When Jean Jacques Rousseau published his book Emile ou de l' education (1762),
he presented new ideas on how to raise children free from cultural
contamination. Rousseau believed that a child was born good,
innocent, and pure, and then degenerated when the child was placed in
the hands of culture. In order for a child to maintain his or her
divine qualities, the child must be raised away from civlization and in
a manner that does not impede the child's natural development. Rousseau
divided the child's growth into stages. Each stage had natural
characteristics that the child experienced and learned from.
After the
publication of Rousseau's instruction manual on education, the book
became the source of inspiration for revolutionaries, philosophers,
educators, and artists who expanded on Rousseau's ideas that all
children are born free and equal, and that modern culture and
technology perverts their souls. The younger the child is, the closer
that child is to God, and people who are close to nature, such as
farmers and indigenous people, are closer to God than people living in
the cities. The ideology that developed from the pages of Emile ou de l' education
became known as the Romantic Paradigm.
The Romantic Paradigm
rejuvenated the entire Western world because it redefined the human
experience in terms of individuality and personal theological intimacy
with nature. The Romantic ideals spread among 19th century elitists
with its biggest converts in the arts and education. American artists
who were being trained in Europe returned to the United States eager to
educate American society with Romantic music, literature, and art.
American educators transformed an archaic education system into one
that treated children as unique individuals who learned and grew at
different stages in their development. Art education was born out of
the Romantic idea that children were naturally gifted with
creativity and art lessons helped children make sense of the world they
lived in.
Art Education
For decades, American educators treated children as miniature adults. When Rousseau published his book Emile ou de l' education
in 1762, he introduced the basic idea that children grew in different
stages. Rousseau's concept was further elaborated on by Granville
Stanley Hall, an American psychologist who specialized in child and
educational psychology. Hall's lectures fueled the growing concern that
schools needed to serve new functions that would adapt to the needs of
the developing child. By the 1880s, educators and psychologists began
to reorganize the curriculum used in the American education system. One
of the changes made was the inclusion of art education. In 1883, The
National Education Association established its first art department.
The art department gave educators guidelines on how to give art lessons
to their students. The art training focused on the idea that children
needed to be prepared for factory work. Pupils could learn trades
through the skillful use of their hands. Drawing was considered the
main activity that helped promote the students' manual dexterities. If
a student wanted to become an artist, he or she could attend a
specialized art school for further training.
The art student would
receive courses that underscored the copying of masters' artworks and
plaster models. The 19th century art student was thought of as a
chronicler of classical design. With rigorous classical training, the
art student would grow into an artist who could capture the morality
and divine truth that was expected in the Romantic era. The academic
mind did not recognize any value in the individual use of line and
color, The design elements were only incidental to a work of art.
Opposed to the classical view was Ernest Fenollosa, a promoter of Asian
art who believed that beauty, not realism, was the true purpose of art.
Another influential driving force that opposed the entrenched classical
teaching techniques was Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow's philosophy claimed
that composition was the essence of beauty and that it should be
applied to all arts including the crafts.
While studying art in Europe, Dow was exposed to the works of
Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Dow was amazed on how Hokusai
controlled the pictorial space of his prints. The Japanese called the
design strategy "notan." Notan was the relationship of light, dark, and
the equality of positive and negative spaces. Dow began to rethink how
art should be taught and published his ideas in 1899 with
a book called Composition. Dow's book based its instruction on the
mastery of the elements of line, notan, and color. In the late 1890s,
Dow taught his theories at Columbia University and the Pratt Institute.
Dow also wrote papers on his composition ideas that were distributed
throughout the United States education system. Dow championed
fine craftsmanship in all media, and promoted the creation of
handmade crafts rather than objects made by machines. Much of Dow's
students went on to become teachers, but some of them became great
artists who helped redefine the meaning of art. Georgia O'Keefe took
Dow's classes at the University of Columbia and went on to become a
great painter who pushed Dow's design elements into abstraction. In
O'Keefe's last interview, she insisted that her work was about seeing
her subject matter as form, shape, and color. Art education made
radical changes in how art was taught. The realistic clarity of
Romantic paintings gradually became obsolete as new ways of creating
art became vogue. Even though one variation to the Romantic Paradigm
withered away, the paradigm's roots and branches sprouted new ways to
perpetuate its ideology. In the future of America's art education, the
Bauhaus would soon come.
