19TH CENTURY ART

Art Nouveau was a movement that swept through the decorative arts and

architecture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Generating enthusiasts

throughout Europe and beyond, the movement issued in a wide variety of styles,

and, consequently, it is known by various names, such as the Glasgow Style, or, in

the German-speaking world, Jugendstil. Art Nouveau was aimed at modernizing

design, seeking to escape the eclectic historical styles that had previously been

popular. Artists drew inspiration from both organic and geometric forms, evolving

elegant designs that united flowing, natural forms with more angular contours. The

movement was committed to abolishing the traditional hierarchy of the arts, which

v iewed so-called liberal arts, such as painting and sculpture, as superior to craft-

based decorative arts, and ultimately it had far more influence on the latter. The

style went out of fashion after it gave way to Art Deco in the 1920s, but it

experienced a popular revival in the 1960s, and it is now seen as an

important predecessor of modernism. Romanticism is one of the 19th

century art. I t first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around

1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and

Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished

until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion,

Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the

Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the

French Revolution of 1789. In Romantic art, nature—with its

uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for

cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world

of Enlightenment thought. The v iolent and terrifying images of nature

conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic

of the Sublime. In French and British painting of the late eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of

shipwrecks (2003.42.56) and other representations of man's struggle

against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility.