The 19th century brought such a long-term and profound change in the history of European culture that it divided the entire history of post-Antiquity Europe into two separate parts. The changes observed in art are nothing but the testimony.
This turning point had a double nature, civilizational and cultural, and its character was total. It consisted of the fact that in the 19th century the cultural construct of the Middle Ages, i.e. the system of values based on transcendence (in case of Europe: Christian values) was burning out. Meantime, the first heralds of a modernist formation appeared. This one was not based on any system of values whatsoever—but on benefits fulfilling different needs, whatever these would stand for. It is true that, axiologically speaking, the benefit is also a kind of value; values, however, are generally uneven between themselves and every system implies certain hierarchy therefore.
It is hard to give a full report on this for four reasons: (1) the process of change had a few clearly separate phases, spread over two centuries' time; (2) it is hard to establish any fair, objective historical perspective, for the phenomenon lasts till the present day; (3) in the 19th century ideological disputes became ideological fights; (4) in an ideological fight the ideologically processed language became the principal weapon. In reference to this the scientific and philosophical terminology and their dissemination are of crucial meaning.
In the second half of the 19th century almost all disciplines of contemporary science, such as history, psychology and sociology were born and begun elaborating their own language. These sciences created not only their research facilities but also the organization structure: new departments at universities, publishing companies, magazines.
Political parties were also born, as well as the parliamentary democracy system; scientists would take an active part in this process. Simultaneously, modern press came into existence as the first representative of mass media—a rotary printing press was invented in 1845 and Linotype in 1886. These were the factors that caused scientific and ideological disputes to transform into ideological fights and the scientific language to blend with the language of propaganda. The phenomenon has always existed (the Renaissance has only invented a depreciating name for the Gothic style), but it was during the 19th century when it became the actual standard—answering to the changing function of philosophy described by Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”. To change the world means to change the way of thinking; and to change the way of thinking is to change the language thoughts are formulated in. However, the stability of a cultural construct (at the point it is about to be changed) is not exclusively decided by the language.
Every community's social life is based on the usage of traditional blueprints which are intuitively recognized. Religion and national community feeling are sources of the constructs based on transcendence. Taking part in ceremonies repetitively helps to inculcate, fix and remind of those blueprints (that is, to maintain traditions). Any individual can think what they want but still they act as community consciousness demands them to; a network of dependencies connects an individual with its community after all. Therefore, an idea of a world change required a systematic fight against the religion and national distinctions.
Both religion and national community feeling, regardless how criticized, share one technical feature. They are based on nonverbal values which refer not only to an individual but to the community at the same time. It makes impossible (or at least difficult) to change individual's behavior by direct verbal argumentation. It is far more effective to influence an individual if one kind of a long-lasting diagram is replaced with another.
Processing of the language (of both scientific and public usage) which begun in the Enlightenment and became more intense in the 19th century, and in fact lasts till the present day, has caused some meanings to fade—if not to turn by 180 degrees (the cultural conservatism is by definition a close mate of economic liberalism, and the cultural liberalism is genetically close to the collectivism). It has also fixed the devaluing collocations, e.g. linking “conservatism” with “religiousness and ignorance”, and “nation” with “nationalism and xenophobia”. The pattern is so strong that advocating nationalism as one nation's aspiration to political sovereignty and as such implying recognition of the same right of other nations is pointless.
PERIODIZATION
In spite of terminological vagueness and lack of any historical perspective, the nature of 19th century’s turning point allows to point out the main lines of division, as well as the direction and most important stages of its transformations.
For the sake of legibility, the 19th century art history has been divided in two:
- the first half of the 19th century and trends and groups as different from each other as the Romanticism, the Ancients, the Nazarenes, mystical paintings of American Hudson River School, the Barbizon school and the Realism.
- the second half of the 19th century and equally diverse trends such as the Impressionism, the Neo-Impressionism, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the academic art, the Symbolism and the pre-Expressionism.
This horizontal, chronological division complements the vertical one, i.e. the chronologically universal content-related division. It separates the trends that focus on an empirically cognizable material world from the ones seeking a variously defined spiritual reality.
The secret of art will it remain that each of the above mentioned made wonderful works come into existence.
THE FIRST HALF OF THE 19th CENTURY
The most relevant experience of those who lived between the 18th and the 19th century was the self-propelled massacre of the French Revolution’s terror, as well as the shock caused by a contradiction of the liberty demands (formulated even during the early Enlightenment period) and the revolutionary practices. The shock was all the greater because of the fact that the French Revolution has been and still is seen as a result of the same process the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Constitution (1791) form part of.
John Locke (1632-1704), was the one who established the principles of the Empiricism. In 1680 he published two treaties on government in which he delineated the principles of republican political system—which has become the base of contemporary democracy (note that at the same time Louis XIV of France was only about to finish the palace in Versailles). Excerpts of this work were included a hundred years later in the American Declaration of Independence and inspired the authors of French constitution which established the constitutional monarchy system.
Eventually, this process concluded with a blood-red terror and led to the restoration of monarchy. For those willing to see the history more logically complex it must have looked like a disaster; something hard to explain applying the rational thinking criteria. Moreover, it was thanks to the rational thinking that the ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood have been derived from the law of nature.
However, the only people who suffered from the shock were these who believed in the French Enlightenment ideals—which were not the only ones at the time but were represented by highly capable journalists, such as Voltaire. There was also the German Enlightenment, Christian Wolff playing an important role in, and Immanuel Kant being its symbol. Kant created a hermetic philosophical system. It did not deny God as a category but it reduced him/her to the idea originating from the speculative human mind—which deprived him of the motivational moral power. The multi-thread English Enlightenment (Scottish, first of all) brought both the empiricists such as George Berkeley (1685-1753) and David Hume (1711-1776), as well as the conservatives, such as Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) or Adam Smith (1723-1790). The latter sought within the economic liberalism the source of prosperity and the only practical way of completion of the the individual’s demand for liberty.
Before the Enlightenment ideals were drowned in blood by the French Revolution, in Germany the opposition had grown against the doctrinally rationalist notion of reality. Representatives of the Sturm und Drang movement questioned the possibility of cognition by means of philosophical speculation. Instead, they praised the supremacy of art and searched for the truth in depths of psychologically defined human soul. The construct of artist—the prophet, the teacher and the healer of the mankind—was then coined for the first time.
As a result of a fiasco of the Revolution, the Enlightenment's vision of man as a rational being—which meant rather heartless—collapsed. The concept prevailing at the moment was the one which also saw the man as a rational being, however motivated by passion and emotion. This implied a change in the attitude towards religion the Enlightenment declared a total war with. However, the elimination of religion caused a spiritual and moral devastation.
Nevertheless, although the French Revolution did not realize the Enlightenment's ideals, it did not mean that the escalating social conflicts which required solutions disappeared. It did not mean either that the exploration of deepest secrets of human psyche would bring such a solution.
Dilemmas of the epoch were expressed by a variety of trends; however, these formed two groups. The first claimed that the main problems of their time could be find a solution to by discovering material reality; these opened the doors to the Realism. The second saw the future in the revival of variously defined spirituality, such as the Romanticism influenced by psychology or the Nazarenes (referring directly to the Christian tradition). Within this group it is possible to find the religiously indifferent Romanticism, the pagan-oriented Ancients, the pantheistic Hudson River School, as well as the Nazarenes.
These two groups were supposed to become more polarized in the second half of the 19th century and lead to the emergence of Modernism.
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