Majestic Nature/Golden History: German Romantic Art
April 24 – October 21, 2007
Peter Cornelius, from Twelve Illustrations to Goethe's Faust by Peter Cornelius, 1816 (plate, this impression 1845), Engraving. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of Stephen and Elizabeth Crawford, 2006.102.h.
While the German-speaking lands in nineteenth-century Europe remained divided into a host of sovereign political entities, their artists and writers championed cultural unity by reviving and celebrating the art of their past.
The nascent Romantic and Nazarene movements stood in contrast to the Neoclassicism of an earlier generation. Rejecting the formal ideals and aesthetic principles of antiquity, German artists turned inward to local sources, Gothic art, and the Renaissance masters Dürer and Raphael. Landscape scenes were no longer based on the Arcadian idyll of the Italian countryside, but rather sublimely depicted the natural, sometimes wild, and varied topography of the German lands themselves.
This exhibition of paintings, drawings, and prints from the private collection of Stephen and Elizabeth Crawford and from the Smart Museum surveyed these artistic currents in the first half of the century.