20th century AD

No one, I am certain, will ever define Romanticism clearly, but then, no one will ever be able to drive a stake through the heart of a word which, for want of a better one, we cannot refrain from using when we try to describe the protean range of new forms and feelings that emerge in the late eighteenth century. Considering that it may be called into service for both West and David, Goya and Blake, Friedrich and Delacroix, Canova and Rude, logicians could surely tell us that Romanticism means either much too much or nothing at all. Nevertheless, most of us in the business of history know that something shattering happened in the late eighteenth century--T. E. Hulme called it "spilt religion"--and that ever since, the shock waves have been registering with varying intensities on the Richter scales of art. The word, of course, is so slippery that it can accommodate even the most ostensibly anti-Romantic aspects of the Modern movement, embracing every contradiction. What could be more Romantic than Mondrian's or Malevich's dream of purging painting of everything but a distilled abstract purity, as untainted by the seen, material world as, say, Flaxman's Homeric outlines? What could be more Romantic than the realization in 1927 of a harmonious community of low-budget houses in Stuttgart, a vision of social and aesthetic Utopia in which geniuses as individual as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe joined forces in a brotherhood of reformatory purpose and style whose pedigree could be traced back to the likes of the Nazarenes or the Pre-Raphaelites? What could be more Romantic that Picasso's or Matisse's espousal of African art in an effort to reach under and beyond those moribund Western traditions that Romantic artists as different as Ingres and Blake had already hoped to undermine in a search for more vital and therefore more archaic sources of art? If we choose, the semantic fire of the infinitely molten concepts evoked by Romanticism can ignite speculations about any art of the last two centuries. Nevertheless, the nostalgic, revivalist mode of the last few decades, best characterized by a word--postmodernism--as ungraspable as Romanticism itself, but at least restricted in time to the later twentieth century (until perhaps we start using it retroactively to characterize, say, the "proto-postmodernism" of Reynolds's appropriations or Nash's witty architectural eclecticism), has turned up a diverse spectrum of art that, instead of looking forward to the Brave New Worlds promised by modernism and worshipping at the shrine of progress, appears to resurrect with irony or longing (or a mixture of the two) a wide range of Romantic imagery and attitudes. Here is an anthology of some of these visual events, which have to do mainly with things remembered as the twenty-first century looms on the horizon: Planet Earth and the pageant of art history.

Landscape or, more cosmically put, nature was the site of countless original Romantic meditations on ultimate mysteries. For the Modern movement, however, it became an endangered species that deflected attention from the marvels of a new man-made world. But since the late 1960s, it has been resurrected and venerated in countless ways, as we realize with growing alarm that the ratio of what was on this planet and what we added to it has changed drastically and for the worse since the Industrial Revolution.

Earthworks are surely the most spectacular and Romantically heroic efforts to establish some mystical contact between artists and the great universe of earth and heaven out there. As pilgrims to the sublime, breaking free from the confines of museums and galleries, these new voyagers have gone, often literally, to the ends of this earth in order to make a human mark so that we, and perhaps some future extraterrestrials, will know that the impulses that produced Stonehenge and the great pyramids are still, against all odds, alive. Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (fig. 1), with its earth-hugging organic coil spiraling against a site worthy of an Old Testament miracle, is an archetype here; but others have established no less awesome and fearful dialogues with lightning, ice, and sky. Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (fig. 2) in New Mexico is, among other things, a human offering to the wrath of a Christian or pagan deity, ready to discharge its malevolent bolts. As a new kind of shrine, it has no less extreme counterparts in the ice sculptures created by Andy Goldsworthy in Arctic climes (fig. 3), even at the North Pole itself: purist, crystalline fantasies that conjure up the chilling specter of Friedrich's Romantic vision of an explorer's ship wrecked for eternity in a Gothic tombstone of icebergs. And still underway--perhaps the most ambitious of all earthworks and all attempts to reunite us pitiful mortals with cosmic time, light, and space--is James Turrell's Roden Crater in Arizona, an extinct cinder cone in a volcanic field that is being subtly altered by the artist's painstaking wizardry in order to put us in regulated synchrony with the cycles of sun and moon, with the unimaginable time of earth's history, and with the changing phenomena of the void of the sky above being suffused with celestial light, day after day. Next to this total immersion in the universe, even Friedrich's Monk by the Sea seems only a modest contemplation upon the minuscule place of a lonely wanderer in the scheme of things. Less macrocosmic explorers of our planet also extend Romantic discoveries about the organic world we inherited from prehistory and are now swiftly killing. For one, Richard Long, whether in his relics of stone, wood, or mud brought back from arduous walks in unpolluted landscapes to the spaces of galleries and museums or in his quiet documentation of these ambulatory communions with the British countryside, recalls the painstakingly slow, antimodern tempo of walking and of observing nature for days, weeks, and months familiar to the experience of such great British Romantics as Constable and Wordsworth.