Читать книгу Romanticism - Léon Rosenthal - Страница 3

At the Exhibition of 1817, the first to take place after the Restoration, the public did not notice any signs of change. Despite David’s exile, the same masters were present defending the same ideas. Beside them there were some young people, their students and followers, supporting the cause.

No doubt it was wished that politics had not imposed or suggested topics remote from the artistic mission such as historical anecdotes or religious themes. Gérard had painted the Entry of Henri IV into Paris in the same way that he had celebrated the 10^th August in the past. There were also signs of weariness; with shy audacity some artists had created scenes with a dramatic quality or tinged with light effects. In fact, there was nothing there to write home about. The young Horace Vernet displayed a large picturesque painting with his Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa but that was an isolated case; the Grand Condé by David d’Angers triggered some curiosity but without raising fears.

However, fervent, anxious and nervous young people questioned and looked for the future in studios or at the Louvre at that very time. They sensed, without understanding the exact reasons for it, that life was now to be found outside the formulae that had ensured the glory of French art for half a century. There had been a soul lying in these tried and tested formulae which was no longer shared by these young people. Some historic and respectable academic rules were still in use, but outdated. Famous professors no longer had control over these young people. They fumbled for new means of expression or, as sometimes happens in such situations, they would temporarily seek guidance from a friend who seemed momentarily inspired.

At the Exhibition of 1819 latent ideas suddenly appeared, revealing themselves in the scandal of The Raft of the Medusa. It was a huge painting whose dimensions alone were a challenge, and it imposed authority in itself even upon those who were distressed by it. No doubt that the battle had started. In that painting, Géricault rejected everything that the French School had stood for: the hierarchy of genres (as he treated a news item like an epic), ideal beauty, the supremacy of drawing, apparent finish, balanced order and serenity.

That vehemently powerful work claimed the joy of painting, the rights of movement, drama, and life. Beyond David’s canon, it was based on principles from the past and strengthened by the tradition it had returned to, whilst at the same time announcing a free form of art. Critics moaned and were disturbed by the multiplication of mundane and religious topics, but young people praised Géricault and saw in him their new leader. He still had a natural penchant for the realist epic that few shared, but he set an example for all and gave them the courage to assert themselves.

Those around him, and in particular the young Delacroix, were attracted by his work and could see something special in it. His drawings, gouaches and watercolours often confirmed what Gros had intuitively discovered, but at the same time he pioneered techniques in different fields. Invented in 1796, lithography had only produced uncertain and imperfect outcomes; Géricault took it up and, with remarkable confidence, revealed its full potential. Lithography would have been inadequate for David and his students, who would have found it too greasy, supple, colourful and sometimes excessive, but it turned out to be perfectly suitable for the new generation.

Géricault’s action was profound and long lasting though he did not show work in public again after the Medusa. He did not take part in the Exhibition of 1822 and died at the beginning of 1824. Before Géricault’s death, Eugène Delacroix had taken up his torch. Dante and Virgil was showed at the Exhibition of 1822 and made him famous. Close to him were artists like Bonington, Champmartin, Sigalon, Camille Roqueplan, Ary Scheffer and Achille Devéria, some of whom achieved enduring fame.

At the Exhibition of 1824 scattered signs of change had turned into a generalised movement in which was at stake the whole direction that art was to take. The Romantics flocked together. Besides Bonington, Copley Fielding, Constable and Lawrence came to display their works at the Exhibition as if they wanted to support the avant-garde.

Facing such attacks and desertion, the French School resisted; it would not let go and the fight turned out to be much harder for artists than writers. Victor Hugo and his emulators faced mediocre writers with worn out, passé formulae who opposed them with insults and mockery but not with powerful works. However, the School which the young artists had decided to destroy was too recent, and the fits of enthusiasm that it had produced were only just past. Girodet was still very successful with Pygmalion at the Exhibition of 1819, but time was not on the School’s side and nobody had David’s authority or the productivity needed either to impose discipline on the young or to stimulate them and give them confidence in proven doctrines. A figure to lead the resistance was looked for, and Ingres was called on for help.

At the time he was blacklisted. La Grande Odalisque, on display beside Roger delivering Angelica at the Exhibition of 1819, had been accused of multiple flaws and seen as directing art backwards to its primitive age, though avant-garde artists appreciated his work. At the Exhibition of 1824, however, The Vow of Louis XIII created a sudden reversal of the situation and put him back in favour with the orthodox point of view.

He was seen as the saviour who was needed: the idiosyncratic features of his genius were ignored whilst his science and energy were put at the forefront. In 1825 he was elected a member of the Institut.

