Summary
American Federation of Arts. Romantic
Art: 1750-1900. New York: American
Federationof Arts, 1965.
N6410 .A470 1965
Summary by Agatha Feltus
This a small book, more a pamphlet,
detailing some of the paintings in
an exhibition given by the American
Federation of Arts in 1965. The
introduction, however, contains a
short discussion on the Romantic
period. According to this piece,
the Romantics had a great love for
mystery and devolving shapes. This
is related to their use of dramatic
lighting, and their fascination with
what light revealed and shadows withheld.
As such, Romantic painting is filled
with witches, ghosts, and other supernatural
figures. (A companion to this interest
in the supernatural was the interest
in the exotic and the foreign, because
part of the romantic aesthetic was
to harken to distant lands which
were no longer within reach.) This
trend towards the unexplained and
the irrational was influenced by
the political turmoil at the end
of the 18th and beginning of the
19th century, which wiped away the
old, contained forms of the 18th
century in a climate of great change.
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Jesse D. Hurlbut--Last Updated November 5, 1993