German romantic poetry appeared in the
1790s, and by the end of the century the shift away from reason toward feeling and
imagination began to be reflected in the visual arts, for instance in the visionary
illustrations of the English poet and painter William Blake, in the brooding, sometimes
nightmarish pictures of his friend, the Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli, and in the
somber etchings of monsters and demons by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya.
France
In France the formative stage of romanticism coincided with the Napoleonic Wars
(1799-1815), and the first French romantic painters found their inspiration in
contemporary events. Antoine Jean Gros began the transition from neoclassicism to
romanticism by moving away from the sober style of his teacher, Jaques-Louis David, to a
more colorful and emotional style, influenced by the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul
Rubens, which he developed in a series of battle paintings glorifying Napoleon. The main
figure for French romanticism was Theodore Gericault, who carried further the dramatic,
coloristic tendencies of Gros's style and who shifted the emphasis of battle paintings
from heroism to suffering and endurance. In his Wounded Cuirassier (1814) a soldier limps
off the field as rising smoke and descending clouds seem to impinge on his figure. The
powerful brushstrokes and conflicting light and dark tones heighten the sense of his
isolation and vulnerability, which for Géricault and many other romantics constituted the
essential human condition.
Géricault's masterpiece, Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), portrays on a heroic scale the
suffering of ordinary humanity, a theme echoed by the greatest French romantic painter,
Eugene Delacroix, in his Massacre at Chios (1824). Delacroix often took his subjects from
literature, but he aimed at transcending literary or didactic significance by using color
to create an effect of pure energy and emotion that he compared to music. Rejecting the
neoclassical emphasis on form and outline, he used halftones derived not from darkening a
color but from juxtaposing the color's complement. The resulting effect of energetic
vibration was intensified by his long, nervous brushstrokes. His Death of Sardanapalus
(1827), inspired by a work of the English romantic poet Lord Byron, is precisely detailed,
but the action is so violent and the composition so dynamic that the effect is of chaos
engulfing the immobile and indifferent figure of the dying king.
Germany
German romantic painting, like German romantic poetry and philosophy, was inspired by a
conception of nature as a manifestation of the divine. This led to a school of symbolic
landscape, initiated by the mystical and allegorical paintings of Philipp Otto Runge. Its
greatest exponent, and the greatest German romantic painter, was Caspar David Friedrich,
whose meditative landscapes, painted in a lucid and meticulous style, hover between a
subtle mystical feeling and a sense of melancholy solitude and estrangement. In the Polar
Sea (1824), his romantic pessimism is most directly expressed; the remains of a wrecked
ship are barely visible beneath a pyramid of ice slabs that seems a monument to the
triumph of nature over human aspiration.
Another school of German romantic painting was formed by the group called the Nazarenes,
who attempted to recover the style and spirit of medieval religious art; its leading
figure was Johann Friedrich Overbeck. Notable among later artists in the German romantic
tradition was the Austrian Moritz von Schwind, whose subjects were drawn from Germanic
mythology and fairy tales.
England
Landscapes suffused with romantic feeling became the chief expression of romantic painting
in England, as in Germany, but the English artists were more innovative in style and
technique. Samuel Palmer painted landscapes distinguished by an innocent simplicity of
style and a visionary religious feeling derived from Blake. John Constable, turning away
from the wild natural scenery associated with many romantic poets and painters, infused
quiet English landscapes with profound feeling. The first major artist to work in the open
air, he achieved a freshness of vision through the use of luminous colors and bold, thick
brushwork. J. M. W. Turner achieved the most radical pictorial vision of any romantic
artist. Beginning with landscapes reminiscent of the 17th-century French painter Claude
Lorrain, he became, in such later works as Snow Storm: Steam Boat Off a Harbor's Mouth
(1842), almost entirely concerned with atmospheric effects of light and color, mixing
clouds, mist, snow, and sea into a vortex in which all distinct objects are dissolved.
The United States
The major manifestation of American romantic painting was the Hudson River school, which
found its inspiration in the rugged wilderness of the northeastern United States.
Washington Allston, the first American landscapist, introduced romanticism to the United
States by filling his poetic landscapes with subjective feeling. The leading figure of the
Hudson River school was the English-born Thomas Cole, whose depictions of primeval forests
and towering peaks convey a sense of moral grandeur. Cole's pupil Frederick Church adapted
the Hudson River style to South American, European, and Palestinian landscapes.
Late Romanticism
Toward the middle of the 19th century, romantic painting began to move away from the
intensity of the original movement. Among the outstanding achievements of late romanticism
are the quiet, atmospheric landscapes of the French Barbizon school, which included
Camille Corot and Theodore Rousseau. In England, after 1850, the Pre-Raphaelites revived
the medievalizing mission of the German Nazarenes.
Influence
The influence of romanticism on subsequent painting has been pervasive. A line can be
traced from Constable through the Barbizon school to impressionism, but a more direct
descendant of romanticism was symbolism (see SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT), which in various ways
intensified or refined the romantic characteristics of subjectivity, imagination, and
strange, dreamlike imagery. In the 20th century expressionism and surrealism have carried
these tendencies still further. In a sense, however, virtually all modern art can be said
to derive from romanticism, for the modern assumptions about the primacy of artistic
freedom, originality, and self-expression in art were originally conceived by the
romantics in opposition to the traditional classical principles of art.
