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Neoclassicism

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Art

   Neoclassicism (sometimes rendered as Neo-Classicism or Neo-classicism)
   is the name given to quite distinct movements in the decorative and
   visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture. These
   movements were in effect at various times between the 18th and 20th
   centuries. This article addresses what these "neoclassicisms" have in
   common.

   What any "neo"-classicism depends on most fundamentally is a consensus
   about a body of work that has achieved canonic status (illustration,
   below). These are the "classics." Ideally— and neoclassicism is
   essentially an art of an ideal— an artist, well-schooled and
   comfortably familiar with the canon, does not repeat it in lifeless
   reproductions, but synthesizes the tradition anew in each work. This
   sets a high standard, clearly; but though a neoclassical artist who
   fails to achieve it may create works that are inane, vacuous or even
   mediocre, gaffes of taste and failures of craftsmanship are not
   commonly neoclassical failings. Novelty, improvisation,
   self-expression, and blinding inspiration are not neoclassical virtues;
   neoclassicism exhibits perfect control of an idiom. It does not
   recreate art forms from the ground up with each new project, as
   modernism demanded. "Make it new" was the modernist credo of the poet
   Ezra Pound.
   Late Baroque classicizing: G. P. Pannini assembles the canon of Roman
   ruins and Roman sculpture into one vast imaginary gallery (1756)
   Late Baroque classicizing: G. P. Pannini assembles the canon of Roman
   ruins and Roman sculpture into one vast imaginary gallery (1756)

   Speaking and thinking in English, "neoclassicism" in each art implies a
   particular canon of "classic" models. Virgil, Raphael, Nicolas Poussin,
   Haydn. Other cultures have other canons of classics, however, and a
   recurring strain of neoclassicism appears to be a natural expression of
   a culture at a certain moment in its career, a culture that is highly
   self-aware, that is also confident of its own high mainstream
   tradition, but at the same time feels the need to regain something that
   has slipped away: Apollonius of Rhodes is a neoclassic writer; Ming
   ceramics pay homage to Sung celadon porcelains; Italian 15th century
   humanists learn to write a "Roman" hand we call italic (a.k.a.
   Carolingian); Neo-Babylonian culture is a neoclassical revival, and in
   Persia the "classic" religion of Zoroaster, Zoroastrianism, is revived
   after centuries, to "re-Persianize" a culture that had fallen away from
   its own classic Achaemenean past. Within the direct Western tradition,
   the earliest movement motivated by a neoclassicial inspiration is a
   Roman style that was first distinguished by the German art historian
   Friedrich Hauser (Die Neuattische Reliefs Stuttgart 1889), who
   identified the style-category he called " Neo-Attic" among sculpture
   produced in later Hellenistic circles during the last century or so BCE
   and in Imperial Rome; the corpus that Hauser called "Neo-Attic"
   consists of bas reliefs molded on decorative vessels and plaques,
   employing a figural and drapery style that looked for its canon of
   "classic" models to late 5th and early 4th century Athens and Attica.

Neoclassicism in architecture and in the decorative and visual arts

   The Academy, designed by Theophil Freiherr von Hansen and completed in
   1885, in Athens, Greece.
   The Academy, designed by Theophil Freiherr von Hansen and completed in
   1885, in Athens, Greece.

   In the visual arts the European movement called "neoclassicism" began
   after ca 1765, as a reaction against both the surviving Baroque and
   Rococo styles, and as a desire to return to the perceived "purity" of
   the arts of Rome, the more vague perception ("ideal") of Ancient Greek
   arts (where almost no western artist had actually been) and, to a
   lesser extent, 16th century Renaissance Classicism.

   Contrasting with the Baroque and the Rococo, Neo-classical paintings
   are devoid of pastel colors and haziness; instead, they have sharp
   colors with Chiaroscuro. In the case of Neo-classicism in France, a
   prime example is Jacques Louis David whose paintings often use Greek
   elements to extol the French Revolution's virtues (state before
   family).
   Henry Fuseli, The artist moved to despair at the grandeur of antique
   fragments, 1778–79
   Henry Fuseli, The artist moved to despair at the grandeur of antique
   fragments, 1778–79

