ROMANTIC MODERNIST ART AND ITS DECLINE by Deniz Tekiner, Ph.D. http://www.google.com/profiles/denizhtekiner
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Romanticism emerged as the first movement of cultural resistance against the detrimental effects of certain modern conditions. Romanticism resisted the rationalization and disenchantment of modern life and sought to invigorate the human capacities for feelings of wonder, reverence, awe, and mystery before God and nature that were seen as ebbing beneath rising tides of materialism and utilitarianism. Romantic resistances to the mechanization of modern life were also resistances to “instrumental rationality,” as Max Weber would later call it, and against the values of the positivist and technological forms of modernism that grew from the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. According to the dominant rationalities of the modern sciences, technologies, and industries, utility is conceived of as the ultimate measure of value, and all things, people included, tend to be subject to cold calculations of usefulness. People thus can be exploited and nature plundered without moral compunction. This became possible in a world in which people are, as the early German Romantic poet Novalis put it, “accustomed to despising everything great and miraculous and regard [all things] as the dead effect of natural laws” (Novalis, 1996, p.63).
In opposition to such attitudes, early Romantics in Germany and England sought to express and evoke apprehensions of things as ends in themselves by their artistic distillations of the numinous and sacred forms of things. Because things understood as sacred tend to be valued as ends in their own right and not merely as means to mundane goals, the early Romantics in effect conceived of their works as antidotes to the emerging ethos of instrumental reason. The early Romantics sought to effect social changes through a moral transformation of individual minds. By making people conscious of divinity, they sought to restore feelings of love and respect for nature, humanity, and community, and hoped to inspire people to manifest the beauty of art in their relations with one another and with nature. By its numinous ideals, Romantic poetry and art asserted the priorities of non-material values against instrumental values. The early German Romantic artists, and the artists of the American Hudson River School also, regarded traditional artistic approaches to spirituality as too laden with ossified canonical content and developed a new symbolic language which they believed would be able to more authentically express and evoke experiences of the numen, or of divinity in itself. Approaching spirituality in terms of feeling and experience, not canonical belief, Romantic artists sought through the “symbolic landscape” to arouse spiritual feeling-states through the psychological resonance of natural images. To this end, Romantic artists developed their aesthetic of the sublime, using a symbolic language that invests nature with all the power and majesty of God. The sublime in Romantic art expresses a “sentimental longing” to overcome the estrangement of humanity from both internal and external nature, or from the most profound potentials of human feeling, and to restore a sense of intimate participation with nature’s processes. It thus in effect seeks to overcome the objectification of external nature as it is viewed from the standpoint of instrumental reason as a mere object of utilitarian control (Schiller, 1993, pp.179-260; Tekiner, 2000, pp.5-26).
Romantic forms of resistance to the rationalization and disenchantment of modern life and to hegemonic materialist and utilitarian ideologies were resurrected in several major modernist art movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These movements, which can for the sake of conceptual efficiency be considered forms of “Romantic modernism” for their common foundations in Romantic concerns and methods, include French Symbolism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Though very different in form and content, these movements shared concerns with the existential importance of liberating free emotional or spiritual feeling and expression, or free subjectivity, from modern constraints of reason (Rosenblum, 1975; Tekiner, 2000; Tekiner, 2006). These concerns are also evinced in the works of Wassily Kandinsky, the Blau Reiter group, and other major mid-twentieth century artists including Frantisek Kupka and Paul Klee. Concurrently, many other important twentieth century artists, including Cezanne, Matisse, and others, were devoted to the aims of aesthetic modernism and expressed no explicit existential, social, or spiritual concerns. Picasso’s concerns were principally aesthetic, though he showed some romantic inclinations by his interests in subjective emotional expression and the expressive potentials of primitive or tribal art forms. Unlike most other aesthetic modernists, he also occasionally ventured into political territories, as in “Guernica” and “The Charnel House.” The early twentieth century Austrian expressionists, like Picasso, showed interests in liberating emotional subjectivity, but did not generally evince the spiritual concerns of the Romantic movements. Some expressionists, like the Neue Sachlichkeit artists George Grosz and Otto Dix, focused principally on political themes.
Romanticism waned in mid-nineteenth century Europe amid a growing enthusiasm for the prospects of reason, science, and industry. France led the way, giving rise to the positivisms of Saint-Simon and Comte. French Realism, which emerged in the 1840s, and French Impressionism, which arose in the 1870s, reflected positivistic assumptions that empirical data are the only valid bases of human knowledge. French Realism rejected idealized or metaphysical subject matter and emulated principles of scientific objectivity. The French Impressionists, like the Romantics, showed reverence for the beauty of nature, but were concerned above all with an exact analysis of visual perceptions and, rejecting the Romantic notion that art should excite the emotions, had no explicit interests in eliciting spiritual responses. Nevertheless, as forms of aesthetic modernism, these movements evinced interests in actualizing cherished contemporary ideals — of objectivity, beauty, and art for art’s sake.
During the 1880s and 1890s, after French Realism and Impressionism ran their courses, the French Symbolist movement revived Romantic concerns with problems of the rationalization and disenchantment of the world and the potentials of art to reawaken spiritual responses. Originally a literary movement, French Symbolism sought to express subjective emotional experiences and ineffable transcendental realities through enigmatic images and metaphors. Influenced in part by neo-platonic essentialism, it sought to communicate personal experiences of ideal realities by means of symbols. As the poet Jean Moréas wrote in his Symbolist Manifesto, “Symbolic poetry seeks to clothe the Idea in a perceptible form” (Chipp, 1968, p.48). The perceptible forms are ideas “clothed” in symbols. Symbolism thus sought to render immaterial objects in perceptible artistic forms. The French Symbolist visual artists were particularly inspired by the neo-platonic philosophy of Plotinus. According to Plotinus, experiences of beauty can lead to a purification of the soul in its contemplation of transcendental Ideas. In Plotinus’s view, experiences of beauty can provoke anamnesis, a reactivation of the soul’s innate knowledge of the Ideas, knowledge that tends to be forgotten after the soul’s corporeal embodiment. In anamnesis, the prisoner of the Platonic cave is, at least for the moment, liberated. As the French Symbolist art critic G. Albert Aurier wrote, in this experience “We remember unconsciously the times when our souls relaxed in the marvelous Garden of Eden of the pure Ideas” (Cheetham, 1991, p.23).
In the early twentieth century, Wassily Kandinsky, strongly influenced by the Symbolist movement and principally motivated by spiritual concerns, invented his own symbolic means of representing metaphysical ideals. Kandinsky saw his art as a means of opposing the prevalent materialistic worldviews that he saw as obstacles to spiritual realization (Kandinsky, 1977). He believed that human consciousness gradually evolves through a progressive transcendence of restrictive materialistic ideas. In his view, spiritually inspired art expresses an intrinsic human “internal necessity” to overcome all material barriers to spiritual realization. He believed that the history of art evinced a general process of spiritual evolution, and that abstract art, because it transcends material nature, signified an advanced stage of spiritual development. In his view, figurative or “objective” art, because it remains tethered to nature, affirms materialism and thus retards spiritual progress. Kandinsky’s abstract symbolic language consists of signifiers of conflicting spiritual and material oppositions. His abstract paintings represent his faith in the eventual triumph of spirituality over materialism. Like many Romantics, Kandinsky saw a primary place for art and artists as catalysts for spiritual evolution (Tekiner, 2000, pp.38-41; Cheetham, 1991, pp.65-101).
To resist the rationalization and disenchantment of modern life, much of Romantic art seeks, principally through its images of the sublime, to revitalize dormant feeling-capacities of wonder, astonishment, terror, and awe. In this respect Romantic art prefigures the Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist movements that, according to the theories that influenced these movements, achieve their emotional effects through stimulations of unconscious processes. André Breton, the prolific Surrealist manifesto writer, was inspired by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind, dream symbolism and interpretation, and free association. For the Surrealists, Freud elucidated the creative potential of the primal depths of the mind, a potential that, the Surrealists thought, modern life represses and stultifies. For them, Freud especially demonstrated the creative potentials of dreams. Freud believed that dreams express unconscious emotions and feelings that generally remain repressed in waking life. For the Abstract Expressionists later, Carl Jung would shed more light on the creative fecundity of the unconscious mind principally through his concepts of the collective unconscious and the archetype. The Surrealists found in dream imagery a means of dredging the creative potentials of the unconscious mind and expressing the emotional intensity of unconscious life. The Surrealists’ belief in dreams as sources of artistic and spiritual inspiration has foundations in Romanticism. In Novalis’s Romantic classic Heinrich von Ofterdingen, for example, a dream of an ideal “blue flower” is the catalyst of the protagonist’s spiritual odyssey.