In 1825 Charles X was crowned in Reims. Gothic decoration was chosen for the ceremony: there was a gallery in front of the façade as well as inside the nave. These solemn circumstances helped assert the triumph of the Middle Ages that had been so looked down on. Everything worked in favour of this reversal: it was in the interest of religion and politics whilst being also supported by the development of historic sciences. In 1831 the novel Notre-Dame de Paris made the craze for medievalism reach its peak. It was visible everywhere, in the inspiration of artists and writers, trinkets, furniture and fashion.

Antoine Jean Gros and Auguste Deaby, The Battle of the Pyramids (21^st July 1798), first quarter of the 19^th century.

Oil on canvas, 389 × 511 cm.

Musée national du château et des Trianons, Versailles.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Field of Waterloo, 1818.

Oil on canvas, 147.3 × 238.8 cm.

Tate Gallery, London.

David’s death in Brussels at the beginning of 1826 went almost unnoticed. A few weeks later an exhibition of Greek art was held. Some of the School’s most famous paintings were displayed, besides which Delacroix, Devéria, Roqueplan and Scheffer also exhibited their work. The stylistic confrontation had exactly the effect that could have been expected: faded enthusiasms were revived and avant-garde artists were crushed by the weight of the glorious past. However, all was in vain and the dying body could not be brought back to life. Nevertheless, the Romantics lost some support, and from then on they were attacked mercilessly.

1827 was marked by the preface to Cromwell. The parallel between Hugo and Delacroix, which was to become famous, was first made by Louis Vitet in the Globe. The artistic struggle reached its peak, and the Exhibition of 1827 turned into a ‘convention on painting’, as a contemporary put it. Delacroix’s Sardanapale, Devéria’s Birth of Henri IV, and Ary Scheffer’s Souliot Women were to be seen. Opposite that group there were The Death of Elisabeth and The Taking of the Trocadero by Paul Delaroche, Mazeppa by Horace Vernet, and Torquato Tasso by Robert Fleury. Bonington displayed The View of Venice and Lawrence Master Lambton. Such a list gives testimony to an exceptional creative intensity. Inspired, feverish, solid or skilful; how could those paintings not trouble minds? Sigalon failed totally. So did Delacroix, whose Marin Faliero did not raise any interest whilst Sardanapale was slated equally by his friends and enemies. It was a success for Boulanger and a short-lived triumph for the creator of The Birth of Henri IV, Eugène Devéria, of whom it was briefly thought that he might become the leader of the Romantics. Two beginners, Corot and Paul Huet, were hardly noticed in the turmoil yet it was through them that landscapes would be included in the controversy.

A few days after the Exhibition started some new rooms opened at the Louvre. On one of the ceilings Ingres had painted The Apotheosis of Homer. To tell the truth, no-one understood it, and it prompted mostly the admiration of the Romantics.

The first performance of the play Henri III and his Court by Alexandre Dumas on 10 February 1829 was not solely a literary event. It revealed some deep changes in the performing arts. Doric porticos which could hardly fill the stage were no longer fashionable; staging, décor and costumes grew richer and were enlivened by Romantic inspiration.

The opening of the Conservatoire’s concerts by Habeneck in 1828 allowed music lovers to discover and develop the cult of Beethoven. Around the end of 1830, Berlioz conducted his Symphonie fantastique. He transferred into the realm of music the same enthusiasm and rage that was going on in painting and poetry, and thus found himself, like Victor Hugo or Delacroix, a key figure in the avant-garde.

The revolution had just begun. It created generous exaltation and a lot of hope. It seemed that the France which had been humiliated under the Restoration regime was about to be reborn. Freedom guiding the People by Delacroix was the sign of that élan. Had it endured, the direction taken by the arts would have been substantially different. Reconciled with their time and bathed in civic spirit, artists would have forgotten their reveries and feverish feelings and would have been reconnected to reality. The Monarchie de Juillet dispelled illusions born on the barricades almost immediately. Artists turned back to the silence of their studios.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Second of May, 1808: The Charge of the Mamelukes, 1814.

Oil on canvas, 266 × 345 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Yet the new regime provided fighters in unexpected fields of activity. Political caricature sprang up with an incredible violence and fierceness but also unbelievable artistic brilliance. Decamps, Raffet and Grandville opened the way to Daumier, and when the laws of September 1834 stopped their sarcasm against Louis-Philippe their satirical wittiness started targeting public mores, and Gavarni applied his sharp mind with endless resourcefulness.

Around that time David’s school seemed utterly exhausted. Gros’s suicide, after the bad reception of his works at the 1835 Exhibition had driven him to despair, could be perceived as a token gesture. Of course that did not prevent followers of David from going on with their teaching, keeping their seats at the Institut, and providing an increased number of bloodless, conventional and outrageous paintings to decorate the monuments and churches of Paris in particular. The Institut, that had the juries of exhibitions under its control, proscribed people like Delacroix, Decamps, Chassériau and, above all, landscape painters throughout the Monarchie de Juillet.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, 1814.