   Each "neo"- classicism selects some models among the range of possible
   classics that are available to it, and ignores others. The neoclassical
   writers and talkers, patrons and collectors, artists and sculptors of
   1765 - 1830 paid homage to an idea of the generation of Pheidias, but
   the sculpture examples they actually embraced were more likely to be
   Roman copies of Hellenistic sculptures. They ignored both Archaic Greek
   art and the works of Late Antiquity. The Rococo art of ancient Palmyra
   came as a revelation, through engravings in Wood's The Ruins of
   Palmyra. Even in all-but-unvisited Greece, a rough backwater of the
   Ottoman Empire, dangerous to explore, neoclassicists' appreciation of
   Greek architecture was mediated through drawings and engravings, which
   subtly smoothed and regularized, "corrected' and "restored" the
   monuments of Greece, not always consciously. As for painting, Greek
   painting was utterly lost: neoclassicist painters imaginatively revived
   it, partly through bas-relief friezes, mosaics, and pottery painting
   and partly through the examples of painting and decoration of the High
   Renaissance of Raphael's generation, frescos in Nero's Domus Aurea,
   Pompeii and Herculaneum and through renewed admiration of Nicholas
   Poussin. Much "neoclassical" painting is more classicisizing in subject
   matter than in anything else.
   Façade of the Larger Marble Palace built by Luigi Vanvitelli's pupil
   Antonio Rinaldi.
   Façade of the Larger Marble Palace built by Luigi Vanvitelli's pupil
   Antonio Rinaldi.

   There is an anti-Rococo strain that can be detected in some European
   architecture of the earlier 18th century, most vividly represented in
   the Palladian architecture of Georgian Britain and Ireland, but also
   recognizable in a classicizing vein of architecture in Berlin. It is a
   robust architecture of self-restraint, academically selective now of
   "the best" Roman models.

   Neoclassicism first gained influence in England and France, through a
   generation of French art students trained in Rome and influenced by the
   writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and it was quickly adopted by
   progressive circles in Sweden. At first, classicizing decor was grafted
   onto familiar European forms, as in the interiors for Catherine II's
   lover Count Orlov, designed by an Italian architect with a team of
   Italian stuccadori: only the isolated oval medallions like cameos and
   the bas-relief overdoors hint of neoclassicism; the furnishings are
   fully Italian Rococo (illustration, left).
   G.B. Piranesi's design for a vase on stand, Rome ca 1780, appealed more
   to his English and French patrons. Similar gilt-bronze vases were made
   in London and Paris, from ca. 1768 onwards.
   G.B. Piranesi's design for a vase on stand, Rome ca 1780, appealed more
   to his English and French patrons. Similar gilt-bronze vases were made
   in London and Paris, from ca. 1768 onwards.

   But a second neoclassic wave, more severe, more studied (through the
   medium of engravings) and more consciously archaeological, is
   associated with the height of the Napoleonic Empire. In France, the
   first phase of neoclassicism is expressed in the "Louis XVI style", the
   second phase in the styles we call "Directoire" or Empire. Italy clung
   to Rococo until the Napoleonic regimes brought the new archaeological
   classicism, which was embraced as a political statement by young,
   progressive, urban Italians with republican leanings.
   David's Oath of the Horatii (1784) is not just neoclassical in subject.
   David's Oath of the Horatii (1784) is not just neoclassical in subject.

   The high tide of neoclassicism in painting is exemplified in early
   paintings by Jacques-Louis David (illustration, left) and Jean Auguste
   Dominique Ingres' entire career. David's Oath of the Horatii was
   painted in Rome and made a splash at the Paris Salon of 1784. Its
   central perspective is perpendicular to the picture plane, made more
   emphatic by the dim arcade behind, against which the heroic figures are
   disposed as in a frieze, with a hint of the artificial lighting and
   staging of opera, and the classical coloring of Nicholas Poussin. In
   sculpture, the most familiar representatives are the Italian Antonio
   Canova, the Englishman John Flaxman and the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen.
   The European neoclassical manner also took hold in the United States,
   where its prominence peaked somewhat later and is exemplified in the
   sculptures of William Henry Rinehart (1825-1874).

   In the decorative arts, neoclassicism is exemplified in Empire
   furniture made in Paris, London, New York, Berlin; in Biedermeier
   furniture made in Austria; in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's museums in
   Berlin, Sir John Soane's Bank of England in London and the newly built
   " capitol" in Washington, DC; and in Wedgwood's bas reliefs and "black
   basaltes" vases. The Scots architect Charles Cameron created palatial
   Italianate interiors for the German-born Catherine II the Great in
   Russian St. Petersburg: the style was international.

