19th century art

1. 19TH CENTURY ART
Art Nouveau was a movement that swept through the decorative arts and
architecture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Generating enthusiasts
throughout Europe and beyond, the movement issued in a wide variety of styles,
and, consequently, it is known by various names, such as the Glasgow Style, or, in
the German-speaking world, Jugendstil. Art Nouveau was aimed at modernizing
design, seeking to escape the eclectic historical styles that had previously been
popular. Artists drew inspiration from both organic and geometric forms, evolving
elegant designs that united flowing, natural forms with more angular contours. The
movement was committed to abolishing the traditional hierarchy of the arts, which
viewed so-called liberal arts, such as painting and sculpture, as superior to craft-based
decorative arts, and ultimately it had far more influence on the latter. The
style went out of fashion after it gave way to Art Deco in the 1920s, but it
experienced a popular revival in the 1960s, and it is now seen as an
important predecessor of modernism. Romanticism is one of the 19th
century art. I t first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around
1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and
Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished
until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion,
Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the
Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the
French Revolution of 1789. In Romantic art, nature—with its
uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for
cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world
of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature
conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic
of the Sublime. In French and British painting of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of
shipwrecks (2003.42.56) and other representations of man's struggle
against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility.