19th-Century Culture and Arts

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Describe the continuities and changes in European artistic expression between 1815 and 1914 (Skill 4.B; LO J).
• Describe KC-3.6.I and KC-3.6.I.A: how Romantic artists and composers turned away from classical artistic forms to emphasize emotion, nature, individuality, intuition, the supernatural, and national histories.
• Describe KC-3.6.I.B: how Romantic writers explored similar themes while responding to the Industrial Revolution and to the political revolutions of the period.
• Describe KC-3.6.II.D: how realist and materialist themes shaped art and literature as painters and writers depicted the lives of ordinary people and drew attention to social problems.
• Describe KC-3.6.III.D: how Modern art (Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism) moved beyond representational forms toward the subjective, abstract, and expressive.

Topic 7.8 traces the principal continuities and changes in European artistic expression across the long nineteenth century. KC-3.6.I: Romanticism broke with neoclassical artistic forms and with rationalism, placing greater emphasis on intuition and emotion. The Romantic movement opens the period; the mid-century Realist turn (KC-3.6.II.D) and the late-century Modernist break (KC-3.6.III.D) close it. The continuity-and-change reasoning process is built into the topic structure.

Romanticism: artists and composers (KC-3.6.I.A). Romantic artists and composers turned away from the classical artistic forms of the eighteenth-century neoclassical tradition and emphasized instead emotion, nature, individuality, intuition, the supernatural, and national histories. The movement developed across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and shaped European cultural production for roughly the first half of the nineteenth century.

In painting, the principal Romantic figures included Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) in Germany, whose Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), The Monk by the Sea (1808-1810), and Abbey in the Oakwood (1809-1810) defined the Romantic landscape tradition with their solitary contemplative figures, sublime natural settings, and quasi-mystical reverence for nature; Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) in France, whose The Massacre at Chios (1824), Liberty Leading the People (1830), and The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) combined dramatic political subject matter with vivid color and emphatic gesture; Theodore Gericault (1791-1824), whose The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) treated a contemporary maritime disaster as a subject of high tragic art; and J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837) in Britain, whose landscape and atmospheric studies pushed late-Romantic painting toward the dissolution of stable form.

In music, the principal Romantic composers included Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), whose middle and late symphonies (the Third "Eroica" 1803-1804; the Fifth 1808; the Ninth "Choral" 1824) extended the late-classical symphonic form toward the expressive scale that defined Romantic music; Franz Schubert (1797-1828), whose lieder (the song cycles Die Schone Mullerin 1823 and Winterreise 1827) established the Romantic German art-song tradition; Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), whose Symphonie Fantastique (1830) introduced the programmatic symphony with its narrative structure ("Episode in the Life of an Artist") and its use of an idee fixe; Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) and Franz Liszt (1811-1886), the principal Romantic piano composers; Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) and Robert Schumann (1810-1856), the principal early-Romantic German symphonists; and Richard Wagner (1813-1883), whose mid- and late-century music dramas (Tannhauser 1845, Lohengrin 1850, the four-opera Ring cycle 1869-1876, Tristan und Isolde 1865, Parsifal 1882) extended Romantic expressive principles toward the late-Romantic Gesamtkunstwerk and toward the harmonic dissolution that prepared early-twentieth-century musical Modernism.

Romanticism: writers (KC-3.6.I.B). Romantic writers explored similar themes while responding to the Industrial Revolution and to the political revolutions of the period. The Romantic literary tradition was simultaneously a reaction against eighteenth-century neoclassical literary form and a response to the social upheaval of industrialization and the political upheaval of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period.

In British poetry, the principal Romantic figures included William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), whose joint Lyrical Ballads (1798) is conventionally read as the founding document of English Romantic poetry; the second-generation Romantic poets Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821), who extended Romantic themes into politically activist directions (Byron died at Missolonghi during the Greek War of Independence in 1824). British Romantic prose included Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) as the principal Romantic-era engagement with the moral implications of scientific ambition, and Sir Walter Scott's historical novels (Waverley 1814; Ivanhoe 1819) as the principal Romantic-era reconstruction of Scottish and medieval national history.

In German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) bridged the late Enlightenment and the Romantic period: his early The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) had already shaped late-eighteenth-century European Romantic sentiment, and his Faust (Part I 1808; Part II 1832) was the principal German-language summit of Romantic literary ambition. The Schlegel brothers (August Wilhelm 1767-1845 and Friedrich 1772-1829), Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801), and Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) extended German Romantic literary thought through criticism, poetry, and prose. The brothers Grimm (Jacob 1785-1863 and Wilhelm 1786-1859) collected and published German folk tales (Children's and Household Tales, 1812-1815) as part of the Romantic-era recovery of national vernacular tradition.

