Romanticism, realism, impressionism, and cubism

1. Romanticism, realism, impressionism, and cubism Chapter 12 Section 4

2. Romanticism • At the end of the eighteenth century, a new intellectual movement, known as romanticism, emerged as a reaction to the ideas of the Enlightenment. • The romantics emphasized feelings, emotion, and imagination as sources of knowing. • How is this different from Enlightenment thinkers?

3. Romanticism • Romantics valued individualism, the belief in the uniqueness of each person. • They rebelled against middle-class conventions. • Men grew long hair and beards and both men and women wore outrageous clothes to express their individuality.

4. Architecture • Romantics influenced architecture, art, literature, music etc. • Romantic architects revived medieval architecture and built castles, cathedrals, city halls, parliamentary buildings (Houses of Parliament in London) and even railway states in a neo-gothic style.

5. Art • To Romantic artists all art was a reflection of the artist’s inner feelings. A painting should mirror the artist’s vision of the world and be the instrument of the artist’s own imagination. • They abandoned classical reason for warmth and emotion. • Eugene Delacroix was one of the most famous romantic painters from France. He believed that “a painting should be a feast to the eye.”

6. Literature • Literature was deeply affected by Romanticism. Writers like Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe wrote using a Gothic style. • Shelley’s Frankenstein and Poe’s The Raven gave chilling examples of this literary style.

7. music • To many romantics, music was the most romantic of the arts, because it enabled the composer to probe deeply into human emotions. • The 19th century is sometimes called the age of romanticism. • Ludwig van Beethoven was the bridge between classical and romantic periods of music.

8. Science • In biology, Louis Pasteur proposed the germ theory of disease, which was crucial to the development of modern scientific medical practices. He also invented a vaccine for rabies. • In Chemistry, the Russian Dmitry Mendeleyev in the 1860s classified all the material elements then known on the basis of their atomic weight. He created his own version of the periodic table. • Europeans began to have a growing faith in Science which lead to increasing secularization.

9. Charles Darwin • In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. He taught that plants and animals had evolved over a long period of time from earlier and simpler forms of life. • This principle is called organic evolution. • Darwin also believed in natural selection. The belief that there was a struggle for existence and that some organisms were more adaptable than others. (survival of the fittest) • Those that are naturally selected for survival will reproduce and thrive. The unfit do not survive. • In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that humans had animal origins and were not an exception to the rule governing other species. • His ideas were very controversial.

10. realism • The view that the world should be viewed realistically, a view frequently expressed after 1850, was closely related to the scientific outlook. • Realism became a movement in literature, visual arts, and politics. • Realists rejected the views of romanticism.

11. Literature • Literary realists wanted to write about ordinary characters from actual life rather than romantic heroes in exotic settings. • They tried to avoid emotional language by using precise description. • They also preferred novels to poems. • Two famous realist authors were Gustave Flaubert from France and Charles Dickens from Britain. Flaubert is best known for Madame Bovary while Dickens wrote classics such as A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities.

12. Art • Realist artists sought to show the everyday life of ordinary people and the world of nature with photographic realism. • Gustave Courbet was the most famous artist of the realist school. • His subjects were factory workers, peasants, and the wives of saloon keepers. • “I have never seen either angels or goddesses, so I am not interested in painting them.”

13. Impressionism • Impressionist art is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. • They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. • Their pictures are very bright and vibrant. • The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colors. • Some of the more famous impressionist artists include EdouardManet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

16. cubism • Visual arts style of the 20th century created principally by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. • It emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening and modeling. • Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, color, and space • Cubists presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously.