APPROACHES - Modernism -- Mainstreams of Modern Art
From: Canaday, John. Mainstreams of Modern Art. New York: Simon and Schustesr. 1961.
The classicist sought to clarify the mystery by intellectualizing man's experience. The romantic sought its heart in the more ambiguous area of the "soul" and was willing to cultivate even life's suffering in the conviction that emotional experience holds the answer everyone seeks. But in the end--and this is the important point--both classicist and romantic were idealists, refusing to accept the world at face value, rejecting it in the end, forcing the experience of life into their respective and equally arbitrary molds in spite of repeated evidence [p. 74] that they could never get more than a part of it to fit.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, twenty-five years after David's death and a decade before Delacroix's and Ingre's, painters were becoming disillusioned with idealism in either form and were turning to realism, which in several forms was to dominate painting until near the end of the century. Meanwhile, the movement had been anticipated by one of the most unillusioned painters who ever lived, the Spaniard Francisco Goya [1746-1828]. [p. 75]
[Canaday, John. Mainstreams of Modern Art. New York: Simon and Schustesr. 1961.]
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