The Origins and Nature of Romanticism
Year of lecture: Unknown
Abstract:
"There can be no doubt that after 1815 the Romantic movement expressed the tensions and mood of the new age more profoundly than Neo-classicism. ‘To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art—that is, intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts’ wrote Baudelaire in his critical review of the Salon of 1846. ‘For me, Romanticism is the most recent, the latest expression of the beautiful’. "The rise of popular democracy, of industrialism, and of capitalism, changed utterly the artist’s relation to society. The importance of his old patrons the church, the court, the nobility declined swiftly. In the new situation the artist became an individualist, forced to rely upon himself. Romanticism was the consequence of the new situation. It was not a style like Gothic or Baroque (this is important to grasp at once) not a style, but as Baudelaire says, ‘a mode of feeling’. For the romantic art is feeling, emption, expression. At the beginning of the 18th century, art theory in France and England stressed the role of reason, symmetry, fitness, simplicity, proportion, clarity and control in artistic creation. ‘Reason’ wrote Reynolds in his VIIth discourse in 1776 ‘must ultimately determine our choice upon every occasion’. But by 1776 that was already a rather old fashioned view, and even Reynolds was shifting his ground. Ten years later in 1786 he wrote in the XIII Discourse ‘I observe as a fundamental ground common to all the arts… that they address themselves only to two faculties of the mind, its imagination and its sensibility’."
