Daniel Gerhartz: The Beauty of Representational Art

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by Daniel Gerhartz

Daniel Gerhartz: The Beauty of Representational Art

by Claudia Moscovici, author of “Romanticism and Postromanticism” (2007) and co-founder of the postromantic art movement 

The American painter Daniel Gerhartz is a contemporary master of representational art. Drawn to painting since adolescence, he studied at the prestigious American Academy of Art in Chicago. Gerhartz states that he learned a lot about painting techniques by studying the works of John Singer Sargent, Alphonse Mucha, Nicolai Fechin and Joaquin Sorolla. Gerhartz also goes on to say on his website, http://danielgerhartz.com, that he is particularly inspired by modern Russian art of Nicolai Fechin, Isaac Levitan and Ilya Repin because “their paintings are completely loose yet deliberate and faithful, not at all flashy.”

by Daniel Gerhartz

Although Gerhartz paints a variety of subjects, most of his works focus on the female figure, in diverse settings, ranging from the realistic and contemporary to idyllic pastoral and romantic. Going far beyond realistic representation or the celebration of feminine beauty, his paintings evoke emotion and represent important aspects of the human condition (such as love, loss, nostalgia, and mourning).

by Daniel Gerhartz

Although often inspired by contemporary life, Daniel Gerhartz’s art clearly continues, for our times, the legacy of the Romantic and Symbolist movements, in two main ways: 1) a technique that emphasizes verisimilitude as well as, quite often, 2) the depiction of idealized figures and settings. In what follows, I’d like to explore why this continuation of the Romantic and Realist traditions are important currents in ART TODAY. They not only add diversity to the wide range of artistic movements we can enjoy, but also preserve valuable artistic techniques that  shouldn’t be dispensed with. 

by Daniel Gerhartz

The aesthetic revolution that occurred during the twentieth-century is unprecedented in the history of Western art. Even the invention of one-point perspective and the soft shading that gives the illusion of depth (chiaroscuro) during the Renaissance didn’t change aesthetic standards as radically as the creation of non-representational, or what has also been called “conceptual” art. Since Marcel Duchamp we have come to believe that a latrine, if placed in a museum, is a work of art. Since Andy Warhol we have come to accept that brillo boxes and other ordinary household objects, if placed in a museum, are objets d’art. And since Jackson Pollock and the New York School of abstract expressionism we have come to realize that what may appear to be randomly spilled paint, globs and other kinds of smudges are not only artistic, but also considered by many to be the deepest expressions of human talent, thought and feeling.

Once art took a conceptual turn, it also became philosophical. As Arthur Danto argues in representational art what constituted “art” was more or less obvious. The only question that was always difficult to determine was: is it good art? By way of contrast, Danto explains, conceptual art compels viewers to think about the very nature of art. The postmodern answer to this question is not only philosophical–namely, that art is a concept because it cannot be identified visually, just by looking at it–but also sociological. Art is, as Danto himself declares, whatever the viewing public and especially the community that has the power to consecrate it–by exhibiting it in galleries and museums, buying it, writing books about it, critiquing and reviewing it, etc– says it is.

A priori, art can be anything. A brillo box, a toilet seat. But it isn’t everything for the simple reason that not everything is consecrated as art. What may seem, by older standards, to be art—such as contemporary Impressionist-style paintings–may not be considered art (but only cheap imitation) by the public or critics, while, conversely, what doesn’t seem to be art—a brillo box—can be perceived as the highest manifestation of artistic genius.

As noted, what makes twentieth- and twenty-first century art conceptual is the fact that what makes it be “art” can no longer be seen with the eye. We can’t see the aesthetic difference between the brillo boxes we discard and Warhol’s brillo boxes. Yet one is called trash and the other pop art. Clearly, it’s not the physical qualities of the object, but rather the assumptions of a community that determine what is (good) art. I cannot dispute this argument—made in different ways by Pierre Bourdieu and Arthur Danto–because, given everything I observe is being called art, I see it as the most compelling explanation of the term “art” as it’s being used today. Having conceded the artistic nature and value of nonrepresentational art, however, postromantic aesthetics argues that just because nonrepresentational art is valued doesn’t mean that contemporary representational art should be dismissed.

To explain the conceptual revolution that occurred in art at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth century, some art historians claim that photography eliminated the need for representational art, or the kind of art that tries to imitate “nature” by depicting faithfully what the eye can see. We can add in parentheses, as E. H. Gombrich observes in The Story of Art, that the notion of the representation of what the eye can see has changed throughout the history of art. Needless to say, it too is shaped by social assumptions. Nonetheless, the difference between a kind of art that aims at faithful visual imitation of the three-dimensional qualities of physical objects and one that doesn’t remains relatively easy to discern.

For instance, even without reading the descriptive title of the painting, it’s clear to tell by just looking at Renoir’s Girl Bathing (1892) that it features a nude girl bathing. Without its explanatory (or deceptive) title, however, it would be impossible to know what Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 (1911) is supposed to represent The last thing that might occur to those who look at it–if it were not for the title–is that it shows a nude.

The invention of photography had a lot to do with the move away from visual representation. To say that photography eliminated the need for representational art, however, is an overstatement. Undoubtedly, the invention of the camera encouraged artists to experiment with other means of representation in the same way that the invention of machines displaced hand-made crafts. The camera probably did for painting what the industrial revolution did for artisanship. But that doesn’t mean that artisanship–or hand-made beautiful objects–are no longer valuable. For what the human imagination, sensibility, eye and hand can create will always be somewhat different from what can be made with the aid of machines. The texture, sense of color and vision that are captured by painters are not identical to those that photography can produce, even though photography can bring us closer to visual reality and even though photography can be artistic.

Verisimilitude, or the true-to-life physical representation of objects, already existed in classical Greek, Hellenistic and Roman art, all of which rendered the beauty, movement and sinuosity of the human body especially palpable in their breath-taking sculptures. In classical Greek and Hellenistic art in particular, the human body conveyed (what was perceived as) the essence of beauty: the glorification of divine powers and aesthetic ideals were embodied in the human form. While Greek paintings and especially sculptures showed knowledge of human anatomy, movement and foreshortening, it’s Renaissance artists who discovered the two other key components of verisimilitude in painting: one point-perspective and shading, which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to two-dimensional painted forms. Gombrich and other art historians credit the architect Filipo Brunelleschi with the invention of one-point perspective as it was enthusiastically adopted by Italian Renaissance painters. Perspective entailed the application of geometrical principles to convey in painting the relative size of objects in terms of their distance from one another and from the viewer. (The Story of Art, 228-9).

The most famous Renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci, added another dimension to making the objects represented in art seem almost real. His most famous painting Mona Lisa is said to deceive the viewers into believing that the woman’s eyes move, returning and even following their gaze with her eyes. Likewise, many have speculated about the meaning of Mona Lisa’s ambiguous smile, whose lips have a mobility that renders her at once impenetrable and expressive. Leonardo was able to achieve these complex visual and psychological effects through the technique called sfumato, or the smoky blurring the contours of the object depicted—especially the corners of Mona Lisa’s eyes and mouth—to leave their outline and expression more open to interpretation.

The study and representation of human anatomy and of nature, foreshortening, capturing human movement and expression, one-point perspective and the creation of soft shadows which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to painted forms — all these techniques which took centuries to develop–have the magical effect of making objects represented by art come to life before our eyes. This kind of naturalistic art is not necessarily “realistic” in the sense of capturing human life as it actually is. For instance, some of the paintings of the surrealists were realistic in their anatomically accurate and three-dimensional representation of the human body, but fantastic in their rendition of reality.

Romanticism and Postromanticism by Claudia Moscovici

In its preference for visual resemblance (as opposed to realism or plausibility), my own art and aesthetics movement, POSTROMANTICISM,  which I co-founded with the sculptor Leonardo Pereznieto in 2002, argues that the artistic techniques that give a sense of three-dimensionality and life-like quality to art are difficult skills that require both patience and technical talent and that are worth preserving and appreciating in art today. There’s no reason to discard the masterful qualities that made art artistic for five hundred years. Nor do such techniques have only a purely historical value. In an artistic world that prides itself upon pluralism, openness and variety, artists who desire to continue the legacy of realistic representation should be able to coexist with those that have rejected it.

by Daniel Gerhartz

The postromantic movement–and representational art in general, of which the work of Daniel Gerhartz is a prime example–represents not a rival, but an alternative to modern and postmodern conceptual art. For in a world of such diverse tastes and sensibilities, there’s certainly room for both.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

Art and Emotion

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We tend to associate art and emotion. The Romantic notion of art as the product of an emotive, sensitive and inspired artist who creates masterpieces to move the public has not altogether disappeared from the popular imagination. Yet, in recent history—particularly since the movement of art for art’s sake in the nineteenth century and the formalist and conceptual currents of the twentieth century—emotion has almost disappeared from art itself. Even in the movement of conceptual art most closely associated with emotion and spirituality—abstract expressionism—emotion is a part of the process of artistic creation and palpable in the moving effect of art upon (some) viewers rather than readily recognizable in the artistic object itself. There is, of course, no eternally valid rule that dictates that emotion should be an inherent part of a work of art—or of any part of the artistic process, for that matter. And, in fact, art has not always existed as separate from artifact and artistic objects have not always been valued for their expressive powers.

For the ancient Egyptians, to offer one notable example, art served a largely symbolic and religious function. Tombs, busts and paintings were used as a means of preserving and glorifying the souls of kings, queens and other privileged members of society. E.H. Gombrich tells us that, appropriately enough, one Egyptian word for sculptor was “He-who-keeps-alive.” Egyptian artists depicted the human figure not as they saw it, nor to express or provoke emotion, but to capture the essence of an important person’s spirit for the afterlife by representing his or her body from its most characteristic angles. The face was shown in profile; the eye from the front; the shoulders and chest from the front; the legs from the side, with the feet seen from the inside and toes pointed upward. (The Story of Art, 60-1). For millennia Egyptian figures had a frozen and immobile, non-expressive look that strove to freeze the souls of powerful men and women in time and to safeguard their happiness in the afterlife.

Greek art was perhaps the first—and certainly the most influential art in the Western tradition–to capture the essence not only of the human spirit, but also of the human form, with all its movement and powers of expression. In Greek art, we feel, even the body seems infused with a soul. Myron’s famous sculpture of the discus thrower, Discobolos (c. 450 B.C), which is of the same era as the better known works of the sculptor Pheidias, displays the beauty, poise, force and movement of a young man’s efforts to launch the discus he holds in his hand. The sculpture is not entirely naturalistic—in the sense that athletes who would try to assume the same position would not be able to throw the discus very far. Nonetheless, it captures the elegance and athleticism of the male body in the first blush of youth. Part of this sculpture’s naturalism lies in the way it conveys movement and emotion through the positioning and poise of the body. This artistic video on classical sculpture by Philip Scott Johnson highlights this phenomenon:

More generally, classical Greek and Hellenistic sculptures rarely look stiff or contrived because of the way in which the human form is balanced: often in a position of counterpoise, with the weight shifted upon one leg, which allows sculptors to reveal the muscular curvatures of the body.

While classical Greek sculpture tends to focus upon the beauty of the human form, Hellenistic art—the art of the empires founded by Alexander the Great’s followers—places increasing emphasis upon the expression of emotion. The kinds of feelings represented in Hellenistic sculpture, however, are not those of everyday people in ordinary circumstances. Rather, Hellenistic art usually exhibits the emotions of extraordinary individuals engaged in tragic conflicts. To offer one well-known example, the sculpture Laocöon and his sons (175-50 B.C.)—executed by Hagesandros, Anthenodoros and Polydoros of Rhodes–immortalizes the story of a priest who is being punished by the gods for forewarning the Trojans not to accept a giant horse which, as it turns out, carried inside it enemy soldiers.

This sculpture was rediscovered in Rome in 1506 and many art historians believe that what was found was not the original sculpture, but a Roman copy. Whether or not it is the original work, The Laocöon Group made a strong impression upon Italian Renaissance sculptors, especially Michelangelo. Laocoon is frozen in an image of terrible anguish since his punishment consists of having to witness two gigantic snakes emerge from the sea and suffocate with their coils his beloved sons. Hellenistic art, at least in this representative sculpture that would become a favorite during the Renaissance and the Neoclassical periods, privileges the expression of a kind of emotion that is at once mythical and dramatic: mythical in its literary and religious references, dramatic in its depiction of human tragedy.

The painting and sculpture of the Renaissance masters continues to focus upon the expression of emotion on a grand scale and to grapple with the connection—as well as the hiatus–between the human and the divine. Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave (1513), for example, reveals the moment when the slave lets go of earthly life as his soul escapes toward heavenly existence.

Despite the twists and turns of his beautiful, muscular form, the slave’s body reflects the resignation, tranquility and spirituality of the transition from life to death. Emotive expression, Michelangelo shows so well, is not necessarily primarily located in the face. The whole body, every movement and gesture, expresses the feelings and attitudes reflected in the face.

This total, eloquent expressivity of sculpture reaches its apex, many believe, in Lorenzo Bernini’s The ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645-52). The sculpture represents the sixteenth century mystic in a state of rapture. We witness the moment when the angel of God pierces the young nun with a golden arrow, provoking the paradoxical feelings of pleasure mixed with pain and of sensual abandon mixed with divine illumination. As she swoons, half-closing her eyes and slightly opening her lips with ecstasy, Saint Teresa becomes the very embodiment of religious fervor, spiritual attunement and passion. Even the drapery that enfolds her body swirls and twists around her with the same mixture of passive yet passionate frenzy visible on her face.

But what about the expression of more modest, individuated feelings? In the modern period, few artists were as thoughtful and successful in showing the relation between human form and feeling as Auguste Rodin. Despite the religious allusions of The Gates of Hell, Rodin brings emotion down to earth by materializing a passion that functions not only as a connection between the human and the divine, but also as an intimate and profound connection between earthly lovers. Perhaps no one else has described Rodin’s most sensual and moving sculpture, “The Kiss,” as eloquently as his friend, the art critic Gustave Geffroy:

“The man’s head is bent, that of the woman is lifted, and their mouths meet in a kiss that seals the intimate union of their two beings. Through the extraordinary magic of art, this kiss, which is scarcely indicated by the meeting of their lips, is clearly visible, not only in their meditative expressions, but still more in the shiver that runs equally through both bodies, from the nape of the neck to the soles of the feet, in every fiber of the man’s back, as it bends, straightens, grows still, where everything adores—bones, muscles, nerves, flesh—in his leg, which seems to twist slowly, as if moving to brush against his lover’s leg; and in the woman’s feet, which hardly touch the ground, uplifted with her whole being as she is swept away with ardor and grace.”