Oil on canvas, 268 × 347 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Delacroix was fully accomplished by then. He painted the admirable Algiers Women in 1834, Saint Sebastian in 1836, Medea and Taillebourg in 1838, Trajan and The Shipwreck of Don Juan in 1840, The Crusaders of Constantinople in 1841 and Marcus Aurelius in 1845. Decamps created high quality works with the same regularity. Chassériau, a child prodigy brought up in Ingres’s studio, asked the Romantics to help him express his refined and complex desires. In his famous lessons on colour, Chevreul justified Delacroix’s technical intuitions and drew up new laws that could allow daring ideas to develop.

Revolution had expanded everywhere. Landscape painting was bubbling with excitement. An imposing group made up of Paul Huet, Dupré, Théodore Rousseau, Daubigny and Corot offered original ways of feeling and representing natural landscapes. At the Exhibition of 1827, Mercury by Rude foreshadowed a renewal in sculpture stamped with authority. Turmoil reached sculpture too. David d’Angers modelled statues, busts and medallions of his most famous contemporaries and sculpted the pediment of the Panthéon in 1837. On the Arc de Triomphe, Rude celebrated the Departure of the revolutionary armies with epic grandeur and Barye managed to catch and represent the lively ferocity of the great cats.

Théodore Chassériau, Ali Ben Ahmed, the Last Caliph of Constantine, with his Entourage outside Constantine, 1845.

Oil on canvas, 325 × 260 cm.

Musée national du château et des Trianons, Versailles.

Eugène Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios, 1824.

Oil on canvas, 419 × 354 cm.

Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Parallel to that, a craze for images developed and lithography played a central role. Illustrations started to appear everywhere in books. Whilst the monumental publication of the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France was going on, enriched by lithographs, some of the most beautiful of which were carried out by Bonington and Isabey, books of all kinds were adorned with frontispieces, images, lithographs, etchings and steel engravings. With the help of incredibly skilful craftsmen, wood allowed illustrations of perfect typographic quality to be inserted in the text. The Magasin pittoresque relied heavily on images in its effort at encyclopaedic popularisation.

Deep changes were also visible in furniture, interior design, clothing and even hairdressing: tasteful or not, art was taken into consideration in all areas. Collectors gathered marvels from the past and threw new light upon them. The choice of a jacket or haircut or the growth of a beard showed aesthetic beliefs and were perceived as manifestos. Without knowing it, elegant men and ladies going to the opera disguised as transvestites, slovenly-dressed young people complaining about the fuss ordered by Chicard, all took up the style established by the Duchess of Berry and Alexandre Dumas. Unexpected costumes, unreliable archaeological extravaganzas, plastic surprises, medleys of colour and flashiness, all were a visual feast added to music or dance.

Was the whole movement a hundred per cent Romantic? Undoubtedly analysis reveals that some aspects were not a matter for Romanticism but parodies, imitations and compromises would not have happened if some active and vivid ferment had not been at work, modelling the period, and people of the time, whether scandalised or overjoyed, saw Romanticism everywhere.

Indeed, Romanticism had swept across the whole of society. Yet, at the same time that one could see signs of it everywhere, it was already deeply eroded and going into decline.

Just after the first battles, Romanticism faced some opposition in the public which it was not going to overcome. I am not referring here to the surprise that Romantic works caused, for every new form of art requires some time for the public to adapt, become educated and eventually understand it. It is also obvious that the eccentric side of early Romanticism would only raise momentary curiosity. No, the essence of Romanticism itself was repugnant to the spirit in general, and the French spirit in particular.

With traditions of clarity, order, logic and analysis and the pre-eminence of rational thinking, everything in France was against an aesthetic movement which praised feeling and passion and relied on the soul’s intimate forces instead of asking for well thought out adhesion.

Eugène Delacroix, The Women of Algiers, 1834.

Oil on canvas, 180 × 229 cm.

Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Francesco Podesti, Henry II, King of France, Mortally Wounded in a Joust, Blessing the Marriage of his Sister Marguerite de Valois with Emmanuel-Philibert de Savoie, 1844.

Oil on canvas, 178 × 280 cm. Castello ducale, Agliè.

Romantic success was never total and the more characteristic the works, the more the polemic reactions they caused. Year after year the general atmosphere was less and less in the Romantics’ favour. Besides, material wealth softened the mal du siècle. When time came for minds to be taken over by new passions, social and humanitarian tendencies as well as political claims called for action, and focused everybody’s attention on the realities of the time, preparing for new artistic ideals.

