WHAT IS ROMANTACISM
- Romanticism in art and photography is about focusing on strong emotions, nature, and individual experience. It highlights beauty, imagination, and sometimes the mysterious or exotic. Think of dramatic landscapes, powerful moments, and emotional expressions. It’s less about strict realism and more about capturing the feeling of a scene. It involves romanticising certain things like nature or a certain lifestyle. For example, in photography, you might romanticise a landscape by capturing the best scenes only and perhaps putting a feeling of otherworldyness/ nostalgia. When you romanticise something, you make it seem better than it really is; in a way, everything humans think about is romanticised: the grass is always greener on the other side. An example of life being romanticised in our minds is thinking about the life of being an underground artist in New York (think Basquiat) is highly romanticised and the image of it looks really appealing/romantic, but in reality it is quite a hard life to live, and that feeling of romanticism that you get when looking at images isn’t necessarily how that person living that life might be experiencing it.
FACTS AND INFO ON ROMANTACISM
Romanticism placed particular emphasis on emotion, horror, awe, terror and apprehension. Emotion and feeling were central not only to the creation of the work, but also in how it should be read.
Romanticism can also have a link with landscape and nature . Landscapes became subjects in their own right and were often charged with symbolism. For romantic artists, nature is a source of inspiration and escape, a refuge from the tumult of the modern world.
WHO
: artist William Blake and the Spanish painter Francisco Goya have been given the name “fathers” of Romanticism by various scholars for their works’ emphasis on subjective vision, the power of the imagination.
WHAT
:an artistic movement marked by the emphasis on imagination and emotions
WHERE
: romantisicm started In western Europe around the 18th century at this time the artistic and cultural movement was being revived (Neoclassicism)
HOW
: With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789.
WHY
: Romanticism was born as a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The Romanticist movement celebrated rebellion, sensation, emotion, subjectivity, and individuality and it rejected tradition, reason, rationality, and authority.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BRITISH PAINTERS JMW TURNER AND JOHN CONSTABLE
JMW TURNER
English romantic painter and water colour specialist , known for his romantic paintings that portray colourful imagery and imaginative landscapes. Joseph Mallord William born 23rd of April 1775 inspired modern art by incorporating a view of impossibility into his paintings by inviting unrealistic colouring and faded scenery to give a sense of romanticism
A line of development can be traced from his early historical landscapes that form settings for important human subjects to his later concentration on the dramatic aspects of sea and sky. Even without figures, these late works are expressions of important subjects: the relationship of man to his environment, the power of nature as manifested in the terror of the storm or the beneficence of the sun. Unmatched in his time in the range of his development, Turner was also unrivaled in the breadth of his subject matter and the searching innovation of his stylistic treatment.
JOHN CONSTABLE
Johns landscapes represent a sometimes astonishing capacity to represent natural appearances—particularly, in his later years, the fleeting and dramatic effects of stormy skies—as well as a profound and prolonged meditation on the rural realities of a Britain undergoing a bewildering socioeconomic transformation.
While some have tried to relocate Constable’s landscapes within their contemporary context and have suggested that they are complex works of art with, often, a deeply political content, others have preferred to see them as embodying a quintessential “Englishness.” The fact that the argument is ongoing confirms the continuing vitality of these landscapes.
THE SUBLIME
In the critical literature, “the Romantic sublime” refers to the mind’s transcendence of a natural and/or social world that finally cannot fulfil its desire. Revealed in the moment of the sublime is that the mind is not wholly of the world, but this revelation may be triggered by a particular setting in the world.
The sublime as defined by The Tate is : “Theory developed by Edmund Burke in the mid eighteenth century, where he defined sublime art as art that refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.”
The sublime is in most creative subject areas; photography, fine art, film, writing, poetry and many more.
Why do these sorts of sublime experiences matter? For Burke, the experience matters insofar as it is the ‘strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’. But for Kant and Schopenhauer, the experience is profounder still. This is how Kant describes the experience and significance of what he terms the dynamically sublime (that is, an aesthetic experience of overwhelming power):
Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens … make our capacity to resist into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power. But the sight of them only becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature. (Emphasis added.)
– AEON
