Au Fait Response to Romanticism and "Tragic Beauty"

“To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.” ~Schumman

---

Perceptions come in stages, and there are intricate timelines that accompany emotional resonance; all the art ever asks of you is patience. As we study and consume works of art, we ought to carefully uphold this procedure of patience so as to avoid diminishing some of its most primitive and enigmatic aspects. When we take viewership and engage with forms of media and portraiture, there is an indisputable truth that art subsists under no obligation to offer us any certain embrace, nor to make any sense at all. Yet, these same pieces fill us with intense grief, sorrow, joy, and remembrance. 

Art is created for the purpose of seeing yourself in things that are not you. We aim to cope with the matters that both overjoy and devastate us, and relate by commemorating the wallowing of mankind together. As critics and observationalists, we encounter common emotional struggle as we are touched by the passion of pieces and simultaneously unable to grapple with that sentiment. Not only this, but the spectrum of sensitivities that follow become only more difficult to process as the art digresses from a cheerful nature; and how is the audience to wrestle with that? What is there to do when something of a tragic complexity cannot leave your mind? What a beautiful thing. How do you hack with being eaten alive by art?

The institution of art as an outlet to publicly pay tribute to despair is a fossil of late Romantic craft. From Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare to Picasso’s Blue Period to depictions of Hamlet’s Ophelia, the acceptance of harrowing artwork bloomed through the Renaissance and Romantic periods. First, people used modes of artistic expression to come to terms with countenance of calamitous events on a historical basis, then expressionists like Käthe Kollwitz familiarized people with the unexplained desolate.

It is no question that we call these pieces beautiful for all they encapsulate; there lies undeniable delicacy in portrayals of even the most venerably ugly things. Being notably one of the most melancholy chapters of expression, art arising out of the Romantic period largely reflected a deep sense of disappointment and hopelessness. The promised ideals of long awaited equality and freedom as advertised by the French Revolution remained unavailed. False social values deescalated rationalistic ideas. The people found their own way to survive. A response and rejection of its preceding period of Classic formality and restraint, Romanticism venerates alienated warriors who died too soon and cornered women on the brink of escapism. However culturally relevant the contents were, the average Romantic artist was genius, but misunderstood, facing emptiness in the masses that stared him back. In a sudden glorification of aesthetic function over mere rigid educational applicability, artistic liberty flourished under these lonely artisans. Yet sorrow perforates the air, the smell of paints and oils dissipating second. This unconfined despair is the Weltschmerz. ‘World-pain’, the despondency of loss and disillusionment that prevails in an age of poor reality. 

Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa offers a distingué standard of the depictions of human suffering and civil survival that characterize the art of the Romantic timeline. Painted in 1819 and located in The Louvre, The Raft of Medusa delineates a scene of wreckage and immoral resolutions to survivalism. The French naval ship Medusa has wrecked near the coast of the African colony at Senegal. Officers on site took the lifeboats for themselves, leaving over one hundred and fifty crew members to endure the death of each other on one makeshift raft. In order to compose the piece, Géricault interviewed the fifteen survivors, and for him they recounted their thirteen days at sea and the serially horrendous conditions they created and withstood in order to hold their breath. 

Located in the Detroit Institute of Arts, The Nightmare by Fuseli both captured and established the undying composition of inconceivably disturbing atmospheres. Borrowing the art of hysterical rendering from popularized doctrines of Burke and Kant, Fuseli portrays undocked terror: a demon haunting a distressed trance, a racehorse with wild eyes, empty vials of a medicinal lifeline, and nightmares that, by found letters of Fuseli’s writing, are believed to be agonized by sexual repression. Elements which detract from normality and comfort. A carefully cultivated sense of unease faces viewers, forcing the confrontation of fear and the mutually inclusive idea of early feminine vulnerability. 

In truth, Romantic art is not merely historically significant; in the name of the preservation of passion we cannot ever fit these pieces of art entirely into ideological frameworks such as “empiricist” or “individualist.” Although true of the pieces and the era, these artworks moderate a broader framework of divine suffering and catastrophe made beautiful. Still, heartsick art isn’t always freeing; yes, it is representative, but further than that, it is burdensomely pensive. Depictions with direct ascription to a familiar pain are difficult to process in full. An often shortsighted stance is to explain the art in a detached way. This does nothing but reduce it. It is human to be feeble in our consumption of difficult content and inadvertently strip things of their value and depth. To this, art offers immeasurable optimism and belief, with the highest capability of reducing our apprehension.

An emerging philosophy that battles this hardship is a romanticism of tragedy that has taken heed in the past decade. Educators, psychologists, and cultural critics have observed that, in many youth subcultures, there is an increasing tendency to aestheticize or romanticize emotional suffering. The new idea of 'beneficial breakage' can give meaning to obsolete personal struggles in the interest of self-expression and definition. Although a very imperfect and often unhealthy ideal, it yields benefits as a tool to find solidarity. This embrace of raw and uncomfortable truths leads perhaps into a modern repetition of the Romantic period, a rebranded timeline of resisting emotional dishonesty and using media and artistic representation to make sense of affliction. 

The beauty of the role of emotionally adverse artwork lies in its intersection of historical basis and human sorrow. The two work in perfect tandem with personal revelation and give art the capability of moving people and resolving anguish, and thus we are elated by the promise that artistic interconnectedness offers. In the words of German contemporary artist Gerhard Richter, “Art is the highest form of hope.” The inevitable traces of both reality and idea in art drive the tension between the natures of anguish and of joy, celebrating the relief found in the full spectrum of the human experience. Like Romanticists, find prize in the gift of grief. Derive joy even from dispiritedness. Answer the art that asks for you.