Rodin revealed human love and life as a process of mutual creation between women and men. Passion is not only a union with those we desire and adore, but also an elevation through shared feelings and sensuality which is always in process, never complete. His representations of the fragility of our mutual creation were as inchoate, vulnerable yet compelling as the material shapes that seemed to emerge only part-finished from the bronze or blocks of stone. In the expression of the beauty, erotic fervor and intensity of human emotion, postromanticism carries on Rodin’s artistic legacy.

We have seen that art can serve many different purposes in different contexts such that it’s impossible to define it in relation to any set of common qualities, including emotion. Yet, as I have also suggested, when emotion is materialized in art, it renders artistic objects all the more poignant, moving and palpable for viewers. The expression of emotion not only touches us, but also enables us to connect to artistic creation in a way that’s unique and irreplaceable. This is why postromantic art continues the Romantic legacy of expressing the fragility, contingency and intensity of human emotion at each stage of the creative process: the feelings and inspiration of the artist; the expressivity of artistic representations, and the emotional impact upon viewers. Emotion and art don’t have to be interconnected. Yet what beautiful and meaningful art is produced when they are!

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

Confessions of a Twenty-first Century Salonnière: My Favorite Art and Literature Blogs

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When I openened a twitter account a few months ago, it wasn’t difficult to find the phrase that best captures me: “Born in the wrong century, a would-be salonnière.” Ever since college, when I first learned about Marquise de Rambouillet–the refined hostess who led the most talented artists and writers of her day in scintillating intellectual discussions in the elegant alcove of her drawing room–I knew that I had missed my opportunity and true calling in life. Sure, women may be able to be and do whatever they want today. Society is less sexist, more democratic. But in an era when entertainment news outdoes even socio-political news in popularity and readership, what hope is there for placing art, literature and philosophy at the center of public attention again?

The main problem I encountered in being a contemporary salonnière was: Where are the salons? Most academic discourse struck me as too technical and specialized to draw a large audience. Fortunately, while an undergraduate at Princeton University, I had the enormous privilege to study with scholars who epitomized the salon tradition of worldly intellectuals: Professor Robert Fagles, translator of Homer’s epic poems, and Professor Victor Brombert,  a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, who encouraged my love for world literature and culture to the point where I decided to pursue Comparative Literature for both my undergraduate and graduate studies. Many years later, I discovered quite a number of online salons, where writers, artists and intellectuals converge to discuss their works, in a clear, interesting and sophisticated fashion. I’d like to share with you some of my favorite contemporary salons. 

Litkicks.com. I discovered Litkicks ( http://www.litkicks.com/) in October 2009, when I found on the internet an article about a fellow Romanian-born writer, Herta Müller. The article was called “Herta Who?” by Dedi Felman and it was about the dissident writer’s recently awarded Nobel Prize in Literature. At that point, the founder of Litkicks, Levi Asher, also wrote a brief note on the blog about my recently published novel on similar themes, Velvet Totalitarianism, 2009/Intre Doua Lumi, 2011. We got in touch by email and I became a regular reader and occasional contributor on the blog. Litkicks features articles on literature, poetry, art, philosophy, music, cinema and politics.

Levi was a software developer (and culture lover) on Wall Street when he started Litkicks.com in 1994, which became, along with Salon.com, a pioneer culture blog. The website was originally launched to support Beat Generation poetry and experimental fiction. Over the years, it has expanded its scope to include contemporary literature in general, essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century French poetry and fiction (including Michael Norris‘s excellent essays on Proust), lively political articles, and Levi’s top-notch Philosophy Series. Litkicks includes articles on established authors published by the big publishing houses as well as reviews about talented independent writers published by smaller presses. The blog has thousands of readers a day, but thanks to a loyal following of regular contributors and commentators, it retains the intimate feel of a community of friends engaged in intellectual discussions and debates.

Catchy.ro. Founded in 2010 by the Romanian journalist Mihaela Carlan, Catchy.ro (http://www.catchy.ro/) is quickly catching on as Romania’s premier blog. Discussing all aspects of art, entertainment, politics and culture, Catchy.ro is inspired by the highly successful The Huffington Post, founded by Arianna Huffington in 2005 and recently acquired by AOL for a whopping 315 million dollars. Part of The Huffington Post‘s enormous success stems from Arianna Huffington’s pull and connections with wealthy investors. To offer just one notable example, in August 2006, SoftBank Capital invested 5 milliion dollars in the company. However, its success can also be attributed to the high quality of its articles and the popularity of its over 9000 contributors. Without question, The Huffington Post gathered some of the best bloggers in every field it features. Moreover, the blog has not merely adapted, but also stayed one step ahead of the curve in its use of technology, recently introducing “vlogging“–or video blogging–which is taking off and making journalism even more multimedia and interactive.

If I mention Catchy’s precursor in some detail, it’s because I believe these are also some of the features that have helped the Romanian blog grow so quickly during the past year, since its inception. Catchy “like a woman” targets primarily a female audience. But ultimately its panel of excellent journalists–with expertise ranging from art, to literature, to philosophy, to music, to fashion to pop culture and, above all, to the most fundamental aspects of human life itself, like health, love and marriage–draws a much broader audience of both genders and every age group. Like The Huffington Post, Catchy.ro also treads perfectly the line between intellectual writing and pop culture, providing intelligently written articles for a general audience. As some of the more traditional Romanian newspapers have struggled and a few even collapsed, the up-and-coming blog Catchy.ro shows that in every country adaptation is the key to success.

Agonia.net.  Started by the technology expert and culture promoter Radu Herinean in 2010, Agonia.net (http://english.agonia.net/index.php) is a rapidly expanding international literary blog. It includes sections on prose, screenplays, poetry, criticism and essays. Agonia.net has the following assets: a) it publishes well-regarded writers and intellectuals, b) it’s contributor-run so that it can grow exponentially and internationally (with sections in English, French, Spanish, Romanian and several other languages in the works) and c) it has a team of great editors that monitor its posts and maintain high quality standards. Agonia. net improves upon the model of online creative writing publishing pioneered by websites like Wattpad.com, which are contributor-run but have no editorial monitoring. Because of lack of editorial control, Wattpad.com has not been taken seriously by readers and publishers despite its vast popularity with contributors. Any literary blog that has a chance at being successful has to have the capacity for handling a large number of incoming contributions while also maintaining reliable editorial standards. Agonia.net seems to have mastered this delicate balance.

In participating in these exciting artistic, literary and intellectual forums, I’m starting to feel like my calling as a 21st century salonnière might not be an anachronism after all. I invite you to explore each of them and see which ones fit your talents and interests best. 

