ROMANTICISM

1775 – 1830:• American Revolution• emergence of the United States• French Revolution• Napoleon• spread of democratic and egalitarian ideals

throughout Europe and America• Sentiment of national identity• Industrial revolution

(1)

• In contrast to the rational order, regularity, and generalization that were said to characterize neoclassical art, the Romantic, largely suggested the irregular, picturesque, wild, and distant as it was associated with the literature and art of the middle ages (gothic). [ . . .] it was also concerned, in a new and vital way, with the concrete and directly familiar.

• (2) Idealistic, empirical, historical and psychological

In 1798 the word “Romantic” was used by the German critics Friedrich and August Wilhelm von Schlegel

• The Romantic refuses to recognize restraints in subject matter or form and so is free to represent the abnormal, grotesque, and monstrous and to mingle standpoints, genres, modes of expression ( such as philosophy and poetry) and even the separate arts in a single work.

(9)

• Friedrich Von Schiller: the poet in the modern world does not depict nature for its own sake but to convey the “ideal.”

• Étalage du moi =display of the self” = in a teleological sense )

• Use of names for the emotions, together with descriptions of emotional states, and a tendency through not so much to sequence of logical argument or of narration but rather the evolution and turn of feeling.

Immanuel Kant / from Critique of Judgment (1790)

(504) Judgment in general is the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given, then judgment, which subsumes the particular under it, is determinative as transcendental judgment it states a priori the conditions that must be met for subsumption under the universal to be possible.

(504)

• What is merely subjective in the presentation of an object, i.e., what constitutes its reference to the subject and not to the object, is its aesthetic character; but whatever in it serves, or can be used, to determine the object is its logical validity. In the cognition of an object of sense these two references [to the subject and to the object ] occur together.

• That subjective feature of a presentation of which cannot at all become an element of cognition is the pleasure and displeasure connected with that presentation.

European Romantics:

• Germany: Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling

• Britain: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, John Keats

• French: Victor Hugo and Stendhal• Russia: Alexander Pushkin• America: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper,

Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. D. Thoreau, R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickonson, Herman Melville

Influence of European Romanticism on American Writing

• Early 19th century• Moral enthusiasm• Faith in the value of individualism• Intuitive perception• Nature as source of goodness and human society is

source of corruption• American politics, philosophy and art• It appealed to the revolutionary spirit, nationalism• Breaking the ties with Puritanism, opposing Calvinism

and rationalism• Emergence of Transcendentalism in New England

Transcendentalism:

• (15)German Idealism: In the philosophy of Kant “transcendental” refers to the a priori element in experience – that is, the way in which the mind determines and orders its own contents through its own laws – and the term “transcendent” refers to ideas, such as freedom of will, God, and immortality that cannot be objects of knowledge.

(15) Transcendentalism is the belief in the existence of a timeless realm of

being beyond the shifting, sensory world of common experience.

• Neoplatonism

• (17)Plato and Descartes:• According to Descartes, reality is comprised of three

principles or substances – matter, mind, and God – • Dualism of matter and mind = the real and the ideal• (17-18) ORGANICISM: It abandons these dualisms by

conceiving the cosmos (reality) as a process rather than as a substance, an activity in which the material world, the mental or ideal, and the Divine mutually involve or interpenetrate each other.

Romanticism in American Art

Artist :John Singleton Copley (1738 - 1815)Painting :The Death of Major Pierson on the 6th of January of 1781

Artist :John Singleton Copley (copley15.jpg)Painting :The Three Youngest Daughters of George III

Artist :John Singleton Copley (copley16.jpg)Painting :Watson and the Shark

Artist :Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1907 -1954)Painting :Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

Artist :Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (leutze9.jpg)Painting :Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth

Artist :Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (leutze2.jpg)Painting :Washington Crossing the Delaware

Artist :Edward Hicks (1780 - 1849)Painting :The Peaceable Kingdom

Artist :Edward Hicks (hicks4.jpg)Painting :The Landing of Columbus

Artist :Edward Hicks (hicks5.jpg)Painting :Penn's Treaty with the Indians

Artist :Gilbert Stuart (1755 - 1828)Painting :George Washington (Athenaeum Washington),

detail

Artist :Gilbert Stuart (stuart11.jpg)Painting :Miss Dick and her Cousin Miss Forster

The Hudson River School:

• Hudson River School (1835 - 1870)Hudson River School was the first American school of landscape painting active from 1835-1870. The subjects of their art were romantic spectacles from the Hudson River Valley and upstate New York. The artist Thomas Cole is synonymous with this region and first leader of the group. Other famous artists of the group are George Caleb Bingham, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, George Inness, John Frederic Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade...

Artist :Albert Bierstadt (1830 - 1902)Painting :The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak

Artist :Albert Bierstadt (bierstadt15.jpg)Painting :Valley of the Yosemite

Artist :Albert Bierstadt (bierstadt14.jpg)Painting :White Mountains, New Hampshire

Artist :Albert Bierstadt (bierstadt11.jpg)Painting :Sunlight and Shadow