Cultural Developments to 1870

Steve Cushion

Splits into two periods, before and after the defeat of the 1848 revolution, the first broadly characterised by the title of "Romanticism", the second by "Realism" or "Naturalism".

1848 was the final and complete triumph of the Bourgeoisie and with its triumph came the end of real political commitment from most artists and a broad acceptance of the status quo.

There are as many romanticisms as there are nations and even vast differences between its different proponents who defy compartmentalisation by art historians. It is even difficult to produce a rigorous chronology given the anachronistic nature of the movement, coming as it did in successive waves of enthusiasm and despair, varying from one country to another. The excesses of the German Romantics between 1800 and 1815 is very far from French lyric poetry of the 1820s. Overdoses of imagination and mystical nationalism, nostalgia for the middle ages contrasting with revolutionary commitment, all make go to make an essential contribution to Romanticism. It is this revolt and this nostalgia which inspire the essential Romantic idea, the feeling that Passion triumphs over Reason.

Romanticism: Hard to define because of its anti-rational nature. Since Rousseau, rationalism had been one of the main ideological props of the Bourgeoisie in their fight for power against absolutism and the old feudal aristocracy. As the Bourgeoisie consolidated its hold on political as well as economic power, it shed its previous Revolutionary role and the Romantics rejected "Reason" as they broke from an increasingly ordinary and boring bourgeois society. Above all the Romantics rejected the ordinary and the banal and pushed to the extremes in all things.

Not just the extreme left, although that was their home.

Shelly

Victor Hugo.

Triumph of capitalism as an economic and political system was the triumph of only one of the three freedoms - Free Trade.
Liberty - forever, Fraternity - if necessary, Equality - never !

"Romanticism in art, European and American movement extending from about 1800 to 1850. Romanticism cannot be identified with a single style, technique, or attitude, but romantic painting is generally characterised by a highly imaginative and subjective approach, emotional intensity, and a dreamlike or visionary quality. Whereas classical and neo-classical art is calm and restrained in feeling and clear and complete in expression, romantic art characteristically strives to express by suggestion states of feeling too intense, mystical, or elusive to be clearly defined. "

The arts flourished in this first half of the 19th century.

The greats of Orchestral music - Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt. Still the backbone of the orchestral repertoire. If they sound banal today, they were revolutionary in their day.

Opera: Verdi and Wagner

Painting: Goya, Delacroix and Friedrich.

Art was political.

Beethoven dedicated his third symphony "The Heroic" to Napoleon in the early days of empire when he was still seen as leading the fight against Feudal reaction.
Friedrich supported the German nationalists in their fight against that same Napoleon.
Romanticism was generally very influential on the nationalist movements of Eastern Europe - Chopin was a leading proponent of Polish independence.
Verdi's opera "Nabucco" uses the symbolism of the captivity of the Jews in Egypt to symbolise the struggle of Italian national unity.
But it was in poetry and writing that the Romantics became their most political.
The poet Lamartine was one of the founders of the French Third republic in the heady days of 1848,
Victor Hugo was a lifelong campaigner for republicanism and liberty,
Shelly was the spokesman for a generation of English radicals and
Byron went off to fight for Greek independence from Turkey, one of the great liberal causes of its day.

Goya

Stands on the dividing line between the old and the new, he starts as a court painter for the King of Spain but already by 1800 he is showing a new and for the period audacious side to his work (the Naked Maja) which will get him into trouble with the Spanish Inquisition.

When the French Armies invaded Spain in 1808 they were at first welcomed by many liberal Spaniards who saw Napoleon as the enemy of Spanish feudalism and absolutism.
The brutality of soldiers quickly alienated much of the population and a long and brutal guerrilla war began.
Goya continued his work as a court painter, for Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother who was proclaimed King of Spain after the French invasion, but he became increasingly hostile to the French. In 1814 when the French were finally defeated and expelled by the ferocity of the popular uprising aided by British and Portuguese regular troops, he painted his most famous pieces commemorating the anti French riots on the 2nd of May 1808 and the bloody reprisals the following day.

