Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism. The dominant movement in European art and architecture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, characterized by a desire to recreate the spirit and forms of the art of ancient Greece and Rome. A new and more scientific interest in classical antiquity, greatly stimulated by the discoveries at Pompeii (where excavations began in 1748) and Herculaneum, was one of the features of the movement, and it is also seen as a reaction against the light-hearted and frivolous Rococo style. The order, clarity, and reason of Greek and Roman art appealed greatly in the Age of Englightenment, and the Neoclassical style could have moral as well as aesthetic implications, particularly in France, where it is associated with the Revolution and a desire to restore ancient Roman values into civil life. It is, indeed, in the paintings of J.-L. David, with their antique grandeur and simplicity of form, and their heroic severity of tone, that Neoclassicism finds its purest expression, but the style was born and had its focal point in Rome. Mengs and Winckelmann were in the vanguard of the movement there, and other leading figures from all over Europe—Canova, Flaxman, Gavin Hamilton, Thorvaldsen—spent the main or important parts of their careers in the city. Many American artists worked there too—notably the sculptor Horatio Greenough, who was a pupil of Thorvaldsen—and took the Neoclassical style back to their country. Because Neoclassicism placed respect for approved models above personal expression it was a style that particularly lent itself to this kind of international currency. The 18th century saw a great growth in the publication of lavishly illustrated volumes on classical art, architecture, and antiquities, and this helped to spread the ideals of the movement. There was, however, considerable stylistic variation within Neoclassicism; Angelica Kauffmann, for example, painted in a delicate and pretty manner that is far removed from David's severity. Moreover, there is no firm dividing line between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, even though in some ways they appear to be at opposite spiritual poles. In the revival of interest in antique art, archaeological zeal could easily give way to a nostalgic yearning for a lost Golden Age, and the term ‘Romantic Classicism’ is sometimes used to characterize an aspect of Neoclassicism in which an interest in antiquity is tinged with Romantic feeling. In fact the antipathy between Classics and Romantics (exemplified by Ingres and Delacroix, for example) was unknown before the 19th century, and it was only in the mid-19th century, at a time when the antique revival style was out of fashion, that the word ‘Neoclassicism’ was coined—originally a pejorative term with suggestions of lifelessness and impersonality. These negative connotations have clung tenaciously to the term, and the ardent aspirations of the founders of Neoclassicism have been obscured by the fact that the more decorative aspects of the movement—Wedgwood pottery, for example—have become more closely associated with the word in the public consciousness than have the great masterpieces of David and Canova.

Neoclassicism is related to but can be distinguished from Greek Taste, which was a fairly superficial fashion for Greek-inspired decoration, and from the Greek Revival, which in architecture was a movement expressing a new interest in the simplicity and gravity of ancient Greek buildings. It began seriously in the 1790s and culminated in the 1820s and 1830s. Greek architecture became widely known in the West only around 1750–60 and in the early days of Neoclassicism it was regarded as primitive and few architects cared to imitate it.

In the context of modern art, the term Neoclassicism has been applied to a revival of the spirit of classicism among avant-garde artists in the second and third decades of the 20th century, marking a return to restraint after a period of unprecedented experimentation. Other terms for this phenomenon include ‘the New Classicism’, ‘the classical revival’, ‘the return to order’, and ‘the call to order’ (this last being the title of a book by Jean Cocteau, published in 1926—Le Rappel à l'ordre).