7.8 19th-Century Culture and Arts

Romanticism (roughly 1790s–1840s) was a reaction against Enlightenment reason, against the strict, balanced Neoclassical style in art, and against the ugliness of early industrial life (5.8). Romantics valued emotion, imagination, the individual genius, the power of nature, the medieval past and national folk traditions. They were fascinated by the supernatural and drawn to the sublime, the feeling of awe or even terror before something vast, like a storm or a mountain.

• Painting: Francisco Goya's The Third of May 1808 (painted 1814), showing French troops executing Spanish civilians; Caspar David Friedrich's lone figures facing misty landscapes; J. M. W. Turner's stormy seas and light; John Constable's English countryside; Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819); Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830), honoring the July Revolution.
• Literature: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, the nature poetry of William Wordsworth, the poems of Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), a warning about science out of control, and Victor Hugo's novels.
• Music: Ludwig van Beethoven's later symphonies, Frédéric Chopin's Polish-inspired piano pieces, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's emotional ballets and symphonies, and the operas of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, which drew on national history and myth.
• Politics: Romanticism fed nationalism by celebrating each people's language, history and folklore.

After the failures of 1848 and in an age of science and industry, many artists rejected Romantic idealism and set out to show the world as it actually was, including poverty and hard labor. Gustave Courbet painted The Stone Breakers (1849), two laborers doing exhausting roadwork, and A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850), an ordinary village funeral painted on the huge scale usually reserved for history and religion. Jean-François Millet showed peasants at work in The Gleaners (1857).

Realist writers did the same in fiction. Charles Dickens attacked the cruelty of industrial England in Hard Times (1854). Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) dissected middle-class boredom. Émile Zola's Germinal (1885) followed a coal miners' strike in grim detail. Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House (1879) questioned women's role in marriage. Other major realists include Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), Thomas Hardy, and the Russians Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, while Honoré Daumier's cartoons mocked judges and politicians.

Photography could now record reality exactly, which pushed painters to do something cameras could not. The Impressionists, beginning with their first group exhibition in Paris in 1874, painted outdoors to capture the changing effects of light and color in a passing moment. They used quick, visible brushstrokes and often painted modern leisure: cafés, boating, railway stations. Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise gave the movement its name; Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot were other leaders.

The Post-Impressionists of the 1880s and 1890s pushed further toward personal expression and structure. Vincent van Gogh used bold color and swirling brushwork to express emotion. Paul Cézanne reduced nature to basic geometric shapes. Georges Seurat built pictures from tiny dots of color. Paul Gauguin moved to Tahiti and painted its people in flat, bright colors, reflecting European fascination with the “exotic” that was tied to imperialism. Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) expressed anxiety directly.

In the decade before World War I, artists broke even more completely with tradition. Henri Matisse and the Fauves (“wild beasts,” 1905) used intense, unnatural color. Around 1907 Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began Cubism, showing objects from several angles at once and breaking them into geometric planes; Picasso drew partly on African and Iberian sculpture. Composers experimented too: the 1913 Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, with its clashing rhythms, caused an uproar in the audience. Audiences who expected paintings to be beautiful and to celebrate shared ideals such as patriotism were often shocked or angered by this new work. These works fit the larger mood of 7.5, in which old certainties about order and reason were breaking down. The story continues with Dada, Surrealism and Bauhaus in 9.14.