   Indoors, neoclassicism made a discovery of the genuine classic
   interior, inspired by the rediscoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum,
   which had started in the late 1740s, but only achieved a wide audience
   in the 1760s, with the first luxurious volumes of tightly controlled
   distribution of Le Antichità di Ercolano. The antiquities of
   Herculaneum showed that even the most classicizing interiors of the
   Baroque, or the most "Roman" rooms of William Kent were based on
   basilica and temple exterior architecture, turned outside in:
   pedimented window frames turned into gilded mirrors, fireplaces topped
   with temple fronts, now all looking quite bombastic and absurd. The new
   interiors sought to recreate an authentically Roman and genuinely
   interior vocabulary, employing flatter, lighter motifs, sculpted in low
   frieze-like relief or painted in monotones en camaïeu ("like cameos"),
   isolated medallions or vases or busts or bucrania or other motifs,
   suspended on swags of laurel or ribbon, with slender arabesques against
   backgrounds, perhaps, of "Pompeiian red" or pale tints, or stone
   colors. The style in France was initially a Parisian style, the Goût
   grec, not a court style. Only when the plump, young king acceded to the
   throne in 1771 did his fashion-loving Queen bring the "Louis XVI" style
   to court.
   At the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, William Henry Playfair
   employs a Greek Doric octastyle portico.
   At the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, William Henry Playfair
   employs a Greek Doric octastyle portico.

   From about 1800 a fresh influx of Greek architectural examples, seen
   through the medium of etchings and engravings, gave a new impetus to
   neoclassicism that is called the Greek Revival.

   Neoclassicism continued to be a major force in academic art through the
   19th century and beyond—a constant antithesis to Romanticism or Gothic
   revivals— although from the late 19th century on it had often been
   considered anti-modern, or even reactionary, in influential critical
   circles. By the mid-19th century, several European cities—notably St
   Petersburg and Munich—were transformed into veritable museums of
   Neoclassical architecture.

   In American architecture, neoclassicism was one expression of the
   American Renaissance movement, ca 1890- 1917; its last manifestation
   was in Beaux-Arts architecture, and its very last, large public
   projects were the Lincoln Memorial (highly criticised at the time), the
   National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of
   Natural History's Roosevelt Memorial. These were white elephants as
   they were built. In the British Raj, Sir Edwin Lutyens' monumental city
   planning for New Delhi marks the glorious sunset of neoclassicism.
   World War II was to shatter most longing for - and imitation of -
   mythical, heroic times.

Covert neoclassicism in Modern styles

   Meanwhile, conservative modernist architects like Charles Perret in
   France kept the rhythms and spacing of columnar architecture even in
   factory buildings. Where a colonnade would have been decried as
   "reactionary," a building's pilaster-like fluted panels under a
   repeating frieze looked "progressive." Pablo Picasso experimented with
   classicizing motifs in the years immediately following World War I, and
   the Art Deco style that peaked in the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts
   Décoratifs often drew on neoclassical motifs without expressing them
   overtly: severe, blocky commodes by E. J. Ruhlmann or Sue et Mare;
   crisp, extremely low-relief friezes of damsels and gazelles in every
   medium; fashionable dresses that were draped or cut on the bias to
   recreate Grecian lines; the art dance of Isadora Duncan; the Streamline
   Moderne styling of US post offices and county court buildings built as
   late as 1950; and the Roosevelt dime. Neoclassic themes can even be
   detected in the Smith Tower, Seattle.

Neoclassicism Part II: Between the Wars

   There was an entire 20th century movement in the Arts which was also
   called Neo-classicism. It encompassed at least music, philosophy, and
   literature. It was between the end of World War I and the end of World
   War II. For information on the musical aspects, see 20th century
   classical music#Neoclassicism and Neoclassicism (music). For
   information on the philosophical aspects, see Great Books.

   This literary neo-classical movement rejected the extreme romanticism
   of (for example) dada, in favour of restraint, religion (specifically
   Christianity) and a reactionary political program. Although the
   foundations for this movement in English literature were laid by T.E.
   Hulme, the most famous neoclassicists were T.S. Eliot and Wyndham
   Lewis. In Russia, the movement crystallized as early as 1910 under the
   name of Acmeism, with Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam as the
   leading representatives.

Neoclassicism today

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