In French literature, Madame de Stael (Anne-Louise Germaine Necker, 1766-1817) introduced German Romantic ideas to a French readership through De l'Allemagne (On Germany, 1813); Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) and Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) defined early French Romantic prose and poetry; Victor Hugo (1802-1885) extended French Romanticism through poetry, drama (the 1830 Hernani affair confirmed the Romantic break with French neoclassical theatrical convention), and the long Romantic-historical novels (Notre-Dame de Paris 1831; Les Miserables 1862). Russian Romantic literature was led by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837, Eugene Onegin 1833) and Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841, A Hero of Our Time 1840).

The mid-century turn to Realism (KC-3.6.II.D). Realist and materialist themes shaped art and literature as painters and writers depicted the lives of ordinary people and drew attention to social problems. The Realist turn developed across the 1840s and 1850s, in close connection with the contemporaneous social-question politics covered in Topics 6.7-6.8 (the early socialist movements, the 1848 revolutions, the early labor and reform movements).

In painting, the principal Realist figures included Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) in France, whose The Stone Breakers (1849, destroyed 1945) and A Burial at Ornans (1849-1850) treated working-class and rural subject matter with the formal weight previously reserved for historical and religious painting; Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875), whose The Gleaners (1857) and The Angelus (1857-1859) gave the French peasantry a sustained pictorial dignity; Honore Daumier (1808-1879), whose lithographic political cartoons (the satires of King Louis-Philippe; Rue Transnonain 1834) and Realist paintings (The Third-Class Carriage c. 1862-1864) treated working-class urban Paris directly; and the Russian Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) movement of the 1870s and 1880s, including Ilya Repin (1844-1930, Barge Haulers on the Volga 1870-1873).

In literature, the principal Realist figures included Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), whose La Comedie humaine (begun in the 1830s; ninety-one finished works) provided the principal Realist panorama of post-Napoleonic French society; Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), whose Madame Bovary (1857) treated provincial bourgeois life with a stylistic precision that came to define literary Realism; Charles Dickens (1812-1870) in Britain, whose Industrial-era novels (Oliver Twist 1837-1839; Hard Times 1854; Great Expectations 1860-1861; Bleak House 1852-1853) are the principal Realist engagement with the social conditions of mid-Victorian industrial England; George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880, Middlemarch 1871-1872); the Bronte sisters (Charlotte 1816-1855, Jane Eyre 1847; Emily 1818-1848, Wuthering Heights 1847; Anne 1820-1849); the Russian Realists Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910, War and Peace 1869; Anna Karenina 1877) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881, Crime and Punishment 1866; The Brothers Karamazov 1880); and the late-century French Naturalist Emile Zola (1840-1902), whose twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893) extended Realism into a self-consciously scientific-deterministic Naturalist framework. Zola's 1898 open letter J'Accuse...! in defense of Alfred Dreyfus brought the Naturalist literary tradition into direct connection with the politics of the Dreyfus Affair (covered in Topic 7.5).

The Realist movement's stylistic aim was the direct depiction of ordinary social experience without the heroic-emotional registers of Romantic art and without the idealizing classicism of the eighteenth-century academic tradition. Its political aim was to make the social conditions of industrial-era Europe directly visible to bourgeois audiences who would otherwise have looked past them. The mid-century Realist novel and the mid-century Realist canvas both treated the Industrial Revolution's social effects (covered in Topic 6.4) as legitimate subject matter for serious art.

The late-century Modernist break (KC-3.6.III.D). Modern art — including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism — moved beyond representational forms toward the subjective, abstract, and expressive, often provoking audiences that expected art to reflect shared idealized values such as beauty and patriotism. The Modernist turn developed across the late 1860s and the early twentieth century and produced the most consequential European stylistic break since the Renaissance.

Impressionism began in France in the 1860s and 1870s. The First Impressionist Exhibition opened in April 1874 at the studio of the photographer Nadar in Paris; the term "Impressionism" was coined (initially as a critical insult) from Claude Monet's 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise. The principal Impressionists included Claude Monet (1840-1926), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), Edouard Manet (1832-1883, transitional figure who never officially joined the Impressionists but whose Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe 1863 and Olympia 1865 had prepared the ground), and the American expatriate Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). The Impressionist program emphasized the painter's optical and atmospheric impression of a momentary scene rather than its precise representational structure: visible brushwork, broken color, contemporary urban and suburban subject matter, and the systematic dissolution of the academic finish that the French Salon had enforced through the mid-century.

