Description
The term neo-romanticism is used to cover a variety of movements in philosophy, literature, music, painting, and architecture, as well as social movements, that exist after and incorporate elements from the era of Romanticism.
It has been used with reference to late-19th-century composers such as Richard Wagner particularly by Carl Dahlhaus who describes his music as "a late flowering of romanticism in a positivist age". He regards it as synonymous with "the age of Wagner", from about 1850 until 1890 - the start of the era of modernism, whose leading early representatives were Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler (Dahlhaus 1979, 98–99, 102, 105). It has been applied to writers, painters, and composers who rejected, abandoned, or opposed realism, naturalism, or avant-garde modernism at various points in time from about 1840 down to the present. Read more ↗
Key Artists
Paul Nash
Founding patriarch of British Neo-romanticism whose visionary interpretations of ancient megaliths, nocturnal hillsides, and wartime wreckage infused the British landscape with melancholic poetry.
Graham Sutherland
Leading Neo-romantic master who transformed Pembrokeshire lanes, fallen tree roots, and thorn bushes into dramatic, semi-abstract forms charged with organic mystery and emotional intensity.
John Piper
Versatile painter and stage designer who abandoned pure geometric abstraction to capture the brooding atmosphere of ruined British churches, country estates, and stormy skies during World War II.
Keith Vaughan
Prominent Neo-romantic figure whose intimate drawings and oil paintings explored the classical relationship between male figures and pastoral British woodland landscapes.
John Craxton
Youthful Neo-romantic prodigy during the 1940s who depicted solitary shepherds, dreamers, and poets enveloped within claustrophobic, tangled thickets and nocturnal English woods.
Pavel Tchelitchew
Russian-born painter whose organic metamorphosis, anatomical X-ray landscapes, and dreamlike biomorphic forms exerted a profound influence on British and American Neo-romantic painters.
Fun Facts
The label 'Neo-romanticism' was applied to this British landscape movement in March 1942 by art critic Raymond Mortimer writing in the 'New Statesman', identifying a shared lineage connecting Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland back to the visionary mysticism of William Blake and Samuel Palmer.
↗ Source: tate.org.uk
The rise of British Neo-romantic painting during World War II was heavily catalyzed by cultural isolation and the threat of Nazi invasion, causing young artists to retreat from international Parisian avant-garde trends into an introspective celebration of endangered native countryside and ruins.
↗ Source: tate.org.uk
Shop
_1940-1_Paul_Nash.jpg)