Strong emotions and mystery. this exhibition invited visitors to enter a world of images that frightens, entices and opens up to unknown spaces. That turns everyday life into poetry and leaves room for you to feel and interpret. The romanticism was an era in art history that left traces we still follow today.
The exhibition The Romantic Eye took a broad look at the period in 19th-century art known as Romanticism. In this exhibition, we aimed to explain what Romanticism was and how it influenced its time. We also tried to show that Romanticism was not purely a 19th-century phenomenon: to this day, we still encounter many of the questions and ideas of that time.
A world of frightening yet enticing imagery that opens up to reveal mysterious spaces in darkness, mist and light. But also a world that turns the most trivial details into poetry, that inspires searching and yearning, that exposes the depths of consciousness and calibrates our sensitivity. A visual world where the boundaries between art, fantasy and reality are about to dissolve.
Romanticism was revolutionary in many respects, not least because art at the time invited viewers to place themselves within the work, to experience it on much freer terms than had previously been the case. The power of imagination became the starting point for a new way of engaging with art that drew on personal memories and experiences rather than learned texts. The boundary between art and reality was no longer so clearly defined. Thanks to a new range of motifs and a more realistic way of depicting nature and people, art became accessible to a wider audience.
Victor Emil Janssen, Self-Portrait at the Easel, c. 1828. Oil on paper mounted on canvas. Photo: bpk, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Elke Walford
Johan Christian Dahl, The Morning After the Storm, 1819. Photo: Sibylle Forster, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen
Caspar David Friedrich, Cross By the Baltic Sea, 1815. Oil on canvas. Private collection
The German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), better known as Novalis, once wrote the oft-quoted words: “The world must be romanticised. In this way its original meaning will be rediscovered. […] Insofar as I give a higher meaning to what is commonplace, and a mysterious appearance to what is ordinary, the dignity of the unknown to what is known, a semblance of infinity to what is finite, I romanticise it.”
This exhibition presented art that does exactly this: that makes us see the world around us in all its parts and from unexpected angles. This can be dizzying heights in spectacular landscapes, life-threatening distress on raging seas, or dense forests in gloomy darkness. But it can also be an enigmatic face that expresses something we can identify with, but have difficulty putting into words, or the unassuming beauty of nature’s nooks and crannies. From the most beautiful to the most inconspicuous, and from the most complicated to something very simple. In short, art that gives the viewer a sense of understanding of the world, or at least an awakening to its fascinating complexity. What the works in the exhibition had in common was that they embody an approach that encourages viewers to see their reality opening up to perspectives and mental spaces where imagination and emotions take over.
In this respect, the exhibition built on a research project undertaken by Nationalmuseum in recent years, which set out to study how viewers in the early 19th century would place themselves within an artwork as co-creators. We studied artists' approaches to generating empathy or to making viewers feel they inhabited the space of the image. Our starting point was reception theory, which posits that artworks do not have a single given meaning, but rather acquire individual meaning through each encounter with a spectator.
The exhibition included works acquired by Nationalmuseum over the past few years, as well as key works on loan from other museums, chiefly in Germany, Norway and France. It also includes some contemporary art to illustrate how Romanticism lives on to this day. The featured 19th-century artists included Peder Balke, Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, Caspar David Friedrich, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Eugène Delacroix, Johan Christian Dahl and Marcus Larson. The contemporary artists are listed below.