Echoing Romantic fascinations with exotic foreign cultures, the anthropology of primitive and ancient cultures also exerted influences on both Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Especially important was Sir James Frazer’s massive The Golden Bough, which was first published in 1890. Also influential on both movements were Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think and Primitive Mentality, which postulate basic differences between the mentalities of primitive and modern people. In Levy-Bruhl’s view, the thought patterns of primitive people, unlike those of modern people, are based on a principle of “mystical participation.” Modern thought, in contrast, as Levy-Bruhl points out, due to its rationalistic tendencies to divide, separate, and classify things, tends not to apprehend the mystical connectedness of things that primitive people take for granted. Levy-Bruhl’s studies corroborate Frazer’s observation that primitive people see dreams as messages from the spirit world and gods. For both the Surrealists and the Abstract Expressionists, Frazer and Levy-Bruhl’s ideas brought in sharp relief the relative spiritual impoverishment of modern life and the importance of dream imagery and myth for the creative process and for the vitality of psychological life (Polcari, 1991, pp.21-40). Implicit in much of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist art is a Rousseauian-type idealization of pre-modern mentalities. Both movements evince a basic assumption that modern civilization tends to stifle human capacities for psychological profundity and that a regeneration of life will require a reactivation of primal dimensions of consciousness.
Like German Romanticism, both Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism reacted against the disenchantment of modern life. Caught in a then-current wave of enthusiasm for socialist movements, many Surrealists laid much of the blame on bourgeois and capitalist culture for the oppression of the emotional life. Bourgeois and capitalist culture, in their views, by its insatiable drives for wealth and industrial expansion, its corresponding devaluation of more profound emotional needs, and its subordination of masses of workers to its imperatives, stultifies the creative imagination. Conceiving of art as a form of revolutionary action or praxis, the Surrealists sought to supplant bourgeois rationality with the Surrealist imagination. Thus like the Romantics, many Surrealists believed that social reform must be founded on psychic reform, on changing predominant modes of feeling and thought.
Surrealism was a principal inspiration for the artists who were to form the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. During the 1930s and 1940s, many of the leading Surrealist painters, including Breton, fled from the chaos of Europe to the United States, especially New York City, and exerted direct and profound influences on the artists that were to form the Abstract Expressionist movement. Abstract Expressionism thus in large part grew out of the Surrealist movement. The artists that were to form the New York School generally shared the Surrealists’ psychological and anthropological interests, but not their interests in politics. Already by the late 1930s in America, the politics of the far left was widely associated, in intellectual circles, not with freedom but with Soviet tyranny. For most of the Abstract Expressionists, the horrific events of the war provoked a turn away from the objective world of political intrigue and inward toward explorations of the subjective arenas of the mind. Many of the movement’s artists were inspired by the ideas of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, especially Jung’s concepts of the collective unconscious and the archetype. Jung believed that archetypes were intrinsic structures of the collective unconscious that signified ideals such as gods, goddesses, demigods, heroes, and heroic journeys, structures that are represented in the mythological motifs of diverse cultures. He believed that archetypes are objectified in myth, art, and dreams as “symbols of transformation” which can catalyze processes of the psychic integration of conscious and unconscious content. Jung’s concepts of the archetype and the collective unconscious provided the Abstract Expressionists with a conceptual basis for an abstract symbolic language. Consistent with Jung, major Abstract Expressionist artists such as Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko supposed that their works represented archetypes (Sandler, 1970; Varnedoe, 1984, 615-659; Rushing, 1987; Polcari, 1991, pp.40-56.) The non-objective primordial imagery of Abstract Expressionism further seeks to recover a pre-rational order of spiritual intensity that the artists thought was in short supply in the modern world. As the Russian-American artist John Graham wrote, the purpose of art should be to “reestablish a lost contact with the unconscious...in order to bring to the conscious mind the throbbing events of the unconscious mind”(Graham, 1971, p.95).
The Decline of Romantic Modernism
The various modernist faiths in the self-actualization of humanity through progress, either through reason, science, technology, or spiritual awareness, underwent processes of deflation during the twentieth century as they suffered through crises including the World Wars, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Europe, the Holocaust, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution into the Soviet dictatorship, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction during the Cold War. That the Western world for several decades had to sit constantly beneath a nuclear sword of Damocles during the Cold War certainly did nothing to bolster a modernist hubris about the bright future prospects of the world. The modernist faith was also undermined by less dramatic but still profound processes such as the exploitation and excessive rationalization of industrial labor, the persistence of widespread poverty, the industrial degradation of natural resources, the emergence of a pervasive and morally corrosive ideology of commodity consumption, and the proliferation of a morally debased and aesthetically vulgar commercial advertising culture, a culture which since the early 1960s has been used to sell political candidates and ideologies as well as commercial products.
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