Romantic art is perhaps best defined by its refusing definition. Intensifying the subjective nature of human experience, Romantic artists reached toward willfully indeterminate goals. They launched their work as songs without words—that is, as open-ended expressions that each individual viewer creatively completes. In the opening lecture for the exhibition The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art, 1760–1860, co-organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, Joseph Leo Koerner, B.A. 1980, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, puts words to some of the pictures on view.



Reception to follow. Generously sponsored by the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund