| The
Romantic
Style
Late 18th-early 19th centuries
Landscape,
Camille
Corot
Romanticism
is
a term used to define a vast and varied movement in literature, arts,
music and architecture of the late 18th and early 19th
centuries. The common idea behind the various forms and expressions of
Romanticism is a simple and foreceful belief in the validity of individual
experience. It stands opposed to NeoClassicism that explored timeless,
universal civic virtues. Instead, the romantic artist expressed a personal
response to the past, present and future. This emphasis on individuality
indicates a profound shift in attitudes. Emotional restraint in art gave
way to emotional intensity. The feverish imagination of the romantic artist
created images of exoticism, nostalgic longing, the bizarre and dream
worlds. In all fields the artist began to be less dependent on the patronage
of the aristocracy. Great solitary figures of the past such as Michelangelo
and Leonardo inspired a kind of hero-worship, and the romantic artist
cast himself in the mold of the freethinking, solitary genius.
In architecture,
a reverence for the past became a longing for it. Dream castles based
on Gothic styles popped up in the English countryside. Napoleon’s
attempt to create a Roman Empire, replete with all the artistic and architectural
trappings was opposed in England by the adoption of the Perpendicular
Gothic style of architecture as a national style. This psuedo-Gothic style
was used for the new Houses of Parliament (1840-1860) as well as for the
style of the new Law Courts. Across the Atlantic in the United States,
Broadway watched the Gothic spire of Trinity Church raised, and in New
Haven, Yale University copied the Gothic style of Oxford and Cambridge.
In Germany, the Romantic movement led to the beginning of the completion
of Cologne Cathedral…work which had begun centuries before.
The
romantic emphasis on the validity of personal, private experience was
expressed forcibly in music. In Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, German
mythology inspired powerful music with nationalistic overtones. Remember
the movie "Apocalypse Now", and the scene where helicopters
are flying through the air in their paths of destruction and murder? The
music swells and seems to delight in a kind of bloodlust that is thrilling
and horrible at the same time. The music is Richard Wagner’s Ride
of the Valkyries from the Ring cycle. Powerful, stirring stuff! Other
composers of the period are: Chopin, Verdi, Bizet and Mendelssohn. A spiritual
predecessor for composers was Beethoven.
There
are many reasons for Romanticism’s celebration of subjectivity. Some
can be traced back to reactions against the rationalism of the Enlightenment
of the 18th century. Reason could not solve all of man’s
problems. In France, the horrors of the Reign of Terror after the Revolution
were reminders of Jonathan Swioft’s apt phrase describing "Man’s
inhumanity to man". With the breakdown of the belief in reason’s
ability to solve man’s problems came the fragmentation of a comprehensive
world view.
Some
artists looked to nature for inspiration. In the 18th century,
the philosopher Rousseau had challenged the supremacy of civilization
with his Discourses championing the "noble savage"
or natural man, uncorrupted by the civilized world. Rousseau’s ideas
became a longing in the hearts of many 19th century urban dwellers,
who dreamed of a life outside the cities.
The
Hudson River School of painters in America, Constable and Turner in England,
and Caspar David Freidrich in Germany provided paintings that fed the
imagination or satisfied escapist longings.
In
France, the inherent nobility of the peasant was the central focus of
Millet’s paintings. Camille Corot’s idealized, pearly landscapes
had the quality of a memory, creating a nostalgic dreamlike state in the
viewer.
Even
NeoClassicism turned from its sober course into the more sensual path
of Romanticism in the work of Jean August Dominique Ingres. Ingres, the
student of the great founder of the NeoClassic movement, David, always
claimed to be faithful to his teacher’s doctrine. We view many of
his paintings in a different light. Although Ingres never departed from
his teacher’s polished style, he used the polish and controlled linearity
of his NeoClassic training to describe seductive female form in exotic
settings. His paintings of women in the Harem and in the Turkish baths
betray a fascination with the exotic.
It is significant
that this was a period of colonization. England conquered India and much
of Africa. The French took Algeria and Central Africa. Exoticism played
an important role in romantic art and architecture. Painters described
the interiors of harems, painted portraits of Africans and Asians, and
erected "Oriental" pavilions on their country estates.
Perhaps ironically,
this was also a period of growing nationalism. The Greek struggle for
independence was championed by Lord Byron, the great romantic poet, and
given a face by the French romantic painter Delacroix. Italy was engaged
in a battle for statehood, and the composer Verdi’s name was
seen as an anagram for this struggle. Victor Emmanuel Re
d’Italia (Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy.) Verdi’s
opera Nabuco (Nebuchadnezzar) told the story of Biblical
Israel under foreign domination. In this opera the Italians saw the echo
of their own struggle for freedom and self-rule. The chorus from the opera
became a revolutionary anthem for those fighting for a free Italian state.
Romanticism began as a literary movement, and had a profound and far-reaching
effect on subject and style in all the arts. The Sturm und Drang (Storm
and Stress) movement of 1770’s German literature formed a powerful
reference. Goethe took Rousseau’s exhaltation of freedom and nature
into new areas of emotion, instinct, fantasy and individual expression.
In the Sorrows of Young Werther, a fabulously successful
and influential novel, Goethe described the quintessential romantic figure…a
sensitive hero of deep feeling, isolated, and for whom the world has no
place. In America, Edgar Allen Poe imagined a macabre and morbid world,
creating the horror genre of literature. In Russia, Pushkin found inspiration
in Russian Folk Tales. In France, Vicotr Hugo’s imagination led him
to great diversity in poetry and prose. Hugo’s stories live on today.
Most people have heard of Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, and
the "hero" of Hugo’s book Notre Dame de Paris, even
if they don’t know that Quasimodo is a fictional character in Hugo’s
novel. Hugo’s novel Les Miserables was adapted for the stage,
and is a successful musical, as well as a film.
The poet John Keats wrote lyrical poems of sensual beauty. His Ode
on a Grecian Urn carries this sentiment, "Beauty is Truth and
Truth, Beauty". It is inspired by Greek art but wanders into a personal
reverie about time and age and what endures.
Our
focus in art is the visual manifestation of the romantic spirit. We will
look at the French painters Delacroix and Gericault, the French sculptor
Francoise Rude, at the English Pre-Raphaelites, at Constable and Turner,
and at William Blake. Although styles differ considerably, the spiritual
individualism is the driving force and connection among these various
visual forms.
~Benita Goldman~
|
|
April
Love 1856 Arthur Hughes
is
housed, appropriately, in the former Bankside Power Station. Sir Giles
Gilbert Scott designed the structure, (and, perhaps most famously, the
ubiquitous red British telephone box). The chimney was purposely kept
built below the height of St. Paul's cathedral. The permanent collection
inside is grouped thematically.
The
themes include: