ROMANTIC ART IN DISTRESS: THE DESPAIR OF FRENCH AESTHETICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

Abstract

This dissertation concerns itself with the period of the 1920's and 1930's in French intellectual history. Three prominent figures have been chosen from French culture of this period--Nobel Prize-winning author Roger Martin du Gard, cubist painter George Braque, and Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel--to illustrate the thesis that this era witnessed a major breakdown in the "romantic style." This latter term is employed to describe the prevailing culture of the West dating from the eighteenth century. It is the view of this study that beyond the catastrophic wars and destruction that afflicted the West during this time, there was an underlying crisis taking place in this "romanticism" that caused as much, as was caused by, the events. Hence, the theme of this dissertation is cultural despair and illness. The subjects are used to portray this illness in the state it had reached by the 1920's and 1930's. It is concluded that basic inherent weaknesses that were latent to romanticism came to the surface in the twentieth century because that era was marked by a culmination of historical crises which exposed the hidden cultural one. The study deals with all the general tendencies of romanticism in a critical manner. The intention is to point out the dangers of some of these tendencies, and in what manner they were dealt with by the three subjects, whose approaches to romanticism were varied.