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

French Cosmopolitanism: The Postromantic Art of David Graux

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Born in Besançon, France, David Graux is a truly cosmopolitan artist. His art evokes Romantic motifs, but is edgy, innovative and postromantic in style. His paintings epitomize the best of both worlds: they are Eastern in inspiration, but have a European flair. Above all, David’s Graux’s art is evocative and poetic. Even the titles he selects– The shadow of the wind, Grazed sigh, The echo of a dream–suggest the last breath of Romanticism as it meets the impenetrable mystery of Symbolism.

As in Symbolist poetry, Graux’s art combines the accessible with the unintelligible. The beautiful nudes are palpably accessible: sensual, classic, in private poses that excite the curiosity, stimulating dream, but not desire. Yet the Oriental symbols—invented by the artist and belonging only to the language of his own imagination–are ungraspable. They touch upon the playful and the abstract, never fading into mere background or ornamentation. On the contrary, they travel the surface of the paintings, functioning as background and foreground alike–as an enveloping atmosphere–to the ethereal nudes.

David Graux’s art, like all forms of poetic expression, is inherently philosophical. It captures the essence of a significant aspect of human existence: the way in which what seems most transparent, accessible, real and temporal is simultaneously illegible, distant and unattainable. His spectacularly beautiful and innovative paintings cross geographical, stylistic and temporary boundaries, aspiring to a universal appeal.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

The Joy of Beauty, Pleasure and Sensuality

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aesthetic philosophy, aesthetics, Almodovar, art criticism, art history, art movements, beauty, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, Decartes, desire, desire in art, Hable con Ella, Joy of Beauty, Leonardo Pereznieto, pleasure, Pleasure and Sensuality, postromantic art, postromanticism.com, Romantic art, Romanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, sensual art, sensuality, sensuality in art, Talk to Her

Postromanticism.com, the international  movement I started with the sculptor Leonardo Pereznieto in 2002, is all about celebrating the joy of beauty, pleasure and sensuality in contemporary art and in life as well. I also wanted to offer art lovers an alternative to abstract postmodern art. Quite justifiably, we believe that there’s a fine line between sensuality and sexuality. We also believe that there’s a difference between pornography and art. In fact, these two distinctions often blend together: we tend to regard art as sensual and pornography as more overtly sexual. Warding off the charge of pornography, photography, sculpture and painting often veil the human body, especially the more eroticized female nude, by representing it in aesthetic poses and allegorical situations that evoke thoughts, emotions and dreams, not only carnal desires.

If the boundary between pornography and art is so heatedly debated, however, it’s partly because it’s drawn by our own subjective reactions. Romantic and postromantic art confront this problem by illustrating palpably the distinction between sensuality and sexuality. Like Romantic art, postromantic art celebrates the beauty of the human body and of sensual images and relations. I invoke the broad concept of beauty (in the abstract) only to limit it to a category that’s easier to define and more relevant to postromantic art: the beauty of sensuality. Let me explain why.

Philosophers, from Plato and Plotinus to Shaftesbury and Diderot, despite their overwhelming differences, have described beauty as an underlying harmony that has a pleasing sensory effect. In so doing, aesthetic philosophers confront several problems already anticipated by Socrates in The Symposium—Plato’s dialogue that deals most directly with subjects of love and beauty. How can we account for changing standards of beauty? What draws us to the beautiful? Is there an underlying notion of beauty that can apply equally well to the magic of a sunset, a pretty woman and a beautiful painting? And if there is, then how can such a general definition serve to explain specific categories of the beautiful, such as the beauty of human beings, of emotions, of architecture or of classical art? Moreover, is it really helpful to define beauty in terms of other difficult concepts, such as harmony, order or agreeability? Doesn’t this process lead to an infinite regress of definitions, each unknown defined in terms of yet another unknown, as Socrates had cautioned? Not having found satisfactory answers to these questions, I’m daunted by the difficulties inherent in defining beauty in the abstract. The beauty of sensual images and objects seems to me a more approachable subject as well as one that’s more useful to understanding Romantic and postromantic art. So let us ask: what is sensuality? And why does it have the power to move us?

As is customary, I’ll begin with a provisional definition. Sensuality is that which titillates the senses without making any specific promises or, much less, delivering. Sensuality leaves our desires, wishes, expectations, emotions, thoughts and impulses in a state of confusion and ambiguity. It provokes what Descartes called a sense of “admiration” or “wonder” that is inseparable from pleasure yet far removed from satisfaction.

Sensuality has little to do with degrees of unveiling, with explicitness. Like sexuality—its foil and companion—it’s more of a psychological rather than physical state. Just imagine the following images placed side by side: one featuring a woman who is fully dressed, with bright red lips puckered in a kiss and a come-hither gaze. Her body is clothed, but her (supposed, staged) intent is crystal-clear. The effect is sexual. Now imagine a picture of a woman who is completely nude. Her looks are understated; her demeanor and glance ambiguous. The viewer is not sure what she desires, thinks or feels. Physically she is revealed. Psychologically, however, she remains a mystery, an enticement. The effect is sensual.

These hypothetical examples lead me to supplement my initial description of sensuality. I will now say that sensuality hints at human subjectivity—at implicit desires, needs, dreams and thoughts—in both the viewer and the viewed. Sexual images and imagery–even when the women or men represented are clothed—tend to strip the image of its psychological content, reducing it to a few body parts in the viewed and a few analogous needs in the viewers. By way of contrast, sensuality, even when the women or men represented are nude, veils the body in a psychological richness and depth that touches upon the artistic.

To probe a little further the nature of sensuality, let us consider another illustration. I’ll borrow my second example from Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her (Hable con Ella), one of my favorite movies. The story focuses upon the obsessive love and desire of Benigno, a male nurse, for a young and beautiful ballerina named Alicia. Upon meeting her, Benigno is entirely captivated by the young woman. Yet he doesn’t get the opportunity to know Alicia and neither do we, the viewers. Almost as soon as they meet, she’s hit by a car when crossing the street and lapses into a coma. Consequently all viewers see of Alicia after the accident is her body, her purely physical beauty. Conversely, as Benigno takes care of his beloved, talks to her and treats her as a human being capable of understanding and responding to him, we become intimately familiar with his personality. We come to understand his loneliness, his obsessive love, his uncontrollable urges, his unwavering devotion.

In coming to multidimensional life for Benigno, however, Alicia also comes to life before our eyes. Almodovar has the immense talent of bringing out psychological richness and intensity in sensual depictions of physical beauty. Through Benigno’s loving gaze, care and compassion, we see more in Alicia than a beautiful body even though that’s exactly what she has been reduced to as a result of the car accident. Sensual art and photography can perform the same magical operation as this movie. They give birth to a soul, to a living personality, in representing sometimes nothing more than the body, its movements and expressions. Which is why our own responses to these images tend to be more complex than physical desire. Sensual photography, literature and art call for the viewer’s or reader’s participation in imagining another person, another life. They’re not just stimulating; they’re also creative.

Philosophers have long been fascinated by the way in which sensuality rivets the attention and excites the mind. Although René Descartes is best known for being the father of rationalism, he’s also one of the most sensitive readers of sensuality and emotion. His reflections on the subject were prompted by his discussions with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Christina of Sweden, both of whom were cultivated, sensitive women who found that Cartesian rationalism could not explain the better part of human behavior. Why do we fall in love? Why do we desire? Why do we feel emotion? Why do we respond to beauty? To address these important questions, Descartes wrote The Passions of the Soul (1649).