Romantic Painting
Closely succeeding neoclassicism, the romantic movement introduced a taste for the
medieval and the mysterious, as well as a love of the picturesque and sublime in nature
(see ROMANTICISM). The play of individual imagination, giving expression to emotion and
mood, superseded the reasoned intellectual approach of the neoclassicists. In general,
romantic painters favored coloristic and painterly techniques over the linear, cool-toned
neoclassic style.
French Romantic Painting
A follower of David who ultimately turned more to the romantic style was his pupil Baron
Antoine Jean Gros, noted for his portrayals of Napoleon in full regalia and for large
canvases vividly depicting Napoleonic campaigns. Gros's colleague Theodore Gericault was
especially renowned for his dramatic and monumental interpretation of an actual event. His
masterpiece, the Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819, Louvre), endows the suffering of the
survivors of a shipwreck with a heroic quality. This painting deeply impressed Eugene
Delacroix, who pursued the theme of suffering humanity in such energetic, intensely
dramatic works as Massacre at Chios (1822-1824) and Liberty Leading the People (1830),
both in the Louvre. Delacroix and other romantics also drew their subject matter from
literature and from travels to the Middle East. Delacroix's divided-color technique (that
is, color laid on in small strokes of pure pigment) was to influence the impressionists
later in the 19th century.
During the romantic period, several French painters concentrated on picturesque landscape views and sentimental scenes of rural life. Jean Francois Millet was one of a number of artists who settled at the village of Barbizon, near Paris; taking a worshipful view of nature, he transformed the peasants into Christian symbols (see BARBIZON SCHOOL). Camille Corot, a painter of poetic, silvery-toned woodland scenes and landscapes, included visits to Barbizon among his extensive travels, portraying the lyrical aspects of nature there, as well as in other parts of France and Italy.
English Romantic Painting
Romantic landscape painting also flourished in England; the trend began early in the 19th
century and is exemplified in the works of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William
Turner. Although distinctly different in their styles, both artists were ultimately
concerned with depicting the effects of light and atmosphere. Despite Constable's factual
and scientific approach—working outdoors, he painted numerous studies of cloud
formations and made notes on light and weather conditions—his canvases are poetic,
expressing the cultivated gentleness of the English countryside. Turner, on the other
hand, sought the sublime in nature, painting cataclysmic snowstorms or depicting the
elements—earth, air, fire, and water—in a sweeping, nearly abstract manner. His
way of dissolving forms in light and veils of color was to play an important role in the
development of French impressionist painting.
German Romantic Painting
Of Germany's romantic artists, Caspar David Friedrich was the leading figure. Landscape
was his favored vehicle of expression. He imbued his hypnotic pictures with religious
mysticism, portraying the earth undergoing transformations at dawn and sunset, or in the
fog and mists, perhaps alluding thereby to the transience of life. Philipp Otto Runge also
devoted his brief career to painting mystical landscapes. Morning (1808-1809, Kunsthalle,
Hamburg) is part of an otherwise unfinished allegorical landscape cycle, The Four Phases
of the Day.
American Romantic Painting
America's first truly romantic artist was Washington Allston, whose paintings are
mysterious, brooding, or evocative of poetic reverie. Like other romantics, he was
inspired by the Bible, poetry, and novels, as is evident in numerous works. Several
artists working between 1820 and 1880 are now distinguished as the Hudson River school;
their enormous canvases reveal their reverence for the beauty of the American landscape.
Thomas Cole, the most noteworthy of these painters, charged his scenes with moral
implications, as is evident in his epic series of five allegorical paintings, The Course
of Empire (1836, New York Historical Society, New York City).
In mid-19th-century landscape painting there appeared a new trend, now defined as
luminism, an interest in the atmospheric effects of diffused light. Among the luminist
painters were John F. Kensett, Martin J. Heade, and Fitz Hugh Lane. A sense of “God
in nature” is apparent in their pictures, as in the earliest works of the Hudson
River school. In contrast to the smaller and more intimate luminist works—for
example, Kensett's scenes along the Rhode Island shore—Frederick E. Church and Albert
Bierstadt painted the spectacular scenery of South American jungles and the American West
on enormous canvases. See AMERICAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE.
19th-Century Nonromantic Painting
Although romanticism was the dominant movement in the arts throughout much of the 19th
century, other—completely opposite—tendencies existed, and certain painters
worked outside any tradition. For example, Francisco Goya, Spain's foremost painter,
cannot be defined by alliance with a particular art movement. His early works are in a
modified rococo style, and his late works (exemplified by the remarkable Black
Paintings on the walls of his home, the Quinta del Sordo) are expressionistic and
hallucinatory. In portraits of the royal family—for example, Family of Charles IV
(1800, Prado)—he emulated a device used by his earlier compatriot Velázquez (in Las
meninas) and included himself at the easel. But, unlike the work of Velázquez, Goya's
portraiture was never objective; his psychological acumen reveals the vapidity of his
subjects, and his brilliant brushwork bluntly records their physical shortcomings.
Quellen:
If you have any questions or news, please send us a message:
Wolfgang Hanagarth