ROMANTICISM, REALISM, IMPRESSIONISM, AND CUBISM

CHAPTER 12 SECTION 4

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 Edouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

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.