Subject And Object Of Art example essay topic

As Europe entered the nineteenth century, those forces that would shape her political and cultural destiny were already in place. From 1799 to 1815 the most powerful figure in Europe was Napoleon Bonaparte. During his meteoric rise and fall France was at war with the rest of Europe, and after his defeat Europe's political structure was changed forever. The goal of self-determination that Napoleon imported to Holland, Italy, Germany and Austria affected not only nations but also individuals. England's metamorphosis during the Industrial Revolution was also reflected in the outlook of the individual, and therefore in the art produced during the first half of this century.

Heightened sensibility and intensified feeling became characteristic of the visual arts as well as musical arts and a convention in literature. "What happened, in fact, in the late eighteenth century, was not a discovery of romanticism, but a conversion to it. The awful threat of 'subjectivism', pushing its rude way into the objective sere nities of classical art, breaking down the smooth walls of the old edifice, ended by seeming g a positive blessing- an opening up of stuffy enclosure, a means, though perhaps rather a ruthless one, of introducing a breath of fresh air into their calm but stagnant atmosphere". (Newton, 11) This tendency toward images of impassioned or poignant feeling cut across all national boundaries. Romanticism, as this movement became known, reflects the movement of writers, musicians, painters, and sculptors away from rationalism toward the more subjective side of human experience. Feeling became both the subject and object of art.

Conscious of being propelled into the future, Europe began to take a long and wistful look at the past and embarked on a series of revivals. Classicism, which had gone in and out of style at regular intervals, was joined with revivals of Gothic art, Egyptian art, and the art of the Renaissance. While the artists outside the established institutions were revolutionizing art, the Academy continued to function as a bastion of traditional standards and values. Recognition in the annual Salon remained the most effective means for an artist to establish himself. The academicians of this generation were lavishly rewarded with more prizes and awards than another generation before or since.

Some artists were interested in painting contemporary, topical events, not only as a depiction of that particular event, but also as an exploration of the passionate emotions and truths that underlay it. In the eyes of these artists, the illumination of the Enlightenment had been dimmed by the atrocities of their age. While Ingres and Delacroix expressed their romantic tendencies through the figure, artists in Germany and England utilized the landscape. A pantheistic conception of God had deeply affected the thinking of English and German poets and painters. Spurred by a thirst for spiritualism in this secular and mechanistic era, they found in nature a manifestation of divinity. Thus landscape emerged as the single greatest subject in Western European art in the nineteenth century.

The allusions to nature in the works of Wordsworth, Gray, Goethe and Beethoven, for example, are proof of the powerful inspiration nature provided. Ranging from historical paintings to portraiture, there was a fundamental shift in the concept of what art was supposed to depict. Images of physical and emotional violence, madness and struggle sought to portray man's inhumanity to man and the loss of reason they felt defined their age..