Why the Romantics Matter

December 1, 2014
In this brief but illuminating celebration of romanticism in the arts, Gay (Modernism: The Lure of Heresy) makes a strong case for the romantic spirit as a modernizing influence that shaped painting, sculpture, prose, poetry, music, dance, theater, and film well into the 20th century. Acknowledging the challenge of synthesizing a "unitary definition" of romanticism from the variety of ways in which it expressed itself through European arts in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Gay identifies a common esthetic impulse to "re-enchant" a world left spiritually bereft in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism. Focusing on key figures in the romantic and modernist movementsânotably Ludwig van Beethoven, Oscar Wilde, and Wassily KandinskyâGay shows how their work broke with tradition, both in terms of technical form and its championing of the free artistic imagination over obligations to mimetic representation and moral instruction. In one of the book's fascinating chapters, Gay describes how the "middlemen of culture"âart dealers, gallery owners, museum directorsâhelped to temper the tensions between avant garde artists and the bourgeois public and gradually educate their customers about the merits of the modern. Although Gay covers a considerable amount of ground across the arts and the different countries that produced them, his book will strike readers as the work of an informed enthusiast rather than an interdisciplinary academic study.