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MASTER AN I,SEMESTRUL II

1. O paralela Beethoven – Hegel.

2. Paradigma romantica.

Romantismul a fost o mișcare artistică, literară și intelectuală apărută în Europa la

sfârșitul secolului al XVIII-lea, atingând apogeul pe la începutul anilor 1800. În
mare parte o reacție împotriva Revoluției Industriale, cât și împotriva normelor
politice și sociale ale Iluminismului.

Caracteristicile generale ale literaturii romantice:

prezența eului liric în textele literare, subiectivitatea trăirilor

exprimarea cu prioritate a sentimentului și sensibilității

libertatea creației, absența oricăror reguli sau constrângeri estetice (prezente la

clasicism)

întoarcerea spre trecut și adorația trecutului, în special al evului mediu și goticii

îmbogățirea limbajului poetic cu regionalisme, neologisme și stilistic

exprimarea specificului național în literatură

tendința de a prezenta istoria într-o lumină ideologizată, glorificarea eroilor și

libertății
apar multe opere care au loc în peisaje, culturi, personaje si țări exotice care
reflectă dorința de evadare din viața reală

descoperirea folclorului național

aspirația spre absolut (iubirea perfectă, libertatea deplină și cunoașterea totală) apar
culegerile de basme și folclor național și includerea limbajului popular în literatură
teme romantice: viața, moartea, iubirea, libertatea, exotismul

Deși termenul de „romantism”, se aplică atunci când vorbim de muzică în perioada

aproximativ de la 1820 până în jurul anului 1900, aplicarea contemporană a
termenului de „romantic” pentru muzică, nu coincide cu această interpretare
modernă. În 1810 E.T.A. Hoffmann i-a numit pe Mozart, Haydn și Beethoven cei
trei „compozitori romantici” și Ludwig Spohr a folosit termenul de „bun stil
romantic” pentru părți din Simfonia a V-a a lui Beethoven. Din punct de vedere
tehnic, Mozart și Haydn sunt considerați compozitori clasici, și după cele mai
multe standarde, Beethoven reprezintă începutul perioadei romantismului muzical.
Începutul secolului al XX-lea, datorită faptului că sensul s-a rupt decisiv de
trecutul muzical, a dus la faptul că secolul al XIX-lea se numește "Era romantică",
și se utilizează în muzică în sens enciclopedic.

Contrastele și emoțiile sporite ale mișcării literare germane Sturm und Drang par a
fi un precursor al romanului gotic, sau elementele sângeroase ale unora dintre
operele din perioada revoluției franceze. Libretul lui Lorenzo Da Ponte scris pentru
Mozart prin muzica elocventă transmite un nou sens al individualității și a
libertății. Generația romantică l-a privit pe Beethoven, ca artistul lor ideal și eroic,
care a dedicat mai întâi o simfonie Consulului Bonaparte, campion al libertății, ca
apoi să-l conteste pe împăratul Napoleon, retrăgându-i dedicația simfoniei Eroica.
În cultura muzicii contemporane, muzicianul romantic a urmat o carieră publică, în
funcție de sensibilitatea audienței provenind din clasa de mijloc, lucru mult mai
frecvent decât să fie patronat de un aristocrat al curților imperiale, așa cum a fost
cazul cu muzicienii și compozitorii perioadelor anterioare. Noua generație de
muzicieni a creat virtuozi, care în calitatea lor de persoane publice își făceau
carieră ca soliști, mergând în turnee de concerte ca de exemplu Paganini și Liszt,
iar dirijorii au început să apară ca figuri importante, de a căror abilitate de
interpretare a muzicii tot mai complexe depindea în mare măsură calitatea redării.
Principali reprezentanți ai romantismului în muzică:

Robert Schumann, romantism poetic

Johannes Brahms

Frédéric Chopin

Hector Berlioz

Carl Maria von Weber

Franz Liszt

Richard Wagner

Piotr Ilici Ceaikovski

Romantismul în arhitectură

Romantismul în arhitectură nu are caracteristici de stil de sine stătătoare. La

mijlocul secolului al 18-lea Horace Walpole și-a construit castelul Stawberry Hill
astfel, încât arhitectura castelului să corespundă exact caracterului și minții sale
care explora neobosit trecutul. În acest scop a folosit elementele goticie și în ciuda
faptului că pentru acest lucru a fost luat în derâdere de contemporanii lui, de fapt a
creat arhitectura neogotică. În arhitectura curentului romantic prima dată curentul
neogotic a avut rol primordial. Astfel a fost construit la Londra Houses of
Parliament după proiectele lui Charles Barry, apoi Tower Bridge. Apoi a apărut un
alt curent care folosea elemente din arhitectura indiană, a Orientului Apropiat,
adăugând apoi elemente din arhitectura maură și bizantină.

La mijlocul secolului apar construcțiile pe bază de schelet din oțel, care la acea
vreme era încă o curiozitate. La expoziția mondială din 1851 Joseph Paxton
proiectează Palatul de cristal din Londra din fontă și sticlă, având o suprafață de 72
000 metri pătrați. În anii 1880 Eiffel construiește turnul său devenit celebru.
Romantismul este un important curent literar si artistic, aparut in Anglia. Franta si
Germania in prima parte a secolului trecut, ca opozitie la clasicism.

Romanticii preconizau o literatura inspirata din realitatile nationale, din traditii

folclorice, din istorie si chiar din miturile si legendele unor popoare indepartate;
sustineau valorile sensibilitatii, ale individului, ale naturii; incercau sa elibereze
creatia artistica de rigiditatea canoanelor si a conventiilor clasice, dand totodata
acces in paginile romanelor, a pieselor de teatru sau in versurile poeziilor unor
personaje si probleme ce reflectau epoca de dupa Marea Revolutie Franceza din
1789.

Romantismul s-a extins treptat in principalele tari europene, cuprinzand toate artele
si chiar unele domenii ale vietii sociale, si determinad existenta unui stil romantic
in mobilier, in imbracaminte etc.In timp ce clasicismul este un curent al ratiunii,
romantismul exalta sentimentul si fantezia. Natura patrunde masiv in creaiile
romantice, in vreme ce pe clasicisti ii interesau numai caractarele umane. Visul si
exotismul, interesul pentru taramuri indepartate reprezinta teme ale romantismului.

Acest curent invata scriitorii si poatii sa se inspire din istoria nationala si din
creatia folclorica specifica tarii lor.Personajele romantice sunt eroi exceptionali in
imprejurari exceptionale, construite adesea pe principiul antitezei si putand evolua
pe parcursul operei in ceea ce priveste trasaturile lor de caracter.

Astfel, principalele caracteristici ale romantismului drept curent literar pot fi

rezumate prin:cultivarea sensibilitatii si fanteziei creatoare, complexitatea
personalitatii umane, evaziunea in trecut, istorie, vis, contemplarea naturii
infatisata sub lumina culorii locale, interesul pentru folclor, prezenta unor
personaje provenind din toate mediile sociale, eroii extraordinari ai operelor epice
fiind pusi sa actioneze in imprejurari extraordinare, totul fiind intr-o libertate
deplina de creatie.

Marii reprezentanti internationali ai acestui curent, Novalis, J.L. Tieck, E.T.A.

Hoffmann, G.G. Byron, P.B. Shelley, A. Lamartine, A. de Vigny, V. Hugo, G.
Leopardi, A. Puskin, M. Lermontov, E.A. Poe, A. Petrofi, A. Mickiewicz au
realizat adevarate caodopere ale literaturii romantice, in proza sau in versuri.
Asemeni oricarui curent literar de o importanta maxima in dezvoltarea ulterioara a
prozei si poeziilor, curentul romantic a avut un sef de scoala si un teoretician care a
dat nastere acestui curent, l-a denumit si si-a sustinut opinia in decursul intregii
cariere artistice. Pentru romantism, acest autor este Victor Hugo (1802-1885,poet
si prozator francez), care, in prefata dramei "Cromwell" considera romantismul ca
fiind o debarasare a limbajului poetic de tot ceea ce are legatura cu o schema, o
norma sau o lege si dand frau liber imaginatiei si inspiratiei creatorului.Hugo
afirma ca tocmai aceste legi eclipseaza adevarata arta, care este pura si neingradita.

Regulile impuse de clasici nu mai sunt valabile, singura sursa adevarata de

inspiratie fiind natura si doar legile ei fiind esenta operei romantice. Fiecare subiect
va avea o valoare unica si irepetabila ce nu va mai fi dictata de legile nescrise ale
prozodiei ci de sufletul si mintea creatorului. Sfaturile naturii vor fi sursa de
inspiratie primordiala, iar fictiunea autorului este singura capabila de a crea
adevarata arta, adevaratul sentiement in inima cititorului.

Romantismul romanesc are cateva trasaturi specifice manifestate datorita aparitiei

in tara noastra cu o intarzaiere cu un deceniu fata de Franta.Prima generatie
romantica (I.H. Radulescu, V. Carlova, Grigore Alexandrescu) se afirma spre
sfarsitul deceniului al treilea si inceputul celui de-al patrulea ale secolulului XIX;
romantismul se prelungeste la noi prin scriitorii pasoptisti (V. Alecsandri, N.
Balcescu, Alecu Russo si altii) pana la Eminescu, considerat indeobste cel mai
mare poet romantic european.

Romantism - Mișcare artistică și literară apărută la sfârșitul sec. XVIII în Anglia și

la începutul sec. XIX în Franța, ca o reacție împotriva clasicismului și regulilor lui
formale, care a preluat tradițiile naționale și populare, promovând cultul naturii,
lirismul, fantezia și libertatea de expresie. Ansamblu de aspecte care caracterizează
curentul romantic; înclinare spre lirism, spre individualism, spre visare, spre
melancolie. Atitudine, comportament dominat de sensibilitate, de imaginație care
nu mai trece de rațiune. — Din fr. romantisme.romantism, termen care
desemnează, ca și clasicismul*, o noțiune estetică și o epocă istorică în evoluția
muzicii (artelor, literaturii). 1. Ca noțiune estetică muzicală, derivă din curentul
omonim ivit în literatură, prefigurat de Victor Hugo în prefața la Cromwell (1827).
Dacă în literatură r. presupune răsturnarea formelor clasice, „muzicalitatea”
textului, plasticizarea sa, în muzica r. se indreaptă spre poetizare, literaturizarea
materialului muzical, păstrând totuși eșafodajul formelor deja definite ale
clasicismului. R. introduce în muzică trăirea umană, frământarea sentimentelor
contradictorii și mai ales predispoziția pentru liric, fantastic, melancolic, pasional,
zugrăvite cu o mare libertate de expresie. În ce privește forma*, r. nu inventează
noi structuri ci le exacerbează pe cele existente, făcând ca materialul sonor să
urmeze dramaturgia sentimentelor, a literaturii, care va forma „programul” multora
din lucrările muzicale ale r. Astfel, dintru început, r. „nu se definește ca un stil ci
ca o atitudine spirituală, ca o stare de spirit” (W.G. Berger). R. apare ca o reacție
subiectivă față de obiectivismul clasic. Individualizarea este consecința acestui
subiectivism, care determină stiluri foarte diferite de la compozitor la compozitor,
în funcție de trăirile pe care le exteriorizează artistic (muzical) fiecare creator.
Trăirea sentimentului romantic este dominanta caracteristicilor ce definesc r. Prin
această înclinare spre sentimental, liric, r. poate apărea în muzica oricărei epoci
creatoare din istoria muzicii. Și tot prin liric (componentă intrinsecă a muzicii), r.
se relevă ca un dat al substanței muzicale, indisolubil legat de aceasta. 2. Ca
noțiune ce delimitează o epocă istorică, r. se plasează în istoria muzicii cu
aproximație între anii 1830-1916. Elementele romantice apăruseră deja în lucrările
lui L. van Beethoven, legătura și continuitatea clasicismului cu r. fiind prin acestea
incontestabil. Cel care făcea exegeza lucrărilor lui Beethoven la începutul sec. 19,
punând bazele terminologiei romantice în sfera muzicii era E.T.A. Hoffmann. El
demonstra atât caracterul romantic al muzicii beethoveniene cât și caracterul
romantic al muzicii în sine, al limbajului muzical. Pentru descrierea perioadei r. nu
se poate urma alt drum decât acela al prezentării fiecărui compozitor care a
îmbogățit paleta coloristică a sentimentului r. cu propria sa viață și creație. Franz
Schubert (1797-1828) este poetul muzical al liedului*, gen pe care l-a cultivat cu
precădere, gen prin excelență romantic. Legătura muzicii cu poezia, cu poeții
romantici, se concretizează în aceste cântece (profunde, vesele sau grave, specifice
poporului germ.), în care nuanțele sentimentelor și impresiilor sunt cizelate cu arta
bijutierului. Schubert a scris lieduri pe versuri de Goethe, Schiller, Rückert, Heine,
Uhland etc. Un alt compozitor care reprezintă r., și prin creația muzicală și prin cea
muzicologică, este Robert Schumann (1810-1856). Caracterul său exaltat, viața
dureroasă, dragostea pentru poezie, îl plasează în punctul cel mai adânc al r.
Schumann a creat un un mod particular de expresie pianistică, lucrările sale
capricioase, strălucitoare, amețitoare, sunt surprinzătoare în contrastele pe care le
exprimă. Tot în domeniul lucrărilor pentru pian, Fréderic Chopin (1810-1849)
introduce o ornamentație* abundentă, pasaje ample, mari acorduri* arpegiate*, o
melodicitate și o fantezie improvizatorică* deosebită, ce subliniază spiritul r.,
melancolia, sensibilitatea și chiar grandoarea și forța ritmică a lucrărilor sale
(Nocturne, Fantezii, Valsuri, Studii, Poloneze etc.). Muzica simf. se impregnează
tot mai mult de spiritul r. în creația lui Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), Simfonia
fantastică fiind un exemplu concludent al exacerbării formelor și al muzicii
programatice*, care își înscrie actul de naștere cu această simf. R. lui Berlioz se
plasează pe alte coordonate de forță, de idei revoluționare, de dorința de a epata.
Caracterul său pasionat, debordant se relevă în grandoarea lucrărilor sale
(Requiem, Harold în Italia, Romeo și Julieta, Damnațiunea lui Faust ș.a.) și în
amplele desfășurări simf. cu orch. imense, efecte timbrale și contraste violente
(orch. duble, coruri mari, soliști, chiar fanfare). Franz Listz (1811-1886) aduce r.
poemelor* sale simf. programatice de un pronunțat dramatism (Preludiile, Faust,
Dante) și tot el este primul care introduce în muzica pentru pian „programatismul”
poemelor simf., prin resursele sale tehnice incomensurabile. Manifestat în
miniatură vocală și instr., în simf. și poem* simf., r. avea să-și spună cuvântul și în
genul operei*. În timp ce, în Franța, Meyerbeer (1791-1895) cucerea aplauzele
publicului cu un melanj de operă germ., fr. și it. (Robert diavolul, Hughenoții,
Africana etc.), iar în Italia, G. Verdi ridica bel-canto*-ulla nivele neatinse, prin
căldura și frumusețea melodiilor (ariilor) sale, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) se
străduia să realizeze spectacolul total, opera sinteză a tuturor artelor (v. sincretism),
drama muzicală simbolică, filosofică, metafizică, revelatoare a marilor idei (Vasul
fantomă, Tannhäuser, Tristan și Isolda, Maeștrii cântăreți, tetralogia Inelul
Nibelungului, Parsifal), realizând totodată și conceptul melodiei infinite. Spre
sfârșitul sec. 19 r. aduce ideea în desfășurarea evenimentelor muzicale, un nou
sentiment al timpului (III) în dinamica sonoră (Listz, Wagner, Brahms). Principiul
ciclic* se face simțit în construcția simf. (Brahms, C. Franck). Conceptul tonal
specific clasicismului și r. începe să se dezvolte în substanța cromatismelor*
(Wagner). Prima parte a sec. 20 delimitează clar începutul unei concepții muzicale
noi: impresionismul, „noua obiectivitate și noua modernitate” (W.G. Berger). Tot
gândirii r. îi aparține interesul pe care compozitorii încep să-l manifeste față de
folclor*, decurgând logic din mișcarea revoluționară de eliberare și emancipare
națională a unor state mici europ. O dată cu dezideratele politice și sociale
aparținând revoluțiilor naționale ale sec. 19, încep să se contureze și coordonatele
culturilor naționale, determinând apariția școlilor muzicale naționale: rusă, cehă,
ungară, norvegiană, spaniolă, românească etc.

ROMANTÍSM - Atitudine estetică fundamentală, caracterizată prin tendința de

evocare a lumii în aspectele ei fenomenale, concrete, opunând faptul individual și
istoric tipurilor eterne și abstracte ale clasicismului, prin afirmarea primatului
factorului emoțional asupra celui rațional, al imaginației asupra observației, prin
exacerbarea sensibilității (religiozitate, melancolie, sentimentul naturii), a
subiectivității și a spontaneității, prin tendința evaziunii în vis, în exotic, în trecut.
2. Mișcare literară și artistică, apărută în Europa la sfârșitul sec. 18 și începutul sec.
19. R. a influențat nu numai arta și literatura, ci și filozofia, istoria, dreptul,
lingvistica, economia politică etc. R. se conturează în fiecare țară ca o mișcare cu
conținut și finalitate specifică. Reprezentanții lui se adresează cu precădere
tradiției, istoriei, folclorului, considerate ca manifestări ale geniului național.
Literatura romantică și-a găsit izvoare și expresii teoretice în cultul rousseauist al
naturii, în socialismul utopic, în idealismul kantian, în idealismul subiectiv al lui
Fichte, în dinamica dialecticii hegeliene, în idealismul obiectiv al lui Schelling. O
înrâurire considerabilă a exercitat, îndeosebi asupra r. târziu, metafizica
voluntaristă a lui Schopenhauer și individualismul nietzschean, ca și
existențialismul lui Kierkegaard. Definit în genere ca o reacție împinsă până la
revoltă față de canoanele tematice și formale ale clasicismului, r. a militat pentru
abolirea dogmatismului estetic și al academismului, a domniei raționalismului rece
și a ordinii stereotipizate, pentru ieșirea din convențional și abstract, pentru lărgirea
nelimitată a universului de probleme, de atitudini, de reprezentări și de imagini ale
omului și artei; el a proclamat primatul subiectivității, ideea afirmării originalității,
spontaneității și sincerității emoționale, a liberei inspirații personale; a promovat
fantezia și sentimentul, cultul eului, individual și național, și libertatea de expresie
ca principii și condiții fundamentale ale artei autentice. Sub toate aceste aspecte, r.
stă la originea întregirii arte moderne. Pregătit și anunțat de preromantism, s-a
manifestat în momente diferite ale evoluției fiecărei literaturi naționale. R.
introduce în literatură noi categorii estetice (urâtul, grotescul, macabrul, pitorescul,
feericul, culoarea locală, bizarul, fantasticul, romanescul etc.) și favorizează
apariția unor noi specii în cadrul genurilor tradiționale, ca și fuzionarea sau
transformarea unora dintre cele existente. R. a infuzat lirism genului epic și
dramatic, a încurajat amestecul de tragic și comic, de sublim și grotesc, a desființat
regula celor trei unități, s-a arătat deschis la inovațiile prozodice. El a sugerat
apropierea poeziei de muzică, a prozei de pictură și a tuturor artelor între ele
(sincretismul lui Wagner). În privința mijloacelor de expresie, a preferat
comparației metafora, vocabulei nobile cuvântul comun, populat, încărcat de valori
afective, aluzia, sugestia, verbul energic și elocvent. Subordonând expresia
necesității de a comunica „stări sufletești”, romanticii au înlesnit diversificarea
stilurilor individuale în funcție de natura mișcărilor psihice și a emoțiilor trăite,
cultivând, potrivit temperamentului, stilul patetic, evocativ, colorat, muzical, fraza
amplă, încărcată de imagini și antiteze. În proză, el manifestă predilecție pentru
peisajul pitoresc, portretul fizic, acțiunea captivantă iar în dramă pentru conflictele
violente, eroii antagonici, lovitura de teatru și tirada retorică.

În artele plastice, r. este caracterizat cu predilecție pentru exprimarea sentimentelor

dramatice, prin intermediul subiectelor eroice și patetice, al temelor istorice și al
legendelor medievale, al peisajului furtunos sau cu ruine, evocatoare de frământare
și mister, ca și prin colțurile de natură care stârnesc emoțiile intime, duioșia,
melancolia și meditația solitară etc., prin cultivarea urâtului și grotescului care
modifică idealul clasic al frumuseții echilibrate și armonioase. Actul de naștere al
r. în pictură pare să fie compoziția „Ciumații din Jaffa” (1840) a lui A.J. Gros.
Tendințele acestui curent pot fi identificate în tablourile sale istorice în care
mizeriile războiului sunt înfățișate cu o crudă și violentă veridicitate, într-o
cromatică vie și expresivă. R. se definește ca un curent de sine stătător, prin
lucrările lui Géricault („Pluta Meduzei”) și Delacroix, Decamps, Fromentin,
Gustave Doré, David Casper Friedrich ș.a.

În sculptură întâlnim aspecte romantice în opera lui Fr. Rude și Aug. Préault.
Apropiat de curentul r., la noi, este C.D. Rosenthal și, în unele aspecte ale operei
sale din tinerețe, Nicolae Grigorescu.

În muzica r. a fost prevestit de Școala de la Mannheim (Stamic, Richter), de primii

mari clasici vienezi (Haydn, Mozart) și, în special, de creația lui Beethoven.
Expresia lirică se impune prin liedurile lui Schubert, Brahms și piesele
instrumentale ale lui Schumann și Chopin, atingând patetismul prin simfoniile lui
Ceaikovski, prin operele lui Verdi și Wagner și prin lucrări programatice de vaste
proporții ca „Simfonia Fantastică” de Berlioz. Operele lui Shakespeare, Dante,
Schiller, Goethe, Byron, Pușkin, frumusețile naturii, inspiră pe compozitori, le
stimulează fantezia, măiestria transpunerilor sonore; armonia și orchestrația devin
mai subtile și mai nuanțate; se afirmă virtuozitatea solistică (Paganini, Listz) și
dirijorală spectaculoasă. Datorită lui Listz apare genul nou al poemului simfonic.
Este valorificat folclorul muzical, se cristalizează școlile muzicale naționale, apar
critica și publicistica muzicală. Unii militează pentru revoluționarea limbajului
muzical (Schumann, Berlioz, Listz, Wagner), alții preferă să rămână credincioși
tradițiilor (Brahms, Reger). Prin Franck, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Bruckner, r. își
trăiește epilogul (postromantism) care s-a prelungit până către mijlocul sec. 20.

„Dati-mi noroiul din strada si va voi face din el carnatia unei femei cu o tenta
delicioasa” – Delacroix.

Romantismul este o mişcare artistică şi filozofică apărută în ultimele decenii ale

secolului XVIII în Europa, care a durat mare parte din secolul XIX. A fost o
mişcare contra raţionalismului care marcase perioada neoclasică; iniţial doar o
atitundine, doar o stare de spirit, romantismul va lua ulterior forma unei mişcări in
care vor fi reflectate propriile sentimente ale artistilor, ce sublineaza drama umană,
iubirea tragică si ideile utopice. Dacă secolul XVIII a fost marcat de obiectivitate şi
raţiune, începutul secolului al XIX-lea va fi marcat de subiectivitate, emoţie şi eu
interior. Anumiţi autori neoclasici alimentaseră deja un sentiment romantic înainte
de răspândirea efectivă a acestei miscari, fiind numiţi de-aceea pre-romantici.
Printre aceştia se află Francisco Goya şi Bocage, insa vom vorbi numai despre
francezul Eugène Delacroix, considerat a fi pictor romantic prin excelenţă.
(Aceasta cu toate ca Romantismul a aparut iniţial în zona Germaniei si in Anglia.)

Spre exemplu, tabloul său numit „Libertatea conducând poporul” reuneşte vigoarea
şi idealul romantic într-o operă compusă dintr-un adevarat vârtej de forme. Tema
este dată de revoluţionarii din 1830, ghidaţi de spiritul Libertăţii (acesta fiind
reprezentat de-o femeie care poarta drapelul francez). Artistul se plasează
metaforic ca un revoluţionar din vârtej, deşi vedea evenimente cu o anumită
rezervare. Aceasta este probabil opera romantică cea mai cunoscută.
Vom continua despre lucrarile lui Delacroix, dupa ce vom efectua intai o paralela
intre romantism si neoclasicism, ambele fiind (conform lui Giulio Carlo Argan, în
opera Artă modernă) feţe ale aceleiaşi monede. Pe când neoclasicimul caută idealul
sublim, dar sub o formă obiectivă, romantismul face acelaşi lucru, insa prin
subiectivizarea lumii exterioare. Cele două mişcări sunt legate asadar prin
idealizarea realităţii, lucru de altfel criticat dupa ce romantismul a ajuns în şcoli.
(Datorită acestor critici a apărut mişcarea ce va da naştere Realismului.) Căutarea
de exotic, de neprimitor şi de sălbatic va reprezenta o altă caracteristică
fundamentală a romantismului. Iar exprimarea senzaţiilor extreme, paradisul
artificial şi naturaleţea în aspect rudimentar, lansarea în "aventuri", i-au inspirat pe
anumiţi artişti ai romantismului. Pictorul englez William Turner a reflectat acest
spirit în opere precum Furtună pe mare, unde apariţia unui fenomen natural este
folosit pentru atingerea sentimentelor mai sus menţionate.

In opozitie cu romantismul, clasicismul reprezinta acea tendința către simplicitate,

claritate, logica și echilibru în tratarea unor teme cu un conținut general omenesc,
adică în care orice reprezentant al umanității se poate recunoaște. Într-o opera
clasica sunt evitate complicațiile inutile, excesele, contrastele puternice, detaliile
multiple si personajele excepționale. Totul pare sa se supună legilor stricte ale
rațiunii.

Pe de alta parte, romantismul (contrar tuturor principiilor clasicismului) prezintă

manifestarea însușirilor celor mai particulare, deci mai contrare acelui omenesc
esențial în clasicism. Artistul romantic nu va face apel la rațiune, ci va încerca sa
câștige favoarea privitorului prin a-l uimi, impresionându-i puternic sentimentul
sau imaginația. Deci nu exista decât un singur fel de-a fi clasic (raspunzand logicii
și rațiunii), dar exista nenumărate chipuri de-a fi romantic deoarece romantismul se
trage din ceea ce este particular si straniu în fiecare dintre noi. Clasicismul impune
prin impresia de unitate, de liniște si de echilibru intre părțile constitutive, pe cand
romantismul este irațional și neconventional, el nu respecta nicio regula decât
obținerea expresivului cu orice preț. Analizând cele doua tendințe după atitudinea
artistului fata de natura, ajungem la convingerea ca un artist clasic admira lumea
exterioara si-o prețuiește, o înțelege și-o considera ceva armonios, rezultat al unor
legi cosmice constante. Un clasic va ajunge la convingerea ca omul e cel mai
interesant și mai desăvârșit pe lume, fiind centrul și măsura tuturor lucrurilor.
Pentru un romantic, natura este in schimb haotica și fără limita, prezentandu-se
străbătuta de forte misterioase si imprevizibile, cărora nimic nu le poate rezista.
“Un peisaj este o stare de suflet”, afirma romanticii, opera devenind un mijloc de
expresie lirica a sentimentelor.

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 aprilie 1798 -13 august 1863), despre care
incepuseram sa vorbim, a fost un important pictor din perioada romantismului.
Cateva aspecte ale vietii sale sociale si artistice ne dau de stiut ca, graţie prietenilor
săi Charles Nodier (1780-1844) şi Victor Hugo (1802-1885), leagă prietenii cu
scriitori precum Stendhal (1783-1862), Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), Teophile
Gautier (1811-1872) şi Alphons de Lamartine (1790-1869); îi cunoaşte pe pictorul
Achille Deveria (1802-1869) şi pe compozitorul Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). În
1822, expune la Salon primul său tablou: Dante şi Vergiliu în Infern, pe care-l vom
comenta in cele ce urmeaza. Între anii 1833 - 1861, lucrează la decorarea
bibliotecii din Palatul Bourbonilor, a galeriei Apolline din Louvre si-a Salonului
Păcii din primaria Parisului. Pictează şi biserici pariziene, precum Saint-Denis du
Saint-Sacrement, Saint-Sulpice. În ianuarie 1857, a fost acceptat printre membrii
Academiei de Arte Frumoase. Îi apreciază pe scriitoarea George Sand (1804-1876)
şi pe Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), pe care îi vizitează la Nohant (în Franţa
centrală), unde lucrează la studii portretistice şi florale. Picturile sale cele mai
celebre sunt: Dante şi Vergiliu în Infern (1822), Macelul din Chios (1824),
Moartea lui Sardanapal (1827), Libertatea conducând poporul (1830), Femei din
Alger (1834), Intrarea cruciaţilor în Constantinopol (1841), Luptă de cai arabi într-
un grajd (1860), Lupta lui Iacob cu Îngerul (1855-1861), Autoportret cu vestă
verde (cca. 1837), Răpirea Rebecăi (1858).

Romantism. Concept care desemnează un curent filosofico-literar de anvergură

europeană, determinat istoric (sfârşitul secolului al XVIII-lea şi prima jumătate a
secolului al XIX-lea), dar şi – pornind de la coordonatele acestuia – o categorie
spirituală specifică, un mod de comportare, un stil estetic sau psihologic.
Termenul, derivat din adjectivul „romantic”, folosit în Anglia încă de la sfârşitul
secolului al XVII-lea cu sensul de „romanesc”, se referea iniţial la caracterul
aventuros al unui romance (romanul cavaleresc medieval). Înainte ca adjectivul
romanesque, derivat din italianul romanezsco (cf. R. Wellek, Conceptele criticii,
Ed. Univers, Bucureşti, 1970, p. 133), să fi căpătat în cultura franceză o largă
circulaţie, noţiunea de gotic era utilizată în sensul de lume gotică opusă lumii
clasice (cf. Ph. Van Tieghem, Le mouvement romantique, Librairie Vuibert, Paris,
1923, pp. 26-27), accepţiune în care gotic însemna modern, la fel cum mai târziu,
în scrierile romanticilor germani, modern va însemna romantic. J.-J. Rousseau îl
foloseşte cu înţelesul de atribut dat unui peisaj sălbatic, solitar. În Racine şi
Shakespeare, traducând cuvântul italian romanticismo, Stendhal va defini
„romanticismul” drept „arta de a prezenta popoarelor operele literare care, în starea
actuală a obiceiurilor şi credinţelor lor, sunt susceptibile să le provoace cea mai
mare plăcere posibilă”. La rândul lui, în Idei elementare despre poezia romantică,
E. Visconti afirmă că „expresia poezie romantică a fost creată în Germania pentru
a deosebi trăsăturile proprii artei poeţilor moderni, de calităţile care aparţin
exclusiv clasicilor antici”. În Germania, termenul a fost introdus de Herder, care i-a
extins sensul la întreaga lume din epoca goticului şi a Evului Mediu în general, în
opoziţie cu lumea clasică. Ca adjectiv, romantisch era utilizat iniţial pentru a
desemna limbile popoarelor romanice, apoi un tip de poezie creată în spaţiul
romanic (fr. romance, it. romanzo), din termenul francez formându-se cel de
roman, ca spre sfârşitul secolului al XVIII-lea să desemneze un anumit
sentimentalism în faţa naturii. În ceea ce priveşte romantismul german (şi parţial pe
cel francez şi pe cel englez), elaborările teoretice (poetici, prefeţe, manifeste) au
precedat (ori uneori au însoţit) creaţiile literare, putându-se vorbi (aşa cum fac Ph.

Lacoue-Labarthe şi Jean-Luc Nancy în L’absolu littéraire. Théorie de la littérature

du romantisme allemand) de o întrepătrundere fertilă între romantismul „teoretic”
şi romantismul „practic”. Aspect evident mai ales acolo unde se resimte ecoul
filosofiei idealiste şi al esteticii romantice germane în creaţia literară.
Romantismul, spune B. Croce, era o revoltă nu numai împotriva clasicismului, ci
împotriva clasicităţii însăşi, împotriva ideii de seninătate şi de infinitatea imaginii
artistice, împotriva catharsisului şi în favoarea pasiunilor tulburi, care nu se supun
şi refuză purificarea” (Breviar de estetică. Estetica in nuce, Ed. Ştiinţifică,
Bucureşti, 1971, p. 215). Romantismul pledează pentru apropierea de viaţa locală,
de realităţile naţionale, de manifestarea lor istorică, dar şi pentru particularul
îngemănat cu generalul, pentru concretul care dă viaţă abstractului. Există însă, în
sânul acestei mişcări eterogene, mai multe tipuri de romantism, tot atâtea direcţii
care configurează harta complexă a unui fenomen cultural greu de definit:
romantism exterior, intim, simbolic, subiectiv, istoric, exotic, pitoresc,
contemplativ, paseist, militant, etc. Uneori, formele sale de manifestare, de o mare
diversitate, sunt nu doar de o uimitoare complexitate, ci şi aparent discordante
unele în raport cu altele: scrutarea încrezătoare a viitorului sau retrageri dezolate în
lumea trecutului, abordarea energică a problemelor actualităţii sau evadarea în
orizonturile exotismului, puneri îndrăzneţe de întrebări sau încercări de diversiune,
îndemnuri spre acţiunea combativă sau renunţări în favoarea pasivităţii
contemplaţiei, cantonarea într-un individualism absolut, orgolios, anarhic sau
simpatia şi generoasa participare la viaţa socială. În Germania, apariţia revistei
„Athäneum”, condusă de fraţii Schlegel (1798 – 1800), în jurul căreia se grupează
primul nucleu romantic (fundamentat filosofic de sistemele lui Kant, Fichte şi
Schelling), poate fi considerată momentul iniţial în istoria mişcării. Principalele
centre ale romantismului german au fost şcoala de la Jena, în jurul anului 1796
(Novalis, Schelling, August Wilhelm şi Friedrich Schlegel, L. Tieck), cercul de la
Berlin (Wackenroder, Solger, Schleiermacher, chiar şi Fichte), cercul de la
Heidelberg (F. Creuzer, J. Görres, fraţii Grimm, A. von Arnim, Clemens
Brentano), cercul de la München (Franz von Baader, C. G. Carus, Schelling, acesta
din urmă în special prin Prelegerile de la

München, din anii 1836-1837), la care se adaugă apoi şcoala suabă (Uhland,
Mörike) şi şcoala austriacă (Grillparzer, Lenau). Trebuie menţionaţi şi mari
creatori care nu au aparţinut propriu-zis unuia dintre aceste cercuri: E.T.A.
Hoffmann, Friedrich Hölderlin, Adalbert von Chamisso sau H. Heine (cu o primă
privire asupra mişcării, în Şcoala romantică). În Anglia, data afirmării
romantismului e legată de apariţia volumului Balade şi idile (1798) al poeţilor
„lakişti” Wordsworth şi Coleridge, cu prefaţa teoretică a celui dintâi, adăugată în
1800. A doua generaţie îi grupează pe Byron, Shelley şi Keats. În Franţa, lucrările
teoretice ale doamnei de Staël (Despre literatură, 1800, Despre Germania, 1813),
influenţate de lucrările lui A. W. Schlegel, au fost urmate de prefaţa lui Victor
Hugo la drama Cromwell (1827), adevărat manifest al romantismului francez.
Principali reprezentanţi, în afara celor deja menţionaţi, sunt Gérard de Nerval,
Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset şi Alfred de Vigny. În Ţările Române,
programul manifest al revistei „Dacia literară” (1840), deşi nu foloseşte cuvântul
„romantic”, exprimă opţiunea literaturii române a timpului pentru romantism.
Opţiune totuşi nu foarte hotărâtă, de vreme ce în creaţiile romanticilor români (cu
excepţia tardo-romantismului eminescian) aluvionează teme clasiciste, luministe şi
preromantice, aşa cum întâlnim la Gheorghe Asachi, Vasile Cârlova, Cezar
Bolliac, Grigore Alexandrescu, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, Ion Heliade Rădulescu şi,
mai târziu, la Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu. În ceea ce priveşte genurile literare şi
temele abordate, romanticii au ales cu precădere romanul istoric, poemul
sociogonic şi poezia lirică, drama, tipologia predilectă fiind legată de concepte
precum demonismul, titanismul, faustianismul (în imediata apropiere a concepţiei
despre geniu), iar ca tematică natura, nocturnul, folclorul, specificul naţional,
istoria, religia şi noua mitologie, visul şi inconştientul, mitul Europei (cf. Ricarda
Huch,

Romantismul german, Ed. Univers, 1974; Albert Béguin, Sufletul romantic şi

visul, Ed. Univers, 1970; Philippe Van Tieghem, Marile doctrine literare în Franţa,
Ed. Univers,1972; Edgar Papu, Existenţa romantică, Ed. Minerva, 1980; Vera
Călin, Romantismul, Ed. Univers, 1975; D. Popovici, Romantismul românesc, Ed.
Albatros, 1972; Paul Cornea, Originile romantismului românesc, Ed. Minerva,
1972; Nicolae

Râmbu, Romantismul filosofic german, Ed. Polirom, 2001). În ceea ce priveşte

elaborările estetice şi înnoirile propuse în domeniul poeticii, principalii teoreticieni
aparţin spaţiului german şi, în mai mică măsură, celui francez, englez sau italian.
Tematizarea conceptelor şi problemelor fundamentale (nu rareori delimitative sau
chiar polemice), avându-şi rădăcina în vechea dispută dintre antici şi moderni, sunt
filtrate prin spiritul dialectic ce încearcă să concilieze opoziţiile. În romantismul
german: plasticitatea antică şi pitorescul modern, raportul dintre artă şi natură,
spiritul dramei romantice, imitaţie şi verosimilitate, principiul naturaleţei şi
imperativul artistic (A. W. Schlegel); relaţia dintre frumosul natural şi frumosul
artistic, dintre idealism filosofic şi realism poetic, semnificaţia înţelegerii poetice şi
a poeziei transcendentale, mitologia şi noua religie, subiect sentimental şi formă
fantastică, aparenţă şi adevăr (Fr. Schlegel); conceptele de „romantizare” şi de
imaginaţie creatoare, natura vizibilă şi natura invizibilă, estetica depărtării, teoria
reprezentării reciproce, idealismul magic (Novalis); relaţia dintre cunoaştere şi
limbaj, conceptul de logică poetică (Hölderlin); opoziţia dintre frumos şi sublim,
produs al naturii şi produs artistic, produs estetic şi produs artistic comun, raportul
artei cu ştiinţa şi cu filosofia, dezvoltarea teoriei despre schemă, alegorie şi simbol,
poezia antică şi cea modernă în relaţie cu mitologia, opoziţiile dintre sublimitate şi
frumuseţe, naiv şi sentimental, stil şi manieră, raportul artelor plastice cu natura
(Schelling). În romantismul francez: teoria climatului (literatura nordului şi cea a
sudului), poezie clasică şi poezie romantică (Doamna de Staël); izvoarele
melancoliei moderne (Chateaubriand); „adevărul artei” şi „adevăratul” faptului (A.
de Vigny), durata fictivă şi iluzia teatrală (Stendhal), ordine şi regularitate,
inspiraţie şi imitaţie, sublimul şi grotescul, amestecul genurilor, teoria dramei
romantice, desfiinţarea unităţilor clasice, de loc şi de timp (V. Hugo). În
romantismul englez: problema limbajului poetic, poezia ca emanaţie a realităţii şi a
adevărului, început şi sfârşit al oricărei cunoaşteri (W. Wordsworth); distincţia
dintre imaginaţie şi fantezie, rolul desfătării poetice (S. T. Coleridge); rolul poeziei
în perfecţionarea moralăa omului, funcţia sa ideală, limbajul poetic, instinct şi
intuiţie poetică (P. B. Shelley). În romantismul italian: combaterea ideii conform
căreia poezia trebuie să fie o imitaţie fidelă a naturii, întemeierea artelor pe
fantezie (U. Foscolo); raportul dintre clasicism şi romantism, conceptul de poezie
mixtă romantică (E. Visconti); regula unităţii de timp şi de loc în raport cu unitatea
de acţiune, problema mitologiei (A. Manzoni); poezia asemenea naturii imuabile şi
primitive, sensibilitatea intimă şi spontană (G. Leopardi). În romantismul
românesc, mai ales datorită contribuţiilor lui I. Heliade Rădulescu (Prefaţa la
Regulile sau Grammatica poeziii, Pentru poezie, Pentru stil): poezia înţeleasă drept
creaţie divină şi creatoare a lumii ideale, încrederea în progres şi în luminarea
mântuitoare, literatura echivalată cu „politica cea mai divină”, dimensiunea socială
a artei şi a filosofiei, rolul mesianic al artistului şi menirea artei (cf. Arte poetice.
Romantismul, coord. Angela Ion, Ed. Univers, 1982). (D. Ş.)

3. Blestematii, de la Baudelaire la Basquiat.

Picasso rejected the European tradition of figure drawing and adopted, somewhat
artificially, that of the African people. This was disingenuous, after all the African
masks that Picasso raided in his quest for elegant and truthful distortions were
produced according to standards even more rigid then that of the West. But Picasso
wasn’t African, he was Catalan and living in the Paris of the early 20th century that
hotbed of imaginary possibilities made flesh. He used the African style as a point
of departure.

For hundreds of years from Raphael to Ingres the rules had remained the same and
then they were vanquished. And once vanquished all bets were off. It’s no accident
that Marcel Duchamp would install a urinal as an art object in an American gallery
at this time. If the rules were canceled then anything could be art and if anything
could be art, everything would be and eventually nothing would be as well.

Authoritarians ranging from midwest US senators to Nazi stooges to Stalinist

apparachiks were opposed to modern art, violently. The midwest senator called it
communism, the Stalinist called it bourgeois decadence, the Nazis agreed. The
word decadence was something they could all agree on. Decadence, the Grim
Slide, the falling apart, the fragmentation, the end of days. But this decadence had
already been announced.

Following Courbet’s opposition to the Academy, following the Impressionists

disregard for classical procedure, Gaugin announced that a painting was simply a
rhythmic colour arrangment and young art students agreed with him. It wasn’t a
matter of not being capable, many of modernism ‘s early figures – Van Gogh,
Picasso, Klimt – could paint ‘properly’ they just saw it as tired and stale. Moreover
they saw it as inherently untruthful.

The Western tradition had struggled for centuries to obtain truth by rendering
nature truthfully. That is they had copied what they saw. They had contemplated
the geometry of beauty knowing that ‘beauty’ was not the same as ‘pretty’. They
had used technology, developed and invented it, in order to produce this mastery of
nature, this rendering of realistic images perhaps in an ancient spiritual quest to
gain control of it. And then, just as the world began to realize the fruits of this
scientific mode of inquiry into appearances and their underlying truths, artists
departed from the form. They kicked against it. They went to war against it.

Why?

Perhaps the solution is to be found before the modernist movement emerged – in

the paintings of the Romantics. These people did not rebel against the formal
dictates of artistic tradition but they did reject its implicit objectivity. Think of
Turner’s clouds or Caspar David Friedrich’s intense yellow skies. The Romantics
were the first generation thoroughly grounded from birth in the principles of
Reason. They had not yet witnessed the wholesale alteration of landscape that
industrialization would produce but somehow, at an instinctive level, they
understood that something vital in humanity was being sidelined. At one and the
same time they expressed that this same indefinable aspect of ourselves was being
set loose on the world. The Romantics were an emotional volcano from which
revolutions, chaos and the shattering of social bonds would escape skarpering out
wild into the world.

And this arc, this hatching out of spiritual poison persisted through the
ambivalence of artists and poets to the modern age: from Baudelaire to Manet;
from Wilde to Modigliani; from Leger to Orwell; from Andy Warhol to David
Bowie. There is in the work of all these figures the encroachment of omnipotent
technology, its possibilities and the fear it inspires. Consider the novels of William
S Burroughs awash with the vulgar mis-en-scene of American pulp fiction, outlaw
sex and techno-political control all assembled with a view to exterminate reason
and all while Reason ascends to the Patriarch’s Throne of a new pantheon.

The story of drawing in the 20th century, the history of making marks in that era of
massive technical innovation is the history of a deliberately defiled trade. Whereas
people accommodated themselves to a pristine world of glass and steel and clean
plastic surfaces inside they were all jagged chaos and mayhem. Faces became
macarbre masks, eyes wretched scratches. And finally all this was rendered
entirely artificial. How long has it been since a major artist emerged from a long
apprenticeship of drawing simply from nature? Does anyone still draw trees with
anything approaching the philosophical refinement of Da Vinci? Well perhaps
Lucien Freud counts here, perhaps not.

In the most ancient days of proto-historical circumstance the artist was a shaman.
These individuals lived in a kind of acid dreamworld and the images left on the
caves of south-eastern France and like places are their dreamings rendered
material. They had no philosophy. They had no Aristotle or Descartes to impart
lengthy treatises on the nature of Nature or the actuality of reality. They were
creatures of instinct and intuition and dreaming, pure. Artists have since been
subjected to the yoke of political systemization, consider the ancient Egyptian
decorating the walls of Pharaoh’s tomb with elaborate illustrations of the god-
king’s society and its strict hierarchies mastered by frightening gods with animal
heads but there is always something… spiritual in the work that lasts.

We modern people are the first who may go to a library and access the vast history
of art. We can see the truth of the above assertion and may equip ourselves
likewise for material with which to rebutt it. The connection between the religious
life of a culture and its art, however, is very difficult to deny. What then will our
descendants say of us? We who are surrounded by countless images that mostly
serve in aid of distraction or commercial promotion. We for whom the word ‘art’ is
officially designated by institutional decree not on the basis of the quality of the
work, nor on the feelings it evokes but strictly in terms of its complicity in an
acceptable theory which has nothing to do with feelings and has no currency
amongst anyone outside of specialist post-graduate institutions of continental
contemporary philosophy.

We moderns who seem almost entirely addicted to some kind of drug. We moderns
who suffer depression in a world where hunger is an historical curiosity or
something that happens in other countries. We moderns whose art bears none of
the intensity of our forebears. We are, as Camille Rose Garcia depicts, lost
children, cartoon characters, drowning in toxic sludge and bewildered. Where are
our shamen? They are there. But we don’t listen anymore.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American
artist.[1] Basquiat first achieved notoriety as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti
group who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side
of Manhattan, New York City during the late 1970s where the hip hop, post-punk
and street art movements had coalesced. By the 1980s he was exhibiting his Neo-
expressionist and Primitivist paintings in galleries and museums internationally,
but he died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27 in 1988. The Whitney Museum of
American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992.
Basquiat's art focused on "suggestive dichotomies," such as wealth versus poverty,
integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience.[2] He
appropriated poetry, drawing and painting, and married text and image, abstraction
and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.[3]

Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a "springboard to deeper

truths about the individual",[2] as well as attacks on power structures and systems
of racism, while his poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of
colonialism and support for class struggle.[3]

Jean-Michel Basquiat, born in Brooklyn, New York, was the second of four
children of Matilda Andrades (July 28, 1934 – November 17, 2008)[4] and Gerard
Basquiat (born 1930 - died July 7, 2013[5]).[6] He had two younger sisters: Lisane,
born in 1964, and Jeanine, born in 1967.[4]

His father, Gerard Basquiat, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and his mother,
Matilde Basquiat, of Afro-Puerto Rican descent, was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Matilde instilled a love for art in her young son by taking him to art museums in
Manhattan and enrolling him as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
[6][7] Basquiat was a precocious child who learned how to read and write by age
four and was a gifted artist. His teachers noticed his artistic abilities, and his
mother encouraged her son's artistic talent. By the age of 11, Basquiat could
fluently speak, read and write French, Spanish and English.

In September 1968, when Basquiat was about 8, he was hit by a car while playing
in the street. His arm was broken and he suffered several internal injuries, and he
eventually underwent a splenectomy.[8] While he was recuperating from his
injuries, his mother brought him the Gray's Anatomy book to keep him occupied.
This book would prove to be influential in his future artistic outlook. His parents
separated that year and he and his sisters were raised by their father.[6][9] The
family resided in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, for five years, then moved to San Juan,
Puerto Rico in 1974. After two years, they returned to New York City.[10]

When he was 11, his mother was committed to a mental institution and thereafter
spent time in and out of institutions.[11] At 15, Basquiat ran away from home.[6]
[12] He slept on park benches in Washington Square Park, and was arrested and
returned to the care of his father within a week.[6][13]
Basquiat dropped out of Edward R. Murrow High School in the tenth grade. His
father banished him from the household and Basquiat stayed with friends in
Brooklyn. He supported himself by selling T-shirts and homemade post cards.

Career[edit]

“ SAMO (for "same old shit") marked the witty sayings of a precocious and
worldly teenage mind that, even at that early juncture, saw the world in shades of
gray, fearlessly juxtaposing corporate commodity structures with the social milieu
he wished to enter: the predominately white art world. ”

— Franklin Sirmans, In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip Hop Culture[3]

SAMO color work at A's, Arleen Schloss, 1979

In 1976, Basquiat and friend Al Diaz began spray painting graffiti on buildings in
Lower Manhattan, working under the pseudonym SAMO. The designs featured
inscribed messages such as "Plush safe he think.. SAMO" and "SAMO as an
escape clause". In 1978, Basquiat worked for the Unique Clothing Warehouse, in
their art department, at 718 Broadway in NoHo and at night he became "SAMO"
painting his original graffiti[14] art on neighborhood buildings. Unique's founder
Harvey Russack discovered Basquiat painting a building one night, they became
friends, and he offered him a day job. On December 11, 1978, The Village Voice
published an article about the graffiti.[15] When Basquiat and Diaz ended their
friendship, The SAMO project ended with the epitaph "SAMO IS DEAD,"
inscribed on the walls of SoHo buildings in 1979.[16]

In 1979, Basquiat appeared on the live public-access television cable TV show TV

Party hosted by Glenn O'Brien, and the two started a friendship. Basquiat made
regular appearances on the show over the next few years. That same year, Basquiat
formed the noise rock band Test Pattern – which was later renamed Gray – which
played at Arleen Schloss's open space, "Wednesdays at A's",[17] where in October
1979 Basquiat showed, among others, his SAMO color Xerox work.
Gray also consisted of Shannon Dawson, Michael Holman, Nick Taylor, Wayne
Clifford and Vincent Gallo, and the band performed at nightclubs such as Max's
Kansas City, CBGB, Hurrah and the Mudd Club. In 1980, Basquiat starred in
O'Brien's independent film Downtown 81, originally titled New York Beat. That
same year, Basquiat met Andy Warhol at a restaurant. Basquiat presented to
Warhol samples of his work, and Warhol was stunned by Basquiat's genius and
allure. The two artists later collaborated. Downtown 81 featured some of Gray's
recordings on its soundtrack.[18] Basquiat also appeared in the Blondie music
video "Rapture" as a nightclub disc jockey.[19]

The early 1980s were Basquiat's breakthrough as a solo artist. In June 1980,
Basquiat participated in The Times Square Show, a multi-artist exhibition
sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated (Colab) and Fashion Moda. In
September of the same year, Basquiat joined the Annina Nosei gallery and worked
in a basement below the gallery toward his first one-man show, which took place
in March 1981 with great success. In December 1981, René Ricard published "The
Radiant Child" in Artforum magazine,[20] which brought Basquiat to the attention
of the art world.

In March 1982 he worked in Modena, Italy and from November, Basquiat worked
from the ground-floor display and studio space Larry Gagosian had built below his
Venice, California home and commenced a series of paintings for a 1983 show, his
second at Gagosian Gallery, then in West Hollywood.[21] During this time he took
considerable interest in the work that Robert Rauschenberg was producing at
Gemini G.E.L. in West Hollywood, visiting him on several occasions and finding
inspiration in the accomplishments of the painter.[21] In 1982, Basquiat also
worked briefly with musician and artist David Bowie.

In 1983, Basquiat produced a 12" rap single featuring hip-hop artists Rammellzee
and K-Rob. Billed as Rammellzee vs. K-Rob, the single contained two versions of
the same track: "Beat Bop" on side one with vocals and "Beat Bop" on side two as
an instrumental.[22] The single was pressed in limited quantities on the one-off
Tartown Record Company label. The single's cover featured Basquiat's artwork,
making the pressing highly desirable among both record and art collectors.
At the suggestion of Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, Warhol and Basquiat
worked on a series of collaborative paintings between 1983 and 1985. In the case
of Olympic Rings (1985), Warhol made several variations of the Olympic five-ring
symbol, rendered in the original primary colors. Basquiat responded to the abstract,
stylized logos with his oppositional graffiti style.[23]

Basquiat often painted in expensive Armani suits and would even appear in public
in the same paint-splattered clothes.[24][page needed][25]

Final years and death[edit]

By 1986, Basquiat had left the Annina Nosei gallery, and was showing at the Mary
Boone gallery in SoHo. On February 10, 1985, he appeared on the cover of The
New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled "New Art, New Money: The
Marketing of an American Artist".[26] He was a successful artist in this period, but
his growing heroin addiction began to interfere with his personal relationships.

When Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987, Basquiat became increasingly
isolated, and his heroin addiction and depression grew more severe.[16] Despite an
attempt at sobriety during a trip to Maui, Hawaii, Basquiat died on August 12,
1988, of a heroin overdose at his art studio on Great Jones Street in New York
City's NoHo neighborhood. He was 27.[16][27]

Basquiat was interred in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, where Jeffrey Deitch

made a speech at the graveside. Among those speaking at Basquiat’s memorial
held at Saint Peter's Church November 3, 1988, were Ingrid Sischy who, as the
editor of Artforum in the 1980s, got to know the artist well and commissioned a
number of articles that introduced his work to the wider world.;[28] Suzanne
Mallouk recited sections of A. R. Penck' Poem for Basquiat and Fab 5 Freddy read
a poem by Langston Hughes.[29] The 300 guests included the musicians John
Lurie and Arto Lindsay; the artist Keith Haring; the poet David Shapiro; Glenn
O'Brien, a writer; Fred Brathwaite, an actor and artist, and members of the band
Gray, which Basquiat led in the late 1970s.[30] In memory of the late artist, Keith
Haring created Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat (1988).[31]

Artistic styles[edit]
"Untitled (Skull)" (1984)

"Basquiat's canon revolves around single heroic figures: athletes, prophets,

warriors, cops, musicians, kings and the artist himself. In these images the head is
often a central focus, topped by crowns, hats, and halos. In this way the intellect is
emphasized, lifted up to notice, privileged over the body and the physicality of
these figures (i.e. black men) commonly represent in the world."

— Kellie Jones, Lost in Translation: Jean-Michel in the (Re)Mix[32]

Fred Hoffman hypothesizes that underlying Basquiat’s sense of himself as an artist

was his "innate capacity to function as something like an oracle, distilling his
perceptions of the outside world down to their essence and, in turn, projecting them
outward through his creative acts."[2] Additionally, continuing his activities as a
graffiti artist, Basquiat often incorporated words into his paintings. Before his
career as a painter began, he produced punk-inspired postcards for sale on the
street, and became known for the political–poetical graffiti under the name of
SAMO. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend's dress with the words
"Little Shit Brown". He would often draw on random objects and surfaces,
including other people's property. The conjunction of various media is an integral
element of Basquiat's art. His paintings are typically covered with text and codes of
all kinds: words, letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, map symbols, diagrams and
more.[33]

A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multi-panel paintings and
individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing,
collage and imagery. The years 1984–85 were also the main period of the
Basquiat–Warhol collaborations, even if, in general, they weren't very well
received by the critics.

A major reference source used by Basquiat throughout his career was the book
Gray's Anatomy, which his mother had given him while he was in the hospital at
age seven. It remained influential in his depictions of internal human anatomy, and
in its mixture of image and text. Other major sources were Henry Dreyfuss'
Symbol Sourcebook, Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, and Brentjes' African Rock
Art.

Basquiat doodled often and some of his later pieces exhibited this; they were often
colored pencil on paper with a loose, spontaneous, and dirty style much like his
paintings. His work across all mediums displays a childlike fascination with the
process of creating.[34]

Representing his heritage in his art[edit]

“ Like a DJ, Basquiat adeptly reworked Neo-expressionism's clichéd language

of gesture, freedom, and angst and redirected Pop art's strategy of appropriation to
produce a body of work that at times celebrated black culture and history but also
revealed its complexity and contradictions. ”

— Lydia Lee[3]

According to Andrea Frohne, Basquiat's 1983 painting Untitled (History of the

Black People) "reclaims Egyptians as African and subverts the concept of ancient
Egypt as the cradle of Western Civilization".[35] At the center of the painting,
Basquiat depicts an Egyptian boat being guided down the Nile River by Osiris, the
Egyptian god of the earth and vegetation.[36]

On the right panel of the painting appear the words “Esclave, Slave, Esclave”. Two
letters of the word "Nile" are crossed out and Frohne suggests that, "The letters that
are wiped out and scribbled over perhaps reflect the acts of historians who have
conveniently forgotten that Egyptians were black and blacks were enslaved."[36]
On the left panel of the painting Basquiat has illustrated two Nubian-style masks.
The Nubians historically were darker in skin color, and were considered to be
slaves by the Egyptian people.[37]

Throughout the rest of the painting, images of the Atlantic slave trade are
juxtaposed with images of the Egyptian slave trade centuries before.[37] The sickle
in the center panel is a direct reference to the slave trade in the United States, and
slave labor under the plantation system. The word "salt" that appears on the right
panel of the work refers to the Atlantic Slave Trade, as salt was another important
commodity traded at that time.[37]
Another of Basquiat's pieces, Irony of Negro Policeman (1981), is intended to
illustrate how African-Americans have been controlled by a predominantly
Caucasian society. Basquiat sought to portray how complicit African-Americans
have become with the "institutionalized forms of whiteness and corrupt white
regimes of power" years after the Jim Crow era had ended.[37] Basquiat found the
concept of a "Negro policeman" utterly ironic. It would seem that this policeman
should sympathize with his black friends, family, and ancestors, yet instead he was
there to enforce the rules designed by "white society." The Negro policeman had
"black skin but wore a white mask". In the painting, Basquiat depicted the
policeman as large in order to suggest an "excessive and totalizing power", but
made the policeman's body fragmented and broken.[38]

The hat that frames the head of the Negro policeman resembles a cage, and
represents how constrained the independent perceptions of African-Americans
were at the time, and how constrained the policeman’s own perceptions were
within white society. Basquiat drew upon his Haitian heritage by painting a hat that
resembles the top hat associated with the Guédé family of Loa, who embody the
powers of death in vodou.[39]

However, Kellie Jones, in her essay Lost in Translation: Jean-Michel in the

(Re)Mix, posits that Basquiat's "mischievous, complex, and neologistic side, with
regard to the fashioning of modernity and the influence and effluence of black
culture" are often elided by critics and viewers, and thus "lost in translation."[32]

Exhibitions[edit]

Basquiat’s first public exhibition was in the group effort "The Times Square Show"
(with David Hammons, Jenny Holzer, Lee Quiñones, Kenny Scharf and Kiki
Smith among others), held in a vacant building at 41st Street and Seventh Avenue,
New York. In late 1981, Basquiat joined the Annina Nosei gallery in SoHo; his
first one-person exhibition was in 1982 at that gallery.[40] By then, he was
showing regularly alongside other Neo-expressionist artists including Julian
Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi. He was represented
in Los Angeles by the Gagosian gallery and throughout Europe by Bruno
Bischofberger.
Major exhibitions of Basquiat's work have included “Jean-Michel Basquiat:
Paintings 1981–1984” at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (1984), which
traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 1985); the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (1987,
1989). The first retrospective to be held of the artists work was the "Jean-Michel
Basquiat" exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 1992
to February 1993. It subsequently traveled to the Menil Collection, Houston; the
Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts,
Alabama, from 1993 to 1994. The catalog for this exhibition,[41] edited by
Richard Marshall and including several essays of differing styles, was a
groundbreaking piece of scholarship into Basquiat's work and still a major source.
Another exhibition, "Basquiat", was mounted by the Brooklyn Museum, New
York, in 2005, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and
the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.[23][42] From October 2006 to January 2007,
the first exhibition in Puerto Rico of Basquiat took place at the "Museo de Arte de
Puerto Rico (MAPR)", produced by ARTPREMIUM, Corinne Timsit and Eric
Bonici.

Legacy[edit]

Untitled acrylic, oilstick, and spray paint on canvas, 1981

"Basquiat speaks articulately while dodging the full impact of clarity like a
matador. We can read his pictures without strenuous effort—the words, the
images, the colors and the construction—but we cannot quite fathom the point they
belabor. Keeping us in this state of half-knowing, of mystery-within-familiarity,
had been the core technique of his brand of communication since his adolescent
days as the graffiti poet SAMO. To enjoy them, we are not meant to analyze the
pictures too carefully. Quantifying the encyclopedic breadth of his research
certainly results in an interesting inventory, but the sum cannot adequately explain
his pictures, which requires an effort outside the purview of iconography ... he
painted a calculated incoherence, calibrating the mystery of what such apparently
meaning-laden pictures might ultimately mean."

— Marc Mayer, Basquiat in History[43]

In literature[edit]
In 1991, poet Kevin Young produced a book, To Repel Ghosts, a compendium of
117 poems relating to Basquiat's life, individual paintings, and social themes found
in the artist's work. He published a "remix" of the book in 2005.[44]

In 2005, poet M. K. Asante published the poem "SAMO," dedicated to Basquiat, in

his book Beautiful. And Ugly Too.

