Tuesday 13 October 2009

Printmaking in the age of Romanticism

This is the title of a great exhibition where you have to run visiting it before the end on the 25th of October 2009! Where: Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery RD, The Domain, Sydney 2000, Australia.

What is the Romanticism?It is a movement of the 19th century who rose up as a revolt against the 18th-century Age of Reason. Unfolding against the political and social turmoil of European history in the wake of the French Revolutionaryand Napoleonic Wars, it emerged as a dominant force in the development of music, literature and painting. Many artists worked primarly as printmakers (and not painters), and besides these there were also armies of higly skilled reporductive engravers whose work contibuted much to the extraordinary richness of printmaking in the Romantic Ange.

Lithograph representing a portrait of Eugène Delacroix, major painter of Romanticism, c1840.

The earliest significant use of the term 'Romantic' was by the German critic Fridriech Schlegel, who, in 1798, applied it to contemporary poetry. The choice of the word itself stemmed from Schlegel's appreciation of the medieval literary genre of the romance - tales of courtly love adn fabulous event- which appealed to the imagination and represented the antithesis of the classical tradition. But Romantism is not really a coherent style, like neoclassicism, nor is it a consistent doctrine.

Copper-engraved print representing Honoré Daumier, great painter and drawner for satire, c1850.


The Romantics believe in the primacy of imagination over reason and the freedom of the artist to express personal, as opposed to shared, experience. Art, they were convinced, should be a private quest for authentic emotion rather than the pursuit of a universal, timeless ideal of beatuy- that it should be charged with the artist's own anxieties and aspirations, dreams and desires, and awaken those emotions on us.




Portrait of William Turner, major romantic painter, c1830. (right side)

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