Neo-classicism, Romanticism and Realism

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Neo-classicism, Romanticism and

Realism

(Academic Script)

Hello everyone!!!

I welcome you all to this exciting episode where we would focus on three
important art movements of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Neo-
classicism, Romanticism and Realism. The chronological sequence of these
three art-movements is, of course, only a convenient stratification of art-
attitudes or tendencies so inextricably bound up with one another and with
preceding movements that it is impossible to tell where one ended and
another began.

In this lesson we will also focus on few prominent artists, who laid the
foundation for the modern western art movements to emerge in late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth century.

This lesson is prepared by Abha Sheth, who is an Art Historian based in

Vadodara, Gujarat. Her area of research has been varied; ranging from
Ancient and Medieval Indian Sculpture and Architecture to Popular Art
Forms and Contemporary Visual Art practices. She has a vast teaching
experience at academic institutions as well as at several other non-
academic teaching platforms.

Introduction

When does modern art begin? In fact modern art begins nowhere because
it begins everywhere. For what happened was not that a new outlook
suddenly appeared; it was that a gradual metamorphosis took place in the
course of a hundred years.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are marked by rapid and extreme
shifts in the social and political structure of Europe and America, inevitably
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accompanied by corresponding movements in the arts. The attitudes to the

arts, as to life in general, underwent a profound change which has
influenced Western thought to the present day. It embodied a number of
separate developments: shifts in patterns of patronage, in the role of
French academy, in the system of art instruction, in the artist’s position in
society and, especially, in the artist’s attitude toward artistic means and
issues—toward subject matter, expression, and literary content, toward
colour, drawing, and the problem of nature and purpose of a work of art.

Out of the turbulence of the revolutionary epoch there emerged three

prominent art styles: Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Realism. All the
three styles deal with the outside world, but Realism shows the world as it
is, Romanticism as the heart tells us it should be, and Neoclassicism as it
would be in some ideal incarnation.

Both Neoclassicism and Realism were mutually inspired by the emphasis

on rationality during the Enlightenment era; they differed in terms of the
subjects they embrace. Neoclassicism is an aesthetic attitude deriving from
the arts of ancient Greece and Rome, specifically an emphasis on simplicity,
proportion, and restrained emotion. On the contrary Realism is an aesthetic
attitude stressing the truthful treatment of material, the normal and
everyday life as it truly is. On the contrary, Romanticism is an aesthetic
attitude born out of a late eighteenth century reaction to the rationality of
the Enlightenment and the transformation of everyday life brought about
by the Industrial Revolution. It stressed powerful feelings, originality, the
individual response and a return to nature.

Neo-classicism

Since the early seventeenth-century, French art had evolved between the
Baroque and Rococo, and the academic and classical. Neo-classicism (1760-
1850 CE) is the name given to quite distinct movements in the decorative
and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon
Western classical art and culture.

In a cultural, artistic, and architectural sense, Neo-classicism grew partly as

a response against the sensuous and frivolously decorative Rococo style
that had dominated European art from the 1720s on. But an even more
profound stimulus was the new and more scientific interest in classical
antiquity that arose in the eighteenth-century. It was given great impetus
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by new archaeological discoveries, particularly the excavation of the buried

Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Neo-classicism, thus, refers to works of art that adopt the subjects and
styles prominent in ancient Greek classical art with its focus on humanism,
rationalism, and idealism. Neo-classicism turned to antiquity not only for
aesthetic inspiration but also for intellectual and human values. It was
essentially, a product—like the French Revolution with which it is often
associated—of the ‘Age of the Enlightenment’. Its period roughly extends
from the French Revolution until the beginning of the restoration—with a
peak during Napoleon’s Empire. The Emperor Napoleon indeed quickly
understood the advantage he could take from the institution of the Salon—
an annual exhibition in Paris of contemporary paintings. Because the Salon
was used as a space for political propaganda to support his regime, many
Neo-classical paintings from these years either directly celebrate the
Christ-like figure of the Emperor, or represent scenes from ancient Rome
that have political resonance in contemporary events.

