Romantic Legacies in the Twentieth Century
Against a backdrop of rapid industrialisation, the Romantic movement that emerged at the turn of the nineteenth-century upheld the fantastical possibilities of the imagination against the hard-edged reason of scientific empiricism, decried the wanton destruction of the natural world, and lamented the all-consuming cycles of labour set in motion under industrial capitalism. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Romanticism’s principles, ideals, and concepts were still keenly felt in the cultural sphere and were proving enduringly relevant for post-industrial society. Far from expressing a nostalgic yearning for a lost past, Romanticism was adopted as a vital, world-building pool of ideas in which Nature and human nature ceased to be perceived as contradictions, exerting a profound influence on the artistic expression of 20th century experience.
The panel seeks to explore the diverse ways in which Romanticism influenced twentieth-century artists. Themes that would be of particular relevance to this discussion include but are not limited to: artists’ recourse to Romanticism as a font of mythological and allegorical narratives; appropriations of Romanticism as the cultural substrate of national and political identities; and conceptions of Romanticism as a basis for ecological activism.
Session Convenors:
Elina Gudmundsson, PhD Candidate, The Courtauld Institute of Art.
Will Atkin, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Art History, University of Nottingham.
Speakers:
Evangelia Naka, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
The Revival of the Sublime in Rothko’s Mature Style: Romantic Origins and Redefinition
Throughout the nineteenth century, a period that runs through the rise of Romanticism, the aesthetic category of the Sublime was crystallized as a central and structural concept of the artistic creation and the aesthetic experience of the period. The iconography of Romanticism, which contributed to the thematization of the concept, is mainly associated with the majesty of nature, the annihilation of man, the vastness and the metaphysical, having awe as its basis. The analytic of the Sublime offered a rich philosophical tradition to the concept and attempted to run through its various manifestations, even updating it through forms of Modernism. In this light, an interpretation based on the philosophy of the sublime seems very relevant in the case of Rothko’s stylistic maturity. The grandeur of the paintings after 1947, as well as the sense of powerlessness inspired to viewers, allows us to place ourselves in the interpretive path of the sublime and note the aftermath of its nineteenth century Romantic version. Robert Rosenblum notes that with light and emptiness, Rothko establishes the basis of the infinite, a considerable subject of aesthetic theories of the sublime, by emphasizing the culmination of his style characterized by its Romantic roots. This paper seeks to explore the renaissance and redefinition of the Sublime as aesthetic category in Rothko’s mature style, the relationship and dialogue developed with the Romantic origins of the concept and its complex theories; in addition, it aims to highlight the new nuance of sublimity created by Rothko’s late works.
Gabriella Daris, Kingston University & Waseda University
Harvesting Fragments of the Future: the Afterlives of Yoko Ono’s Instructions
Painting in Three Stanzas (1961)
It ends when it is covered with leaves,
It ends when the leaves wither,
It ends when it turns to ashes
And a new vine will grow, ————-
Yoko Ono’s instructions grow as the Romantic reflection does, and like a vine, they continue to live auto-poietically and thus, they have indefinite afterlives. The instructions are internally self-organized and self-constituting and they are externally energetic, for their auto-poietic system depends on their embedding environment that reflects the conditions of their day. To that end, the instructions are what Friedrich Schlegel calls fragments from the future. The ‘genre of the fragment,’ argues Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘is the genre of generation’ given that the fragment itself is ‘no more than germinating’, and fragmentation is a ‘dispersal that leads to future dissemination and harvest.’ Instructions are like seeds that have what Benjamin calls, an ‘embryonic form’, and their double agency is illustrated by their ability to both spread knowledge and disseminate it from generation to generation. Thus, their life ‘attains in them to [their] ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering.’ This paper critically examines Yoko Ono’s concept of instruction in relation to the Romantic concept of the fragment to argue that divergent from the artist, the instructions have a life history of their own for they are at once authoritative, autonomous and autopoietic agents.
Manuel Mazzucchini, Università degli Studi di Verona
Mythologies of the End: Romantic Shades in the Poetics of Anselm Kiefer
The sense of vertigo and dismay one feels in the presence of Anselm Kiefer’s monumental canvases is only partly offset by the magnitude of the feeling of the sublime that they evoke in the subject contemplating them. This bleakness is testified by the persistence of the ruins of history, which acts as an allegory of nature. We would like to show how the trope of catastrophe both in history and in nature is a key element for considering Kiefer (thus finding ourselves in agreement with prominent art critics such as Dagen, Celant, Longari) one of the most notable living Romantic artists. In a lecture given at the Collège de France, Kiefer emphasised how the artist plays with history; he gives new life to ruins by turning the vestiges of the end in a new beginning, just as nature generates new life from destruction. Commenting on his latest cycle of works exhibited in the Sala dello Scrutinio of Palazzo Ducale in Venice (2022), Kiefer reiterated the concept through the metaphysics of Andrea Emo, to the point that he chose one of Emo’s quotes to indicate the title as well as the poetic orientation of the exhibition: These writings, when burned, will finally give some light. We will therefore illustrate the fundamental trace of Kieferian Romanticism as we follow the tension between nature and history in his work, paying particular attention to the “Venice cycle” and the peculiar meaning of catastrophe that informs it.
Matthew Bowman, University of Suffolk
Interpretations of Interpretation—Craig Owens’ Postmodernist Romanticism
Long semi-repressed, the end of the 1970s saw the reemergence of allegory within art criticism; on this occasion, however, allegory was briefly awarded a new, positive valorization in sharp contrast to the rebukes that was standard within aesthetics. Allegory’s reappraisal was conjoined with the growing importance of the still-new October journal and, in particular, the appearance of younger artists whose practices seemingly required interpretation according to a framework that was rapidly theorized as postmodern.
Arguably, the clearest manifestation of this reemergence was Craig Owens’ 1980 two-part essay “The Allegorical Impulse.” Yet in its specific repudiation of what it takes to be Greenbergian modernism, it both announced postmodernism’s priority of allegory over symbol and allegorical interpretation against hermeneutics. Taken together, both positions seemingly constitute Romanticism’ final knell, specifically the Frühromantik that responded during the 1790s to Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies.
This paper will contend, perhaps despite itself, that Owens’ essay is a retrieval of the Frühromantik problematic rather than its final overturning. Somewhat unknowingly, Owens was part of the deconstructive reassessment that, in the 1970s, forged or acknowledged links between Poststructuralism and Romanticism in such a manner that questioned the symbol/allegory and hermeneutic/allegory divisions. Rather than its end, then, “The Allegorical Impulse” is Romanticism’s closure, one that reflects back upon the activity of art criticism as such. In this paper, I will seek to exploit the complexity of this closure, its incessantness, to outline how Owens reproduces, inverts, and destabilizes the Romantic oppositions he depends upon and demonstrates the continuing relevance of Romanticism in postmodernism.