Post-Impressionism (a retrospective term coined by Roger Fry in 1910) extended and challenged the Impressionist program from roughly 1880. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) sought a more structural reconstruction of pictorial space (the late Mont Sainte-Victoire series); Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) extended Impressionist color toward overtly expressive effects (The Starry Night 1889; the Sunflowers series 1888-1889); Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) drew on Polynesian and "primitive" sources for color and subject matter (the late Tahitian period 1891-1903); Georges Seurat (1859-1891) developed the systematic Pointillist technique (A Sunday on La Grande Jatte 1884-1886). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) extended Post-Impressionist line and color into the visual culture of late-century Parisian commercial entertainment.

Cubism developed from 1907 through Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963). Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, painted in Paris; first publicly exhibited 1916) opened the Cubist break with European representational convention; the work incorporated visual motifs from African masks Picasso had seen at the Trocadero ethnographic museum in Paris (covered in Topic 7.7's KC-3.5.III.B section). Analytic Cubism (1909-1912) systematically fractured representational space into multiple simultaneous viewpoints; Synthetic Cubism (1912 onward) reintroduced collage materials and decorative pattern. Cubism's influence radiated to the Italian Futurists (Filippo Marinetti's 1909 Futurist Manifesto; Umberto Boccioni's 1913 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space) and the German Expressionists (the Dresden-based Die Brucke from 1905 and the Munich-based Der Blaue Reiter from 1911, including Wassily Kandinsky's pioneering abstract canvases of 1910-1913). Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and the French Fauves had opened a parallel late-Impressionist break in 1905 toward emphatic non-naturalistic color.

Modernist music developed in parallel. Claude Debussy (1862-1918, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun 1894; Pelleas et Melisande 1902) extended late-Romantic harmonic principles toward Impressionist musical effects; Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) extended the program further. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, premiered at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees on 29 May 1913, produced the most famous riot in twentieth-century musical history and stood as the central pre-war musical Modernist statement. Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and his Vienna students Alban Berg (1885-1935) and Anton Webern (1883-1945) had begun the move toward atonality and (eventually) twelve-tone composition by 1908-1912.

Modernist literature began before 1914 with the late work of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906, the Norwegian dramatist whose mid-career Realist plays A Doll's House 1879 and Ghosts 1881 had already provoked late-century European audiences) and August Strindberg (1849-1912); the early novels of Marcel Proust (1871-1922, Swann's Way 1913, the first volume of the long In Search of Lost Time cycle); and the early stream-of-consciousness experiments that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka would extend after the First World War. Symbolist poetry (Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal 1857; Stephane Mallarme; Paul Verlaine; Arthur Rimbaud) had opened the move from late-Romantic and Realist literary registers toward the subjective and the abstract.

The Skill 4.B argument. Topic 7.8's suggested skill is 4.B (Contextualization: explain how a specific historical development or process is situated within a broader historical context). The skill applies in two principal ways. First, students should locate each of the three principal artistic phases (Romanticism, Realism, Modernism) in the political, social, and economic context of its period: Romanticism within the post-Napoleonic Restoration and the early Industrial period; Realism within the mid-century social-question politics and the 1848 revolutions; Modernism within late-century imperial, urban, and scientific contexts. Second, students should describe both the continuities (the persistent European concern with subject matter, form, and aesthetic theory; the bourgeois patronage and exhibition systems that supported all three movements; the transnational circulation of artistic ideas across European capitals) and the changes (the successive Romantic, Realist, and Modernist breaks with the conventions of the preceding period). The continuity-and-change reasoning process is the topic's organizing principle.

Three sources framing the long arc: Wordsworth's manifesto for Romantic poetry, Courbet's manifesto for Realist painting, and Kandinsky's manifesto for Modernist abstraction.

1. (Continuity and Change, Skill 4.B) Describe the principal continuities and changes in European painting between roughly 1815 and 1914. Trace the line from Friedrich and Delacroix through Courbet and Millet to Monet, Cezanne, and Picasso.
2. (Continuity and Change, Skill 4.B) Describe the relationship between the Romantic literary movement and the political and economic upheavals of the early nineteenth century. Use the Wordsworth Preface as a starting point.
3. (Continuity and Change, Skill 4.B) Account for the mid-century Realist turn. Why did European painters and writers turn from Romantic to Realist subject matter and treatment? Use the Courbet Realist Manifesto as a starting point.
4. (Continuity and Change, Skill 4.B) Describe the Modernist break. Why did late-century European painters move beyond representational forms toward the subjective, abstract, and expressive? Use the Kandinsky treatise as a starting point.
5. (Continuity and Change, Skill 4.B) Describe the principal continuities across the long nineteenth century. What aesthetic concerns, institutional structures, and intellectual commitments persisted across Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.