ROMANTICISM

I was becoming more aware of many aspects of my work so far which had links with Romanticism. I wanted to have a more in-depth look at this late 18th/early 19th century movement to try and set my own approach in a context of both tradition and influences carried through to contemporary art.

Introducing Romanticism

A reaction to ‘Neoclassicism’ and 'Age of Reason’ which was an era of belief in rational thought, intellectualism and order, visual qualities of precision, balance and detail. Ideas of art as promoting virtue, the result of trained education, and a way through which nature could be improved on. Instead Romanticism called for:

  • Imagination, individualism, spirit of rebellion

  • Anti-rational - horror, madness, violence, the supernatural, the spiritual

  • Wild, ungovernable nature with which the spiritual self seeks solace, God relocated in nature, religion becoming replaced with metaphor and feeling

  • Drew on scenes from the past


Romantic subjects in art included:

  • Ruins

  • Nature and landscape

  • The sublime, lofty, spiritual

  • God and religion

  • Science and history

  • Politics and social order

  • Sympathy, melancholy and horror

German writer Friedrich Schlegel described Romantic art as a “perpetual becoming”. Schlegel’s thought seems to suggest that Romantic art, in celebrating nature’s power, is accepting of uncertainty and change - and so accepts also that knowledge and reason are not absolute.. 

Michael Bird talks about Post-Modernism “..attempting to set Romanticism in quotation marks”. As well as looking at Romanticism in the context of its time, when its aspirations of expressing the imagination, the spiritual and natural were still new and idealistic, it’s also important to look at contemporary meanings. Through all of the changes which have occurred since the early 19th century, some aspects of Romanticism have become seemingly out of touch, naive, or kitsch, as we are even more aware of uncertainty and change in our fast-paced world. 

Sources:

‘Art’. Andrew Graham Dixon, London:DK

‘100 Ideas That Changed Art’. Michael Bird, London: Lawrence King, 2012

'Art History Survey Course-Neoclassicism and Romanticism’ [lecture] Falmouth University, 2013

Aimee Labourne