Everything about Classical Revival totally explained
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 that draw upon Western classical art and culture (usually that of
Ancient Greece or
Ancient Rome). These movements were dominant during the mid 18th to the end of the 19th century. This article addresses what these "neoclassicisms" have in common.
Overview
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, doesn't 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. "Make it new" was the
modernist credo of the poet
Ezra Pound; contrarily, neoclassicism doesn't seek to re-create art forms from the ground up with each new project. It instead exhibits perfect control of an idiom.
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's highly self-aware, that's 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 neoclassical 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
In the
visual arts the European movement called "neoclassicism" began after
A.D. 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've 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).
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.
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).
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.
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 1785. 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 1774 did his fashion-loving Queen bring the "Louis XVI" style to court.
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's 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 criticized at the time), The
National Gallery in Washington, DC (also heavily criticized by the architectural community as being backward thinking and old fashioned in its design), and the
American Museum of Natural History's Roosevelt Memorial. These were
white elephants when 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 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
In the
United States public buildings are still built in the neoclassical style. A good recent example is
Schermerhorn Symphony Center.
In
Britain a number of architects are active in the neoclassical style. Two new university Libraries,
Quinlan Terry's Maitland Robinson Library at
Downing College and Robert Adam Architects'
(External Link
) Sackler Library illustrate that the approach taken can range from the traditional, in the former case, to the unconventional, in the latter case. The majority of new neoclassical buildings in Britain are private houses. Firms like
Francis Johnson & Partners specialize in new country houses
(External Link).
Neoclassical architecture is usually now classed under the umbrella term of "traditional architecture" and is practised by a number of members of the
Traditional Architecture Group.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Classical Revival'.
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