Semester 2, Lecture 1

STUDY REFERENCE ONLY; DO NOT QUOTE FROM THESE NOTES AS THEY ARE NOT REFERENCED

The period from about 1750 – 1880 was a time of huge social and political change. The Industrial Revolution was underway in England, creating a huge working class churning out mass-produced goods for sale. The new middle class made up of these new industrialists, traders, merchants, were busy seizing political power from the monarchy and nobility, either directly through revolution or else indirectly through parliament.

The second half of the 18^th C saw the establishment of a number of revolutionary republics (France and America being the two most noted. In many cases these new republican governments officially adopted the neoclassical style because of its association with the democracy of Ancient Greece and Republic of Ancient Rome. Neoclassical artists set out to replace the sensuality and triviality of Rococo with a style that was logical, solemn in tone, and moralizing in character. The philosophy of Neoclassicism promoted fixed, ideal values, the importance of the state, rationalism, public opinion, impersonal clarity for the expression of universally relevant and eternally valid truths and so on. In France, the Academy that was established following the Revolution had very strict control over what kind of art was favoured. You may recall that we looked at Ingres who was a staunch Republican neo-classicist in his attitude and in his style, yet his early works were considered unorthodox and he struggled for recognition by the Academy. A claustrophobic dogmatism developed around the Academy, part of a Europe-wide institutionalisation of the visual arts during the second half of the eighteenth century. Inevitably this produced a reaction, a demand for freedom of expression and diversity of style which led to what we call the Romantic movement or Romanticism.

The word meant something a bit different than it does today – by the middle of the 18th century "romantic" in English and romantique in French were both in common use as adjectives of praise for natural phenomena such as views and sunsets. This was close to modern English usage but without the implied sexual element.

It’s a bit misleading to call it a movement, because it consisted of a wide number of individual responses to the constantly changing situation that faced the populations of Western Europe at that time. It is even difficult to talk about Romanticism as a style – it’s a bit like the Baroque in that way. The artists and writers and composers that we call the Romantics had one thing in common, and that was an attitude, essentially what the French Romantic writer Baudelaire described as a way of feeling.

The word began to be used first in Germany to describe a certain kind of poetry around 1790, in which individual feeling and experience were prioritized over classical ideas of beauty and form. Spiritual freedom and individual creativity, rather than agreed norms or models – these things were considered primary amongst the Romantics. Their work is concerned with the expression of an artist’s own unique, inner vision setting aside the demands of external voices like the state, the church, the family, public opinion and so on. This coincides with a general decline in the idea of absolutes – political absolutes like the monarchy, religious absolutes like Papal Authority, social absolutes like the rigid class system that people were born into and so on.

In fact, we are going to begin with a Spanish artist, Francisco Goya, who is almost an exact contemporary of the French artist David. Goya had started out as someone who supported the vision of the Enlightenment with its professed ideas of social justice, rationalism, scientific progress, a hatred for religious fanaticism, superstition and cruelty.  But his optimistic faith in the power of reason was overturned by the events of his own lifetime, by many examples of cruelty and inhuman behavior in war and conflict often carried out by forces who put themselves forward as the agents of Enlightenment.

Goya’s early work resulting from commissions for tapestries for the royal palace is quite positive in mood, often portraying a carnival atmosphere. The tapestries glorify leisure activities of the rich, poor, young, and old in a playful, almost Rococo manner. However, following a period of ill health which left him profoundly deaf his paintings began to express a kind of unease, partly reflecting his personal situation but also reflecting what he considered to be a moral and political crisis in Spain. He continued to be successful, and began to receive commissions to paint members of the nobility, including the Royal Family.

While this is obviously modeled on Velaquez’ Las Meninas painting, it is a remarkably unflattering portrait, of which one French writer said "It looks like the corner baker and his wife after they have won the lottery’. The royal couple apparently did not express displeasure over the work, although Goya never painted them again.

It is probably in Goya’s prints that we best see the Romantic artist at work, portraying his personal imaginative visions, defying traditional academicism and conventional subjects. In 1777 he completed a series of 80 etchings titled Los Caprichos, satirizing Spanish life. The prints used acquatint, a relatively new process at the time. They were an artistic experiment and a medium for the artist’s criticisms of Spanish society at the time. He described the series as depicting "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual".

He didn’t spare artists in his critique; here the artist is shown as a trained monkey painting the portrait of an ass, although the painting shows the donkey without his long ears, and sporting a powdered wig! Goya wrote in his notes “He is quite right to have his portrait painted. Those who don’t know him or have never seen him will now know who he is.” In another comment aimed directly at artists, he wrote at the bottom of his print, “You’ll never die of hunger,” that is to say – those who put themselves in service to the ruling elite and avoid telling the truth will be handsomely rewarded.

In this image an artist, asleep at his drawing table, is besieged by creatures associated in Spanish folk tradition with mystery and evil. The title of the print, emblazoned on the front of the desk, is The Sleep of Reason breeds Monsters. This could be read as the artist, in this case Francisco Goya - adherence to the values of the Enlightenment, primarily Reason. Without Reason, it seems to suggest, evil and corruption prevail. However, the full epigraph reads: "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."

The term Romanticism which has come to mean something sentimental, something that tries to gloss over reality, but Goya’s work in particular shows that this was not the case at the time of Romanticism. Here is an image by David from 1814; It shows a typical Neo-Classical subject, the Spartan king Leonidas prior to the Battle of Thermopylae at which he and his men died.  Here is a painting by Goya from the same year, representing the massacre of Spaniards during the French invasion of the country six years earlier.

In addition to the unflinching portrayal of contemporary brutality, it is worth noting the looseness of Goya’s brushwork compare to that of David with its smooth, polished surfaces. Goya’s style is more individualistic, less representational, less Academic. David’s style of painting is associated with what we call the Academic style, and we will be looking later on at how French artists rejected this Academic style as the century progressed.

Goya also produced a series of prints called The Disasters of War, a very unflinching look at the horror that he witnessed, with both sides shown to be equally savage.

So when you hear something described as Romanticised today, it means that all the horror or dark side has been erased from something; you can see that this is not the case in the work of Goya, or later Romantics as we will see. The starting point for any discussion about Romanticism hinges on the primary importance that the artists placed on the imagination, and the free expression of the artist’s feelings. As we move into the 20^th C the expression of the artist’s inner vision will become more and more psychological, more symbolically charged, but at the beginning of the 19^th C this inner vision was still largely focused on a personal response to lived experience of the world. The Romantic artists often made works that engaged directly with real happenings and events instead of idealized or allegorical representations.

By stressing the realistic at the expense of the idealistic or classical elements in David’s work, the Romantics created a new type of modern history picture. We see a shift in emphasis from heroes to victims. We will see this in the work of the great French Romantic painter Gericault. He was a painter of a socially new type, from the middle class with a private income large enough to allow him to work privately without commission. Financial independence helped to establish the new notion of artistic independence.  He was able to take on a subject of his own choosing for a huge painting called The Raft of the Medusa.  When this ship foundered, the captain and the senior officers took the only seaworthy lifeboats and cast 150 passengers and crew adrift on a make shift raft on which only 15 survived the horrifying ordeal of 13 days.  The men on the raft were not heroes in any accepted sense of the word.  They suffered atrociously but in no noble cause; they were victims of incompetence not of human or divine malevolence.  Gericault raised their plight to a level of universal significance. By elevating an unheroic subject to a colossal and heroic scale Gericault might seem to have been attacking by implication not only the long established hierarchy of genres but also the recent restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and nobility, because the captain of the doomed ship was a nobleman who had been appointed to the position without proper skills. Despite the controversial subject matter the raft of the medusa was well received by the artistic establishment. 

Another of the great French Romantics was Eugene Delacroix, who struck up a friendship with the older Gericault, and even posed for one of the figures in the Raft of the Medusa (dead youth lying on his face in the center of the foreground) .

In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took his inspiration from the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic content characterized the central themes of his work, and led him to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Extract from a letter written from Morocco;

“This place is made for painters. (people) might find much to criticize as regards human rights and equality before the law but beauty abounds here, not the over-praised beauty of fashionable paintings. The heroes of Davis and Co. with their rose pink limbs would cut a sorry figure beside these children of the sun, who moreover wear the dress of classical antiquity with nobler air, I dare assert.  If you ever have a few months to spare, come to Barbary and there you will see those natural qualities that are always disguised in our countries and you’ll feel moreover the rare and precious influence of the sun, which gives intense life to everything”.

This is the period in European history when the idea of travel for pleasure begins to develop.

Delacroix strongly identified with the Romantic poet Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action. In his work you can see a use of expressive brushstroke similar to that of Goya. He also studies the optical effects of colour which had a profound influence of the Impressionists.

The Romantic emphasis on authentic and direct experience contributed to the rise in the status of the sketch. Because this was seen as the least premeditated form of the arts it demonstrated a free handling of materials revealing the individuality of the touch of the artist. 

