Review of Romanticism

The Power of Passion!!

Poet Goethe wrote: “Feeling is all!”

Romantic artists & poets rebelled against Neoclassic age of reason and Enlightenment rationality…

We choose EMOTION over objectivity! (Fuseli’s Nightmare shown above)

Blake’s Tyger Tyger poem debunks rationalism with questioning What Immortal hand or eye can frame thy fearful symmetry?

Romantics lived full throttle… living intensely rather than wisely. Romantic poets and composers like Byron, Keats, Shelley, Chopin, and Schubert all died young.

Romanticism = revived interest in macabre tales like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstiein.

The “in” decorating look was Gothic revival, like the Houses of Parliament above.

Wanderer above a Sea of FogCaspar David Friedrich, German Romanticism, 1918, oil on canvas

Cult of nature worship was big… Turner & Constable lifted the status of landscape painting.

Man and nature touched by supernatural.

Friedrich wrote: “The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees in him.”

SUBLIME: :any cathartic experience from the catastrophic to the intellectual that causes the viewer to marvel in awe, wonder, or passion

Gericault launched French Romanticism with one painting… shipwreck caused a political scandal. Gericault investigated the story like a reporter… Captain was an incompetent political appointee, set149 immigrants adrift with wreck, only 15 lived.

Struggle ofr survival… macabre/Gothic ideas.

He built a model raft in his studio and even lashed himself to a small boat in a storm to capture the sublime.

The Raft of the Medusa, Theodore Gericault, 1819

Hope vs. Despair

Delacroix: Painter of Passion

Leader of Romantic movement after Gericuault’s death at age 32

“passionately in love with passion.”

“ I’d rather die of passion than boredom.”

Spectators wept at this painting, depicting an actual horrible war event, seeing the baby clutching its dead mother’s breast

Ingres vs. Delacroix: Two Rival Schools

Delacroix liberated painting from the Classical concept of painting as tint applied over forms defined by line drawing.

His influence went to Van Gogh, Monet, Turner, Degas, and Cezanne.

Captured essence of reality instead of reality itself.

Delacroix said: “If you are not skilled enough to sketch a man falling out of a window during the time it takes from him to fall from the 5th story to the ground, then you will never be able to produce monumental work.”

Two portraits of the violinist Paganini

By Ingres & Delacroix

Constable: Field and Stream; English Version of Romanticism

Constable made nature his subject, while Turner’s subject was really COLOR.

Constable rebelled against coffee colored tones in landscapes; he wanted to paint what he actually saw with the colors of nature the way they really looked.

Many criticized his highlights and vivid colors.

Turner.. Color, vortex, emotion, nature.

Became more abstract as he became older.

Ppower of pigment… enormous invluence on modern art.

NATURE IN THE RAW

COLE LED THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL IN AMERICA…

Combined real and ideal.

Believed America was a primeval paradise, a fresh start for humanity

Bierstadt and Church also were explorer/artists.

Goya in Spain: Social Rebel

Indebted to Velasquez

Bitter satire on the Spanish court

Art of social protest! The Disasters of War was a series of 1810-1814, exposed atrocities committed by both the French and Spanich armies. He showed corpses, castrations, beheaded civilians impales on bare trees, etc.

The Third of May, 1808, is a response to the slaughter of 5000 Spanish civilians. Immediacy of photojournalism.

Goya predated Picasso’s Guernica.