In film[edit]

Basquiat starred in Downtown 81, a vérité movie written by Glenn O'Brien and
shot by Edo Bertoglio in 1981, but not released until 1998.[45] In 1996, seven
years after the artist's death, a biographical film titled Basquiat was released,
directed by Julian Schnabel, with actor Jeffrey Wright playing Basquiat. David
Bowie played the part of Andy Warhol. Schnabel was interviewed during the film's
script development as a personal acquaintance of Basquiat. Schnabel then
purchased the rights to the project, believing that he could make a better film.[46]

In 2006, Equality Forum featured Jean-Michel Basquiat during LGBT history

month.[47]

A 2009 documentary film, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, directed by

Tamra Davis, was first screened as part of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and
was shown on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2011.[34]

In music[edit]

Basquiat is referenced in Jay Z and Frank Ocean's song Oceans: "I hope my black
skin don't dirt this white tuxedo before the Basquiat show" in the 2013 album
Magna Carta Holy Grail. Both Jay-Z and Kanye West made reference to Basquiat
on their 2011 collaborative album Watch the Throne. In "Illest Motherfucker
Alive", Jay Z raps "Basquiats, Warhols serving as my muses". Jay Z also mentions
him on his 2013 album Magna Carter Holy Grail when he says "Yellow Basquiat
in my kitchen corner go 'head, lean on that shit Blue, you own it." In his verse on
Lil Wayne's song "John", Rick Ross raps "Red on the wall, Basquiat when I paint".
In the song "Ten Thousand Hours" Macklemore raps "I observed Escher, I love
Basquiat" and on his song "Victory Lap" raps "unorthodox, like Basquiat with a
pencil". In his song "Die Like a Rockstar", about overdosing, Danny Brown raps
"Basquiat freestyle" to hype himself up. ASAP Rocky also mentions Basquiat in
his song "Phoenix", rapping "Painting vivid pictures/call me Basquiat, Picasso".
Rapper Robb Bank$ has a song titled "Look Like Basquiat." Korean rapper Jazzy
Ivy released the single/album "Jean & Andy" inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat
and Andy Warhol. "Rich Niggaz" on J. Cole's second album Born Sinner he raps,
"It's like Sony signed Basquiat". Referencing his parent label, Sony, he compares
Basquiat to himself in terms of the change in their works after signing to a major
label. On his song "Untitled", Killer Mike compares himself to Basquiat and 2Pac,
saying "This is Basquiat with a passion like Pac." On the track Moments by Kidz
in the Hall from their Semester Abroad mixtape Naledge says "look inside myself I
think I see a masterpiece, a little Basquiat mix a little Master P." Australian hip
hop artist Iggy Azalea named her 2011 mix-tape Ignorant Art as an homage to
Basquiat's term for his own art. Also, Korean rapper T.O.P. references Basquiat in
his 2013 single "DOOM DADA", when he says "MIC-reul jwin shindeullin, rap
Basquiat" which translates to "A god-given rap Basquiat with a mic."

Collections[edit]

Notable private collectors of Basquiat's work include Swizz Beatz, Mera and
Donald Rubell, Lars Ulrich, Steven A. Cohen, Laurence Graff, John McEnroe,
Madonna, Leonardo DiCaprio, Flea, Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj .[48]

Art market[edit]

Basquiat sold his first painting in 1981, and by 1982, spurred by the Neo-
Expressionist art boom, his work was in great demand. In 1985, he was featured on
the cover of The New York Times Magazine in connection with an article on the
newly exuberant international art market; this was unprecedented for an African-
American artist, and for one so young.[45] Since Basquiat's death in 1988, his
market has developed steadily – in line with overall art market trends – with a
dramatic peak in 2007 when, at the height of the art market boom, the global
auction volume for his work was over $115m. Brett Gorvy, deputy chairman of
Christie's, is quoted describing Basquiat's market as "two-tiered. [...] The most
coveted material is rare, generally dating from the best period, 1981–83."[49]
In 2001 New York artist and con-artist Alfredo Martinez was charged by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation with attempting to deceive two art dealers by
selling them $185,000 worth of fake drawings by Basquiat.[50] The charges
against Martinez, which landed him in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correction
Center on June 19, 2002, involved an alleged scheme to sell fake Basquiat
drawings, accompanied by forged certificates of authenticity.[51]

Until 2002, the highest money paid for an original work of Basquiat's was
US$3,302,500, set on November 12, 1998 at Christie's. In 2002, Basquiat's Profit I
(1982), a large piece measuring 86.5"/220 cm by 157.5"/400 cm, was set for
auction again at Christie's by drummer Lars Ulrich of the heavy metal band
Metallica. It sold for US$5,509,500.[52] The proceedings of the auction are
documented in the film Some Kind of Monster.

In 2008, at another auction at Christie's, Ulrich sold a 1982 Basquiat piece,

Untitled (Boxer), for US $13,522,500 to an anonymous telephone bidder. Another
record price for a Basquiat painting was made on in 2007, when an untitled
Basquiat work from 1981 sold at Sotheby's in New York for US$14.6 million.[53]
In 2012, for the second year running, Basquiat was the most coveted contemporary
(i.e. born after 1945) artist at auction, with €80m in overall sales.[54] That year, his
Untitled (1981), a painting of a haloed, black-headed man with a bright red skeletal
body, depicted amid the artist's signature scrawls, was sold by Robert Lehrman for
$16.3 million, well above its $12 million high estimate.[55] A similar untitled
piece, also undertaken in 1981 and formerly owned by the Israel Museum, sold for
£12.92 million at Christie's London, setting a world auction record for Basquiat's
work.[56]

Authentication Committee[edit]

The Authentication Committee of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat was formed

by the gallery that was assigned to handle the artist's estate.[57] Between 1994 and
2012, it reviewed over 2,000 works of art; the cost of the committee's opinion was
$100.[57] The committee was headed by Gerard Basquiat. Members and advisers
varied depending on who was available when a piece is being authenticated, but
they have included the curators and gallerists Diego Cortez, Jeffrey Deitch, John
Cheim, Richard Marshall, Fred Hoffman and Annina Nosei (the artist's first art
dealer).[58]

In 2008 the authentification committee was sued by collector Gerard De Geer, who
claimed the committee breached its contract by refusing to offer an opinion on the
authenticity of the painting Fuego Flores (1983);[59] after the lawsuit was
dismissed, the committee ruled the work genuine.[60] In early 2012, the committee
announced that it would dissolve in September of that year and no longer consider
applications.

Jean-Michel Basquiat Biography

Painter (1960–1988)

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist painter in the 1980s. He is best

known for his primitive style and his collaboration with pop artist Andy Warhol.

QUOTES

“I am not a black artist, I am an artist.”

—Jean-Michel Basquiat

Synopsis

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York.
He first attracted attention for his graffiti under the name "SAMO" in New York
City. He sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork on the streets before
his painting career took off. He collaborated with Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s,
which resulted in a show of their work. Basquiat died on August 12, 1988, in New
York City.

Early Years

Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 22,
1960. With a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat's
diverse cultural heritage was one of his many sources of inspiration.
A self-taught artist, Basquiat began drawing at an early age on sheets of paper his
father, an accountant, brought home from the office. As he delved deeper into his
creative side, his mother strongly encouraged to pursue artistic talents.

Basquiat first attracted attention for his graffiti in New York City in the late 1970s,
under the name "SAMO." Working with a close friend, he tagged subway trains
and Manhattan buildings with cryptic aphorisms.

In 1977, Basquiat quit high school a year before he was slated to graduate. To
make ends meet, he sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork on the
streets of his native New York.

Commercial Success

Three years of struggle gave way to fame in 1980, when his work was featured in a
group show. His work and style received critical acclaim for the fusion of words,
symbols, stick figures, and animals. Soon, his paintings came to be adored by an
art loving public that had no problem paying as much as $50,000 for a Basquiat
original.

His rise coincided with the emergence of a new art movement, Neo-Expressionism,
ushering in a wave of new, young and experimental artists that included Julian
Schnabel and Susan Rothenberg.

In the mid 1980s, Basquiat collaborated with famed pop artist Andy Warhol, which
resulted in a show of their work that featured a series of corporate logos and
cartoon characters.

On his own, Basquiat continued to exhibit around the country and the world. In
1986, he traveled to Africa for a show in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. That same year, the
25-year-old exhibited nearly 60 paintings at the Kestner-Gesellschaft Gallery in
Hanover, Germany—becoming the youngest artist to ever showcase his work
there.

Personal Problems

As his popularity soared, so did Basquiat's personal problems. By the mid-1980s,

friends became increasingly concerned by his excessive drug use. He became
paranoid and isolated himself from the world around him for long strethes.
Desperate to kick a heroin addiction, he left New York for Hawaii in 1988,
returning a few months later and claiming to be sober.

Sadly, he wasn't. Basquiat died of a drug overdose on August 12, 1988, in New
York City. He was 27 years old. Although his art career was brief, Jean-Michel
Basquiat has been credited with bringing the African-American and Latino
experience in the elite art world.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (French: [ʃaʁl bodlɛʁ]; April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867)
was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and
pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du
mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern,
industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of
prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine,
Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with
coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral
experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture
that experience.[1]

Baudelaire the poet[edit]

Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic
prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to
the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of
consciousness. This obsessive idea is above all a child of giant cities, of the
intersecting of their myriad relations.

—Dedication of Le Spleen de Paris

Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His poetry is

influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th century, although its
attention to the formal features of verse connect it more closely to the work of the
contemporary "Parnassians". As for theme and tone, in his works we see the
rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of
man as typically espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical,
effusive and public voice in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of
individual moral complexity, an interest in vice (linked with decadence) and
refined sensual and aesthetical pleasures, and the use of urban subject matter, such
as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all expressed in highly ordered verse,
sometimes through a cynical and ironic voice. Formally, the use of sound to create
atmosphere, and of "symbols", (images which take on an expanded function within
the poem), betray a move towards considering the poem as a self-referential object,
an idea further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarmé, who
acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard.

Beyond his innovations in versification and the theories of symbolism and

"correspondences", an awareness of which is essential to any appreciation of the
literary value of his work, aspects of his work which regularly receive (or have
received) much critical discussion include the role of women, the theological
direction of his work and his alleged advocacy of "satanism", his experience of
drug-induced states of mind, the figure of the dandy, his stance regarding
democracy and its implications for the individual, his response to the spiritual
uncertainties of the time, his criticisms of the bourgeois, and his advocacy of
modern music and painting (e.g., Wagner, Delacroix).

Early life[edit]

Baudelaire was born in Paris, France, on April 9, 1821, and baptized two months
later at Saint-Sulpice Roman Catholic Church.[2] His father, François Baudelaire,
a senior civil servant and amateur artist, was thirty-four years older than
Baudelaire's mother. François died during Baudelaire's childhood, in 1827. The
following year, Caroline married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, who later
became a French ambassador to various noble courts. Biographers have often seen
this as a crucial moment, considering that finding himself no longer the sole focus
of his mother's affection left him with a trauma which goes some way to explaining
the excesses later apparent in his life. He stated in a letter to her that, "There was in
my childhood a period of passionate love for you".[3] Baudelaire regularly begged
his mother for money throughout his career, often promising that a lucrative
publishing contract or journalistic commission was just around the corner.

Baudelaire was educated in Lyon, where he boarded. Baudelaire at fourteen was

described by a classmate: "He was much more refined and distinguished than any
of our fellow pupils [...] we are bound to one another[...] by shared tastes and
sympathies, the precocious love of fine works of literature".[4] Baudelaire was
erratic in his studies, at times diligent, at other times prone to "idleness". Later, he
attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, studying law, a popular course for
those not yet decided on any particular career. Baudelaire began to frequent
prostitutes and may have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis during this period.
Baudelaire began to run up debts, mostly for clothes. Upon gaining his degree in
1839, he told his brother "I don't feel I have a vocation for anything." His
stepfather had in mind a career in law or diplomacy, but instead Baudelaire
decided to embark upon a literary career. His mother later recalled: "Oh, what
grief! If Charles had let himself be guided by his stepfather, his career would have
been very different... He would not have left a name in literature, it is true, but we
should have been happier, all three of us".[5]

His stepfather sent him on a voyage to Calcutta, India, in 1841 in the hope of
ending his dissolute habits. The trip provided strong impressions of the sea, sailing,
and exotic ports, that he later employed in his poetry.[6] (Baudelaire later
exaggerated his aborted trip to create a legend about his youthful travels and
experiences, including "riding on elephants".) Baudelaire returned to the taverns
where he began to compose some of the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal. At twenty-
one, he received a good-sized inheritance but squandered much of it within a few
years. His family obtained a decree to place his property in trust[7] which he
resented bitterly, at one point arguing that allowing him to fail alone financially
would have been the one sure way of teaching him the value of maintaining well-
ordered finances.

Baudelaire became known in artistic circles as a dandy and free-spender. During

this time Jeanne Duval became his mistress. His mother thought Duval a "Black
Venus" who "tortured him in every way" and drained him of money at every
opportunity.[8] She was rejected by his family. He made a suicide attempt during
this time.
Baudelaire took part in the Revolutions of 1848 and wrote for a revolutionary
newspaper. However, his interest was passing, as he was later to note in his
political writings in his journals.

In the early 1850s, Baudelaire struggled with poor health, pressing debts, and
irregular literary output. He often moved from one lodging to another to escape
creditors. He received many projects that he was unable to complete, though he did
finish translations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.

Upon the death of his stepfather in 1857, Baudelaire received no mention in the
will but he was heartened nonetheless that the division with his mother might now
be mended. At thirty-six he wrote her: "believe that I belong to you absolutely, and
that I belong only to you".[9]

Published career[edit]

His first published work was his art review "Salon of 1845," which attracted
immediate attention for its boldness. Many of his critical opinions were novel in
their time, including his championing of Delacroix, and some of his views seem
remarkably in tune with the future theories of the Impressionist painters.

In 1846, Baudelaire wrote his second Salon review, gaining additional credibility
as an advocate and critic of Romanticism. His support of Delacroix as the foremost
Romantic artist gained widespread notice.[10] The following year Baudelaire's
novella La Fanfarlo was published.

The Flowers of Evil[edit]

The first edition of Les Fleurs du mal with author's notes.

Baudelaire was a slow and fastidious worker, often sidetracked by indolence,

emotional distress and illness, and it was not until 1857 that he published his first
and most famous volume of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil).
Some of these poems had already appeared in the Revue des deux mondes (Review
of Two Worlds) in 1855, when they were published by Baudelaire's friend Auguste
Poulet Malassis.[11][12] Some of the poems had also previously appeared a
"fugitive verse" in various French magazines during the previous decade.[13]
The poems found a small, appreciative audience, but greater public attention was
given to their subject matter. The effect on fellow artists was, as Théodore de
Banville stated, "immense, prodigious, unexpected, mingled with admiration and
with some indefinable anxious fear".[14] Gustave Flaubert, recently attacked in a
similar fashion for Madame Bovary (and acquitted), was impressed and wrote to
Baudelaire: "You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism... You are as
unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist".[15]

The principal themes of sex and death were considered scandalous. He also
touched on lesbianism, sacred and profane love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the
corruption of the city, lost innocence, the oppressiveness of living, and wine.
Notable in some poems is Baudelaire's use of imagery of the sense of smell and of
fragrances, which is used to evoke feelings of nostalgia and past intimacy.[16]

The book, however, quickly became a byword for unwholesomeness among

mainstream critics of the day. Some critics called a few of the poems "masterpieces
of passion, art and poetry" but other poems were deemed to merit no less than legal
action to suppress them.[17] J. Habas writing in Le Figaro, led the charge against
Baudelaire, writing: "Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible,
everything one understands is putrid". Then Baudelaire responded to the outcry, in
a prophetic letter to his mother:

"You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim
independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this
book, whose title (Fleurs du mal) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold
and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its
positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it. The book enrages people.
Moreover, since I was terrified myself of the horror that I should inspire, I cut out a
third from the proofs. They deny me everything, the spirit of invention and even
the knowledge of the French language. I don't care a rap about all these imbeciles,
and I know that this book, with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the
memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of V. Hugo, Th. Gautier and
even Byron."[18]

Illustration cover for Les Épaves, by Baudelaire's friend Félicien Rops.

Baudelaire, his publisher and the printer were successfully prosecuted for creating
an offense against public morals. They were fined but Baudelaire was not
imprisoned.[19] Six of the poems were suppressed, but printed later as Les Épaves
(The Wrecks) (Brussels, 1866). Another edition of Les Fleurs du mal, without
these poems, but with considerable additions, appeared in 1861. Many notables
rallied behind Baudelaire and condemned the sentence. Victor Hugo wrote to him:
"Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars... I applaud your vigorous spirit
with all my might".[20] Baudelaire did not appeal the judgment but his fine was
reduced. Nearly 100 years later, on May 11, 1949, Baudelaire was vindicated, the
judgment officially reversed, and the six banned poems reinstated in France.[20]

In the poem "Au lecteur" ("To the Reader") that prefaces Les Fleurs du mal,
Baudelaire accuses his readers of hypocrisy and of being as guilty of sins and lies
as the poet:

...If rape or arson, poison or the knife

Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff

Of this drab canvas we accept as life—

It is because we are not bold enough!

(Roy Campbell's translation)

Final years[edit]

Baudelaire next worked on a translation and adaptation of Thomas De Quincey's

Confessions of an English Opium Eater.[21] Other works in the years that followed
included Petits Poèmes en prose (Small Prose poems); a series of art reviews
published in the Pays, Exposition universelle (Country, World Fair); studies on
Gustave Flaubert (in L'Artiste, October 18, 1857); on Théophile Gautier (Revue
contemporaine, September 1858); various articles contributed to Eugene Crepet's
Poètes francais; Les Paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch (French poets; Artificial
Paradises: opium and hashish) (1860); and Un Dernier Chapitre de l'histoire des
oeuvres de Balzac (A Final Chapter of the history of works of Balzac) (1880),
originally an article "Comment on paye ses dettes quand on a du génie" ("How one
pays one's debts when one has genius"), in which his criticism turns against his
friends Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Gérard de Nerval.[11

Jeanne Duval, in a painting by Édouard Manet

Apollonie Sabatier, muse and one time mistress, painted by Vincent Vidal.

By 1859, his illnesses, his long-term use of laudanum, his life of stress and poverty
had taken a toll and Baudelaire had aged noticeably. But at last, his mother
relented and agreed to let him live with her for a while at Honfleur. Baudelaire was
productive and at peace in the seaside town, his poem Le Voyage being one
example of his efforts during that time.[22] In 1860, he became an ardent supporter
of Richard Wagner.

His financial difficulties increased again, however, particularly after his publisher
Poulet Malassis went bankrupt in 1861. In 1864, he left Paris for Belgium, partly in
the hope of selling the rights to his works and also to give lectures.[23] His long-
standing relationship with Jeanne Duval continued on-and-off, and he helped her to
the end of his life. Baudelaire's relationships with actress Marie Daubrun and with
courtesan Apollonie Sabatier, though the source of much inspiration, never
produced any lasting satisfaction. He smoked opium, and in Brussels he began to
drink to excess. Baudelaire suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and paralysis
followed. After more than a year of aphasia, he received the last rites of the
Catholic Church.[24] The last two years of his life were spent, in a semi-paralyzed
state, in "maisons de santé" in Brussels and in Paris, where he died on August 31,
1867. Baudelaire is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

Many of Baudelaire's works were published posthumously. After his death, his
mother paid off his substantial debts, and at last she found some comfort in
Baudelaire's emerging fame. "I see that my son, for all his faults, has his place in
literature". She lived another four years.

Critiques[edit]

Baudelaire was an active participant in the artistic life of his times. As critic and
essayist, he wrote extensively and perceptively about the luminaries and themes of
French culture. He was frank with friends and enemies, rarely took the diplomatic
approach and sometimes responded violently verbally, which often undermined his
cause.[25] His associations were numerous and included: Gustave Courbet, Honoré
Daumier, Franz Liszt, Champfleury, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Balzac and
the artists and writers that follow.

Edgar Allan Poe[edit]

In 1846 and 1847, Baudelaire became acquainted with the works of Poe, in which
he found tales and poems that had, he claimed, long existed in his own brain but
never taken shape. Baudelaire had much in common with Poe (who died in 1849 at
age forty). The two poets display a similar sensibility of the macabre and
supernatural turn of mind; each struggled with illness, poverty, and melancholy.
Like Poe, Baudelaire believed in the doctrine of original sin, denounced democracy
and the idea of progress and of man's natural goodness, and Poe held a disdainful
aristocratic attitude similar to Baudelaire's dandy.[26] Baudelaire saw in Poe a
precursor and tried to be his French contemporary counterpart.[27] From this time
until 1865, he was largely occupied with translating Poe's works; his translations
were widely praised. Baudelaire was not the first French translator of Poe, but his
"scrupulous translations" were considered among the best. These were published as
Histoires extraordinaires (Extraordinary stories) (1852), Nouvelles histoires
extraordinaires (New extraordinary stories) (1857), Aventures d'Arthur Gordon
Pym, Eureka, and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (Grotesque and serious stories)
(1865). Two essays on Poe are to be found in his Oeuvres complètes (Complete
works) (vols. v. and vi.).

Eugène Delacroix[edit]

A strong supporter of the Romantic painter Delacroix, Baudelaire called him "a
poet in painting." Baudelaire also absorbed much of Delacroix's aesthetic ideas as
expressed in his journals. As Baudelaire elaborated in his "Salon of 1846", "As one
contemplates his series of pictures, one seems to be attending the celebration of
some grievous mystery... This grave and lofty melancholy shines with a dull light...
plaintive and profound like a melody by Weber".[10] Delacroix, though
appreciative, kept his distance from Baudelaire, particularly after the scandal of
Les Fleurs du mal. In private correspondence, Delacroix stated that Baudelaire
"really gets on my nerves" and he expressed his unhappiness with Baudelaire's
persistent comments about "melancholy" and "feverishness".[28]

Richard Wagner[edit]

Baudelaire had no formal musical training, and knew little of composers beyond
Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber. Weber was in some ways Wagner's
precursor, using the leitmotif and conceiving the idea of the "total art work"
("Gesamtkunstwerk"), both of which gained Baudelaire's admiration. Before even
hearing Wagner's music, Baudelaire studied reviews and essays about him, and
formulated his impressions. Later, Baudelaire put them into his non-technical
analysis of Wagner, which was highly regarded, particularly his essay "Richard
Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris".[29] Baudelaire's reaction to music was passionate
and psychological. "Music engulfs (possesses) me like the sea".[29] After
attending three Wagner concerts in Paris in 1860, Baudelaire wrote to the
composer: "I had a feeling of pride and joy in understanding, in being possessed, in
being overwhelmed, a truly sensual pleasure like that of rising in the air".[30]
Baudelaire's writings contributed to the elevation of Wagner and to the cult of
Wagnerism that swept Europe in the following decades.

