2 papers Art history visual analysis (5-7 pages)

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ART HISTORY 132

Romanticism

Romanticism

  • aim: reaction against established order (“status quo”)
  • government
  • religion
  • cult of the artist:
  • assertion of subjective experience & feeling
  • extreme states of emotion
  • as opposed to form & objectivity of Neo-Classicism
  • cult of nature: sublime
  • wild, ever-changing aspects
  • exotic & supernatural

Fuselli’s The Nightmare
(1781)

Blake’s Ancient of Days
(c. 1800)

Francisco Goya
(1746-1828)

  • biography:
  • denied entry into Royal Academy
  • journeyed to Rome (1771)
  • court painter to Charles III (1786)
  • court Painter to Charles IV (1789)
  • serious illness left him deaf (1792-93)

  • media: oils & graphic arts

  • political context: social revolutionary
  • opposed to Charles IV’s corrupt & suppressive reign
  • sympathies w/ failed French Revolution & Enlightenment
  • opposes FR invasion of SP in 1808
  • lead to Peninsular War (1808–1814)
  • opposes "Intruder king", Joseph I, brother of Napoleon

Goya

  • “Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”
  • date: 1798
  • series: Los Caprichos
  • medium: etching & aquatint
  • significance: pro-Enlightenment vs. cultural superstition
  • narrative: secular Temptation of St. Anthony
  • motifs: beasts of the night (e.g., owls, bats & felines)
  • composition: dynamic diagonal
  • recalls Caravaggio’s Entombment
  • light/shadow: modified tenebrism & chiaroscuro effects


(Left) CARAVAGGIO’s Italian Baroque Entombment (c. 1600)
vs.
(right) GOYA’s “Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (c. 1800)

Goya’s The Disasters of War
(c. 1800)

Goya’s Third of May, 1808
(1814)

Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Sons
(c. 1819-23)

Théodore Géricault
(1791-1824)

  • training:
  • self-taught @ Louvre (1810-15)
  • copied Titian, Rubens, Velazquez
  • rejected prevailing Neoclassicism
  • aesthetic: Baroque revival
  • narrow range (browns, flesh tones)
  • dramatic lighting effects
  • dynamic compositions
  • narrative: immediacy & emotional intensity
  • subjects: contemporary events
  • outrage at French monarchy’s restoration
  • process: uncompromising truth
  • Interviews w/ survivors
  • reconstruction of events

Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa
(1818-19)

Eugène Delacroix
(1798-1863)

  • significance: “last of great artists of the Renaissance and first modern” (Baudelaire)
  • biography: bastard son of Talleyrand
  • subjects:
  • contemporary history
  • exotic foreign cultures
  • reclining nudes
  • ancient & medieval literature
  • aesthetic: Baroque revival
  • compositions: dynamic
  • color: Venetian influence & Rubens
  • brushwork: painterly

11.psd

Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People
(1830)

(Left) Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830)
vs.
(right) photograph of barricade at Maidan Square
during Ukrainian Revolution (2014)

(Left) Detail of Liberty from DELACROIX’S Liberty Leading the People (1830 CE)
vs.
(right) Hellenistic Greek Winged Victory of Samothrace (c. 250 BCE)

(Left) Detail from DELACROIX’s Liberty Leading the People (1830)
vs.
(right) detail from CARAVAGGIO’s Entombment (1603)

(Left) Detail from DELACROIX’s Liberty Leading the People (1830)
vs.
(right) detail from CARAVAGGIO’s Death of the Virgin (c. 1600)

Delacroix’s Odalisque
(c. 1850)

(Left) DELACROIX’s French Romantic Odalisque (c. 1850)
vs.
(right) TITIAN’s Venetian Renaissance Venus of Urbino (c. 1500)

(Left) DELACROIX’s French Romantic Odalisque (c. 1850)
vs.
(right) INGRES’ French Neo-Classical Grand Odalisque (c. 1815)

DELACROIX’s The Death of Sardanapalus
(1827)

Honore Daumier
(1808-1879)

  • significance: political caricatures and satires on social behavior
  • biography: ardent Republican
  • 1830: contributes to anti-gov’t weekly Caricature
  • 1832: sentenced to prison for 6 mo. for attacks on King L-P
  • 1835: political satire suppressed
  • 1848: returns to political subjects w/ revolution
  • themes: social injustice & class warfare
  • media: lithography
  • style: Baroque revival
  • dynamic compositions
  • strong contrasts of light & shadow

Daumier’s Gargantua
(1831)

(Left) Detail from DAUMIER’s Romantic period Gargantua (1831)
vs.
(right) detail from BOSCH’s Northern Renaissance Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500)

Daumier’s Rue Transnonain
(1834)

(Top) DAUMIER’s Rue Transnonain (1834)
vs.
(bottom) detail from DELACROIX’s Liberty Leading the People (1830)

15.psd

John Constable
(1776-1837)

  • biography: resisted family obligations to take over milling and farming business in Stour Valley (Suffolk County)
  • training: Royal Academy Schools
  • life classes and anatomical dissections
  • studied and copied Old Masters
  • significance: “6-footers” valued by FR landscapists (e.g., Monet) for light, color, brushwork

career: never financially successful

  • elected belatedly to RA at age 52
  • sold more paintings in FR than GB
  • thesis:
  • landscapes are scientific & poetic
  • imagination can’t alone produce art

technique: sketches painted in ‘plein aire’ (outdoors)

  • subjects: cult of nature
  • picturesque
  • set w/in rural everyday life
  • momentary effects of nature
  • cloud formations
  • movement of water
  • play of light through dense foliage

Constable’s Hay Wain
(1821)

Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral
(1831)

(Left) RUISDAEL’s Dutch Baroque Jewish Cemetery (c. 1650)
vs.
(right) CONSTABLE’s English Romantic Salisbury Cathedral (c. 1830)

J.M.W. Turner
(1775-1851)

biography: lower middle class

training: Royal Academy at age 14

career: opposed English Academy’s classicism

  • opposite of Reynold’s definition of History Painting (i.e., classical vs. contemporary)
  • art criticism: John Ruskin (c. 1840)
  • praised T’s landscapes as “true, beautiful, and intellectual”
  • color: vibrant transparencies
  • forms: dissolve & blur into atmosphere
  • narrative tone: sublime
  • humanity dwarfed by violence of nature

TURNER’s Houses of Parliament Burning
(1835)

Turner’s The Slave Ship
(c. 1840)

Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed
(1844)

Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed
(detail)

  • locomotive: George Stephenson
  • 1814: built steam-powered machine
  • 1825: Stockton & Darlington Railway in NE England, 1st public steam railway
  • 1829: The Rocket won Rainhill Trials
  • Establishes S’s company as pre-eminent builder of locomotives on railways in UK, US and Europe
  • 1830: first inter city passenger railway, Liverpool & Manchester Railway
  • brushwork: “impasto”
  • intuitive dabbing of paint w/ loaded brush
  • implies form, rather than purely descriptive
  • no use of contour to define boundaries

Caspar David Friedrich
(1774-1840)

  • biography: son of candle-maker
  • training: studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden
  • career: won prize at Weimar competition organized by Goethe (1805)
  • narrative tone: sublime
  • discovered "the tragedy of landscape"
  • subjective, emotional response to natural world
  • metaphysical reflection on relation between humanity and natural world
  • theory of landscape: “the spiritual eye”
  • “Art stands as mediator between nature and humanity. The original is too great and too sublime for the multitude to grasp”

FRIEDRICH’s Monk by the Sea
(1809-10)

Friedrich

  • Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
  • date: 1818
  • setting: expansive & sublime
  • heroic feat to ascend
  • atmospheric perspective
  • meaning: contradictory impression
  • mastery over landscape
  • insignificance of individual w/in it
  • figure: anonymous
  • faceless
  • impossible to know whether young man is exhilarated or terrified, or both

FRIEDRICH’s Abbey in the Oak Forest
(1809-10)