Romanticism

Romanticism opposed the Age of Enlightenment, and argued that emotion was a valid aesthetic experience (the nature of art, beauty and taste).

The main concept of the Enlightenment is the objective, empirical way of justifying or knowing something; that you gain knowledge through observation, experience or experimentation.


“A life of sensations rather than thoughts”


Charles Baudelaire states that ‘Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.’

‘Romanticism gives artists entire freedom; proclaims drama in the highest form of poet art; utters revolt against classicism; not against realism; introduces local colour, tends towards morbidity, humanitarianism, love of nature, mystic religious feeling.’


We will be looking at paintings through the centuries that were affected by the romanticism movement, how people perceived them and the emotion these paintings conveyed.

In the romanticism movement artists wanted to convey emotion from the issues they painted, such as the French revolution and how the dark dimly lit paintings contrasted against the light.

Past influences the future; everything in the future has had some sort of influence from the past, directly or indirectly, in some form or another.

Romantics take the idea of how their paintings can affect people emotionally.

It was a movement against the social and political norms of the age of the enlightenment; it wanted to break away from the traditional classical paintings of the past.

This artist period was in reaction against Neoclassicism.

Strong visual arts.

A contemporary movement which was seen to be influenced by the concepts within romanticism was Fauvism. The paintings within the Fauvism movement expressed emotion and wild, often inharmonious colours, without regard for the subjects natural colours.

Everything we see today not just in paintings and art, has been influenced by the past in one way or another. Not necessarily in a direct way but everything has to know the past to move on, to proceed, to improve, to create new ideas.

The imagery portrayed in the reproduction of The Wonderer Above The Sea Of Fog strived upon how past ideas have enriched contemporary visual culture. It takes key features from the original image and elaborates these to achieve the desired impact of portraying the characters personality and emotions.

The main similarity that artists share is the fact that they want to convey emotion in their work. Yet the way they conveyed emotion was expressed very differently depending on the artists view on the romanticism movement. For example at the beginning of this movement artists focussed on painting with dark contrasting tones of colour to express emotion and visually reflecting events, such as the French Revolution.

Henri Matisse also wanted to show emotion in his paintings, instead by using vivid colour to express this.

Romanticism had a renewed look at nature and mankind's relationship with it – delivered through the strong emotional sensation we get from the art work of the time.