Apart from the above factors, urbanization and the rise of the middle class
are among the social trends that contributed to Neo-classicism. Between
1750 & 1800 CE, rapid urbanization led to the concentration of a growing
middle class in industrial centres. Though classical art traditionally
appealed to elite segments of society, it gained rapid currency as the rising
middle class of the Enlightenment sought to copy many of the social trends
embraced by the aristocracy. Moreover, middle-class proponents of the
Enlightenment valued Neo-classicism because it reflected the value of
science and reason that dominated the period. It was favoured because it
appealed to both the philosophical and social trends that emerged from the
increased interaction between European aristocrats and non-titled citizens.

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)

The opening conflict of the eighteenth-century was between two armies of

idealists, the Neo-classicists and the Romantics, who shared the same
dissatisfaction with the state of the world but had different ideas about
how to change it. Fundamentally, it was a question of whether the head or
the heart should govern us, a matter of choosing between the intellect and
the emotions. Jacques-Louis David, the arch-classicist, declared that “…art
should have no other guide than the torch of reason”, but this dictum is
opposed by a sentiment held dear by the French: “The heart has its reasons
which Reason does not know.”
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While French neoclassical art is finely represented in the works of a

number of painters, two stand out in particular—David and his pupil Jean
Auguste Ingres.

David’s work was crucial in shaping the attitudes that led, ultimately, to
twentieth-century abstract art. He and his followers were fully wedded to
their idea that a painting was an adaptation of classical relief sculpture;
they subordinated atmospheric effects, emphasised linear contours,
arranged their figures as a frieze across the picture plane, and accentuated
that plane by closing off pictorial depth by using such devices as a solid
wall, a back area of neutral colour, or an impenetrable shadow. This can be
seen in both The Oath of the Horatii and more clearly in The Death of
Socrates.

The Neo-classicists looked back to the French painter Nicolas Poussin for
their inspiration. The decision to promote "Poussiniste" painting with its
well-delineated form and clear drawing became an ethical consideration as
they believed that strong drawing was rational, therefore morally better.
France was on the brink of its first revolution in 1789, and the Neo-
classicists wanted to express a rationality and seriousness that was fitting
for their times. The neo-classicism of David and his followers involved
specifically moralistic subject matter related to the philosophical ideals of
the revolution and based on the presumed stoic and republican virtues of
early Rome. They supported the rebels through an art that asked for clear-
headed thinking and self-sacrifice to the State, as evident in David’s The
Oath of the Horatii. The “moralising” attitudes of the figures and the almost
abstract simplification of the composition results from the artist’s attitude
toward his subject—a deliberate attempt to replace eighteenth-century
royalist elaboration with republican simplification and austerity.
Art, for them, was cerebral and not sensual. It is evident from the smooth
and uniform surface of Neo-classical painting where no brush-strokes are
discernible to the naked eye.

One of David’s greatest paintings, Death of Marat, contains all the neo-
classical elements—spatial compression, sculptural figuration, and highly
dramatised subject. Another famous painting of his Lictors Returning to
Brutus the Bodies of his Sons for Burial, exhibited in 1789, has been seen as
an allegory of a sublime sacrifice to the state: Brutus, who discovered proof
that his sons were plotting against the state, had them executed, and the
scene shows the return of their bodies, while Brutus sits in the shadow.
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Elected to the French parliament after the Revolution, David reigned over
art in France, establishing Neo-classicism as a kind of official style of the
French Revolution.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)

Ingres, during his long life, remained the exponent and defender of the
Davidian classical tradition. While he retained the formal elements that
were so much a part of his neoclassical training—extreme linearity and
glazed, smooth surface—he begun to reject neoclassical subject matter and
the idea that art should be morally instructive. By 1808, Ingres was
beginning to walk on both sides of the neoclassical/romantic divide. He, for
instance, subverted David’s classicism in his famous La Grande Odalisque—
painted in 1814. David was largely interest in idealizing the human body,
rendering it not as it existed, but as he wished it did, in an anatomically
perfect state. Ingres, on the other hand, rendered the female body in an
exaggerated way—distorting the form to make her body more sinuous and
elegant.