Art
On the surface of 19th century easel art lays a thin
veneer of deception. The majority of Americans were unaware that
artists became the proponents of Romanticism. Albert Bierstadt, Thomas
Moran, and Fredrick Church were thought of as landscape painters. Art
museums around the United States would catalog the Hudson River School
artists as Luminaries. A recent Luminary exhibition at the
Brandywine River Museum in 2003 promoted their show as Art of the American West from a Private Collection.
Their brochure never mentioned anything about the Romantic Paradigm's
influence on the Luminary painters. The show was presented for its
superficial qualities of rugged mountain men, and "noble savages" who
all lived close to nature. The museum's brohure proclaimed;
Artists
played an integral part in the discovery and documentation of the West
in the 1800s. Before television, radio, and the Internet, their works
served as the main source for public understanding of the land beyond
the Mississippi River, known as the "expeditionary painters," the
earliest western artists traveled thousands of miles into uncharted
territory, and, like trappers and traders of the period, they
experienced danger and adventure firsthand. Many lived among Native
Americans.
Other
19th century American artists who glorified the great outdoors included
Fredrick Remington, Charles Russell, and Henry Farny. The American
genre painters would later be lumped together with the Luminaries in
what is now referred to as Western Art. The veneer of deception that
exists on Western Art is the artworks' realistic subject matter. The
majority of people who admired the works of Western
artists saw only beautiful landscapes and portraits of farmers,
pioneers, and Native Americans living in the Wild West. On the
contrary, American elitists who were educated in the finest
universities were able to gaze upon the same paintings and see morality
and divine truth. In an attempt to make morality and divine truth
a little more obvious, Thomas Cole set out on an ambitious quest
to educate the masses.
In 1836, Cole completed a five-part series called A course of an Empire.
The series graphically illustrated the Romantic ideal that human
culture destroys civilization and nature reclaims the land that
civilization was built on. In 1848, Cole created another series called The Voyage of Life. In this four-part series, Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age,
Cole illustrated how man can find divine revelation through the
intimate relationship with nature. In Cole's first piece, he paints an
angel presenting a little baby to the wilderness. The second piece
shows the youth envisioning the divine truth as he sets out on the
river of life. The third piece shows the man being guided by the divine
as he struggles through the river's rapids (the rapids were meant to be
a metaphor for modern civilization). The final painting depicts
the old man's deliverance back to the divine world in reward for his
faith. The French artist Jean-Francois Millet was another artist who
illustrated Romanticism in his work.
Millet
became popular in America with his paintings of peasants who,
like indigenous people, were close to the divine because of their
relationship with nature. In Millet's piece The Angelus
(1859), he painted a peasant man and woman engaged in prayer while
standing in their freashly plowed field. In the distant background
beyond the furrowed land is a faint image of a church. The painting
proclaimed that in order to find true spirituality, men and women must
remove themselves from culture and immerse themselves in nature. Millet
and Cole's paintings played an important role in perpetuating
Rousseau's ideas that culture, civilization, and technology were bad and
nature was good, and the only way humanity can redeem itself from the
perils of civilization is to embrace nature. The idea of embracing
nature manifested itself in another art movement called Art
Nouveau.
The first Art Nouveau artworks began to surface in France
during the 1880s. The movement spread to other countries and by 1890,
Art Nouveau became a welcomed addition to American Arts and Crafts. Its
flowery organic forms characterized the Art Nouveau style. In
illustrations, artists designed intertwining vines that accentuated the
curvaceous forms of Celtic water nymphs. In graphic design studios,
calligraphers created fonts that looked as though each letter was
cultivated in a garden. Glass artists were also busy at the furnace
creating iridescent bowls that appeared to blossom out of organic
pedestals. The artists used nature as inspiration for their artworks
because of the deep seeded belief that they were the practitioners of
divine inspiration. American artists in the 19th century felt they had
a responsibility to uphold morality, and demonstrate to society that
their artistic visions were a direct link to the divine. For some
American artists, the best way to project the image of the sacred
artist was to leave the studio and paint outside.