The defection of artists themselves was a serious sign of the movement running out of steam. Louis Boulanger, for whom Hugo cherished great hopes and whose zeal had led him to truly extravagant behaviour, finally turned to dull and spineless painting. Overwhelmed by the weight of early glory, and despite a few successful comebacks, Eugène Devéria disappeared too. Ary Scheffer turned his back on the colourfulness of Gaston of Foix and preferred pale philosophical abstraction.

Others looked only for success and, in order to achieve it, they weakened their effects, added mannerism and, in the end, produced watered-down Romanticism. Some tried to revive the graces of the eighteenth century that they had talked down in the past. Achille Devéria and Célestin Nanteuil came down with a bump and produced undemanding lithographs.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Charles IV and his Family, c. 1800.

Oil on canvas, 280 × 336 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The crowd seemed to prefer skilful men who produced mundane or dramatic images using a plain language devoid of technical originality. Avatars, weaknesses of disoriented artists and an uneducated public all had a negative impact but then an even more damaging phenomenon occurred. From 1840 on, the suppressed classical tendencies found a new vigour and claimed revenge; public opinion called for a reaction and young people turned away from Romanticism. Victor Hugo’s play The Burgraves was a memorable failure, and Ingres suddenly appeared like the hero of the hour. He was just back from Italy, where he had managed the Ecole de Rome and had had an incredible influence on his pupils. He had just painted the Stratonice, which was showered with praise. He was acclaimed as a saviour and humbly agreed to stand up in the sacred cause of art. He had soon forgotten his previous ambitions and with total authority he proclaimed the cult of the beautiful and condemned any deviation from the rule. He had only a few direct disciples but, nevertheless, dull and faded paintings reappeared everywhere. Neo-classical landscape painters turned to Antiquity again and were influenced by Poussin. The general appearance of exhibitions changed completely: colour, movement and life disappeared. Romantic art was still allowed in, but seemed out of place. Greyness and a sense of wisdom had swept in. An English man felt like going for a cold bath as he entered the Exhibition of 1846. New artists appeared like Gérôme with his Cockfighting; the calculated and glamorous effects of the Decadent Romans by Couture appeared vivid and inspired.

Caspar David Friedrich, On the Sailing Boat, 1818–1820.

Oil on canvas, 71 × 56 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

It was a time of helplessness. Hyperbolic assertions, polemic beliefs and basic negation were not worthwhile anymore. Either out of scepticism or indifference the most sensitive people accepted the novelties that stood out, whatever doctrine they stemmed from. They preached eclecticism, and events seemed to prove them right. Times were weary though each year probably had its harvest of works worth admiring. Some were as good or even possibly superior to the works of the previous years but their flaws and qualities were precisely the same that had been debated ad nauseam. A feeling of general discomfort and stagnation gradually developed, awaiting the advent of the man, the idea or the work that would be capable of reviving energies, enthusing a new spirit and stirring up art out of its dullness.

At that time precisely a whole chain of events occurred, the importance of which people of the time could not realise. They appear to us, however, as the portents of a new faith, the revelation of which was awaited. On several occasions, works containing elements of poetry focused on reality praised by Géricault were exhibited. Since The Readers in 1840, Meissonier had accustomed the public to meticulous accuracy. The opening of a Spanish gallery at the Louvre in 1848 showed the example of masters filled with an intense naturalist feeling. The daguerreotype was invented in 1839 and photography focused everybody’s attention on views of direct reality once again. At the same time, Balzac, Stendhal and George Sand analysed contemporary life.

Thus realism crept into art and society through obscure and complex mechanisms. At first it only seemed to be claiming a small place but soon it asserted itself as the only truth and that it was up to the realist to regenerate the arts. At the last Exhibitions of the Monarchie de Juillet, two young painters had a modest start as no-one, not even themselves, guessed their potential. Then came the 1848 Revolution and Courbet and Millet discovered their own genius in the middle of the universal turmoil. Amidst a blaze of publicity they proclaimed the beliefs that were at the core of artistic battles. Of course some artists whose soul was definitely Romantic were going to remain: neither Delacroix nor Berlioz or Préault would give up their ideals and they could neither be forgotten nor despised. They would remain a reference for young people and, in a way, would continue to have more influence than ever. However, the continuing action of Romanticism would be of a different kind now, somewhat pacified and somewhat historical. In 1848 a new period started for the arts; Romantic times were over.

Charles-François Grenier de Lacroix, called Charles-François Lacroix de Marseille, A Mediterranean Harbour Scene at Sunset, 18^th century.

Oil on canvas, 45.8 × 61 cm.

Private collection.

Richard Parkes Bonington, Boats by the Normandy Shore, c. 1823–1824.

Oil on canvas, 33.5 × 46 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

Caspar David Friedrich, Dreamer (Ruins of the Oybin Monastery), c. 1835.

Oil on canvas, 27 × 21 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.