Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst

From its very inception in the late eighteenth century, Romanticism's celebration of euphoria and sublimity has been dogged by its equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime, the grotesque and the irrational. In 1930, the famous literary theorist Mario Praz named this strain in literature "Dark Romanticism," but its equivalent in art has never been thoroughly assessed in art history. This volume is the first to examine a current that runs from Goya's war etchings through Symbolism and up to Surrealism, presenting Romanticism as an intellectual position that was embraced throughout Europe and that endured into the twentieth century. Among the artists included are Henry Fuseli, William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, Victor Hugo, Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Félicien Rops, James Ensor, Max Klinger, Edvard Munch, Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst.