Art 108 Study Guide



“Landscape Art and Romantic Nationalism in Germany and America”

Brian Lukacher

Runge’s New Age

1. What capacity of landscape painting was important for the development of Romantic art in Germany and America?

2. What did Philipp Otto Runge think about the condition of religious and historical art in 1802?

3. What did Runge and other German Romantics expect of landscape painting? What was it supposed to express?

4. How did the Romantic artists and writers relate to nature?

5. What was behind the enthusiasm for national unity in Germany? Was there a German nation at this time?

6. Describe Runge’s style. How is it like Flaxman’s

7. What is Sturm und Drang and why did the Ossianic sagas appeal to its proponents, such as the philosopher, J.G. Herder?

8. What beliefs did Blake and Runge share about the purpose of their art?

9. How are Runge’s illustrations in the Times of Day allegorical and pantheistic?

10. What is the difference between Runge’s Night and Carstens’s? What does Lukacher mean by the “exhaustion of an encumbered classical sublimity”? What was Runge’s aspiration in the new century?

11. What is “transcendence”?

12. With what circle was Runge associated and in what German city?

13. Which of Runge’s beliefs are manifested in the painting, Morning (1808), and how? What traditions does the painting bring together? Describe how this can be seen in the work.

14. How does Morning defy conventions of religious painting? What was Runge’s attitude toward scientific observation?

15. How did Runge’s expectations for the Times of Day (Tageszeiten) change? How was it a synaesthetic device and what were the artist’s aims? Were his hopes achieved?

16. How did Runge respond to the Napoleonic invasion of the Prussian and Swedish states?

A Soulful Past: Lukasbund

17. What was the Lukasbund? Where and when did it form? Who were its leaders? Where did the name come from? What were its aims? Were they influenced by the Enlightenment?

18. Which German artist was emulated by the Lukasbund? Why? When did he live?

19. Why did the Lukasbund artists leave Germany for Rome in 1809? Where did they house themselves? What did the Italians call them and why?

20. In what period is Pforr’s Count Rudolph of Hapsburg and the Priest set? Describe Pforr’s style and what it means.

21. Were the Lukasbund artists interested in current events and experiences?

22. What are the primary concepts of German Romanticism that the Lukasbund exemplified?

Friedrich and the Mediation of Landscape

23. What was Friedrich’s attitude toward the Lukasbund group? How was he like them?

24. How was Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea “strikingly modern”? In what way is it typical of Friedrich’s subjects?

25. In what way does Monk by the Sea mediate between nature and man?

26. What specific landscape is represented in Monk by the Sea? What ideas does it communicate besides recognizable topographical features? How was it interpreted by the Romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist?

27. How is Abbey in the Oak Forest a symbolic pendant to Monk by the Sea?

28. How is the subject of Abbey “German”?

29. What besides a monk is being buried in Abbey? What else is being mourned?

30. Compare Friedrich’s later paintings, Hill and Ploughed Field near Dresden (1824-8) and Large Enclosure near Dresden (1832) the earlier paintings.

31. To what might the details in these paintings – crows, grounded sailboat - allude?

32. How has the artist made a specific landscape signify “a global and even cosmic expanse” and what lies beyond empirical, perceptual experience?

33. What is “the tragedy of landscape” that Friedrich’s art conveys?

Progress and its discontents: Thomas Cole and the American landscape

34. What was the attitude of American (US) patrons and audiences toward grand history painting?

35. Where did US artists John Vanderlyn and Washington Allston go to learn history painting?

36. Why were Vanderlyn and Allston frustrated about their audience? Were they successful in the United States? Who appreciated their painting?

37. From where did the moral and religious authority of the US come, according to William Cullen Bryant?

38. What artist was at the center of the Hudson River school of landscape painters?

39. What is paradoxical about Cole’s wilderness aesthetic in landscape painting?

40. What is the role of Indian culture in these paintings?

41. Why was Cole anxious about the populism of Jacksonian democracy? How did his work change after a trip to Europe?

42. How did Cole’s 5-painting series, the Course of Empire, raise his landscape paintings to “a higher style”?

43. Describe the Course of Empire series and its message. What literary sources influence it?

44. How does Asher B. Durand’s Landscape, Progress collapse “the temporal stages of Cole’s Course of Empire into a modern parable of technological determinism and nationalist self-assurance?”

45. How is George Inness’s Lackawanna Valley different in attitude and style from the other Hudson River School technological landscape paintings?

To Silence or to reveal nature’s allegory

46. What were the backgrounds of John Kensett and Fitz Hugh Lane and why were they called “luminists”? Did their art have nationalist connotations of the wilderness aesthetic of Cole and Durand?

47. What specific landscapes did the Luminists depict? What is the mood of their work? Is it picturesque or sublime?

48. Did Frederick Edwin Church continue the nationalist rhetoric of American landscape begun by Cole?

49. How is Twilight in the Wilderness an allegory?

50. What book partly inspired Church’s travels to South America and works like Cotopaxi? Describe the natural elements in the painting. Where does the painting position the viewer?

51. How is the sense of catastrophe implied? What was the range of interpretations of the work? What war was erupting in the US in 1862?

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