The horrific, the miraculous and the grotesque challenged the supremacy of the beautiful and the immaculate. Young literary figures and artists turned to the reverse side of Reason. The disillusionment was as great as the original enthusiasm when the dark aspects of the Enlightenment were revealed in all their harshness. Bloodstained terror and war brought suffering and eventually caused the social order in large parts of Europe to break down.
Many of the artistic developments and positions presented here emerge from a shattered trust in enlightened and progressive thought, which took hold soon after the French Revolution – initially celebrated as the dawn of a new age – at the end of the 18th century. It is conceived to stimulate interest in the sombre aspects of Romanticism and to expand understanding of this movement. The exhibition’s take on the subject was geographically and chronologically comprehensive, thereby shedding light on the links between different centres of Romanticism, and thus retracing complex iconographic developments of the time. The art works speak of loneliness and melancholy, passion and death, of the fascination with horror and the irrationality of dreams.Īfter Frankfurt the exhibition, conceived by the Städel Museum, traveled to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In the 20th century artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte or Paul Klee and Max Ernst continued to think in this vein. The works on display by Goya, Johann Heinrich Fuseli and William Blake, Théodore Géricault and Delacroix, as well as Caspar David Friedrich, conveyed a Romantic spirit which by the end of the 18th century had taken hold all over Europe. Using outstanding works in the museum’s collection on the subject by Francisco de Goya, Eugène Delacroix, Franz von Stuck or Max Ernst as a starting point, the exhibition also presented important loans from internationally renowned collections, such as the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée du Louvre, both in Paris, the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the Art Institute of Chicago. In the museum’s exhibition house this important exhibition, comprising over 200 paintings, sculptures, graphic works, photographs and films, will present the fascination that many artists felt for the gloomy, the secretive and the evil. It was the first German exhibition to focus on the dark aspect of Romanticism and its legacy, mainly evident in Symbolism and Surrealism. From Goya to Max Ernst“ was on view from September 26th, 2012 until January 20th, 2013. The Städel Museum’s major special exhibition “Dark Romanticism.