That which touches our senses, thoughts and feelings, the philosopher explains, ignites the response of admiration or marvel. Admiration is not a coup de foudre, or the feeling of falling in love on the spot. It is, in Descartes’ own words, “a sudden surprise of the soul which manifests itself in considering with special attention objects which seem rare and extraordinary.” (The Passions of the Soul, 116) To catch our attention, these objects or subjects have to either be or appear to be rare and special. Alicia may have been an ordinary girl, but in Aldomovar’s movie, despite being deprived of the capacity to think, feel and speak, she appeared tragically unique in her predicament, sympathetic, moving.

Sensual images or scenarios—especially when artistic–have the power to transform what may be ordinary into something–or someone—quite extraordinary. In turn, as Descartes elaborates, our appreciation of sensual beauty has calmer, more thoughtful manifestations than stimulating our visceral drives and emotions: “And this passion has something special about it since we don’t notice that it’s accompanied by any transformation of the heart or the blood as we do with the other passions.” (116) Which is not to say that this more psychological form of passion is less powerful. On the contrary, as Descartes explains: “Which doesn’t prevent it from having a lot of force, caused by surprise or marvel, which is to say, the sudden and unforeseen reception of an impression which changes the movements of the soul.” (117)

For Descartes, passion is the opposite of action. An action is something one does through an act of will. By way of contrast, a passion is what happens to someone more or less involuntarily. Not all passions, however, overwhelm the senses and unleash complex sensations, thoughts and feelings. In fact, the kind of passions that provoke such unsettling, exciting movements—that attract our admiration–are quite rare. So how do sensual representations motivate, to use Descartes’ expression, the movements of the soul? By triggering complex forms of identification in us, the readers or viewers. By taking a two-dimensional image on a screen or series of words on a page and creating the contours of other human beings with rare powers to captivate the attention and inspire the imagination. Sensual photography, creative writing, cinema and art reflect back into our eyes not so much another human being as our own complexity. The philosopher and mystic Simone Weil has said that when a very pretty woman looks in the mirror, she doesn’t realize there’s more to her than external beauty. Whereas when an unattractive woman looks in the mirror, she knows there’s more to her than what she sees. In sensual Romantic and postromantic art and literature, it’s apparent that beautiful and sensual images conceal much more than meets the eye.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Passionate Art

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Auguste Rodin, Claudia Moscovici, love, passion, passion in art, passionate art, postromantic art, postromanticism, Rodin, Romantic art, Romanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, the art of passion, The Kiss

Passion was the core of the Romantic movement and it is also, along with sensuality and the appreciation of beauty, the focal point of postromanticism. Sensuality and passion hardly seem separable since we tend to experience them together. It’s nearly impossible to imagine passion without the excitement, agitation and upheaval of the senses and emotions that we associate with sensuality. At the same time, however, sensuality and passion are opposites. Sensuality is the acute sensibility to beauty and to the myriad of potential delights it promises. It’s a way of seeing beauty in the world, in both human beings and objects. Such beauty is so vast and all-pervasive— kalon, or sea of beauty as Plato’s prophetess, Diotima had depicted—that it’s not necessarily anchored by any preference or bound by any attachment. Every week we may gaze at dozens of attractive persons, inspiring scenes and beautiful paintings or sculptures. Sensuality moves our eyes from object to object, stirring our desires, dreams and solipsistic emotions, but not necessarily capturing our devotion.

Much as sensuality, in its link to perception, evokes the aesthetic and epistemological dimensions of postromanticism, passion constitutes its ethics. This doesn’t mean that postromanticism mandates that human beings should not appreciate a multitude of objects or beings. But it does unabashedly declare: love is special. Many of us fall passionately in love and such feelings are so miraculous that they seem to defy explanation. Yet, at the same time, they are so important that they have inspired thousands of writers, poets, philosophers and artists throughout human history to depict passionate love. Not everyone does or should fall deeply in love. But those who do, we tend to believe, are very fortunate. If passionate love is a privileged form of human experience that has intrigued us for millennia, then it’s certainly worth valorizing it in our times.

Like Romanticism, postromanticism focuses above all on the expression of passionate love. Yet, in our day and age–an age so imbued with feminine and feminist sensibilities–one can no longer speak of the asymmetrical love between a male poet or artist and his ethereal muse, which has long been the dominant cliché of Romanticism. Postromantic love is reciprocal and symmetrical. Nor does postromanticism preserve the instrumental view of passion as a means of reaching something higher than human experience; of moving from the human to the divine, as we see in idealist traditions of love from Plato, to the Renaissance neoplatonists, to the Romantics. In Postromantic poetry, literature and art, passion begins with earthly existence and never transcends it.

Definition: So what is postromantic passion? Above all, passion is a focalization of the senses, thoughts and emotions upon one primary subject. I call it an ethics because it implies considering at every step one’s attitude and actions towards the beloved and, conversely, his or her actions and feelings towards oneself.

The transcendent in the contingent: The beloved is not randomly chosen. Even if meeting him or her occurs by accident—as do most human encounters—the fit between the lovers feels so right that it appears to be determined by a higher force. The intervention of that higher force cannot be proven. Nonetheless, it has a certain metonymic logic similar to the one described by the Stoics, who perceived the imprint of divine will in the beauty and harmony of the universe. Postromanticism thus spiritualizes, but only gently and lightly, passionate love. It doesn’t necessarily express a belief in divinity, but rather an elevation of emotion and humanity. Passionate love is that which uplifts one’s creative and life energies, as if by force of destiny, with the elegance, sense of wonder and inevitability of something that appears to transcend human experience.

The artist and the muse: With so many successful female artists in the world and, more generally, with so many women encouraged to pursue their talents, it’s impossible nowadays to retain the Romantic idea of the artist as male and the muse as female. When the passion is shared, both members of the couple can inspire and engage in creativity.

Idealization and lucidity: While Romanticism tends towards the idealization of the beloved, postromanticism claims that the beauty of love and of the beloved often lies in his or her imperfection. For the Romantic poets the muse was otherworldly. Only through her nonexistence could she embody aesthetic ideals. She wasn’t a woman, but a fantasy, a dream. In postromanticism, however, the source of inspiration is not a “crystallized” or idealized object of the imagination—as the novelist Stendhal had described love–but a contingent person who is known in the smallest details of his or her reality. Which is not to say that postromanticism follows the legacy of realism or naturalism. In postromanticism, unlike in naturalism, the mundane aspects of the lovers and of love itself never become scientifically predictable, mythical or grotesque, as they do, for instance, in Zola’s naturalist fiction. Postromanticism declares: real love is endearing and unique; a product of a rare fit between two individuals who, through their mutual devotion, create lasting values in an ephemeral life.

Focalization: We tend assume that the Romantic life is synonymous with the adventurous life, the life of an emotional tourist: traveling everywhere; having a multiplicity of relationships; experiencing each type of woman or man as one samples exotic dishes from distant parts of the world. Yet when one glides only on the surface of human existence, it’s difficult to be immersed in passion. For passion requires time to become deeper, richer and more intimate; it requires focalization so that it will not disperse and become a flash of intensity that’s one episode among a hundred others. In losing focus, passion also loses intensity and significance. It ceases to exist.

