Please find below resources on a few themes, artworks, and crossovers with contemporary culture or literature I’ve mentioned in the past few weeks.
Kehinde Wiley makes large paintings that appropriate famous compositions from European art and insert contemporary Black figures. These paintings not only act as large works of portraiture but also make us question who is represented in the canon of art history and who has been left out.
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/169803
Romanticism, like we discussed in class, was a wide cultural movement, spanning art, music, and literature. Some famous novels of Romanticism include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (technically a poem), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and many others.
https://wwnorton.com/college/english/nawest/content/overview/romanticism.htm
We also discussed how Thomas Cole’s painting and writing laid the groundwork for an American interest in preservation of the wilderness and prefigured some of our current reckoning with the destruction humans bring to the environment. Many contemporary artists look to this, drawing at times on principles from Romantic landscapes.
https://www.theartstory.org/movement/environmental-art/
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-nine-artists-respond-to-climate-change
Stephen Hannock, for example, directly quotes Cole’s painting, adding a personal layer of script as well as updating the view with contemporary bridges and development.
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