romantic impulse, The

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2002 by Loughery, John

It should be remembered that the Romantic painter has designs on the spectator. He is out to remove the spectator from his normal or appropriate perceptual field, and in doing so to infect him with his own personal doubts.

-Anita Brookner, Romanticism and Its Discontents

A FEW DAYS AFTER SEEING THE TWO MIES VAN DER ROHE SHOWS in New York last summer, at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney-an impeccable and chilling experience-I was in Barcelona for a week, immersed in the Catalan version of Art Nouveau and (by way of Antonio Gaudi: who else?) Art Nouveau gone slightly mad. A more potent architectural contrast isn't to be found. Mies stood for tautness, rigor, an icy sensuality, and reason transcendent (perhaps its own kind of Romantic quest); the anti-Modernist Gaudi, for the Catholic God, aggressive idiosyncrasy, a reworked Orientalism, an urban landscape of sea cliffs and dreams. Eccentric and overbearing as he will always seem-and work on the famous Sagrada Familia cathedral proceeds seventy-five years after his death, no end in sight-Gaudi is in the end only another, if more truculent, example of one current of modern art: creativity motivated by discontent and high aspiration-a slap at the sensible, the cozy, and the mundane.

Of course, the Romantic impulse has always been wide open for parody, from its earliest days to our own more skeptical, irony-obsessed time. A small show I saw the following week in Madrid at the Museo Romantico, "El Amor y la Muerte en el Romanticisimo," touched on that theme in a funny and judicious way. (The Museo Romantico is one of the many small museums off the beaten path, which abound in Madrid, perfect for a visit when one's saturation point has been reached at the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza, or the Reina Sofia.) Paintings by numerous, largely minor or unknown nineteenth-century artists illustrated the classic Romantic's obsession with grand passion and early death, but the small, tart drawings of Leonardo Alenza were really the memorable element of the exhibition. In Satira del suicido romantico, three young Werthers are in a positive frenzy to do away with themselves, one leaping off a mountaintop dagger-in-hand, the other shooting himself even as the noose tightens round his neck. The third has energetically chopped off his own head. In another, equally droll work, the drama of unrequited love has taken its participants into their dotage as a wheezy, white-haired poet still woos his Muse six decades past her prime.

The whole question of Romantic striving and self-importance, and the sober antithesis of so much emotional intensity, formed a kind of subtext to my experience of the main summer exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. "Spirit of an Age: Nineteenth-Century Paintings from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin" was a traveling show (also seen in London earlier in 2001) of seventy of that museum's most famous works, organized to keep the collection on view while the old Nationalgalerie building is undergoing extensive renovation. (The Neue Nationalgalerie, opened in 1968, is a Mies van der Rohe building of especially pristine design.) A display of any nation's art spanning the years 1800 to 1900 is apt to be almost pointlessly diverse; but in the case of "Spirit of an Age," the diversity had its own sort of logic-less aesthetic than political and peculiar to the situation of Germany between the Napoleonic wars and World War I. A region that wasn't a nation at all, but rather a loose confederation of states at the beginning of the century, and yet was a superpower ready to rival Britain, France, and Russia a hundred years later, groaned under the weight of its identity issues. No less than America's Hudson River School and Western painters, its leading artists reflected some of those needs and some of that confusion.

The exhibition began, perhaps misleadingly, with a single majestic picture in the entranceway, strategically placed amid the wall plaque information and the brochures. Ostensibly about the site of a Greek victory over the Persians in 490 B.C., Carl Rottman's The Battlefield of Marathon (c. 1849) is to modern eyes more pure landscape than political allegory. Certainly the title and any indefinable ground activity mean little in comparison to the massive clouds and powerful brushwork that predominate in this lush and gloom-driven picture. (The historical analogy the painting establishes between ancient and modern Greece supposedly has to do with Bavaria's interest in helping Greece to achieve its independence from Turkish rule and the disappointing direction taken by that free Greek state-disappointing, that is, to Bavarians-when the Greeks rejected a son of Ludwig I as their monarch.) The symbolic dimension of Rottman's painting is so obscure today that it is possible to appreciate The Battlefield of Marathon for its considerable aesthetic qualities alone. Would that that were the case with most of the other works in the show.

What followed from such a promising first image was a chronological review extending from the Romanticism of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Caspar David Friedrich to the Nazarenes, Biedermeier realism, and the Deutschromer of the 1860s, on to the anti-academic Secession movements of the 1890s, ending with some very early Max Beckmanns and the Expressionism of Lovis Corinth. Adolph Menzel figured prominently as the major name in late nineteenth-century German painting, and a small selection of French art-Cezanne, Manet, Renoir-was included in one of the last galleries to acknowledge museum director Hugo von Tschudi's acquisition of avant-garde work from abroad. Considering how conservative their art remained, the wider relevance of these bold purchases to German artists is open to question. In any event, von Tschudi's open-mindedness and Francophile leanings didn't sit well with the Kaiser, who forced his resignation in 1909.