Energy: Passion is a mutual consumption that gives rather than depleting energy. Like a windmill, like any rhythmic movement, it generates while absorbing energy, but not all by itself, but from the external impetus of two individuals’ continual efforts to live for and with each other.

Symmetry: Passion is constantly reinforced by symmetrical dialogue. The lovers negotiate everything and feel equal in the relationship. Which doesn’t mean that they’re identical. In fact, often passion becomes more exciting when the lovers share differences in temperament, point of view and opinion. Yet there are no conventional gender roles in postromanticism. One person is not necessarily more submissive, the other more authoritative; one person is not necessarily more emotive, the other more rational. The differences are unique to each couple, not necessarily polarized. They are diffused, varied and less predictable than in the Romantic complementarity between masculine and feminine roles.

Reciprocity: Reciprocity, which was largely ignored by the Romantic movement, is the pillar of postromanticism. Passion that is mostly solipsistic—one human being’s dream or projection upon an idealized person—is not real. It may represent desire or even a strong infatuation. But only once feelings, thoughts and desires are shared, do we enter the realm of passionate love.

Proximity and distance: The Romantic male artists and their muses, even when they coupled in real life, appeared infinitely distant in art because the descriptions of women were so often veiled and disguised. The Romantics privileged the metaphors of woman as muse, angel, Salomé or femme fatale; of woman as all the more desirable because mysterious, multiple, changing and unattainable. In this tantalizing play and disguise of feminine identity, the difference between Romanticism, modernism and postmodernism is almost effaced. Postromanticism doesn’t need feminine mystery and masquerade to cultivate desire and love. Which doesn’t mean that it assumes love to be transparent. Postromanticism trusts that passionate love can generate its own dynamics: a constant movement between creating and lowering barriers which, unlike the Romantic vision of the femme fatale who fans desire through strategic advancements and withdrawals, is reciprocal, genuine and spontaneous.

Breathing: Passion is nourished by a proximity and intensity of communication so strong that it seems as if the lovers are breathing each other’s air. Without suffocating. The withdrawals are themselves part of the process of breathing. They are periods of inhaling air, of absorbing life experience and knowledge, in order to exhale it back to one another; to have a renewed life energy to offer one’s beloved.

Thinking: Postromantic passion is characterized by a rhythm and emotion which are genuine and spontaneous yet thoughtful at the same time. In this respect, it resembles Wordsworth’s Romanticism, which described passion as a processed and thoughtful rather than immediate and visceral emotion. Without the mediation of thought, passion risks being just a passing fancy; a gust of wind. And winds quickly change direction. Passion is a symbiotic relation between two individuals who enable each other to interconnect the important aspects of human life, including sensation, emotion and thought. Passion engages all of our human faculties.

Devotion: Passion is an enduring devotion. It’s not necessarily a commitment or responsibility in the way more institutionalized relations are, where the primary connection is external to the relationship. In other words, in passion the connection is not made by conventional morality and law. But the result is even more spectacular. Because devotion, a term evocative of religious experience, has transcendental dimensions. Passion is a secular form of adoration.

Fidelity: We tend to believe that virtue is a more reliable foundation for fidelity than passion, but postromanticism says that’s not the case. Virtue is often tested in the face of temptation and experienced as a tension between conscience and desire. All too often, the desire is more immediate, easier to satisfy and stronger. Passion reduces that tension and alleviates its pangs. In passion, the obsessive desire and focus upon a primary object is so strong that the energy left for others is weaker and more superficial, thus not posing a real threat to the relationship.

Jealousy and Possessiveness: If philosophers from Plato to Kant cautioned against passion, it’s largely because they associated it with negative emotions such as jealousy, possessiveness and hatred, which occur when love turns full circle and collapses upon itself. The Romantics, from Goethe to Constant, often confirmed this negative impression in describing how the force of passion leads to madness, murder and suicide. It’s undoubtedly true that passion is often accompanied by feelings of jealousy and possessiveness. Yet that’s not necessarily a bad sign. In moderation, jealousy and possessiveness may constitute a declaration of love. They can express: I know you desire others and that others are desirable to me, but I need and am grateful for the uniqueness of our attraction and feelings. Jealousy, in moderation, rekindles the flame of passion. It suggests: out of all the desirable persons we meet, I still chose you and you me. Jealousy in excess snuffs out the flame of passion. It suggests: I don’t trust you; you’re not freely mine. Rather than loving you, I possess you.

Ritual: Passion is a cherished ritual rather than a habit. A repetition of activities that appear always new, always exciting, because they’re primarily motivated by emotions and desires. In lasting love, one needs the repetition of activities as one needs to breathe air or eat regularly, rather than going through the motions today out of inertia, because one did it yesterday. In its rhythm and intensity, the repetition of acts in passionate love—going to a movie, dining out–resembles the repetition of religious rituals.

Erotism: Postromantic passion is erotic in a way that’s intensely sensual and at the same time different from diffused sensuality. In passion, the physical longing for someone is stimulated by knowledge and love of that person, rather than the love being motivated primarily by desire. That’s what makes passion different from the multiplicity of human attraction. While sensuality is a feast for the senses, passion offers food for the soul. Postromanticism places passion at its center, declaring: life and art would be emptier and more impoverished without such exquisite nourishment.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Modern Classics: The Sculptures of Martin Eichinger

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Claudia Moscovici, Martin Eichinger, Modern Classics: The Sculptures of Martin Eichinger, postromantic art, postromanticism, Romanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, sculpture

Martin Eichinger studied design and anatomy at Ferris State University and did his postgraduate work in sculpture at Michigan State University. He also pursued independent studies of classical sculpture in Europe. He has won numerous awards and competitions including a Kellogg Internship and NEA grants.

When one looks at the astonishing feminine beauty represented by Martin Eichinger’s sculptures, it’s difficult to believe that the ancient Greeks denuded and placed young men on a pedestal first, long before acknowledging the beauty of women. Praxiteles was the first Greek sculptor to recognize in the nude feminine form the unique undularity, tenderness, expressivity and sensuousness of the female form. Since then, sculptors have celebrated the beauty of femininity in countless sculptures, busts, reliefs. In our day, Martin Eichinger stands out as a master of this longstanding tradition. He combines the elegance and simplicity of sculpture inspired by the classical tradition with the sense of movement and emotion that is, above all, the legacy of Romanticism.

Like the classical Greek sculptors, who painted their works of art in vibrant colors as if attempting to bring to life the human forms, Eichinger sometimes adds colors, gems and iridescence to the timeless beauty of his sculptures. His figures often tell a story: “I am a narrative sculptor creating my cast bronze sculptures using the “lost wax” process. I don’t feel that my art work is complete until I sense that it has entered someone’s life in a meaningful way; that it moved someone, changed someone, or explained a person’s perspective.” Indeed, it is this narrative bent that modernizes and gives a unique personality to each one of Eichinger’s figures.

