Romanticism

Catalog description

Around 1800, European Romantic artists, philosophers, and writers theorized that the past was irretrievable, traditions dead, and conventions bankrupt. To echo Baudelaire, "to say Romanticism is to say modern art," for its principled refusals of finicky illusionism, narrative coherence, beauty, the metamorphosis of matter into the ideal, nascent nationalism, empire, gender normativity, racial hierarchies, anthropocentrism, god, and transcendence. Consequently, this seminar invites dexterity in apprehending aesthetic and ethical acts of unburdening, undertaken in contexts and idioms not our own, namely nineteenth-century European, mostly French, art, studied in light of philosophical, political, and literary manifestos. " We will study the crisis in sculpture and monuments, the most prestigious of public arts. Their former claims to enduring values, elite rarity, fixity, and human unity meet with iconoclasm, banalizing proliferation, reproducibility, impermanence, and contingency. We also study two-dimensional works. They stake out new roles for the artist as impassive and disruptive eye-witness; reveal the cravenness of leaders of global finance; replace religion with art; admit to violent Orientalist fantasies; stage the irruption of the commodity into the supposedly high-minded realm of art; and claim new audiences via new media. Artists considered include Canova, Goya, Friedrich, Géricault, Ingres, Delacroix, and Guillon-Lethière. Period authors include F. Schlegel, Gr​é​goire, de Staël, Byron, and Hugo.