Théophile Gautier[edit]

Gautier, writer and poet, earned Baudelaire's respect for his perfection of form and
his mastery of language, though Baudelaire thought he lacked deeper emotion and
spirituality. Both strove to express the artist's inner vision, which Heinrich Heine
had earlier stated: "In artistic matters, I am a supernaturalist. I believe that the artist
can not find all his forms in nature, but that the most remarkable are revealed to
him in his soul".[31] Gautier's frequent meditations on death and the horror of life
are themes which influenced Baudelaire writings. In gratitude for their friendship
and commonality of vision, Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to Gautier.

Édouard Manet[edit]

Manet and Baudelaire became constant companions from around 1855. In the early
1860s, Baudelaire accompanied Manet on daily sketching trips and often met him
socially. Manet also lent Baudelaire money and looked after his affairs, particularly
when Baudelaire went to Belgium. Baudelaire encouraged Manet to strike out on
his own path and not succumb to criticism. "Manet has great talent, a talent which
will stand the test of time. But he has a weak character. He seems to me crushed
and stunned by shock".[32] In his painting Music in the Tuileries, Manet includes
portraits of his friends Théophile Gautier, Jacques Offenbach, and Baudelaire.[33]
While it's difficult to differentiate who influenced whom, both Manet and
Baudelaire discussed and expressed some common themes through their respective
arts. Baudelaire praised the modernity of Manet's subject matter: "almost all our
originality comes from the stamp that 'time' imprints upon our feelings".[34] When
Manet's famous Olympia (1863), a portrait of a nude prostitute, provoked a scandal
for its blatant realism mixed with an imitation of Renaissance motifs, Baudelaire
worked privately to support his friend, though he offered no public defense (he
was, however, ill at the time). When Baudelaire returned from Belgium after his
stroke, Manet and his wife were frequent visitors at the nursing home and she
would play passages from Wagner for Baudelaire on the piano.[35]

Nadar[edit]

Nadar (Félix Tournachon) was a noted caricaturist, scientist and important early
photographer. Baudelaire admired Nadar, one of his closest friends, and wrote:
"Nadar is the most amazing manifestation of vitality".[36] They moved in similar
circles and Baudelaire made many social connections through him. Nadar's ex-
mistress Jeanne Duval became Baudelaire's mistress around 1842. Baudelaire
became interested in photography in the 1850s and, denouncing it as an art form,
advocated its return to "its real purpose, which is that of being the servant to the
sciences and arts". Photography should not, according to Baudelaire, encroach
upon "the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary".[37] Nadar remained a
stalwart friend right to Baudelaire's last days and wrote his obituary notice in Le
Figaro.

Philosophy[edit]

Many of Baudelaire's philosophical proclamations were considered scandalous and

intentionally provocative in his time. He wrote on a wide range of subjects,
drawing criticism and outrage from many quarters.

Love[edit]
"There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes
his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of genius wants to be 'one'...
It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man
nobly calls 'the need to love'."[38]

Marriage[edit]

"Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created
marriage."[38]

The artist[edit]

"The more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes... Only the brute is
good at coupling, and copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to
enter into another–and the artist never emerges from himself."[38]

Pleasure[edit]

"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of
doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."[38]

"But what matters an eternity of damnation to one who has found an infinity of joy
in a single second?"

Politics[edit]

Along with Poe, Baudelaire named the arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre as his
maître à penser[39] and adopted increasingly aristocratic views. In his journals, he
wrote "There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. A
monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy, are equally absurd and feeble. The
immense nausea of advertisements. There are but three beings worthy of respect:
the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of
mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to
practise what they call professions."[40]

The Public[edit]

"In this regards, my friend, you're like the public, to whom one should never offer
a delicate perfume. It exasperates them. Give them only carefully selected
garbage." [41]
Time[edit]

"The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief." [41]

"Each man bears within himself his own dose of natural opium, incessantly
secreted and renewed, and, from birth to death, how many hours can we count
filled with pleasure,with prosperous and effective action?" [41]

Influence[edit

Portrait by Gustave Courbet, 1848.

Baudelaire's influence on the direction of modern French (and English) language

literature was considerable. The most significant French writers to come after him
were generous with tributes; four years after his death, Arthur Rimbaud praised
him in a letter as 'the king of poets, a true God'.[42] In 1895, Stéphane Mallarmé
published a sonnet in Baudelaire's memory, 'Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire'.
Marcel Proust, in an essay published in 1922, stated that along with Alfred de
Vigny, Baudelaire was 'the greatest poet of the nineteenth century'.[43]

In the English-speaking world, Edmund Wilson credited Baudelaire as providing

an initial impetus for the Symbolist movement, by virtue of his translations of Poe.
[44] In 1930, T. S. Eliot, while asserting that Baudelaire had not yet received a
"just appreciation" even in France, claimed that the poet had "great genius" and
asserted that his "technical mastery which can hardly be overpraised... has made
his verse an inexhaustible study for later poets, not only in his own language".[45]
Eliot also alluded to Baudelaire's poetry directly in his own poetry. For example,
he quoted the last line of Baudelaire's 'Au Lecteur' in the last line of Section I of
'The Waste Land.'

At the same time that Eliot was affirming Baudelaire's importance from a broadly
conservative and explicitly Christian viewpoint,[46] left-wing critics such as
Wilson and Walter Benjamin were able to do so from a dramatically different
perspective. Benjamin translated Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens into German and
published a major essay on translation[47] as the foreword.

In the late 1930s, Benjamin used Baudelaire as a starting point and focus for his
monumental attempt at a materialist assessment of 19th century culture, Das
Passagenwerk.[48] For Benjamin, Baudelaire's importance lay in his anatomies of
the crowd, of the city and of modernity.[49] François Porche published a poetry
collection called Charles Baudelaire in memory of Baudelaire.

In 1982, avant-garde performance artist and vocalist Diamanda Galás recorded an

adaptation of his poem The Litanies of Satan (Les Litanies de Satan).

The song "How Beautiful You Are" by The Cure from their 1987 album Kiss Me,
Kiss Me, Kiss Me was inspired by and based on Baudelaire's poem "The Eyes of
the Poor".[50]

In 2008, the Italian band Baustelle dedicates to him the song Baudelaire on its
album Amen.

The Baudelaires, protagonists of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate

Events, were named after him.[51]

Currently, Vanderbilt University has "assembled one of the world’s most

comprehensive research collections on...Baudelaire."[52]

The Japanese comic or manga Aku no Hana, by Shūzō Oshimi is inspired by

Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal. The anime was aired in 2013 and drew attention
due to it heavy use of rotoscope animation. The protagonist in both manga and the
anime, Takao Kasuga, is a bookworm whose favorite book is Les fleurs du mal,
translated in Japanese as Aku no Hana.

Charles Baudelaire Biography

Critic, Poet, Author (1821–1867)

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet best known for his controversial volume of
poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil).

QUOTES

“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a

counselor, a multitude of counselors.”

—Charles Baudelaire

Synopsis
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet born on April 9, 1821, in Paris, France. In
1845, he published his first work. Baudelaire gained notoriety for his 1857 volume
of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). His themes of sex, death,
lesbianism, metamorphosis, depression, urban corruption, lost innocence and
alcohol not only gained him loyal followers, but also garnered controversy. The
courts punished Baudelaire, his publisher and the book's printer for offending
public morality, and as such, suppressed six of the poems. Baudelaire died on
August 31, 1867 in Paris.

Early life

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris, France on April 9, 1821, to François

Baudelaire, a senior civil servant and amateur artist, and his wife, Caroline. After
François died, in 1827, Caroline married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, who
later became a prominent ambassador.

As a young man, Baudelaire studied law at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Dissatisfied

with his choice of profession, he began to drink daily, hire prostitutes and run up
considerable debts. Upon obtaining his degree in 1839, Baudelaire chose not to
pursue law—to his mother’s chagrin—and turned to a career in literature instead.

In 1841, Baudelaire's stepfather sent him on a voyage to India, in an effort to

redirect his stepson's energy. The themes of the sea, sailing and exotic ports that
appeared in Baudelaire's later poetry were largely inspired by this experience.
Upon his return to Paris, Baudelaire became friends with other authors and artists.
He also began a lifelong relationship with Jeanne Duval. When his parents rejected
the coupling, a troubled Baudelaire attempted suicide.

Baudelaire soon began to publish his writing. His first published work was an 1845
art review, which attracted immediate attention. Many of his critical opinions,
including his championing of Delacroix, were bold and prophetic. In 1846,
Baudelaire wrote his second art review, establishing himself as an advocate of
Romanticism.

Baudelaire struggled with poor health and pressing debts throughout his adult life.
He moved frequently to escape creditors, making it difficult to devote himself to
any one project. However, he did manage to produce translations of stories by
Edgar Allan Poe, whose work he greatly admired, as well as write the works of
poetry for which he would eventually become known.

'The Flowers of Evil'

In 1857, Baudelaire published his first and most famous volume of poems, Les
Fleurs du mal ("The Flowers of Evil"). The poems found a small but enthusiastic
audience. The principal themes of sex and death, however, created a public
scandal. Other themes included lesbianism, metamorphosis, depression, urban
corruption, lost innocence and alcohol.

Baudelaire, his publisher and the book's printer were prosecuted for creating an
offense against public morality. Six of the poems were suppressed. Many notables
of the era, including Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo, rallied behind Baudelaire
and condemned the decision. Today, The Flowers of Evil and its famous French
author are held in high literary regard. The book helped to create an appreciation
for new literary artforms, bring once-controversial issues out of the dark and create
a surge for truth and impressionism among writers and readers alike.

Baudelaire next worked on a translation of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an

English Opium Eater. Other works in the years that followed included Petits
Poemes en prose ("Small Prose Poems") and critical studies of Flaubert, Théophile
Gautier and Balzac.

Final Years

By 1859, Baudelaire was suffering from a number of chronic conditions, brought

on by stress and his long-term use of laudanum and opium. His long-standing
relationship with Jeanne Duval, and relationships with actress Marie Daubrun and
courtesan Apollonie Sabatier, provided inspiration but no consistent
companionship. Baudelaire lived with his mother for a short time toward the end of
his life, producing the poem "Le Voyage," among other works. Eventually,
financial difficulties drove him to leave his home. In 1864, he departed for
Belgium, hoping to raise enough money to pay off his debts.

Baudelaire suffered a massive stroke in 1866. The final months of his life were
spent in a semi-paralyzed state in Brussels and Paris, where he died on August 31,
1867. Baudelaire was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. Many of his
works were published posthumously, allowing his mother to resolve his debts.

4. Impresionismul si Expresionismul, curente contemporane si antinomice.

Posteritatea lor.

Curentul artistic al impresionismului a apărut în Franţa în ultimele decenii ale

secolului al XIX-lea şi s-a propagat în Germania, Italia, Rusia şi în mai toate ţările
Europei, inclusiv în tara noastră, el fiind parcă o replică la curentul romantic. Se
impune la început în domeniul picturii şi a literaturii, găsind apoi teren propice de
afirmare a unor noi idei stilistice şi în muzică ce va modifica conceptia clasică
despre melodie, ritm şi formă, aducând o mare fluiditate a planurilor sonore, a
orchestraţiei. Sentimentele şi aspectele realităţii sunt redate într-o viziune
interiorizată, în care predomină elementele lirice. Impresionismul i-a avut ca
reprezentanţi de seamă pe Claude Achille Debussy şi Maurice Ravel în Franţa, pe
Emanuel de Falla în Spania, pe Richard Strauss în Austria, Respighi şi Malipiero în
Italia, Korecenco şi Cerepnin în Rusia, Delius şi Scott în Anglia.

Claude Debussy a mutat accentul de pe lumea trăirilor interioare ale artistului pe

surprinderea frumuseţilor naturii, a redării farmecului momentului. Acesta era şi
idealul pictorilor impresionişti, neîntrecuţi în a surprinde prin nuanţe de culoare,
irizările fine ale atmosferei. El a dat naştere unei arte a sugestiei, artă în care
lucrările nu primesc contururi definitive. Astfel, preocupat de ideea transpunerii
cuvintelor în muzică, spunea că poetul “îmi va îngădui să-mi grefez visul pe al
său”.

Titlurile multora din lucrările sale trădează această orientare, fie spre un
programatism de tip descriptiv, fie spre o lume de sugestie pură. În creaţia
pianistică, ciclurile “Imagini”, din alcătuirea cărora amintim “Reflexe în apă” sau
“Peşti de aur”, iar din creaţia simfonică piesele “Nocturne”, “Marea”, “Iberia” sau
“Preludiu la după-amiaza unui faun”, sunt pilduitoare pentru atmosfera de mare
rafinament coloristic şi discreţie în exprimare.
Compozitorul C. Debussy este însă şi creatorul unui nou model de exprimare
dramatic-muzicală, opera sa “Pelleas şi Melisande”, fiind atât de deosebită “de
opera fluviu” wagneriană sau de modelele oferite de reprezentanţii şcolilor
naţionale. Plecând de la sugestiile recitativului francez, Debussy a creat o prozodie
originală, o vorbire muzicală plină de discreţie şi lirism.

Desprinzându-se de puternica influenţă a geniului wagnerian şi pornind de la

tradiţiile folclorice, şi acelea ale şcolii naţionale ruse, C. Debussy a creat un limbaj
în care melodia – de caracter modal, nu tonal cromatic ca cea a lui Wagner – a dat
naştere unui univers armonic şi orchestral de mare rafinament.

Originalitatea limbajului său armonic este născută din înlănţuiri acordice provenite
din gama de şase tonuri. Un exemplu potrivit pentru muzica sa plină de culoare
este lucrarea “Preludiu la după-amiaza unui faun”, scrisă după un poem de
Mallarmé. Piesa este un “discurs” de o expresie reţinută, de infinite nuanţe,
sugerate de folosirea timbrurilor delicate ale suflătorilor de lemn în combinaţii
ingenioase cu harfa. Totul este neobişnuit pentru auz, începând cu ideea muzicală
aşezată la baza poemului, ideea construită pe un interval de cvartă mărită, umplută
cu un mers cromatic descendent.

Autorul poemului a apreciat faptul că muzica lui Debussy a mers mult mai
departe decât textul poetic, prin sublinierea stării de nostalgie, de vis, prin bogăţia
ei de culori. Alături de C. Debussy, compozitorul Maurice Ravel, foarte cunoscut
prin lucrarea pentru orchestră “Bolero”, ca şi prin versiunea orchestrală a
“Tablourilor dintr-o expoziţie”, a fost un virtuz al orchestrei, care ştia să valorifice
culorile instrumentelor într-un mod, ce vrăjeşte auzul.

Despre o asemenea stare de spirit vorbesc şi poeziile lui John Hervey Mackey, care
l-au inspirat pe compozitorul Arnold Schonberg în crearea câtorva lieduri. În
poemul ”La marginea drumului”, poetul sugerează sentimentul de neîmplinire, de
însingurare. Imaginea ochiului, care se închide înainte ca împlinirea să vină,
sugerează drama unei existenţe consumate în van, în aşteptare şi solitudine.
Acestea sunt temele preferate pentru reprezentanţii curentului expresionist în
muzică. Cei trei mari compozitori vienezi: Arnold Schonberg (1874 - 1951), Alban
Berg (1885 - 1935), Anton Webern (1883 – 1945), au marcat prin arta lor, noua
orientare. Atraşi deopotrivă spre muzica bazată pe text, ca şi spre cea pură, cei trei
compozitori au scris în cele mai variate genuri: de la lied şi operă, până la cvartet,
simfonie şi suită. Indiferent de genul în care se integrează lucrările lor, acestea
sunt aproape toate expresia unei creaţii străbătute de tensiune, de fior dramatic,
dacă nu chiar de spaimă, cum se întâmplă cu multe dintre operele semnate de
Arnold Schonberg şi Alban Berg.

Caracteristică pentru o asemenea stare de spirit este opera “Aşteptarea”

(Erwartung) pentru un singur personaj (voce feminină) şi orchestră. Acţiunea
acestei drame psihologice se desfăşoară în plină noapte într-o pădure. Este redat un
întreg cortegiu de stări sufleteşti, pline de tensiune. Piesa se aduce o linie melodică
formată din intervale disonante, care împleteşte cântecul cu strigătul şi cu vorbirea
cântată, după cum o cere starea sufletească. Discursul orchestral, la rândul său,
creează de la început o atmosferă sumbră, valorificând timbrul coardelor grave şi a
suflătorilor de lemn. Depărtându-se tot mai evident de muzica integrată în
tonalitate, creaţia acestor compozitori se apropie de una bazată pe gama
dodecafonică, în care sunetele nu mai sunt atrase spre un centru tonal, ci au
independenţă totală.

Alban Berg, discipolul lui Anold Schonberg, a utilizat resursele totalului cromatic
în lucrări vocal-dramatice cu o forţă genială, dintre care amintim opera
“Wozzeck”.

Anton Webern a fost cel de-al treilea creator al şcolii vieneze, şi a creat un stil
propriu, ce cultivă cu severitate dodecafonia. Cu un spirit riguros, el tinde spre o
exprimare concentrată, în care fiecare sunet este purtătorul unei expresii , de unde
provine dificultatea de a-l pătrunde şi a-l înţelege la prima ascultare.

Influenţa celor trei compozitori vienezi s-a exercitat asupra multora dintre
creatorii secolului XX. Astfel, câţiva compozitorii moderni, ca Pierre Boulez în
Franţa sau Luigi Nano în Italia, au aderat la cuceririle limbajului dodecafonic, în
timp ce Iannis Xenakis ajunge la muzică pornind de la principii ce guvernează
ştiinţa matematicii moderne. După părerea compozitorul Edgar Varèse, arta trebuie
să ţină pasul cu ştiinţa.

Reprezentanţii şcolilor naţionale din secolul XX, printre care Igor Stravinsky,
George Enescu, Bela Bartok şi alţii, nu sunt mai puţin înnoitori, suflul şi vitalitatea
artei lor izvorând din bogăţia melodică şi ritmică a melosului popular, modal şi din
varietatea ritmică neobişnuită a acestuia. Creaţii ca “Pasărea de foc” sau “Petruşca”
de Igor Stravinski, rămân modele ale impresionismului muzical. Toate tendinţele
amintite ţintesc spre lărgirea universului sonor şi înglobarea în acesta a unor noi
resurse obţinute prin intermediul diverselor posibilităţi tehnice, ultima dinre ele
fiind aceea, care operează cu sunete “pure”, de origine artificială, prin muzica
artificială a zilelor noastre.

Precursori ai impresionismului au fost pictorii spanioli Diego Velasquez şi

Francisco Goya ,în pictura engleză William Turner şi John Constable, precum şi
francezii Courbet, Ingres şi reprezentanţii Şcolii de la Barbizon.

Începuturile schimbării au apărut în pictura franceză mai devreme, prin 1830, când
Eugene Delacroix şi Gericault au început să ,,încalce" regulile ieşind din tiparele
romantice, devenite mult prea populare printre artişti. Tendinţa lor era de a se
inspira din viaţa reală, şi pentru implantarea unui sentiment mai amplu de trăiri
intense, de voluptate creatoare, insuflate de mediul în care trăiau. Într-o accepţie
mai largă, termenul de impresionism desemnează arta , pictura, care se opreşte la
senzaţie, disociind-o de sentimente şi idei, în timp ce într-o accepţie restrânsă,
termenul de impresionism se aplica unei tehnici picturale precis conturate, născută
ca o reacţie împotriva artei academiste. Încă de la Eugene Delacroix, pictorul nu
mai redă culoarea pe care o ştie, ci culoarea pe care o vede, impresia de moment a
culorilor.