At first glance, Ingres’s subject matter is of the most traditional sort. But
unlike the tradition of representing reclining female nudes in the disguise
of classical mythology—famously titled ‘Venus’—both Ingres and Goya (La
Maja Desnuda 1797-1800), refused to conceal who and what their female
figures were. In case of Ingres, she was not the Roman goddess of love and
beauty, instead was an odalisque, a concubine who lived in a harem and
existed for the sexual pleasure of the sultan. Ingres retained his
neoclassical line to embrace, in this case, a geographically distant and
romantic subject.

This tension between Neoclassicism and Romanticism will continue

throughout the first half of the nineteenth century as painters will tend to
side with either Ingres and his precise linearity or the painterly style of the
younger painter Eugene Delacroix.

Romanticism

By nineteenth-century, Neoclassicism had come to be seen as conservative,

academic and no longer revolutionary. Art was evolving quickly—coming
out of the studio and out of the academy. The first great school of art to
successfully challenge the establishment was Romanticism.
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The Romantic Movement was a revolt of the heart against Reason, of the
mysterious against rational, of the individual against formula—in short, of
the senses and the imagination against everything else. It was a pan-
European movement that had its roots in England in the mid-eighteenth
century. Initially associated with literature and music, it was a movement
of liberation of the self, in opposition to Classicism and its rigid forms.
Many felt that the Revolution, as the outcome of the enlightenment
emphasis on reason, did not keep its promises. There was thus a shift from
reason to sentiment, from objectivity to subjectivity, and, in the visual arts,
from form to colour.

Romanticism was not initiated in France, but its impact on French arts was
particularly important. It is challenging to define nineteenth-century
French Romanticism as the art was not limited to one genre: it affected
historical painting, portrait painting, and landscape painting—making it
difficult to give a set of characteristics that would be universally valid.

The modern conception of the artist was largely created in the Romantic
era: before, the artist worked for a patron, and was clearly socially inferior
to him. After the Revolution, the commissions increasingly came from the
bourgeois class, and the social barrier between artist and patron began to
be less significant. The institution of the Salon, a biennial show organized
by the state, gave more autonomy to the artists, since their works were not
systematically commissioned anymore, but bought after the show, either
by the state or by private collectors. This growing economic autonomy
went along with a social change of status of the figure of the artist: as his
intellectual pretensions grew, he became closer to the figure of the writer.

The first marker of a Romantic painting may be the facture, meaning the
way the paint is handled or applied on to the canvas. Viewed as a means of
making the presence of the artist’s thoughts and emotions apparent, the
romantics revived the textured surface of Rubens and Rembrandt.
Romanticism reverted to the formula of asymmetry; diagonal recession in
depth; and indefinite, atmospheric-colourist effects more appropriate to
the expression of the inner imagination. This approach to art, interpreted
as a direct expression of the artist’s persona—or “genius”—reflected the
Romantic emphasis on unregulated passions. The artists employed a
widely varied group of subjects including the natural world, the irrational
realm of instinct and emotion, the exotic world of the “Orient” and
contemporary politics.
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One of the first artists to move away from neo-classicist attitude in France
was Theodore Gericault. His remarkable Raft of the Medusa (1819), a
historical tableau, confronted its audience with the theme of man and
nature. It depicts not some heroic event in contemporary French history,
but the aftermath of a shipwreck scene where, the veneer of civilization is
stripped away as the victims fight to survive on the open sea.

Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)

But if Gericault was the precursor, the artist who rapidly established
himself as the figurehead of French romantic art was Eugene Delacroix.
Through his exploration of exotic themes, his accent on violent movement
and intense emotion, and through his reassertion of Baroque colour and
free brush strokes—the French Romantic movement came into its own. His
intensive study of the nature and capabilities of a full colour palette derived
not only from the Baroque but also from his contact with English colour
painters such as Constable and Turner.

Delacroix exhibited his monumental Massacres at Chios in 1824 at the

annual French Salon. This painting serves as an excellent example of what
Delacroix hoped romanticism could become. Rather than looking at the
classical past for a narrative, Delacroix looked to contemporary world
events for his subjects. This is also to be seen in his famous Death of
Sardanapalus (1827).