It has been said that he only painted these after the French had lost as a cynical move to ingratiate himself with the returning regime of King Ferdinand Vll. Be that as it may, the final effect is stunning and is a remarkable break from previous forms of painting and represents one of the early Romantic influences.

Delacroix.
Napoleon had succeeded in alienating many liberal Europeans from the idea of revolution, but the stifling reactionary kingdoms imposed by the victorious powers after his defeat at Waterloo in 1815 quickly reopened the issue and Romanticism comes into its own as the major trend in the visual arts.

For a new generation of Romantics, the disappointments of the French Revolution were quickly outweighed by the poverty, oppression and general mediocrity of the new order.

Eugene Delacroix is the classic Romantic artist and his Liberty on the Barracades sums up the movement.
Delacroix himself was a personal friend of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand, his painting, the Death of Sardanapolous was based on a play by Byron and we see in all these people the economic change that so influenced Romanticism.

The proponents of Romantic art were mainly socially displaced young men who were now subject to market forces to make a living. They were freed from the stifling orthodoxy that the "Ancien Regime" had forced upon them by the necessity to find a patron. This new-found freedom gave them great freedom of expression, but also the freedom to starve if they could not sell their works on the open market.
It was a period when a few made a fortune from their art and many went hungry, when the image of the struggling artist freezing in his garret room first developed and the Latin Quarter in Paris built its bohemian reputation.

Revolt

Thus the romantic artist both came from and depended upon the bourgeoisie and so their revolt was personal as well as political, their alienation was a product of the triumph of the very capitalism that had allowed their development.
In order to avoid a philistine and respectable old age, many like Shelly and Byron took the logical alternative of dying young, in battle for Greek independence like Byron or from tuberculosis like Chopin.
Recognising the alienation that was a product of capitalism produced in some Romantics, particularly in Germany a "Romantic" view of the Middle Ages, far from the squalor and cruelty of the real Middle Ages, but one of misty fairy tale castles peopled by sad and beautiful pale young women.
Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame is in the same mould, although his greater political understanding gave the tale a greater vitality and timelessness that even the wretched Walt Disney Corporation could not totally destroy.

Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich took this view into his landscapes. Landscapes that had the appearance of accuracy and an almost photographic realism, but which were based in his imagination.
The emotion and spirituality of the paintings was for Friedrich a means of celebrating the natural world and the divine power that he saw as having created it.

"The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand".

Noble Savage

Another way in which Romantic dissatisfaction with the modern world expressed itself was in the concept of the Noble Savage, seen to be living in a world of primitive communism, untarnished by money or class society.
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenemore Cooper reflects this trend and was used by Cooper to push his social and political views in the form of a novel.
But even though the Chingushcook, the admirable Native American character is clearly more moral than all the white men in the story, the book still seems extremely racist by today's standards.
A racism that appears to be endemic in capitalism and a subject to which we will be returning in a couple of weeks when we discuss Nationalism.

1848

The defeat of the 1848 revolution was the death knell of Romanticism as a social force.
The contradictions in a revolutionary bourgeois movement at a time when the bourgeoisie finally ceased to have any revolutionary role to play, contradictions in a movement that above all resisted the ordinary, the boring and the banal at a moment when triumphant capitalism imposed a crushing respectability to guarantee its legitimacy, all meant that the glory days of the Romantics were over.The reactionary slogan

"Art for Art's sake" replaced the previous "Art for Humanity's sake"

Orientalism

The movement went East. Always fascinated by what we now call the Middle East, it provided a refuge for those disappointed by developments in Europe. The connection goes back a long way and the classic romantic hero Lord Byron had died in the War of Greek Independence from Ottoman Turkey, while Delacroix had painted propaganda for the same cause.

Now they returned to escape reality. The myth of the noble savage could be found in the deserts and the ancient cities of the East.

You can run from reality, but you can't hide and capitalist values followed them.
The painting of the orientalists became increasingly patronising and eventually moved to become an apology for imperialism.

