Neo-Romanticism

Neo-Romanticism. A movement in British painting and other arts c.1935–55, in which a number of loosely affiliated artists looked back to certain aspects of 19th-century Romanticism, particularly the ‘visionary’ landscape tradition of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, and reinterpreted them in a more modern idiom. The term was coined by the critic Raymond Mortimer in 1942. Painters and graphic artists representative of the movement include John Minton, John Piper, and Graham Sutherland, who all worked in a landscape tradition that was regarded as distinctly national, and projected a Romantic image of the countryside at a time when it was under threat from Nazi Germany. Other artists whose work has been dubbed Neo-Romantic include the poet Dylan Thomas, the film director Michael Powell, and photographers such as Bill Brandt and Edwin Smith. The term Neo-Romanticism has also been applied to certain painters working in France in the 1930s, notably Berman and Tchelitchew, who typically painted dreamlike imaginary landscapes with rather mournful figures. Their work influenced the British Neo-Romantics.

In the 1980s ‘Neo-Romanticism’ was one of the many terms used as a synonym for Neo-Expressionism, but it did not catch on in this sense.