În 1863, Édouard Manet pictează tabloul intitulat „Olympia”, care a provocat un

scandal enorm, reprezentând-o pe zeiţa Venus în chip de curtezană. Nu se vorbeşte
încă de impresionism, dar se pot întrevedea caracteristicile principale ale acestei
mişcări, care îl vor duce în aer liber să picteze faimoasele sale peisaje.Peste trei ani
o anltă expoziţie a Academiei acceptă deja lucrările unora din pictorii aparţinând
noii orientări, ca Edgar Degas, Frédéric Bazille, Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet,
Camille Pissarro, îi respinge însă pe Cézanne, Renoir şi din nou pe Manet, ceea ce
provoacă reacţia multor scriitori şi pictori faţă de conservatorismul juriului
Salonului Oficial. Manet îşi va expune picturile, printre care celebra „Le Déjeuner
sur l'herbe”, împreună cu Pissarro, Jongkind, Fantin-Latour şi alţii în "Salonul
refuzaţilor" (Le Salon des Refusés), spre stupefacţia publicului conservator şi
entuziasmul tinerilor pictori .
În 1870 războiul franco-german din îi risipeşte pe artişti, Cézanne se retrage în
provincie, Pissarro, Monet şi Sisley se duc la Londra, ceea ce va marca o etapă
importantă în dezvoltarea impresionismului, fiindcă acolo vor descoperi pictura lui
William Turner, care va exercita o puternică influenţă asupra lor. În anul 1874 se
înfiinţează "Societatea anonimă a pictorilor, sculptorilor şi graficienilor” şi îi va
reuni pe artiştii Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne şi Berthe Morisot,
care organizează o expoziţie colectivă. Articolul intitulat "Expoziţia
Impresioniştilor" scris de cronicarul de artă Louis Leroy, în paginile revistei
„Charivari”, a folosit pentru prima dată termneul de „impresionist”, ce a devenit
titlu generic al curentul reprezentat de aceşti pictori. Impresionismul a fost punctul
de plecare pentru Georges Seurat şi Paul Signac, maeştri ai neoimpresionismului,
pentru Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh şi pentru
mulţi alţi "postimpresionişti" din Franţa şi alte ţări.

În Germania, reprezentanţi impresionismului au fost Lovis Corinth şi Max

Liebermann, în Italia au creeat Giorgio Boldini, Simone Lega şi alţii, grupaţi sub
denumirea de „Mâzgâlitorii" iar în Danemarca şi în Suedia Peter Krojer şi
Anders Zorn.

Impresionismul a reînnoit tehnica picturală, tematica şi mijloacele de expresie,

ajungând la o mare fineţe şi rafinament. Preocupaţi de amănunt, ei au pierdut din
vedere întregul, sau ceea ce s-ar putea numi imaginea sintetică a lumii şi au cultivat
o estetică a vizualităţii pure, deschizând porţile unor direcţii estetice noi, ajungând
să devină punctul de plecare a majorităţii curentelor artistice de la începutul
secolului al XX-lea. Curentul impresionist a cunoscut o largă răspândire
internaţională, cu dezvoltare diferenţiată de la o ţară la alta, în concordanţă cu
tradiţiile lor culturale .

Expresionismul reprezinta una dintre cele mai interesante miscari culturale

moderne ce s-a manifestat pentru intaia oara in poezie si in pictura, avandu-si
originile in Germania inceputului de secol XX. Principalul scop al artei
expresioniste era acela de a prezenta lumea independent de realitatea mondena,
artistii expresionisti incercand sa prezinte natura inconjuratoare doar dintr-o
perspectiva subiectiva, lumea fiind distorsionata radical de emotiile, sentimentele
si trairile acestora. Pe scurt, scopul artistilor expresionisti a fost acela de a exprima
stari, idei sau trairi sufletesti, realitatea fizica fiind exclusa pe deplin.
Scurta istorie a expresionismului

Expresionismul a luat nastere, dupa cum am mentionat si in randurile de inceput

ale acestui articol, ca un curent avangardist in Germania in primii ani ai secolului
XX. Acest curent artistic s-a mentinut si mai tarziu si, mai mult decat atat, a fost
raspandit in mai multe regiuni si s-a cocretizat prin diverse mijloace de exprimare
artistica, printre care se numara pictura, dansul, teatrul, filmul, arhitectura,
sculptura si muzica.

Expresionimsul s-a manifestat inainte de toate in pictura prin intermediul grupului

de artisti format in anul 1905 – Dieexpresionism die bruke Brücke din Dresda
(Dresden). In limba romana denumirea grupului de artisti poate fi tradusa prin
“punte, pod”, iar scopul principal al acestei grupari a fost acela de a crea o punte de
legatura intre “vechea” Germanie si “viitoare” Germanie. Dintre membrii grupului
Die Brücke, cei mai importanti au fost Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff si Erick Heckel. Tinerii artisti erau la acea vreme studenti in
cadrul facultatii de arhitectura, iar gruparea lor s-a manifestat in aceeasi perioada in
care fauvismul incepe sa se inradacineze in mintea si spiritul pictorilor francezi,
care doresc sa gaseasca alte mijloace de exprimare artistica. Asemenea fauvistilor,
expresionistii incearca sa se exprime intr-un mod mult mai natural, viziunea lor
artistica fiind mult mai expresiva si tocmai aceasta fiind cea care a dat numele
intregii miscari. In anii urmatori infiintarii grupului, numerosi tineri artisti
imbratiseaza noile idei, printre care se numara Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Otto
Mueller si Kees van Dongen. Picturile acestor artisti se asemanau din foarte multe
puncte de vedere cu cele ale fauvistilor, caracterul primitv fiind cea mai puternica
legatura. Cele doua grupari artistitice au mentinut o oarecare legatura, stabilind in
acelasi timp diferentele de conceptie artistica, fara a exista in acest fel posibilitatea
ca ele sa fie confundate. Unul dintre reprezentantii gruparii Die Brücke, Kirchner,
afirma ca aceasta grupare artistica “lupta pentru o cultura umana, care este
fudamentul artei adevarate”.

In anul 1911 nucleul expresionismului German, grupul Die Brücke se muta la

Berlin, pentru ca in anii urmatori acesta sa se destrame din cauza personalitatilor
artistice diferite.
expresionism kirchnerIn ceea ce priveste utilizarea termenului expresionism, acesta
a fost folosit pentru intaia oara in anul 1850, insa nu in aceptiune artistica. Se
presupune ca in domeniul artistic, termenul expresionims a fost preluat de la
Julien-Auguste Hervé a carui expozitie de pictura organizata la Paris in anul 1901 a
purtat numele “Expressionismes”. Mai mult decat atat, conform teoriei elaborate
de istoricul de origine ceha Antonin Matějček, termenul expresionism poate fi
considerat antonimul impresionismului avand in vedere ca artistii expresionisti au
dorit inainte de toate sa se poata exprima liberi, fara a-si filtra ideile si trairile asa
cum presupune impresionismul.

Expresionismul si mijloacele de exprimare artistica

Dupa cum am mentionat si in randurile anterioare, expresionismul s-a manifestat in

mai multe domenii. Se presupune ca unul dintre precursorii cei mai importanti ai
acestui curent este insusi filozoful Friedrich Nietzsche, ideile sale asupra acestui
curent artistic fiinc concluzionate intr-un mod cat se poate de concis in opera “Asa
grait-a Zarathustra”. In literatura, expresionismul s-a manifestat in opere al
autorilor precum August Strindberg, Frank Wedekind, Fyodor Dostoevsky si chiar
Lucian Blaga in literatura romana. Daca in pictura expresionismul s-a manifestat
ca si in cazul fauvismului prin folosirea culorilor puternice, a formelor nedefinite
pentru a exprima sentimente reale, literatura de acest tip s-a mnifestat prin
prezentarea dramei personajelor, generand structuri estetice pure. Expresionismul
in literatura este adesea considerat o revolta impotriva naturalismului si
realismului, incercand sa exprime realitatea metafizica nicidecum sa
surprindaexpresionims pictura evenimentele in ordne cronologica. In acest fel,
operele caracteristice acestui curent nu portretizeaza persoanjele si nu contureaza
actiunea, ci prezinta trairile interioare, tumultul sufletesc, sentimentele, trairile si
emotiile personajelor in urma caror cititorul va putea fi capabil sa contureze
actiunea, personajul si lumea in care acesta traieste.

Expresionismul in literatura poate fi considerat drept o reactie impotriva modului

de gandire superficial al unei societati mecanizate, deoarece acest curent pune
accentul in totalitate pe capacitatea de receptare a cititorului. Personajele pincipale
sunt prinse in mijlocul unei lumi distorsionate de prorpiile viziuni si reflexii, o
lume a propriilor conflicte interioare sau sociale in care insisi cititorii vremii
respective traiau.
In teatru, expresionismul s-a manifestat sub forma unei drame a protestului social,
o drama in care prezentarea lumii sociale ocupa cel de al doilea loc dupa
prezentarea tumultului interior al persoanjelor, tumult exprimat in monologurile
acide.

expresionism sculpturaExpresionismul s-a manifestat si in dans, cei mai de seama

reprezentanti fiind Marry Wigmar, Rudolf von Laban si Pina Bausch, in sculptura,
in cinematografie si chiar si in domeniul muzical.

Expresionismul incepe sa cunoasca declinul incepand cu anul 1933, dupa venirea

nazistilor la conducerea Germaniei. Acest mijloc de exprimare artisica a fost
considerat ofensiv si chiar degenerant si pentru a demonstra acest lucru, in anul
1937 este organizata o expozitie ce poarta numele “Arta degeneranta”, expozitie in
cadrul careia artistii expresionisti sunt caracteriazati drept dusmanii regimului.
Operele artistilor au fost confiscate iar cel de Al Doilea Razboi Mondial a dus la
pierderea multora dintre ele. Cu toate acestea, cele care s-au pastrat sunt expuse in
prezent in mari muzee din intreaga lume.

Expresionismul în muzică. Şcoala vieneză modern.Apărut la începutul secolului al

XX-lea în Germania şi Austria, curentul expresionist se manifestă în cercul Die
Brücke, Der blaue Ritter în artele plastice, literatură şi apoi în muzică. Arta
expresionistă este, într-o anumită măsură, un protest împotriva ororilor Primului
Război Mondial şi al crizei din societatea vremii. Lucrările expresioniste redau cu
tehnici şi structuri noi sordidul, fantasticul sau caracterul patologic al unor
personaje. Şi în creaţia postromanticilor, în unele simfonii de Mahler şi opere de
Strauss, apar elemente expresioniste. Pentru a putea surprinde imagini mai puţin
obişnuite, era nevoie de accentuarea contrastelor în toate elementele exprimării
muzicale. Momente expresioniste găsim şi în creaţia marilor compozitori moderni.
Ei recurg la procedee expresioniste pentru a reda hidosul, maladivul sau
înfricoşătorul din viaţă. La Prokofiev, Bartók, Honegger, Sharuski, Enescu sau
Şostakovici, grotescul nu izvorăşte dintr-o cinică înclinare spre caricatural, ci din
indignarea omului care asistă la batjocorirea unor idealuri înalte.

Dacă impresioniştii surprind lumea printr-un complex de senzaţii şi impresii,

negând eul contemplatorului, expresioniştii caută să refacă această unitate,
restabilind relaţia între lumea obiectivă şi subiectul care o contemplă. Dar ei caută
în realitate ”forme fixe”, eterne şi atemporale, forme care, neexistând în natură şi
societate, sunt căutate în subiectul însuşi. De aici un subiectivism absolut. Bazat pe
filosofia lui Husserl, care admite ”adevăruri eterne şi imuabile”, relevate prin
intermediul intuiţiei, şi pe filosofia lui Bergson, care, şi el, admite revelarea prin
intuiţie a unui ”impuls către viaţă”, expresionismul va genera o artă foarte
tensionată.

În timp ce impresioniştii doresc să redea în imagini pastelate lumea înconjurătoare,

expresioniştii pretind că ”depăşesc realitatea” şi caută ”formule veşnice”, dorind a
se contopi cu cosmosul prin diferite intuiţii sau viziuni subiective. La expresionişti,
obiectul contemplării se deplasează din sfera senzaţiilor răzleţe ale vieţii
înconjurătoare spre stările omului, iar contemplarea acestor trăiri sufleteşti este
considerată drept revelaţie a ”valorilor eterne”. Tematica se extinde spre subiecte
nemaivăzute, către extaz, iluminare, revelaţie, iar atunci când redau scene sau
fenomene din viaţă manifestă predilecţie pentru scene sadice, halucinante sau de
groază, tinzând către expresia unor stări sufleteşti exacerbate sau de-a dreptul
maladive.

În muzică, expresioniştii, caracterizaţi prin îngroşarea contururilor în redarea

imaginilor, caută procedee insolite în domeniul tuturor elementelor de exprimare
muzicală: melodie, ritm, armonie, dinamică, timbru. Ca şi impresioniştii, ei
manifestă tendinţa de negare a modalităţilor de organizare a limbajului muzical:
simetria sintactică, unitatea tonală, armonia structurală. Pretinsă a fi expresia
puternică şi directă a unor fenomene descoperite în universul interior al creatorului,
în muzica expresionistă se adoptă libertatea limbajului şi a tectonicii. Expresioniştii
vor duce mai departe procesul de disoluţie al tonalităţii, vor exagera fluctuaţiile
dinamice şi agogice, libertatea ritmică şi vor preconiza libertatea formelor.

Dacă la impresionişti primează finele nuanţări, un colorit orchestral discret şi

subtile sonorităţi, expresioniştii, nişte romantici exacerbaţi, folosesc mijloace dure
de exprimare muzicală, o ritmică violentă şi deosebit de variată, numeroase
poliritmii şi polimetrii, melodii contorsionate cu polifonii complexe şi aspre culori
timbrale, cu contraste violente şi valorificarea registrelor extreme. Melodica, cu
salturi mari şi intervale neobişnuite, apare ca o fugă de cantabil, la fel şi armoniile
în continuă mişcare şi cu disonanţe exagerate, ce anihilează ordinea funcţională,
mergând până la politonalism şi atonalism. Vrând să redea sentimentul de teamă al
omului chinuit şi protestul împotriva tarelor societăţii timpului, artistul expresionist
preferă teme de la periferia vieţii sociale şi psihologice, legate de erotica
patologică, crimă sau sadism.

Spre deosebire de impresionism, curent născut în Franţa şi care n-a creat o şcoală
decât în mică măsură printre muzicieni, expresionismul s-a manifestat în Germania
ulterior răspândirii muzicii impresioniste, împotriva căreia se pare că luase poziţie.
Cu Schönberg se constituie ca şcoală şi, în afara influenţelor pe care le exercită
asupra unor compozitori neafiliaţi integral acestui curent, apar în Germania o serie
de compozitori care se integrează total în vederile lui Schönberg.

Impresionismul în muzică. Claude Debussy

Între marile figuri care au ilustrat muzica franceză de la răscrucea secolelor al

XIX-lea şi al XX-lea, îi putem număra pe Saint-Saëns, Fauré, d’Indy, Debussy şi
Ravel. După cum se poate observa, un grup de compozitori de diverse tendinţe, dar
uniţi prin două ţeluri: al revirimentului muzicii franceze simfonice, de cameră şi, în
general, al înnoirii limbajului muzical fără îndrăzneli şocante. Toţi se situează pe
poziţia muzicianului francez care tinde să scoată muzica ţării sale din anonimat şi
să-i redea specificul şi strălucirea unei arte, altădată preponderentă. Singur
Debussy poate aspira la poziţia de reformator, deşi nu a avut veleităţi de şef de
şcoală.

Debussy a fost promotorul impresionismului, curent de mare răsunet în cultura

muzicală şi cu contribuţii în dezvoltarea unor noi procedee de limbaj. Născut ca o
reacţie împotriva torentului emoţional postromantic, impresionismul urmărea
redarea unor impresii particulare şi fixarea a tot ceea ce era subtil. Impresionismul
muzical a fost strâns legat de pictura lui Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne,
Sisley şi de poeţii Verlaine, Mallarmé, Valery, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. În timp ce
Germania şi Austria cunosc experienţele expresioniste, Franţa va aduce în cultura
europeană inefabilul muzicii impresioniste.

Muzica impresionistă surprinde impresii subiective, prin diferenţieri de amănunt.

Compozitorii evită generalizările, imaginile monumentale, în care numeroase şi
variate elemente se contopesc într-un tot închegat. Există mai degrabă o succesiune
de impresii, decât desfăşurări sonore dictate de o clară idee directoare, un rafinat
simţ în cizelărea îngrijită a detaliilor formei şi tectonicii, precum şi în dozarea
efectelor sonore.

Curentul impresionist a apărut în Franţa la finele veacului al XIX-lea, primul

compozitor impresionist fiind E. Satie, care a adoptat ulterior alte poziţii. L-au
urmat Debussy şi Ravel, fără ca aceşti compozitori să fie exclusiv tributari
impresionismului.

5. Innoiri si sinteze in arta secolului XX ( in diversele domenii).

Avangarda artistică a secolului XX

Avangarda reprezintă mişcarea literară, artistică şi intelectuală care joacă prin

noutăţile aduse, prin inovaţii, un rol de precursor şi luptă împotriva tradiţiei
consacrate.Această mişcare intelectuală apărută la începutul secolului XX, este
caracterizată prin căutarea unor soluţii radicale şi prin ruperea de trecut.Acest
curent artistic-literar luptă împotriva formelor şi cutumelor traditionale consacrate
prin conturarea unor formule excentrice şi îndrăzneţe. Termenul îşi are originea în
jargonul militar din limba franceză, desemnând detaşamentul care explorează
terenul necunoscut pentru a pregăti înaintarea trupelor.

Aproape toţi scriitorii care s-au afirmat în secolul XX s-au format în atmosfera
socialistă, sub puternica influenţa a publicaţiilor ei, cei mai mulţi dintre ei şi-au
descoperit ţelul în literatură prin mişcarea socială. Alţii însă s-au axat pe propriile
lor visări şi năzuinţe împletite însă cu solidaritate şi compasiune pentru cei
nedreptăţiţi.

Literatura secolului XX a fost dezvoltată sub înrâurirea frământărilor ţărăneşti din

acele vremuri, însă difuzarea acestei ideologii se face sub forme noi şi îndrăzneţe.

Un alt curent literar care se subscrie avangardei este dadaismul, curent cultural şi
artistic nonconformist şi anarhic îndreptat împotriva rutinei în viaţă, gândire şi artă.
Sentimentul crizei civilizatiei da un elan sporit unui curent intelectual nascut
inainte de razboi: miscarea Dada. Acesta a aparut ca un protest timid si ironic
nihilist impotriva unei lumi conservatoare si a societatii care i-a dat nastere,
inclusiv impotriva artei sale. Dadaismul respingea orice fel de arta, nu a avut nici
un fel de caracteristici bine definite , desi a imprumutat cateva trucuri de la
avangardele cubiste si futuriste de dinainte de 1914.

Alt curent literar care se regăseşte în structura avangardismului este

futurismul.Futurismul este o mişcare a modernismului artistic italian, celebrând
noua eră a tehnologiei moderne. Iniţiatorul mişcării este poetul Fillipo Tomasso
Marinetti care, în 1909 publică Manifestul futurist. Revolta futuristă împotriva
tuturor tradţiilor culturale merge mână în mână cu glorificarea "frumuseţii vitezei",
cultul maşinilor şi al societăţii contemporane. Alţi reprezentanţi ai futurismului în
literatură au fost Ardengo Soffici (în acelaşi timp şi pictor), Fortunato Depero şi
Gian Pietro Luciani.

Avangardismul este caracterizat prin spiritul de frondă, prin negarea violentă a

formelor de artă consacrate, căutând proclamarea noului. Artiştii avangardei dau
dovada unui activism susţinut şi se concentrează asupra creaţiei ca proces,
neinteresându-se de rezultatul ei (opera). Acţiune de şoc, avangarda are funcţie
regeneratoare şi deschizătoare de drum în arte.Avangarda acţionează energic în
momentele de criză politică sau socială asociindu-se adeseori cu manifestări
extremiste. Avangarda corespunzătoare crizei înfăptuieşte gesturi anarhice şi
revolte spectaculoase.În literatura română se poate vorbi despre un avangardism
activ mai ales în anii 1922-1932, prin intermediul revistelor „Contemporanul”,
„Urmuz”, „Alge” ş.a. Un precursor al avangardei literare poate fi socotit
Urmuz, care anunţă absurdul suprarealist prin prozele sale.Reprezentanţi din
literatura română: Tudor Arghezi, Alexandru Macedonski, Davidescu, Aderca.

Avangarda literară dă impresia că neagă centrul, în realitate raţiunea ei de a fi

constă în expansiunea centrului unei literaturi; după „consumarea“ oricărei
avangarde veritabile, nucleul unei literaturi se măreşte, îşi schimbă coordonatele
spaţio-temporale. Dacă astfel se prezintă avangarda, nu tot aşa stau lucrurile şi cu
spiritul avangardist (cu care deseori „se confundă“ avangarda), deoarece el
caracterizează şi avangarda propriu-zisă, sau modernismul extrem şi
tradiţionalismul.Deosebirile dintre modernism şi avangardism sunt foarte subtile,
devenind uneori, la unii scriitori, aproape insesizabile.

Principiul de baza al modernismului, dar mai ales al avangardei, pare a fi lozinca

lui William Fleming: “Singurul lucru permanent este schimbarea”.

Avangarda corespunde unei crize a valorilor, a unei permanente căutari a

identitatilor şi chiar a sensului literaraturii.

Câteva teme care au produs dispute între istorici, de-a lungul secolului în discutie,
merita a fi mentionate aici: Marele Razboi (controversa „Fischer“), sistemul de la
Versailles, emergenta si expansiunea regimului sovietic, „fascismele“ si
„nazismul“, procesul de la Nürnberg, Yalta si sferele de influenta, Cortina de Fier
si Razboiul Rece, gorbaciovismul si disolutia sistemului sovietic etc.

