Inverted classicism

Abstract

In the first part of the article, the author delineates the first interpretations within the early romantic movement that pointed out that we can no longer regard classic works of art as the best representations of artistic achievements, but rather as untimely contibutions that detracted from genuinely new art forms. The main purpose of romantic questioning of the works that were accepted as exemplary was to devote particular attention to epochal changes in the very essence of art. Given that the classical works are stable, rounded out and complete, the early romantic age particularly favoured works in which tension, incompleteness and fragmentariness predominated. The second part of the paper discloses a transformation of the concept of tradition after the inherited classical patterns have lost their previous role as regulative and normative principles of art. The concept of «postclassical» tradition was thematized in order to elucidate motives thanks to which we may speak about the common anticlassical tendencies of both phenomenology and early avant-garde.