Inspired by the French impressionists, Theodore Robinson,
John Singer Sargent, and John Henry Twachtman put on their hiking
boots, loaded their back packs with paints, brushes, and canvases, and
headed for the hills to work in the blazing sun. What the
American impressionists had in common was the strong desire to use
nature as their subject matter. It was the perfect situation for the
impressionists to not only paint nature, but to actually get sunburned,
mosquito bitten, and dehydrated while in the process of painting
nature. Enduring pain and living an austere life in the name of art
helped to shape the modern idea of what a dedicated artist was. The
definition of an artist eventually became one who makes supreme
sacrifices in order to enrich society with beautiful things.
By 1910, new artists who were educated by Arther Wesley
Dow began to radically change the way paintings looked. One of Dow's
students, Georgia O'Keefe, became the vanguard of American modernism.
In classical compositions, a flower was presented as a whole flower
with all its realistic texture defined. O'Keefe's flower was painted so
that the flower's detial divided the pictorial space into large
harmonious positive and negative shapes. O'Keefe's representational
paintings explored the "notan" qualities in nature which allowed many
Americans to develope an appreciation for the language of abstraction.
Kitsch
There
was one approach to Romanticism that had a broad appeal to the American
audience. Starting in the 1880s, artists began to create art that was
drenched in sentimentality. Serious paintings that used beautiful
children engaged in scenarios that when looked upon by mothers and
fathers, would drain gallons of teardrops from their eyes. The typical
subject matter used in this style of Romantic art were children in
danger, children discovering nature, children playing, children
praying, and children doing cute things. English, French, and German
artists capitalized on the new bourgeoisie's need for art by furnishing
them with plenty of sentimental pictures along with a healthy dose of
cheaply made master artwork copies. Artwork that exploited nostalgia
and the Romantic ideal about children became known as kitsch. The
German word was applied to everything that was made for the purpose of
evoking sentimental emotions, which also included things that were
aesthetically inferior in production standards. The novalists Milan
Kundera provided a perspective on how kitsch seduces our senses in his
book, The Unbearable Likeness of Being;
The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the
multitudes can share. Kitsch may not depend on an unusual situation; it
must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their
memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children love.
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear
says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear
says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children
running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes the kitsch
kitsch. The brotherhood of men on earth will be possible only on a base
of kitsch.
Serious attempts by well trained artists such as Winslow Homer's piece Snap the Whip (1872), and Mary Cassatt's painting Sleepy Baby
(1910), added to the growing mountain of kitsch. Confusion about what
kitsch was stemmed from the contradicting definitions of its media. In
one hand, kitsch was said to represent images that harvested nostalgia
about innocence and love. In the opposite hand, kitsch was definned as
any object that was made of inferior quality. Mary Cassatt's paintings
of children were done well. Her compositions, brush work, and palette
display mastery of the impressionistic technique. Maxfield Parish's
scenes of tranquil bliss were also painted with mastery in the
realistic style. It is difficult to think of Cassatt and Parish as
being the equivalent to a poorly made medal toy of President Theodore
Roosevelt's head attached to the wheelhouse of a battleship. The
controversy over what should be regarded as kitsch will always be a
part of intellectual amusement. The type of kitsch that represents
inferior production standards and corny mass-produced souvenirs will
eventually find a place in the garbage cans. Kitsch that was made well
and embraces sentimentality will always be accepted by everyone. We
need the cute little bunnies and the pictures of babies playing with
puppies and kittens to remind us that with all the serious judgements
and expectations we place upon ourselves, we can be reassured that the
ultimate goal in life is comfort.