Secolul XX are, neîndoielnic, o memorie dintre cele mai traumatizante si mai greu
de analizat riguros. Un secol în care mai toate valorile au fost supuse contestatiei,
negarii absolute sau prin relativizare sistematica, dând expresie, pesemne,
„profetiilor“ nietzscheene sau de alta sursa.

ARHITECTURA

La inceputul secolului XX, arhitectii au lasat de-o parte stilurile traditionale si s-au
straduit sa dea nastere unor tipuri de constructii practice si potrivite exigentelor
societatii moderne. Dupa anii ’60 acest “stil international” a lasat loc
“postmodernismului” sprinten si diversificat.

În arhitectura modernistă, forma era dictată de funcţiune, astfel încât se ajunsese

deja la o prevalenţă a funcţionalităţii, în dauna esteticului şi simbolicului.
Arhitectura modernistă, prin apelul făcut până la saturaţie la geometrie, nu reuşea
să mai depăşească excesiva raţionalitate şi rigiditate. Refuzul ornamentelor o
făcuse să adopte un minimalism formal care era departe de a satisface apetitul
pentru complexitate al omului actual şi incapabilă de a răspunde dilemelor şi
ambiguităţilor pe care le cuprinde epoca în care trăim, şi care este, tocmai datorită
acestor trăsături de “complexitate şi contradicţie”, o epocă postmodernistă.

Prin reconsiderarea principiilor de arhitectură, postmodernismul reuşeşte în

domeniul arhitectural să elibereze schemele formale, păstrând stabilitatea dar
promovând cu convingere şi flexibilitatea formală şi funcţională, dezvoltând astfel
capacitatea de adaptabilitate a construcţiei la solicitările contextuale şi funcţionale.
Aceste principii sunt preluate şi de arhitectura europeană, politică şi de securitate,
care se doreşte a fi, în acelaşi timp, o “construcţie” stabilă dar şi cu un înalt grad de
flexibilitate şi de adaptabilitate.

În teoria postmodernistă a securităţii există o atenţie specială acordată relaţiei

dintre securitate şi identitate, ceea ce ne îndreptăţeşte să credem şi să sperăm că
dimensiunea fundamentală a identităţii naţionale va putea fi păstrată chiar în
condiţiile în care securitatea naţională va suferi un proces accentuat de modificare,
şi poate chiar de slăbire a coordonatelor sale tradiţionale. În concepţia generală a
identităţii trebuie luate în considerare în mod explicit atât valorile cât şi sistemul,
specific fiecărei naţiuni, de referinţă atât la realitatea materială, cât şi la realitatea
spirituală, raportarea la “ceilalţi” din punct de vedere istoric şi geografic
influenţând în mod deosebit formularea identităţii naţionale.

Arhitectura modernă şi postmodernă

POSTMODERNISMUL

Postmodernismul este răspunsul unei pleiade impresionante de arhitecţi, extrem de

activă cam de pe la 1950 încoace, la formalismul impus de generaţiile anterioare,
un formalism ce s-a numit la vremea sa modernism. Acest nou curent a adus o
viziune originală şi proaspătă asupra formelor, volumelor, detaliilor unei
construcţii. În plus, postmoderniştii au reevaluat posibilităţile de expresie ale
spaţiului din jurul clădirii. Teoreticienii noului curent sunt consideraţi Robert
Venturi şi Denise Scott, care au publicat o lucrare de referinţă (Learning from Las
Vegas) după o analiză atentă a proprietăţilor înşirate de-a lungul Las Vegas Strip.
Ei au propus trecerea de la criteriul strict funcţional la cel estetic, răspunzând pe
măsură agresivităţii neornamentale ce caracteriza modernismul. La celebra
aserţiune lansată de marele modernist Mies van der Rohe, care spunea că “less is
more”, Venturi a răspuns cu “less is a bore”. Adică, mai pe româneşte, în loc de
“puţin înseamnă mult”, crede că “puţin înseamnă plictisitor”. Supranumit şi
neoeclectic, postmodernismul în arhitectură dă valori noi şi readuce pe faţadele
clădirilor culoarea, ornamentul, referinţa pur estetică. Adepţii neînduplecaţi ai
modernismului l-au numit vulgar, dar opera construită a celor mai importanţi
reprezentanţi a validat postmodernismul ca pe un curent cu forţă şi greutate. Ei au
reinventat formele sculpturale, ornamentaţia de tip antic, antropomorfismul. Au
utilizat materiale capabile să creeze efectul de trompe l’oeil. Au adus în conceptul
arhitectural pluralismul şi au utilizat arme precum ironia, paradoxul,
contextualismul.

Arhitectura postmoderna a fost descrisa ca fiind "neo-eclectica", astfel

încât referinta si ornamentul s-au întors pe fatade, înlocuind stilurile fara
ornamente si agresive ale modernismului, de exemplu într-o cladire din
Boston Massachusetts. Acest eclectism este combinat cu utilizarea
unghiurilor non ortogonale si a suprafetelor ciudate cele mai faimoase fiind
Stuttgart State Gallery si Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Postmodernismul în arta

Daca modernistii au sperat sa scoata la lumina universaliile sau fundamentele artei,

postmodernismul încearca sa le detroneze, sa îmbratiseze diversitatea si
contradictia. O abordare postmoderna a artei respinge distinctia dintre arta joasa
sau înalta. Respinge de asemenea granitele rigide si favorizeaza eclectismul,
amestecul de idei si forme. Promoveaza parodia, ironia, scrisul jucaus. Spre
deosebire de arta moderna, cea postmoderna înlocuieste tonul grav ce însotea actul
de cautare a adevarului, cu "jocul". Postmodernitatea a îmbratisat de asemenea
amestecul cuvintelor cu arta, colajul si alte miscari din modernism într-o încercare
de a multiplica mediile si mesajele. Foarte multe elemente se centreaza pe o
schimbare în alegerea temelor. Artistii postmoderni privesc mass-media ca o tema
fundamentala pentru arta, si folosesc forme, tropi, materiale precum monitoare
video, arta ready made sau descrieri ale unor obiecte mediatice, ca puncte focale
ale operelor lor.

Andy Warhol este un exemplu timpuriu al artei postmoderne în actiune, prin modul
în care îsi aproprie simboluri populare comune si artefacte culturale "gata facute",
aducând ceea ce alta data era considerat mundan sau trivial pe terenul artei înalte.
Atitudinea critica a postmodernismului este împletita cu aprecierea unor opere
precedente. Astfel operele miscarii dadaiste primesc o recunoastere ca si ale
autorului de colaje, Robert Rauschenberg, a carui opera a fost initial considerata
lipsita de importanta în anii 50, dar care a devenit unul dintre precursorii miscarii
prin anii 80. Postmodernismul a ridicat în rang cinematograful si discutiile despre
acesta, plasându-l în rândul celorlalte arte frumoase.

Postmodernismul în literatura

În anumite privinte, se poate spune ca literatura postmoderna nu se raporteaza la

cea modernista, pe masura ce îsi dezvolta sau rafineaza stilul si devine constienta
de sine si ironica. Împreuna literatura moderna si postmoderna reprezinta o ruptura
de realismul de secol XIX, în care naratiunile spun o poveste dintr-un punct de
vedere obiectiv sau omniscient. Sub raportul personajului, cele doua literaturi
exploreaza subiectivismul, renunta la realitatea exterioara, pentru a examina stari
interioare de constiinta. Exemplul elocvent în materie modernista este "fluxul
constiintei" în maniera Virginiei Woolf sau a lui James Joyce. Atât literatura
moderna cât si cea postmoderna exploreaza fragmentarismul în narare si
constructia. Astfel de exemple avem prin operele modernistilor Virginia Woolf,
ale dramaturgului suedez August Strindberg sau ale autorului italian Luigi
Pirandello.

Daca literatura modernista a considerat fragmentarea si extrema

subiectivitate drept expresii ale unei crize existentiale, ale unui conflict
freudian interior, literatura postmoderna a evitat aceasta criza. Personajele
torturate si izolate, anti eroii lui Knut Hamsun sau Samuel Beckett, sau
lumea de cosmar al lui T.S. Eliot, fac loc în scrierile postmoderne unor
naratiuni deconstruite si auto reflexive din romanele unor John Fowles, John
Barth, sau Julian Barnes.

Arta secolului XX

De-a lungul timpului, cultura si arta au suferit numeroase transformari, evoluand in

acelasi timp cu intreaga omenire si cu societatea in general. Arta secolului XX mai
este denumita si arta moderna deoarece, la sfarsitul secolului al XIX-lea,
modernismul devine cel mai important curent artistic manifestat diferit de la o
cultura la alta, insa urmand aceeasi tematica.
Incepand cu secolul al XIX-lea cultura, dar si stiinta, sufera transformari rapide
datorita schimbarilor sociale si economice. Daca statornicia este cuvantul care
caracterizeaza cel mai bine curentele artistice aparute pana in secolul XX,
modernitatea presupune o succesiune rapida a stilurilor artistice, curentele
urmandu-se si influentandu-se reciproc.

Dezvoltarea rapida a societatii incepand cu sfarsitul secolului al XIX-lea, si

continuand in secolul XX, si schimbarile importante au influentat intr-o foarte
mare masura modul in care mijloacele de exprimare artistica sunt percepute de
catre populatie. Acest lucru a dus la impartirea categoriilor artistice in cultura
populara si cultura superioara (moderna) astfel incat, numeroase miscari artistice
au reevaluat formele estetice, culorile, mijloacele de exprimare artistica,
transmiterea si intelegerea mesajului si multe alte aspecte ale proiectelor artistice.
Unul dintre factorii cre au influentat intr-o foarte mare masura arta secolului XX
este tehnologia, in sensul ca dezvoltarea rapida a tehnologiei nu doar ca a avut un
mare impact asupra artistilor, dar in foarte multe dintre cazuri a constituit chiar
subiectul operelor de arta. Mai mult decat atat, arta secolului XX este influentata
intr-o mare masura si de importantele conflicte politice si militare caracteristice
acestui secol.

Artistii secolului XX, din punctul de vedere al viziunii artistice, al scopurile si al

tehnicilor folosite, pot fi si ei considerati fie experimentalisti inovatori – cei care
cauta sa schimbe viziunea artistica, scopurile lor in aceasta privinta nefiind bine
delimitate si precise ceea ce cu siguranta duce la aparitia unor greseli; isi
construiesc tehnicile de-a lungul timpului iar inovatia apare abia spre sfarsitul vietii
artistice, sau pot fi considerati conceptualisti – cei care isi exprima emotiile, ideile
si trairile, au scopuri clare ceea ce le permite sa isi aleaga cu precizie tehnicile sa
isi limiteze abilitatile artistice si sa creeze sistematic. Insa, aspectul cel mai
important al invoatorilor conceptualisti este delimitarea vechilor concepte de ceea
ce este nou. In acest fel, conceptualismul a introdus notiunea de “arta ca idee” si in
acest fel se schimba modul in care mijloacele de exprimare artistica sunt
privite.arta secol XX

Una dintre miscarile artistice de referinta pentru secolul XX este art nouveau (in
traducere din limba franceza – arta noua). Art nouveau respinge tehnicile folosite
in mijloacele de exprimare artistica caracteristice secolului precedent. Art nouveau
isi are radacinile in arta sfarsitului de secol XIX, scopul sau fiind crearea unor
opere de arta complexe care sa imbine creativ pictura, desenul, scultpura si
arhitectura. Din acest motiv, art nouveau s-a concretizat in ample opere
arhitecturale, din moment ce unele dintre cele mai importante opere de arta care
apartin acestei miscari artistice sunt camere intregi sau chiar locuinte in care
elementele mentionate anterior sunt imbinate conform tehnicilor art nouveau.

Dintre cei mai importanti reprezentati ai acestei miscari ii putem enumera pe

Alphonse Mucha, Antoni Gaudi, Hector Guimard, Gustav Klimt, Victo Horta si
Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec.

O alta miscare artistica importanta pentru secolul XX este fauvismul, un curent

artistic aparut in Franta la inceputul secolului XX. Manifestat in pictura, fauvismul
a reprezentat un nou mijloc de interpretare a formelor si a culorilor, artistii alegand
sa reprezinta lumea reala in culori puternice si forme simple. Cei mai importanti
reprezentanti ai miscarii fauviste sunt Henri Matisse si Andre Derain.

Cubimsul reprezinta o noua forma de manifestare artistica a secolului XX, bazele

sale fiind puse de catre Georges Braque si Pablo Picasso. Cubismul a reprezentat
una dintre cele mai importante miscari artistice ale secolului, impregnand o noua
viziune asupra artei.

arta secolului XXIn randurile de inceput ale acestui articol am afirmat ca

tehnologia a avut un mare impact asupra artei, reprezentand in foarte multe cazuri
subiectul operei de arta. Acesta este si cazul futurismului, curent artistic aparut in
Italia secolului XX din fascinatia pentru tehnologie, pentru rapiditatea evolutiei
societatii, pentru viteza, respingand arta traditionala. Cel care a initiat aceasta
miscare artistica a fost Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. Printre cei mai importanti
reprezentanti ai futurismului se numara Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo si Gino
Severini.

O miscare artistica de amploare in secolul XX este expresionismul, aparut in

Germania. Dupa cum spune si numele, expresionismul are la baza exprimarea
directa a sentimentelor, trairilor si emotiilor, acest curent fiind manifestat atat in
pictura, muzica, scultpura cat si in literatura. Dintre reprezentantii de seama ai
picturii expresioniste ii putem aminti pe Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde si
Erick Heckel, iar reprezentatii literaturii de acest gen sunt Franz Kafka, James
Joyce si August Strindberg.

Alaturi de expresionism, expresionismul abstract presupune manifestarea

intr-un mod mai agresiv si, dupa cum spune si numele – abstract, a trairilor,
a emotiilor si sentimentelor.

Arhitectura si sculptura sufera, de asemenea, schimbari constructive.

Dupa incheierea celui de al Doilea Razboi Mondial, arta romaneasca intra in umbra
din cauza presiunii comuniste. In toata perioada comunista dreptul la libera
exprimare a artistilor si nu numai este suprimat, domeniile artistice fiind
manipulate de sistem, fiind introdus un asa-numit “realism socialist”. Orice forma
de manifestare artistica reprezinta o forma de manifestare si prezentare a “omului
nou”, operele de arta reprezentand in acelasi timp succesul regimului comunist si
evolutia tarii.

Dupa cum am mentionat si anterior, schimbarile sociale, politice si economice au

influentat intr-o foarte mare masura evolutia artei la nivel mondial in secolul XX.

“Muzica este o putere spirituală în stare să lege toţi oamenii între ei.” Enescu

“Dintr-un popor nu rămâne nimic, decât cultura.” M. Eliade

În muzica romantică, continua varietate şi accentuare a contrastelor au avut

un efect contrar, căci ascultătorul, obosit de atâtea disonanţe şi profuziune
coloristică, căuta din nou claritatea, simplitatea şi echilibrul. Se repeta istoria din
acel moment de tranziţie de la Baroc la clasicism, când proliferarea polifonică şi
complicarea ei a stârnit reacţia monodiei acompaniate şi a asigurat succesul unei
arte a simplităţii şi a echilibrului. Desigur, istoria se repetă, dar nu în toate
aspectele ei, căci condiţiile spirituale şi mijloacele de expresie ale finelui Barocului
sunt diferite de cele de la răspântia secolelor al XIX-lea şi al XX-lea.

Acest neoclasicism de tip beethovenian a cuprins parţial şi pe Bruckner,

dacă ne referim la transparenţa armoniilor, la linia simplă şi simetrică a melodiilor
sale, la ritmul ordonat şi la dezvoltările fără încleştări tensionate. Rămâne, desigur,
emfaza sonoră a grupului alămurilor, la care adaugă instrumente noi, tubele,
precum şi unele viziuni romantice depresive, care dau unor linii melodice arcuiri
cromatice de neîndoielnică inspiraţie wagneriană. Însuşi faptul că n-a scris opere,
ci s-a mărginit la simfonii, misse, cantate, recviem şi Te Deum, ne face să-i
atribuim, mai degrabă, un spirit clasicizant decât o fervoare romantică.

În dorinţa de a găsi noi căi de exprimare muzicală sau de a inova cu orice

preţ, negând mijloacele tradiţionale, compozitorii moderni au creat un limbaj
muzical în care nu mai guvernează principiul funcţional. Completa independenţă a
sunetelor unele faţă de altele, ca şi abolirea oricărei polarizări duce la
dezorganizare, dacă acest procedeu este folosit unilateral şi se neagă orice structură
bazată pe sensuri funcţionale. Stravinski, care, în marea majoritate a vieţii sale, a
rămas fidel principiului tonal, considera în Poetica sa muzicală că: “Muzicienii
care neagă tonalitatea nu sunt atonalişti, ci antitonalişti.” Se ştie că spre sfârşitul
vieţii, la vârsta de 71 de ani, Stravinski s-a convertit şi el la serialism.

6. Criza de legitimitate in arta de azi.

The Sacred and the Profane I: Is Contemporary Art Perverted Art?

JOSEPH SCHICKEL

In the October 1989 issue of Crisis, under the title “Contemporary Art Is Perverted
Art,” Mr. Frederick Hart states: “The air is becoming suffocatingly pungent with
the incense of pious indignation from the art world concerning Congress’ reaction
to the way the National Endowment for the Arts is spending taxpayers’ money.”
This is a factual and welcome observation. Mr. Hart goes on to make the case that
“the contemporary art establishment” is perversely manipulating an unknowing
public. Moreover it “delights in” and “thrives on a belief system of deliberate
contempt for the public.” It is clear that Mr. Hart passionately believes this. The
facts are certainly not documented in the article.
Contemporary art is the art of any current time. If one is an artist in 1990 he or she
is a contemporary artist. Whether a particular artist is in tune with the profound
realities of his or her time, or is rebelling against them, is another matter. An
architect friend once told me he would be happy to design a Gothic church if the
bishop would supply the Goths to build it.

Is Mr. Hart’s Vietnam Memorial statue—a contemporary work—glorious or

perverted? What about Maya Ying Lin’s Vietnam Memorial wall? I would offer
that neither of these remarkable works is perverted. The better question is which of
the two works, one frankly contemporary, the other at least purporting to spurn its
quality of being contemporary—is more profound. Which speaks more eloquently
of the heroic sacrifices of the soldiers? Which is more ennobling? Which better
serves and nourishes the spiritual and emotional needs of visitors? Which better
comforts the grief of family and loved ones? Which is more inspiring? Which
better raises the spirits? Which is more beautiful? And above all before you answer
—go and look!

The dictionary tells us that “pervert” means “to deviate from what is considered
right, good, and true; to corrupt.” It seems intellectually sloppy and irresponsible to
generalize that the art of our time is perverted. Certainly some is and just as
certainly some is good, true, and beautiful. I am grateful to Mr. Hart for starting
some much needed discussion—discussion woefully neglected in the Catholic
journals. There is much for a civilized community to discuss. Does public rejection
or acceptance play a role in the worthiness of art? Have works of great inspiration
initially been condemned, then later revered? Have works at first acclaimed been
later recognized as shallow? Can works of art that are disrespectful of flag or
crucifix be true reflections of an unpatriotic and faithless society? Is the problem
with the art, or the public, or both?

Is the art of Georges Rouault or Mark Chagall glorious or decadent? What about
Mark Rothko or Jim Dine? Should the government be funding art in the first place?
These are questions worthy of consideration. As a Catholic, it is my hope that Mr.
Hart’s insightful article will stimulate serious discussion about the role of art in a
life of faith. It is this hope which prompted my response.
Historically, art has been the engine of civilization, not its wrecking ball. Jacques
Maritain, regarded by many as the pre-eminent philosopher of art of this century,
speaks of the indispensable roles of art, the artist, and beauty—in civilization,
culture, and spirituality. He uses the ancient, crisp, and refreshing language of the
Schoolmen—art is a virtue, a habitus. Truth, goodness, and beauty are the three
great transcendentals. In Art and Scholasticism he writes:

“The moment one touches a transcendental, one touches being itself, a likeness of
God, an absolute, that which ennobles and delights our life; one enters into the
domain of the spirit.” The thoughts and words of Maritain and Yves R. Simon
(rooted in the good metaphysical soil of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle) are
desperately needed if the current cultural and spiritual crisis is to pass.

As the son and grandson of working (very hard) artists, I was introduced to both
the joyful discipline (habitus) of art, and the fickle foibles of a certain self-
proclaimed “art world” at a young age. My father, William Schickel, told me about
the true role of the artist in civilized society. “Beauty,” he said, “is food for the
soul.” These few words explain the role of the true artist rather well. As Mr. Hart
points out, the artist is called to serve—to serve the common good and to feed
spiritual hunger.

In times past, the Church, linchpin of civilization, saw that she had a pivotal
cultural role to play here. Recognizing that there could be no spiritual revival
without cultural renaissance, she pursued them together, as one and the same
effort, with breathtaking results. The Church’s great treasures in art and
architecture stand in witness to both the effort and the success. The Church in
America today faces the same challenge as the Church of centuries past—to play
its spiritual and cultural role. But instead of commissioning works in art and
architecture that are concrete, contemporary expressions of timeless traditional
truths which could nourish the spiritual hunger of the faithful, she… forms
committees.