In “Pillow Dance,” for example, the young girl shifts her weight on one foot, her body almost taking flight along with the dreams that still appear to envelop her, comforted as she is by her familiar pillow. Like neoclassical art, this sculpture is more allegorical than realistic. The beautiful girl, a vision herself, embodies–in her somnolent grace, her precarious poise and her restful flight–the very boundaries between dream and reality that are evoked by all of Eichinger’s visionary art.

Claudia Moscovici, Romanticism and Postromanticism (Lexington Books, 2007)

 

Reviews of Romanticism and Postromanticism

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art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, Edward Kaplan, fineartebooks, literary criticism, Marshall Olds, postromanticism, Reviews of Romanticism and Postromanticism, Romanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, the Romantic movement, William C. Carter

In Romanticism and Postromanticism, Claudia Moscovici writes that “art criticism, like philosophy, like love itself, depends upon cultivating a lucid passion.” This book, which brings a breath of fresh air to the study of enduring themes, is the lucid, engaging result of Moscovici’s own passion for literature, philosophy, and art. And it is much more, an enthusiastic appeal to seize the day, to live life to the fullest, complete with a manifesto and a roster of artists who epitomize the aspirations of the postromantic movement.

—William C. Carter, Distinguished Professor of French, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Addressing both a revolution in esthetics and an important development in the history of thought, Claudia Moscovici argues that in its break from the Enlightenment, Romanticism promoted core values such as verisimilitude, expressivity, and sensuality, that have become an important postromantic opposition — in our contemporary visual arts, especially — to Modernism and postmodernism. The discussion is fresh and engaging.

—Marshall C. Olds, Willa Cather Professor and Professor of Modern Languages, University of Nebraska

Claudia Moscovici is a historian of ideas, astute reader of literature, and sensitive interpreter of art. Her unusual, original book, vividly written, solidly researched, is both academically sound and passionately committed. Lucid chapters on Rousseau, Mme de Staël, Diderot, Wordsworth and Baudelaire define the aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology of the movement she calls postromanticism, alive today. Exciting to read.

—Edward K. Kaplan, Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities, Brandeis University

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Introducing “Opera” by Edson Campos: Delacroix with a Postromantic Twist

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Claudia Moscovici, Death of Sardanapalus, Edson Campos, Eugene Delacroix, fineartebooks, Opera by Edson Campos, postromantic painting, postromanticism, Romantic art, Romantic painting, Romanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism

Edson Campos’s spectacular new painting, “Opera,” puts a postromantic twist on Eugene Delacroix’s famous Romantic masterpiece, “Death of Sardanapalus” (1827), which is, in turn, inspired by one of Lord Byron’s plays. Delacroix is widely known as the leader of the Romantic movement in art.  Yet his brand of Romanticism never gave way to sentimentality: it was distinct, bold and individualist. The poet Charles Baudelaire captured the painter’s style best when he said: “Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.”

In the “Death of Sardanapalus,” Delacroix depicts the last moments of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, his harem and his servants, before the inevitable defeat. The color scheme is warm—vibrant reds, yellows, browns and shades of shimmering gold. It captures the tragic energy of the events as well as the exotic setting. The king, however, remains expressionless as he orders the guards to kill his servants, concubines and animals, whom he regards as his rightful property. If he must fall defeated to the enemy, he refuses to leave behind for his enemies any of his belongings. Most shocking—and yet also most moving—is the scene which is entirely absent from Byron’s play: the sacrifice of a beautiful nude woman, perhaps the king’s favorite concubine, who is being stabbed from behind by one of the guards.   The fierce, merciless concentration of her assailant sharply contrasts with her passive, defenseless pose and quiet suffering.  In this Romantic allegory, the women are property and victims. There is  striking beauty in the composition and color scheme of the painting, but sheer brutality in its message.

In Campos’ postromantic pastiche of Delacroix’s painting, the violent central scene of the concubine being stabbed has been removed. Campos still recreates, however, with a stunning likeness, some of the elements of Delacroix’s original. He depicts the king’s unemotional expression, as he supervises the murder of his harem, servants and horses. He also shows a seminude concubine, a helpless victim that has already been murdered. The most compelling scene, which captures movement and emotion, is represented by a horse. We see it rearing its body to escape death, its eyes opened wide with fear.  However, instead of the brutal murder scene of the nude concubine, a beautiful young woman with long, flowing hair, enveloped in a satin red gown, forms the focus of Campos’ rendition of Delacroix’s masterpiece. Her expression still reflects the resignation of Delacroix’s female victims. Yet Campos attenuates the brutal violence of the scene.   Her stance may be passive and resigned, but she’s still very much alive. The transposition of this new representation of femininity—which replaces the central scene of sacrifice and violence of Delacroix’s “Death of Sardanapalus”—endows Campos’s “Opera” with a sense of promise, hope and a languid, almost sensual, spirituality that are glaringly absent from the original. Under Campos’ creative touch, Delacroix’s Romantic nightmare vision turns into a more ambivalent postromantic image that sharply contrasts brutal violence with possible hope and redemption. 

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

What is Postromanticism?

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art, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, Leonardo Pereznieto, postromantic art, postromanticism, postromanticism.com, Romantic art, Romantic movement, Romanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, What is Postromanticism

Some artistic movements happen organically. The Impressionist and Fauve movements, for example, emerged naturally from the artists’ friendship and practice. The name and the aesthetic philosophy of Impressionism came almost as an afterthought, accidentally. Yet both the name and the concept stuck. An insulting word cast by an art critic about Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise became the seed that eventually gave this group of artists a recognizable image. Other artistic movements happen prescriptively. The Surrealists could not have been what they were without the philosophical structure and sometimes dogmatically narrow focus that the writer André Breton gave to their art. Today movements can come together in virtual space. The Internet connects artists from all corners of the world who would never have met, created together, seen that they share the same vision, become friends. This is how postromanticism happened. Before I met any of the artists, I had written about the aesthetic values contemporary art had lost and should attempt to recapture. I called that aesthetic “postromanticism” and posted it on the internet. Postromanticism as a movement, however, didn’t come into being until one artist, the Mexican sculptor Leonardo Pereznieto, saw his art reflected in my words. Since then we have discovered dozens of artists who identify their art with our aesthetic vision. My book, Romanticism and Postromanticism (Lexington Books, hardcover 2007, paperback 2010) introduces some of these artists and the postromantic movement. This brief essay will describe how it originated.

A logical way to explain the nature of postromantic art is to begin with its name. Surely with a name like postromanticism, this movement has something to do with Romantic art. Yet since we put the post- in there, it must also come after Romanticism and be contemporary in some way. Postromanticism is, indeed, primarily, but not exclusively, inspired by nineteenth-century Romantic art. Postromantic painters admire the art of Bouguereau, whose sensual, palpable images of angelic women and shepherd girls were eventually displaced by the less idealized style of the Impressionists. They also find inspiration in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, which shocked Victorian society only to stand the test of time as one of the period’s most interesting artistic legacies. Postromantic sculptors identify with the art of the sculptor Rodin, who revolutionized sculpture as the expression of passion, sensuality and emotion.

