The Transition from Romanticism to the Modern Era, Essay Example

Two years after the painting of Bacchante in 1872, exhibition of Mary Cassatt’s work in a Paris Salon captured the attention of Europe’s well known painters like Edgar Degas. A wealthy daughter of a Philadelphia banker, Cassatt is the sole American artist considered within the scope of this rather limited literature review of the movement and its impact in the textile arts (de la Croix and Tansey, 1980).  For women artists painting at the time of the Late Romantic Period, textile fashions, and their essential elements derived from fragmentary, hybrid and shifting ideological productions became perhaps one of the most critical vehicles for a historiography of everyday life; an art of mass proportions.The Bacchante is an early composition by Cassatt, and the work reveals the transition from Romanticism to Impressionism vís-a-vís continuity in classism in subject matter and softness in light. The image is on the precipice of Impressionist optics, albeit external, making luminous the face and brilliant folds of the garment. The luxury of the textiles infers the East.

Late 18^th century and early 19^th century Romanticism commenced as a literary movement, but came to involve visual artists, particularly painters Blake, Delacroix, Friedrich, Gericault, Goya, Philipp Otto Runge and Turner (Vaughan, 2010). While Cassatt is later and most typically identified with Impressionism, as her work developed in that direction, the early renderings of her training fit squarely in the realm of the Romanticist. As a school of intellectual query, Romanticism was largely ignored or rejected by many of the artists whom later became associated with it. A more forgotten paradigm within the History of Western Art then its descendents, Romanticism is most often associated with 1) supplication of emotion and intuition at the expense of or parallel to, Reason; 2) a belief that there are crucial areas of human experience neglected by rationalism; and 3) and a substantive focus on the individual, the personal and the subjective (i.e. portraiture) (Vaughan, 2010). The suppleness of Romanticism’s anti-thesis to Reason offered much in terms of its aesthetic transference to Impressionism, but with little similarity in epistemological root. Impressionism on the contrary, was an explicit motion away from ‘the Subject’ to the sphere of light and application of thought to the depiction of everyday instances over time.

Cassatt’s work tends to imbue subject matter with both the emotive and the everyday, and is mentioned here mostly, however, for her work on domestic subjects. In her late 19^th century depiction of mother and child in, The Bath, she presents anonymous subjects posed against a background that makes the painting inimitable in its deployment of Japanese print compositional devices (de la Croix and Tansey, 1980). It is the immediacy of the composition that creates an ‘ambience’, one of the key conventions that would come to characterize Cassatt’s diffusion of internal emotion into atmosphere. If the body is where fashion finds its canvas, and ultimately engenders the History and its theoretical tenets with an apt bridge between theories of interpretation and practices of expression, in the realm of the domestic we find extension.

References

de la Croix, H. and Tansey, R. G. (1980). Gardner’s: Art Through the Ages. New York: Harcourt and Brace.

Vaughan, W. (2010). Romanticism. Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Retrieved from: http://www.oxfordartonline.com

(2010). Romanticism in the Visual Arts. Oxford Companion to Western Art. Oxford Art Online. Retrieved from: http://www.oxfordartonline.com