The current cultural bureaucracy in the form of guidelines, directives, boards of

review, consultants, and so on, has become a hindrance to fine art and design in
Church-related projects. Parkinson’s law states that as bureaucratic structure
grows, organic reality diminishes. My grandfather, the noted stained-glass designer
Emil Frei, commented that a board of review will stop the best projects and the
worst projects—with uninspired mediocrity as the result. My father quips that
liturgy now runs a close second to sex in the sheer volume of publications,
manuals, workshops, guidelines, how-to books, and audio-visual materials that are
available. It would seem that the level of satisfaction in the two fields is also
comparable. Quips and good intentions aside, and looking at the big picture (for
happily a small amount of high quality work still occurs), we can say the Church’s
cultural bureaucracy hinders rather than helps good art and design. It frustrates the
result it seeks by looking to the false authority of bureaucratic structures to insure
artistic merit. Only the true (and greatly feared) authority of the qualified artist can
hope to produce such a result. Put bluntly, it can never be assured! But the artist is
the only one who offers the hope of success. If you want guarantees, buy
government bonds. But if you quest for pure, inspired, unadulterated brilliance,
commission a fine artist and let him or her work. False authority is vigorously
exercised by cultural bureaucracies in many dioceses—even as these dioceses shun
their legitimate moral and theological authority. Yves R. Simon’s eloquent General
Theory of Authority is badly needed here.

About a year ago, several members of my family started the Maritain Gallery. It is
our effort to fill a void in contemporary culture. Today a person of faith, when
seeking out a religious image, is often forced to choose between a reproduction of
a profound image from the past and a shallow contemporary image. The Maritain
Gallery strives to express the timeless traditional truths in modern form—within
the cultural mainstream of art today. It was Maritain’s belief that religious art, to
be authentic, must be part of the general artistic movement of its time. “Religious
art is not a thing that can be isolated from art itself, from the general movement of
the art of an age; isolate it, and it grows corrupt, becomes dead letter.” If this is
true of religious art it is certainly true of public art as well.

In Brideshead Revisited, Cordelia asks Charles if modern art is all bosh. “Great
bosh,” replies Charles, and Cordelia is relieved. But perhaps the answer is not as
simple as Cordelia hopes, and Mr. Hart suggests.

Panel discussions in academic circles are rarely characterized by violent outbursts

of emotion. But in the summer of 1950, when Hans Sedlmayr, professor of art
history at the University of Munich, appeared at a Darmstadt gathering to defend
his thesis that contemporary art was the symptom of a universal disease, he was
booed and even interrupted with ironic shouts of “Heil Hitler!” Sedlmayr was
challenged by another speaker, Professor Willi Baumeister, known for his non-
objective paintings, and a teacher (from 1946 till his death in 1955) at the Stuttgart
Academy of Fine Arts. It was, perhaps, not sporting to inject a political and
personal note. But Baumeister, as an anti-Nazi and a protagonist of abstract art,
had been fired from a teaching job in 1933, and for twelve years thereafter had,
like other modernists, lived a rather precarious life. He did not refrain from
reminding the audience that Sedlmayr, self-styled champion of sanity and morality,
had, as a teacher at the University of Vienna under Hitler, happily endorsed the
Nazi philosophy!

Austrian-born Sedlmayr was invited to Darmstadt because two years earlier he had
published a best-selling volume, Verlust der Mitte (“The Lost Center”). The
German title refers to the author’s main point—that, having lost their center in God
and Man, the arts of the last two centuries also lost all reality and
comprehensibility—and therefore is more apt than the title supplied by the British
translator, Brian Battershaw. This book, though neither well written nor well
illustrated, has sold more than 100,000 copies in Germany and Austria since its
publication ten years ago at Salzburg.

Whatever he may have been in the past, Sedlmayr is now a staunch Catholic, and
indeed the dominant idea of this book—that man’s fall is the cause of his
presumptuous endeavor to be autonomous, to replace God as the center of all
things—comes from St. Augustine. Unfortunately, the fruits of collaboration with
the Nazis peer through the historian’s Christian terminology, in the frequent use of
words like zersetzend (“decomposing”) or untermenschlich (“subhuman”) more
reminiscent of Streicher’s newspaper, Der Stuermer, than of serious art history.
Echoes of Mein Kampf are present too. In 1924, Hitler described cubist, futurist,
and dadaist art as “the morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men,” as
“cultural decay,” and warned that it was the state’s business to “prevent a people
from being driven into the arms of spiritual madness.” Perhaps Sedlmayr, lecturing
on the subject to Viennese students during the last war, also endorsed state control
and punishment for artists painting skies green or trees purple, but in rewriting
these lectures for publication, he assumed the role of an unpolitical scholar,
observing and weighing the world from the quiet of his study. And whereas Hitler
found no faults with the 19th century, Sedlmayr suggests that the sickness of our
age, of which modern art is only one symptom, began its work of corroding society
long before the French Revolution.

In Sedlmayr’s view the arts were healthy so long as they were all united in the
creation of great cathedrals. The trouble started when the related forces of
Enlightenment, Deism, Democracy, and Industrialism set man up as the center of
all things, which led to the arts breaking away from each other and to the
appearance of pure architecture, pure sculpture, and pure painting. Richard Wagner
(“undoubtedly the genius of the century”) vainly tried to arrest this process of
disintegration by advocating a return to the

Gesamtkunstwerk, but he was an exception, for much 19th century art was “quite
peculiarly dishonest and insincere.” Sedlmayr’s bêtes noires are not the shallow
academicians (like Bouguereau who was, indeed, quite peculiarly dishonest and
insincere) but rather all artists who emphasized color, and masses in shadow or in
light, rather than line and contour. His negative judgment includes Goya (one of
the “great depulverizing agencies”), Constable, Turner, the Impressionists, the
Pointillists, and so forth.

Not only did these artists desert linearism, they also dared to free themselves from
theological and mythological subject matter. Worse still, man no longer was
portrayed as the glorious creature of the Renaissance masters—in Seurat’s work he
is “like a wooden puppet,” and in Cézanne “an apple has the same physiognomic
value as a face.” How this dethronement of man jibes with the arrogance of
modern man (who wishes to replace God), Sedlmayr does not bother to explain.

This is not the only inconsistency in the book. The 19th century is seen as a period
of eclecticism, weakness, and lack of conviction (what about the rebellious spirits,
from Courbet to Toulouse-Lautrec?). The 20th century, on the other hand, is
attacked for being just the opposite—iconoclastic, forceful, and contemptuous of
tradition. Formal distortion (practiced, I believe, by all good artists in all lands and
all ages) suggests to him the broken universe; other symptoms of decay are the
influence of Negro sculpture and of primitive and pre-Columbian art, the
predilection for “demoniac” art (from Bosch, Brueghel, and Goya, to Ensor,
Kubin, and the Surrealists), and the elevation of caricature to the status of a
legitimate art form. He is upset by an abstract painting because it does not permit
immediate recognition of space relations, by the “instability” of Rodin’s Tumblers,
by a Le Corbusier villa which, instead of resembling the traditional type of house,
“suggests a spaceship that has just landed.”

Sedlmayr is living proof that a very learned man (he has done first-rate scholarly
work on Baroque architecture) can be a philistine at heart. He seems to resent all
art that is new, complicated, mysterious. Admitting that he had never read a line
Ezra Pound wrote, an American Congressman recently explained: “I like things
that are clear.” Sedlmayr says the same thing, but he requires more than two
hundred pages to make this statement.

The most offensive feature of the volume, perhaps, is the author’s assumption that
he knows precisely what God likes and dislikes. He exclaims: “The disrupted
relationship with God is at the heart of the disturbance,” and “All suffer because
God has become distant, or, perhaps, is dead.” But what does this tell us
concerning the present state of art? Is art exclusively religious? Wasn’t da Vinci in
conflict with the Church? Wasn’t Perugino a non-believer? Didn’t art thrive in the
civilizations of India and the Far East, to which Sedlmayr’s concept of God must
be alien, and isn’t it conceivable that art could flourish in a society of atheists?

Sedlmayr, with his resonant catchwords—“egalitarian craze,” “degradation,”

“materialism,” “nihilism,” “chaos”—sounds more like a revivalist preacher than a
sober historian. He loathes everything that is dynamic, expressionist, irrational—in
other words, all that goes beyond pretty illustration. He denounces modern art as
escapist, but how much more escapist is a critic like Sedlmayr who, having lived
under the Nazis, nevertheless resents Franz Marc for saying that man was
“hideous,” Barlach for seeing man as “one of nature’s experimental failures,” and
George Grosz for declaring that man was “a beast!”

It may have been bad manners on the part of Willi Baumeister to remind Sedlmayr
of his Hitlerite past. For my part, I wondered whether a repentant Sedlmayr was
not thinking of Auschwitz and Dachau when he declared that contemporary
funerals showed “the contempt for man . . . the absence of any true culture.” But, I
quickly noted, he was only concerned about modern funereal architecture.
It is generally recognized that contemporary art is in a state of crisis that is
becoming more profound every year. The infrastructure created in the 1980s is
being destroyed, and there is a dearth of new ideas in the artistic community.
Thousands of people employed in this field ("art system") are seeking employment
in other areas. It appears that the visual arts that used to be the standard by which
experimentation and innovation were measured in the past are yielding to other
forms of expression. In reality the general cultural setting has changed so radically
that the basic functions of contemporary art are no longer relevant. At the same
time it must be recognized that the contemporary visual arts in many years of
development have garnered considerable strategic experience in interacting with
society. No other type of human activity can make this claim. The contemporary
artist is acutely aware of the function and structure of contemporary society and is
an expert in communication. With very limited means he is able to maximize the
dissemination of information. Contemporary art is a platform for developing the
most shocking, the most paradoxical, and the most fantastic forms of
representation.

Representation itself is never neutral and carries within itself a certain way of
perceiving reality. The modern artist is primarily concerned with how the
perception of the consumer is formed. This process has continued without
interruption throughout the twentieth century, and there is no indication that any
other area of the humanities has taken this function upon itself. In actual fact it is
not modern art that is in a state of crisis, but the outdated model of its functioning
created in the 1980s. This model contains at least several stereotypes:

1) a claim to innovation which created commodified art in the art market;

2) reliance on the market system of production and redistribution of art as the main
determinant of its reliability and universality and, as a consequence, the tendency
toward the creation of high-quality "art products";

3) obligatory achievement of museum status as a guarantee of historical worth.

What all of these points have in common is the conviction that art has an intrinsic
value outside of the communicative event. Whereas the postmodernists accused
classical modernism of being excessively ambitious without any basis in reality,
criticized the position of the "genius" who made his works appear out of nothing,
as well as classical modernism's claims to independence, etc., the newest art can
also criticize the postmodern culture of contemporary art of being concerned with
its preservation and monetary worth. In reality the only value that art possesses is
within the confines of the process of its creation. Outside of this event any artifact
(work of art) must be seen only as the documentation of this event outside of any
relationship with a preceding artifact and works of art. Art that is valued in this
way is truly "contemporary," as its main goal is to provide for maximum
communication.

Contemporary art is not a commodity, nor is it an innovation or a universal value,

which deserves to be conserved. How can it be defined?

In order to be contemporary, art must be specific to the utmost and functional, i.e.,
it must relate to the real world -politics, show business, music, analytical practice,
medicine, etc. I do not mean that art should be subservient to the above-mentioned
activities; what I am referring to is their mutual transgression. When art encroaches
on politics, we save art from art and politics from politics. When art diffuses itself
with some sort of analytical practice, a new type of activity is the result.

Among the many genres of contemporary art, the most current are those which are
the most functional and communicable. The following is a list of the more
important ones: performance, posters, strategic planning of representational
activity, different types of design, club and institutional activity. The main task of
the artist is to synthesize the different artistic genres into a unified system and to
introduce this entity into another sphere of human activity. Under functionality I do
not necessarily have in mind the positive "utility" of art as it was understood by the
Russian Constructivists, but finding another mode for its existence. The
introduction of art into real life could also be destructive, malignant, chaotic, and
confusing. The Italian artist Oliviero Toscani provides one of the best examples of
this approach. His ads for United Colors of Benetton are a synthesis of art and
advertisement intended for a mass public. Toscani is not dependent on museums,
galleries, or curators, nor does he define himself through the existing system of
modern art but demonstrates a completely new approach to the functioning of art.
His images are ubiquitous in all the Benetton stores and on Benetton products,
where they fulfill a certain function (advertising, in this case), but bear a direct
relation to art. Seen from a broader perspective, Benetton itself has become
Toscani's artistic project. The most important aspects of his approach are the
interaction of art with other types of activity and his attempts to build
nontraditional relationships with society.

In this regard Jeff Koons is the culmination of one of the most important stages of
modern art. He made use of the aesthetic of kitsch and camp, and brought to a
dazzling conclusion the orientation toward the creation of high-quality long-lasting
artifacts. It is at this point, one could say, that art bids farewell to the Museum as
one of the forms of transcendence. Another key figure of the 1980s, in my opinion,
was Cindy Sherman, who used photography to create classical paintings for
museums. The ideology of the Museum was implicit in the works of these artists.
The "current" (contemporary) artist breaks with this implication -the success of his
works is tested by their inclusion into social processes and their ability to
synthesize the creative milieu.

If we were to attempt to formalize the activity of the current artist by assigning it to

a certain "genre," the most elementary form of this activity could be characterized
as Situation. This term, which was introduced by the Situationist International,
refers to the construction of some sort of social event. Situation is not performance
and not a Happening; it is rather a hooligan prank, a provocation touching upon not
so much the aesthetic sphere of functioning within the system of art as the sphere
of political (in the broad sense) legitimacy. In the Moscow art community, the ETI
movement [Expropriation of the Territory of Art; founded by Osmolovsky in 1989]
and Alexander Brener worked in this genre. One of the latest situations created by
Brener, which received some notoriety, was performed at the international
Manifests exhibition in Rotterdam. During a speech by the main sponsor of this
event, Brener came up to the microphone and began commenting on the speech by
using such words as "this is a lie, this is true," demonstrating on one hand the
absurdity of such "accusations" and on the other hand their appropriateness
precisely because of their absurdity. I believe that one of the most important
elements of this gesture was its suddenness and spontaneity. It is precisely this
factor that makes it possible to categorize this gesture as a situation rather than a
performance. The gallery manager Marat Gelman works in a more complex and
approximate version of this "genre." His project involving new Russian money was
actually a situation rather than just an ordinary exhibition.
Another distinguishing characteristic of the contemporary artist is that he plans his
works within the framework of complete projects. He does not think of his art as a
succession of unrelated works but as a project, within the scope of which different
works by him and other artists and documentation may be incorporated. Leading
examples of this approach are Oleg Kulik's Consignment of Animals and Dimitri
Gutov's Lifshitz's Institute. In my opinion an artist such as Oliviero Toscani also
engages in this type of "project" approach, which is an attempt to conceive of art as
a process rather than as an aggregate of works.

Finally, the most complex "genre" in current art is one in which a "milieu" is
created, which encompasses the activities of several people united in a "disjunctive
synthesis." The best-known current artist of this type is, of course, Quentin
Tarantino. His main task is to create a milieu in which it does not matter to the
participants of the process through which forms their flows of desire and creativity,
whether literature, performance, objects, posters, exhibitions, film, theoretical
articles, reviews, etc., are channeled.

The task of this type of current artist consists of initiating processes of positive
disjunctive synthesis, intertwining different forms of activity, and taking part in
events that completely differ in essence from each other: musical, political,
theatrical, analytical, editorial, curatorial, etc. The topos of the current artist is the
broadest possible, and it encompasses practically all areas of the humanities. This
type of artist has turned from a creator of visual images into a creator of milieus
and situations. This type of activity was well known in the past; one need only
recall the activity of Andre Breton and David Burliuk, among others. This type of
creative activity, however, was never formalized as "creative."

On the other hand, the process of creating situations and creative milieus is linked
to political activity as it concerns the economic and political basis of society and
the state. This process cannot help but enter into conflict with the laws and rules of
late capitalist society, which essentially have not changed since the time of Marx's
"Das Kapital".

We may add the following points in addition to the above-mentioned ones relating
to the 1980s:

1) Communication instead of innovation;

2) Synthesis of social processes, milieus, and situations instead of creating
products for the market;

3) A maximum of social functionality as a guarantee of historical and social

viability.

In rejecting the museum, current art stakes out a claim in favor of situation and
communication in the present, and thus aspires to become a permanent event in art
rather than a recollection of an event stored in a museum.

Art today is in deep crisis. Criticism seems to have abandoned any notion of
evaluation, the public has been denied the possibility of understanding, and
aesthetics have lost all legitimacy. Formerly, artists claimed their right to decide
for themselves what counted as a work of art, thanks to the subversion of the
established criteria of aesthetic judgment. But that very subversion is today the
object of subsidy and support by museums and galleries, anxious to display their
liberalism. A new and ambiguous game of complicity and antagonism has united
artists and institutions.

Yet, however much the alliance of subversion and subsidy aims to exclude
it, aesthetic judgment remains a necessity. Whatever the nature of a work of art, it
can only be one if the artistic quality it claims for itself can be justified and shared.
As symbol it cannot be reduced to a symptom; as an object of judgment it cannot
depend on simple individual preferences. Thus it is now urgent to find aesthetic
arguments that pay proper attention to the internal logic of artworks, arguments
that are rigorous without claiming absolute truth.

Art & Crisis

Contemporary art does not transcend economic crises. The crises of 1991 and
2008/2009 have sufficiently proved this. The loss of liquidity combined with
sellers’ fears of booking a loss or a sales failure generally tends to relegate
financial and pleasure investments to the bottom of the list of art buyers’ primary
concerns. In effect, when an economic crisis kicks in, prices collapse and certain
Contemporary works can lose more than 50% of their value almost overnight. Mid-
and top-end artworks (i.e. valued at over €10,000) do not react immediately to
financial market and property price fluctuations. There is usually a lag of between
a quarter to one year before the art market starts to feel the effects of an economic
crisis and a loss of liquidity on art prices... unless of course there is a very strong
event like the collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008. Until that date,
the art market resisted the ambient financial chaos with astonishing arrogance and
the period 2006 - September 2008 saw more million-dollar auctions results than
ever before (or since). Although the art market didn’t seem particularly worried by
the sub-prime crisis in September 2008, with the subsequent economic crisis, it
suffering a very serious correction that kicked in just 48 hours after the collapse of
the American investment bank! Until that date, buyers were lapping up 85% of
artworks carrying estimates above the $1m threshold (since 2007), but after 17
September 2008, this ratio fell back to 60%. Thereafter, the market began to
contract fast: the S&P 500 lost 45% in the 6 months between September 2008 and
March 2009, and art prices contracted by 34% over the same period1, and by
42.8% for Contemporary art between January 2008 and the end of 2009.
Meanwhile, central banks lowered interest rates and governments injected billions
into the recapitalisation of banks in order to ensure the continuity of a faltering
system. At the same time, auction houses stopped offering guaranteed prices and
pushing estimates ever higher. These adjustments, coupled with a much more
appropriate market offer, rapidly put the machine back on the rails: within just a
few months, as financial markets returned to a dynamic growth path (that took the
S&P 500 up 95% over the following two years), art prices returned to their 2007
levels. Thus after a global contraction, the art market bounced back. How has it
reacted to the financial crisis in 2011? It looks just as impervious to the financial
turbulence in 2011 as to the American sub-prime crisis three years earlier.
Remember that at the start of August 2011, global markets plunged in response to
the debt crisis. On Friday 5 August 2011, for example, London lost 2.71%,
Frankfort 2.78% and the CAC 40 in Paris lost 1.26%, its tenth consecutive daily
contraction. The French market had never seen such an extended drop since its
creation in 1987. Between the beginning of July 2011 and the end of August, the
CAC 40 lost more than 20% of its value. In mid-July, European markets were
already on the slide and yet the high end of the art market continued with complete
indifference to the crisis. In fact, art prices – clearly supported by numerous
investors and by new collectors from the East – remained stable, and the race for
records continued apace. Of course, past experience has shown us that the unsold
rate of Contemporary art is a key barometer of the art market’s level of confidence.
Over the period covered here ( July 2010 - June 2011), the auction companies
posted a combined average unsold rate of 37% versus 43% between July 2008 and
June 2009. In effect, with no alarming signals detectable, it looks for the time
being as though the market’s offer is perfectly matched to its demand. Another
way of judging the state of mind and confidence of the art market is by examining
the results of Artprice’s art market confidence index - AMCI2. In September 2008,
confident in the economic outlook (50% of AMCI respondents held a positive
economic outlook for the following three months, and 60% considered the
economic situation at the time as being favourable), two-thirds of the respondents
were expecting a rise in art prices. This year, the AMCI shows particularly strong
purchase intentions (66% of respondents3) despite the apparent nervousness
expressed regarding the short-term economic outlook4. After a “historically” good
first semester, it seems that art market professionals are better equipped and more
lucid in the face of another potential crisis. At a time when financial boom and bust
cycles appear to accelerating, gold, along with a number of other alternative
investments are becoming increasingly attractive. In this context, art may once
again be considered a less volatile investment.