When I spoke to a journalist about postromantic art to offer an introduction to one of our collective exhibits, she raised several questions that were crucial to explaining this movement. She asked me: where is the “post” in postromanticism? What makes postromantic art original? What makes this group of individual artists scattered all over the world a movement? Here I will answer these questions.

 1. Romantic in Inspiration

It’s relatively easy to point to the continuity between the Romantic and Postromantic movements. Like Romantic artists, the Postromantics capture human passion, sensuality and beauty in their works. They mirror and at the same time idealize visual reality. When you look at the sculptures of Leonardo Pereznieto or Nguyen Tuan, you immediately detect the influence of Rodin. Similarly, Edson Campos’ paintings evoke the sensual purity of Maxfield Parrish and the allegorical narratives and elegance of the Pre-Raphaelites.

The postromantic artists, however, also incorporate other styles of art into their own. Which is why what renders them postromantic is not only the inspiration they find in the Romantic movement, but also the fact that like the Romantics, they privilege the expression of beauty, passion and sensuality in their art.

2. Original in Creation

The issue of originality is rather complicated. One might legitimately ask, how are these artists original when they clearly imitate styles of art that are at least two hundred years old? Moreover, haven’t modern styles of art—abstract expressionism, pop art and postmodern installations, ready-mades, pastiches—displaced the tradition of art that imitates and idealizes reality? To explain why and how postromanticism is original, let’s see first what originality means. What makes art be original? As opposed to new? As opposed to a passing fad? As opposed to something that has mere shock-value?

The whole notion that art had to be above all else original began in the nineteenth-century, with the Impressionist movement. Artists such as Manet and Monet staked the value of art on its ability to go against the norms established by the Academy and the Salons. They presented reality in an entirely new way. As the famous French novelist Emile Zola explained, Manet and the Impressionists set the new standard for what makes art be artistic: originality, which implies not mere newness of style, but a relevant and revolutionary newness. A novelty, in other words, that is important to society. After Impressionism, modern art was perceived as provoking thought rather than only stimulating pleasure or emotion. And so art became, as the critic Arthur Danto puts it, increasingly conceptual.

Modern art—the trends of cubism, abstract expressionism, pop art and postmodern art—stakes its worth on establishing this relevant newness. However, contemporary art that continues the trends that began during the early twentieth-century can no longer take it for granted that they’re being new and relevant to their society. When Duchamp placed his urinal on exhibit in New York during the early twentieth-century, he was certainly shocking, not fully serious and arguably original. But anybody who does postmodern ready-mades and installations today will need to think critically about how his or her art is original. Doing what Duchamp did eighty years ago cannot be assumed to be cutting-edge nowadays. Similarly, when Jackson Pollock splattered paint on a canvas and helped establish New York as the epicenter of international art, he was controversial and original. Now the tradition of abstraction is eighty years old. Any artist who paints in an abstract style cannot automatically present his or her work as original, fresh and modern.

I haven’t yet established the originality of postromantic art, but I have shown that its competitors haven’t either. We’re all in the same boat. In fact, it’s arguably more new and different to find inspiration in styles of art that are three hundred years old than to imitate those that are fifty years old. Modernist trends are much more common and accepted by today’s artistic establishment. Does this mean that we should abandon looking for originality in contemporary art?

Absolutely not. Art today can still be original if it puts a new twist on whatever tradition in the history of art it follows and if it shows that this twist is still interesting and relevant to the society and culture of its own times. For art is even more about the public—promotion, sales, influence, consecration—than it is about the creative process and the individual artists.

To illustrate this point, I’ll borrow an analogy from the novelist and paradox-maker, Borges. Borges once wrote a story about an author, named Pierre Menard, who tried to rewrite the novel Don Quixote in the twentieth-century. Menard reproduced Cervantes’ text word by word. Yet from a certain perspective his novel was entirely different. When you transpose fiction into a whole new context, Borges illustrates, everything changes.

Cervantes was creating a whole new lay Spanish language that was unpretentious and easy to understand for his times. Writing in the same prose several centuries later, Menard, however, sounded stale and quaint to his readers. Furthermore, the social and religious assumptions Cervantes could take for granted, Menard had to learn with great effort by reading biography, history and learning the classical languages. Last but not least, while Cervantes’ novel fit with his context and established the tradition of novel writing, Menard’s Don Quixote stuck out like a sore thumb in the context of twentieth-century literature. By then readers were used to the train of thought style and fragmentation of modern fiction. In this context, a novel like Don Quixote seemed glaringly traditional. Borges’ story shows that art is never just its content, but is in large part a product of its social context. Writing and readers, art and the public, are inextricably intertwined. Which is why one can’t bring back the past exactly as it was even if one reproduces older styles down to their smallest details.

 3. Sticking Out

Much like Menard’s twentieth-century version of Don Quixote, postromantic art deliberately sticks out against the background of contemporary art, so heavily dominated by modern and especially postmodern art. But postromantic art is not reactionary. Postromantic artists realize, as Borges’ parable illustrates, that bringing back nineteenth-century Romanticism intact would be an impossible goal. We do not wish to freeze any art movement in time.  Instead, postromantic artists preserve the best of tradition—by placing emphasis upon technical skill, beauty and passion—while still keeping up with the times—by using new media, being sensitive to our contemporary public and creating new styles.

I consider artistic movements to be not only chronological, or following one another in art history and then dissipating and dying forever. Rather, art is also, at the same time, “chronotopic” (to use Bakhtin’s famous formulation): new art is constantly fertilized by various former styles and movements, which it renews for its own context. Which is why you will discover postmodern pastiche mixed with a traditional techniques in the paintings of Edson Campos and David Graux and the use of new media—acrylics and fiber optic illumination—in the Rodin-like sculptures of Leonardo Pereznieto. Not to speak of the exquisite photography of Guido Argentini, which endows modern images with the beauty, immobility, expressivity and endurance of Romantic and modernist sculpture. In this balance between old and new lies our originality. We are new in our unique and harmonious combination of modern and traditional techniques. We are relevant in providing the sophistication critics seek with the beauty, passion and accessibility that the public prefers.

 4.  The Postromantic Movement

Does the fact we’re original in some ways make us a movement? More generally, what makes something be an art movement? First, a movement has to include a significant number of artists, a group. Such a group needs to be formed by artists who have a reputation on their own, as individuals. Our movement, which has just begun to form, already includes dozens of artists from several countries, including Mexico, Brazil, the United States, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Romania and Italy. And we’re growing rapidly as more artists see the appeal of postromantic art.

Second, to be a movement, a group of artists has to propose some shared techniques and a cohesive vision. The postromantic artists do have that in common implicitly. My job as a writer is to help render what they have in common more obvious by articulating an aesthetic vision.

Third, and most importantly, a movement has to move. An art movement affects the public; is discussed by art critics and the media; adapts to society; is challenged and reacted against (otherwise it becomes complacent and stale); it spreads and mutates; is imitated or followed by other artists. We’re starting to meet this much tougher standard as well. The postromantic artists have had articles written on their art all over the world. They had several collective exhibits, including at the Biennale di Firenze, the art expo in Florence, Italy, where a section of the museum was devoted to postromantic art. However, what ultimately will make this movement move is you—our public and readers—for whom we paint, sculpt, photograph and write. It’s to you that we devote postromanticism, the art of passion.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754