Romanticism and Its Discontents - Softcover

Brookner, Anita

4.22

37 ratings by Goodreads

9780374527846: Romanticism and Its Discontents

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374527849 ISBN 13: 9780374527846

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

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A brilliant reassessment of French Romantic painting by a noted art historian and Booker Prize winner

In Romanticism and Its Discontents, Booker Prize-winning novelist and celebrated art historian Anita Brookner offers a stunning reassessment of the masters of French Romantic painting in the context of nineteenth-century poetry, literature, and criticism.

Examining the works of these artists, Brookner traces the way in which French Romanticism evolved from the political turmoil of the late eighteenth century and the defeat of Waterloo in 1815, and replaced the agnosticism of the Enlightenment and the Revolution with a new heroism. She argues that the Romantics in France made the heroism of modern life their creed and "transferred their idealism to the domain of art, either as practitioners or as critics."

Here is Gros as hero and victim, Alfred de Musset as enfant du siecle, Delacroix as Romantic Classicist, and later in the century, Zola as an advocate of life for art's sake and Huysman's indulging in the madness of art.

In Romanticism and Its Discontents, Anita Brookner takes us on a fascinating tour of these artists, poets, and critics, bringing unfamiliar works brilliantly to life and casting a new light on more recognizable ones.

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About the Author:

Anita Brookner trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. She has written a number of books on art history, and nineteen novels, including the 1984 Booker Prize winner, Hotel du Lac. She lives in London.

From Publishers Weekly:

Following her earlier biography of the neoclassicist painter Jacques-Louis David, acclaimed novelist and art historian Brookner (Hotel du Lac; Falling Slowly; etc.) here tackles the French Romantics. As a brief outline of the movement, this study breaks no new ground, but it is a fluent and shapely introduction that covers the major names, with chapters devoted to artists Ingres, Delacroix and Gros, writers Musset, Baudelaire, Zola and Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers. As in the David biography, which focused on how the artist's later career was ruined by his homosexuality, and as in Brookner's novels of the rich, sensitive and depressed, the latter part of the title (a takeoff on Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents) rules the interpretations here. With artists like Baron Gros, Brookner wonderfully integrates psychobiography with social history, implying that during the Terror following the French Revolution, this artist's paranoia was sensible and lifesaving. The Goncourt brothers are lauded for their "unflinching pessimism which cannot quite conceal a sorrowing outlook." Brookner overrates Madame de Sta?l and misleadingly calls the tyrannically gifted 18th-century epistolary artist Madame du Deffand "a modest and discreet person." Despite a novelist like Zola, who personified "Romanticism as energy," the final word is given to the "constitutionally depressed" critic Sainte-Beuve. (Surprisingly, there is no bibliography or list of suggested reading.) Brookner definitely paints the Romantics with her own brushAmaking sure that no one has too good a timeAbut she communicates her highly personal view with the sureness of a professional in literary low spirits. Illus. not seen by PW. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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