Delacroix's iconic painting, Liberty leading the People (1830) celebrating

the second French Revolution of 1830, is, at its core, a history painting. The
painting at first seems to be overpowered by chaos, but on closer
inspection, it is a composition filled with subtle order.

The monumental—and nude to the waist—female figure powerfully strides

forward and looks back over her right shoulder as if to ensure those who
she leads are following. She wears atop her head a Phrygian cap, which in
ancient Rome signified liberated status of the slaves. The figure serves as
an allegory—in this instance, a pictorial device intended to reveal a moral
or political idea—of Liberty. Different types of people surround her,
making it clear that the revolution is not just for the economically
downtrodden, but for those of affluence, too. The painting accurately
renders the fervour and chaos of urban conflict.
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John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and the English Landscape

If Romanticism is defined as the supremacy of emotion over reason, it

found its most characteristic manifestation in Germany and England. John
Constable is regarded as one of the two great British landscape artists of
the nineteenth-century, alongside his contemporary J.M.W. Turner, who
was largely responsible for reviving the importance of landscape painting.

He almost exclusively painted landscapes—avoiding the far more popular

genres of history painting and portraiture. Most of his artistic output is
comprised of images of the rural countryside of England’s Suffolk and Essex
counties. When most artists would sketch scenes in nature before returning
to the studio to paint, Constable began to bring his canvases outside and
paint directly from nature, adding a sense of veracity and immediacy to his
paintings and inspiring future artists like those that would form the
Barbizon School as well as the later Impressionists.

Constable was deeply invested in the physical experience of nature. The

artist famously studied weather reports and spent countless hours
sketching clouds, which he rendered with precise meteorological detail
in Wivenhoe Park, Essex. Constable believed that an artist could encourage
positive and negative emotions in the viewer through the depiction of
nature—particularly through the play of light and dark on the landscape
and skyscape. The emotions Constable intended to stir up in his viewers
were, much like in his later View on the Stour near Dedham, those of
nostalgia for the past, and a desire to recapture the English connection to
nature that was disappearing during the early decades of the Industrial
Revolution. Many of his works depict an idyllic England that still physically
existed in some locations, but was barely holding on.

Constable was clearly the product of the Age of Enlightenment and its
increasing confidence in science. But Constable was also deeply influenced
by the social and economic impact of the industrial revolution.

A famous artist in his own lifetime, Turner is known for his swirling, light-
filled Romantic paintings of land- and seascapes. Turner displayed a visible
evolution in his painting style throughout his long career. As his career
progressed he began to pay less attention to the details of objects and
landscape and increasingly became fascinated with natural and
atmospheric elements. His landscapes varied from the sublime to
the picturesque, each artwork exploring atmosphere through his careful
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attention to light and colour, and an expanding repertoire of techniques. In

his later life, Turner painted many pictures exploring the effects of the
elements: wind, rain, snow, sea, and storms. In Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off
a Harbour's Mouth (1842) a steamboat struggles to stay afloat in the heart
of the vortex. The swirling shapes, shifting colours, and blurry marks make
it seem as if we’re looking directly into a storm. Rain, Steam, and Speed -
The Great Western Railway focuses on the dynamic nature of technology,
whereas The Fighting Temeraire presents a mournful vision of what
technology had replaced, for better or for worse.

Francisco de Goya (1746–1828)

The art of the twentieth-century involves fundamental changes in attitude

toward the subject as well as toward the form of painting. One of the major
figures, who had a demonstrable influence on what occurred subsequently,
was the Spaniard Francisco de Goya. His art went through many stages
during his long life, but in his middle and late years he was particularly
concerned with the inherent evil and insane cruelty of mankind.

Goya began his career designing tapestries for the royal residences, and
eventually became court painter to the King of Spain. But after Napoleon’s
army occupied Spain and deposed the King, Goya documented the horrors
he witnessed in his two paintings: The Second of May, 1808 and The Third of
May, 1808 in Madrid. Goya continued his account of the atrocities of war in
a series of eighty-five prints called The Disasters of War. Executed from
1810 to 1820, the series depicts the travesties witnessed during Spain’s
struggle for independence from France. These works remain as some of the
most powerful anti-war images ever created.