Architecture
There were many architectual styles that overlapped each
other in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The
majority of popular architectual styles were revivals and variations of
past designs. Italianate, Richardsonian Romanesque, Beaux Arts,
Neo-Classical Revival, and Colonial Revival were designs that barrowed
features from classical Greek, Roman, Gothic, and Renaissance
architecture. Toward the end of the 19th century, a shift in design
strategy began to flourish as a result of art education's emphasis on
design elements and the Romantic ideal. Starting in 1890, there began to
emerge a completely new way some American architects perceived line,
form, and space. The new architects viewed the industrial mass-produced
building products as a degradation against man's artistic nature. They regarded
classical designs as being the cultural influence that spawned the
industrial revolution. The new style was called Arts and Crafts and it
embraced design and construction as an expression of art. Construction
workers were thought of as artists who expressed their genius in wood
and stone. Arts and Crafts architecture sought a spiritual connection
with the surrounding environment and the natural and manmade materials
used in the building's construction. One of the most famous American
architects that came from the Arts and Crafts era was Frank Lloyd
Wright.
Wright never attended architecture school. At the age of
15, Wright entered the University of Wisconsin as a genius student.
After studying engineering for a few semesters, he dropped out and
moved to Chicago where he eventually became an apprentice for
Louis Sullivan. After his apprenticeship ended, Wright opened his own
practice in 1893. Wright was influenced by the Romantic idea that
artistic genius came to those who were closest to nature. Wright would
later describe himself as; "I am an American primative - an innocent
but clever country boy whose education on the farm made me more
perceptive and more down to earth."
In 1908, Frank Lloyd Wright began to think of his work as
being Organic Architecture. Wright thought of Organic Architecture as a
harmonious relationship between natural materials and the building's
form and function. The Isabel Roberts Residence
(1908) in River Forest, Illinois, is an example of Wright's Organic
architectural vision. Unlike the classical styles that rise above its
conquered ground, the Isabel Roberts Residence
gives the impression that its linear presence has always been a part of
the landscape. The split-level Prairie style house is made entirely out
of geometric plains. Wright also incorporated geometric shapes in the
windowpanes. Large windows throughout the home reduced the degree of
enclosure and allowed the occupants to see the beautiful landscape
their home was a part of. The interior space was equally revolutionary
in its floor plan. Wright designed the two-story high living room to be
the main gathering place for the family. It was a wide-open living
space with a very large fireplace that represented the home's heart.
The bedrooms were half-level above the living room. The work areas were
a half-level below the living room. Wright embraced the Romantic idea
that being close to nature allowed the person to feel divine
tranquility with his or her soul. Wright incorporated the Romantic
ideals into his designs that created an innovative way homes and
buildings looked and how people lived within its opened spaces.
Epilogue
To historians, Romanticism is confined to a
short time period between the years of 1780 to 1900. Art
historians cataloged Romantic art in a shorter time slot so that other
art movements could be understood for their visual differences. Despite
the variations in artistic expression, the Romantic Paradigm had far
reaching influences that forever changed Western civilization. The
romantic ideological roots became entangled in every art movement that
followed the more obvious Romantic artworks. The Romantic Paradigm's
unrealistic concepts about nature, children, farmers, and indigenous
people became an invisible world of thought that engulfed American
society. Its ideology transcended the bounderies of time and embraced
future generations who knew not where Romanticism came from, or how it
was affecting their attitudes about life. To modern society, it seemed
right to think that farmers and people living away from the cities had
profound wisdom from their intimacy with nature.
The most recent bloom from the Romantic Paradigm came in Terrence Malick's war film The Thin Red Line
(1998). The film's reference to Romanticism is found in the young man
who walks amoung the Melanesians prior to his baptism of fire. The
Melanesians accept the young man as innocent and pure. After the
battle, the young man returns to the village and the Melanesians reject
him. He is no longer a part of the divine world that the "noble
savages" live in. In order for the young man to regain entry into the
divine world, he allows himself to be killed as a way to cleanse his
battlefield sins. The film ends with a coconut that has taken root in
shallow water. Its infant leaves sprout up toward the sun. Melanesian
children who invite the young man's soul back into the divine world
sing a Vanuatu hymn:
God Yu Tekem Laef Blong Mi
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