The same dislocated and bored young middle class men who had previously congregated in the less respectable quarters of Paris, Vienna and Berlin and helped the workers to build their barricades in 1830 and 1848, or, like Ernest Meissonier, at least had painted them afterwards, now filled the ranks of those going out to the ever growing empires of the major powers.

They satisfied their taste for adventure as servants of the bourgeoisie rather than as its critics. The previous contradictions were resolved in favour of the ruling elite and art suffered in consequence. The artistic output of the period from 1848 to 1875 is much less impressive than the previous period. The few outstanding artists of the period had generally made their name before 1850.
It is no accident that Brahms, one of the few composers of the period with any talent is most famous for his lullabies.

It was however the period when more money was thrown at the arts than any period before or since. Industrialists and merchant princes outbid each other to spend vast sums on terrible paintings.

The various Artistic academies such École des Beaux-Arts in Paris or the Royal Academy in London imposed a crushing sterility on visual art.

Realism

Romanticism became replaced by Realism as the predominant school. Rather than try and change the world, the best we can now expect in political and social terms from our artists is a portrayal of some of the worst excesses of capitalism, suitably sanitised to appeal to the industrialist's conscience without threatening him.
The poor were represented, but only in so far as they accepted their lot and waited for a philanthropist to improve their situation.

The Deserving Poor replaced the Noble Savage as the object to be patronised. The Gleaners replaced the barricades. Many just stuck to the safety of Landscapes.

The public perception of the artist changed as well and, provided they stuck to the rules, they were given a special place of respect and esteem. From Court ornament in the 18th century, to Genius in the later 19th. The triumphant bourgeoisie now started to remake Art and Culture in its own image with "Genius" seen as a sort of non-financial version of "Enterprise"."Truth" and "Wisdom" became the domain of the artist, but only such truth as the bourgeoisie were prepared to hear. The New York times has the slogan "All the news that's fit to print", a slogan parodied by "Rolling Stone Magazine" as "All the news that fits". Respectability and fashion came to dominate the arts, First Nights and Private Views and with it came an intolerable snobbishness.

Capitalist ideology is strong on deferred gratification, on their being no pleasure without pain. This was translated to mean that there is no appreciation of art without effort, which resulted in increasingly obscure music and tedious paintings.

Even Gustav Courbet, personally a revolutionary, he was an active participant in the Paris Commune of 1871, was well within this trend, even those of his paintings which shocked the sensibilities if the period were not socialy rebellious, merely scandalous.

It was only prose writing that flourished, Dickens Flaubert, Zola, Goncourt, Tolstoy. This was partly due to technological changes that made reproduction relatively cheap. This is the start of the paperback novel and the penny magazine. Increasing literacy, also a by-product of industrialisation and the need for basic literacy amongst factory workers, gave writing an economic significance as money could be made by publishing companies producing for this new market of the lower middle class and skilled workers. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 1.5 million copies throughout the British Empire.

Realist writing was however in the same mould as the rest of the movement, criticising injustice, but setting its face against any attempt by the oppressed to change things for themselves. Zola was very critical of the Paris commune and when the miners do go on strike in Germinal, it all ends in tears. Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities from the point of view of the aristocrat as victim of the bloodthirsty mob.

So far we have talked of artistic developments very much from the point of view of the upper classes, but this was also the period when art was introduced to the masses:

§ Reproductions of paintings via engravings
§ Popular newspapers with novels in instalments
§ Coral societies and brass bands
§ Music hall bands giving snippets from Verdi and Wagner

Cultural flow was downwards, drowning the increasingly irrelevant peasant culture. Where they couldn't smother it, they adopted it in a sanitised, prissy form to become jolly folk songs. For the masses, this was a period of great economic and social change as millions of peasants migrated to the cities to work in the new factories. This migration was initially too disorienting for a popular proletarian culture to develop its own momentum and we will have to wait till the next century for the development of a proletarian counter attack against the all pervading bourgeois cultural hegemony.

However, things were stirring in the artist community itself and amongst the young artists in the Latin Quarter, rubbing shoulder with prostitutes and anarchists, a deep dissatisfaction with the sterility of conventional art was developing to burst out as Impressionism, and Expressionism.