As a young man, Goya discarded the classicism and was never affected by
the type of romanticism that developed in France. His art was born from a
fervent experience of life. Because he deals so frequently with horrors and
with the fantastic, he may appear to be a painter of the world of
imaginative emotionalism inhabited by one type of romantic. But Goya was
a realist as he saw the world without illusion; for what it is and he accepts
its existence as unalterable fact.

His later years were spent largely in a house outside Madrid which he
painted with haunting scenes. Saturn Devouring his Sons belongs to this late
series, known as the “Black Paintings.” This black vision was expressed in
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terms of monstrous images that were yet rooted in the most precise and
penetrating realism.

Realism

Realism emerged in the aftermath of the revolution of 1848 that

overturned the monarchy of Louis-Philippe and developed during the
period of the Second Empire under Napoleon III i.e. from about 1840 until
the late nineteenth-century. As French society fought for democratic
reforms, the Realists democratized art by depicting modern subjects drawn
from the everyday lives of the working class. Realism rejected both; the
idealized classicism of academic art and the exotic themes of Romanticism.
Instead, it was based on direct observation of the modern world and sought
to convey a truthful and objective vision of contemporary life. In keeping
with Gustave Courbet‘s statement in 1861 that “…painting is an
essentially concrete art and can only consist in the representation of real
and existing things…”, Realists recorded in often gritty detail the present-
day existence of humble people—paralleling related trends in the
naturalist literature of Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert. The elevation of
the working class into the realms of high art and literature coincided with
Pierre Proudhon’s socialist philosophies and Karl Marx’s Communist
Manifesto, published in 1848, which urged a proletarian uprising.

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)

Courbet exhibits the three-way conflict of past, present and future more
clearly than any other artist of his time. He met the writer Charles
Baudelaire and other progressive thinkers within the first years of making
Paris his home and established himself as the leading proponent of Realism
by challenging the primacy of history painting. The groundbreaking works
that Courbet exhibited at the Paris Salons of 1849 and 1850-51—
notably Burial at Ornans and The Stonebreakers—portrayed ordinary
people from the artist’s native region on the monumental scale formerly
reserved for the elevating themes of history painting. To achieve an honest
and straightforward depiction of rural life, Courbet eschewed the idealized
academic technique and employed a deliberately simple style, rooted in
popular imagery, which seemed crude to many critics of the day.

When two of Courbet’s major works—Burial at Ornans and The Artist’s

Studio—were rejected by the jury of the 1855 Exposition Universelle in
Paris, he withdrew his eleven accepted submissions and displayed his
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paintings privately in his Pavillon du Realisme, not far from the official
international exhibition. As the introduction to the catalogue of this
independent, one-man show, Courbet wrote a Realist manifesto—echoing
the tone of the political manifestos—in which he asserts his goal as an
artist, “…to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch
according to my own estimation.”

Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) executed scenes of rural life that

monumentalize peasants at work, such as Sheep Shearing Beneath a Tree
and Sower. Millet’s subject of predilection was the life in the countryside,
and his work mostly dealt with the poor people at work in the fields. As
time passed, Millet’s paintings became more popular, perhaps because they
also became more idealistic and optimistic. His famous work Gleaners,
exhibited at the Salon of 1857, still show hard agricultural tasks, but this
time the postures and the bodies display an almost classical composition,
and convey the dignity and beauty of the scene. Like Courbet’s portrayal of
Stonebreakers, Millet’s choice of subject was considered politically
subversive, even though his style was more conservative than that of
Courbet, reflecting his academic training. His pictures appealed to his
contemporaries, in part because of the nostalgia for life in the countryside
in a moment of intense urbanization.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) was a French landscape and

portrait painter. His vast output simultaneously references the Neo-
Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations
of Impressionism.

Conclusion

Out of the turbulence of the revolutionary epoch there emerged those art
movements that immensely affected ideas about the artist's individual
creativity, sincerity and integrity, about the relative importance of
expression and representation and, above all, about the power of the artist
to transcend logical processes of thought and break through to states of
mind beyond conscious control. The episode focussed on few such artists
and their artworks.