Delacroix was greatly influenced by the English Romantics, particularly Constable and Turner. It is reported that after seeing this painting (The Haywain) that he went back to France and reworked the Massacre at Chios. It is difficult for us to see any connection between those two works, but that is partly because Constable has suffered as a result of being over-reproduced and from being very popular with amateur painters. You need to get up close to a finished Constable painting to see the energy in the brushwork and the colour. Every painting that he made was based on an exact situation and location. He didn’t favour the use of imagination but tried to capture scenes exactly as he saw them. Constable concluded that direct observation of the world was bound to lead to spontaneous generation of a stimulating diversity of artistic approaches. Possibly more than any other aspect of his work, the oil sketches reveal him in retrospect to have been an Impressionist long before that was established in France, an avant-garde painter who demonstrated that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new direction. He was far more recognized for his work in France, while in England he struggled to sell any work.

Looking at Constable’s paintings it’s easy to forget that the Industrial Revolution was well underway in Britain at this stage, producing great wealth for those who owned factories, but generating social suffering on a vast scale. The French political analyst Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of Manchester in 1835 “From this filthy sewer pure gold flows.  Here humanity attains its most complete civilisation and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned into a savage”. While in 1845, conditions in Manchester convinced Karl Marx that the system of industrial production provided the key to the problem of historical change.  Assisted by Fredrick Engles- the representative in Manchester of a German cotton mill- he wrote the Communist Manifesto (London 1848) which called for a forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions..  Although it had little immediate effect, this pamphlet acquired the status of an almost Holy text.

When we look at the work of Joseph Turner, any resemblance to the work of Constable is not immediately apparent. Turner was a more natural observer than Constable, less reflective more impulsive, more concerned with the visual appearances and especially with the fleeting effects of light.  He was concerned the practice of painting as an end in itself.  He made use of atmospheric effects like mist, fog and water spray to reduce form to its most abstract, allowing him to focus largely on colour and the clash of elemental forces in nature.

The word sublime is very much associated with the Romantic movement. There are a number of definitions for sublime, but we are interested in the definition that is associated with aesthetics which usually refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. The forces of nature such as we encounter in a storm or natural disaster are sublime, because they are beyond representation, they cannot be reduced to words.

It is said that Turner had himself tethered himself to the mast of a ship in a storm at sea in order to experience the full severity of nature’s wrath at first hand and that this painting, Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth is a result of that experience.

So this is a very important opportunity for us to discuss the term aesthetics. This is a term that gets used in a very vague way to describe something to do with taste or beauty, but in fact aesthetics is far more interesting than that. It was the Ancient Greeks who first coined the term to mean that which is perceived by the senses, but the modern use of Aesthetics dates from the Age of Enlightenment, initiated by two 18^th C German philosophers Baumgarten and Kant. They sought to elevate the role of perception in consciousness, to give greater weight to the direct experience of the individual in forming ideas and values.

If you remember that the opposite of aesthetic is anaesthetic that should help you to identify what is going on in theory in Modern Aesthetics – the idea of rousing awareness, waking people up to the reality of the world.

There are two more artists that I want to introduce to you in relation to Romanticism. The first is the German artist Caspar David Friedrich who was captivated by the notion of encountering nature in solitude, emphasising physical and spiritual isolation. His works express moments of intensity. He gave the following advice to artists; ‘Close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards’.

Monk by the Sea is a strange work to consider after the work of Turner with its dynamism and energy. What we have here is a kind of boundlessness, monotonous, that dwarfs the human, reduces it to an insignificant element in one way, and yet communicates that this scene must have a beholder in order to be appreciated. There is a sense of the insignificance of the human being and yet, because this figure is identified as a monk, implying spiritual reflection, the vast significance of consciousness is perhaps the main subject of the work.

This theme of human contemplation is seen again in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog 1818.  It is worth pointing out that up to this time, mountains were not seen as objects of appreciation, but rather as obstacles, places of danger and discomfort. During this period, as part of the inclination to travel, people began to make tours to the Alps, and the idea of mountains as places of physical and spiritual isolation and elevation found their way into Romantic philosophy. In Wanderer, the elevated position suggests both mastery over a landscape and the insignificance of the individual within it. We see no face, so it's impossible to know whether the prospect facing the young man is exhilarating, or terrifying, or both; we are invited to occupy that place of contemplation.

I want to finish up with William Blake, who is sometimes described as a pre-Romantic because his work began at the end of the 18^th C. Blake took an almost opposing position to the of Constable who, you may remember, favoured the painting of exactly what could be seen with the eye, not influenced by any internal vision. Blake took the view that the imagination was all-supreme; he described the imagination as "the body of God".

He was a poet and a mystic, deeply religious but totally unorthodox. He did not hold with the doctrine of God as an entity separate from and superior to mankind speaking about Jesus Christ he said: "He is the only God ... and so am I, and so are you." He believed in liberty and social equality in society and also between the sexes. In his own lifetime he was considered to be mad, but later came to be held in high regard for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work.

Blake is best known for his illustrations, both of his own poems such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and other texts of a spiritual nature, including books from the bible. .