Symbolism
Fin de Siècle Europe
Flight from modernity and critique of European culture, a reaction
against the19th century’s dominant ideologies of positivism and faith in
progress, science and technology.
Objective optical “realism" of Impressionism is rejected for the
representation of personal symbols, memory, imagination, and dreams
to evoke a sympathetic understanding of the artist's “Idea” in the viewer,
as music does.
"Art has gone through a long period of aberration caused by
physics, chemistry, mechanics, and the study of
nature....Artists, having lost all their savagery, went astray
on every path."
Paul Gauguin
Henry Fuseli (Anglo-Swiss ,1741–1825), The Nightmare, 1781, oil on
canvas, 40 x 50 in., Detroit Art Institute. 18th Century Romanticism. The
dreamer and the dream. The subjective vision is a universal subject of art.
Symbolism and Decadence
Subjective visions
Correspondences
Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.
Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.
Charles Baudelaire, 1857
Baudelaire's Theory of Correspondences in which objects become signs for the
artist's personal ideas and feelings includes the idea of "Synesthesia" in which
the 5 senses yield equivalent and concomitant responses, so that a line can be
"noble" or "false“ (Gauguin), a shade of yellow, "sour" and clanging (Kandinsky).
Paul Gauguin, Mallarmé (Nevermore),
lithograph published in a Symbolist art and literature magazine, 1891
Paul Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau), 1892. Oil on
canvas, 29 x 36 in., Albright Knox Art Gallery. Symbolism. Equivalent “reality” of
the dreamer and the dreamed
Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We
Going? (D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous), oil on
burlap, 55 × 148 in., 1897–1898. Symbolism and Primitivism
Paul Sérusier, The Talisman,
1888, oil on cigar box lid
The Nabis, Pont Aven “School” of
Gauguin (“Studio of the North”)
“Remember that a picture,
before being a battle horse, a
nude, an anecdote or whatnot,
is essentially a flat surface
covered with colors assembled
in a certain order.”
Maurice Denis, Definition of
Neo-Traditionalism, 1890
James Ensor (Belgian Symbolist, 18601949), Self Portrait with Masks, 1899
. . . and my suffering, scandalized, insolent, cruel, malicious
masks. . . I have joyfully shut myself in the solitary milieu ruled
by the mask with a face of violence and brilliance.
James Ensor
James Ensor, Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889,
1888, 99 x 169,” oil on canvas, The Getty
Compare Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov
James Ensor, detail of Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889
Compare with (right) Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlandish c. 1450-1516)
Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1515-1516, oil on wood.
Edvard Munch (Norwegian Symbolist-Expressionist 1863-1944)
Self Portrait with Cigarette, 1895, oil on canvas, 46 x 34 in.
Munch lived off and on in Paris between 1889-1892
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/12/arts/design/20090213-MUNCHAUDIOSS/index.html Open link for a short video of the major 2009 “Edvard Munch:
Influence, Anxiety, Myth” Chicago Art Institute exhibition
Edvard Munch, The Vampire, oil on canvas, 1893
Munch, Puberty, 1895, oil on canvas, 60 x 43”
Edvard Munch, The Dance of Life, 1899-1900, oil on canvas, 49 1/2 x 75,” National Gallery,
Oslo. Part of The Frieze of Life, the series that contained most of Munch’s major paintings
Edvard Munch, The Scream (Der Schrei der Natur [The Scream of Nature]), 1893,
Casein/waxed crayon and tempera on paper (cardboard), 35 7/8 x 29,“ National Gallery,
Oslo. (Left) Munch, The Scream, 1893, woodcut
I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned
blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and
tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood
there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. EM
The version of The Scream
owned by Norwegian
businessman Petter Olsen,
sold at Sotheby's for a
record US $120 million at
auction on 2 May 2012
Gustav Klimt (Austrian Symbolist / Vienna
Secessionist, 1862-1918), Idyll, 1884, oil on
canvas, Vienna, decoration for the
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Gustav Klimt, Death & Life, oil on canvas, 1916
Joseph Maria Olbrich (Austrian, 1867-1908)
Vienna Secession building, 1898, Jugendstijl (Austrian Art Nouveau)
Above the entrance:“To every age its art and to art its freedom”
Gustav Klimt was first President of the Vienna Secession, founded in April 1897 by
Klimt, Koloman Moser,Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich
Vienna Secession Building, Jugendstijl details of front. Designs attributed to
Koloman Moser (Austrian Painter and Designer, 1868-1918)
Gustav Klimt, detail from The Beethoven Frieze: The Hostile Powers, 1902, Casein
paint on stucco, 220 x 635 cm, Vienna Secession building, lower floor
Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, (left) 1902 exhibition; (right) 2010 photo,
Vienna Secession building lower floor.
Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze: Praise to Joy, the God-descended, 1902
Casein paint on stucco, 220 x 470 cm
Koloman Moser, Bookcase, 1903, made by Caspar Hrazdil, Vienna, Thuya
and Lemon Wood, Brass, and Glazed Glass, 57 x 39 x 16 in.
(right) Moser, cover design for Ver Sacrum (Rite of Spring), international
Jugenstijl magazine of Vienna Secession, published from January 1898 to
October 1903 . Formation of the The Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop)
Koloman Moser, Stained glass window for St. Leopold’s Church (Kirche Am
Steinhof), 1905-7, the church of Vienna’s psychiatric hospital, Otto Wagner,
architect.
The Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna
Workshop), an Arts & Crafts
Movement, established in 1903,
brought together architects, artists
and designers committed to design
(primarily jewelry, fabrics for
clothing, ceramics and pottery,
and furniture).
(right) the Stoclet Palace,
Brussels, Belgium, designed by
Josef Hoffmann and built by the
Weiner Werkstätte, 1905-11, This
integration of architects, artists,
and artisans makes it an example
of Gesamtkunstwerk: the first aim
of the Vienna Workshop.
Wiener Werkstätte logo
Stoclet Palace dining room,
marble walls with frieze, The
Tree of Life, by Gustav Klimt,
1909, a mosaic white and
multi-colored majolica, semiprecious stones and gold tiles.
The Vienna Secession’s “total
work of art”
detail
Auguste Rodin, Gates of Hell, 1880-1917, with detail (right) Symbolist and
Expressionist sometimes associated with Impressionism because of the
gestural texture of the relief
Detail of Rodin’s Gates of Hell: Fugit Amor
Modernist aesthetics of fragmentation and the
issue of “originality” (vs. the copy / reproduction) as a modernist myth
Sculpture exhibition Paris World Fair 1900
(left) Auguste Rodin (French Sculptor, 1840-1917) in studio with collection
of antique sculptures: fragments with Balzac study
(right) artist among his “fragments”
Rodin, Detail of Gates of Hell with The Thinker and sources:
Michelangelo and Durer
Michelangelo, Last
Judgment, 1535
Night, Michelangelo, 1520–34
Durer, Melancholia, 1515
Constantin Brancusi (Romania, 1876-1957)
(left) Vitellius, 1898
(right) Brancusi in Paris studio, 1933
The Saint of Montparnasse
Brancusi was an admirer of 17th C.
Tibetan monk and poet, Milarepa
of the Himalayas
(left) Constantin Brancusi, Sleep, 1908
(right) Medardo Rosso (Italian 1858-1917) Ecce Puer, 1896
“We are nothing but a play of light” (Rosso)
Constantine Brancusi, Child Supplicant, bronze 1906 and Newborn, 1915 (right)
Constantin Brancusi, Sleeping Muse, life-size, bronze, 1910
Constantin Brancusi, The Origin of the World, 1924
Brancusi’s quest for the essential (true) “sign” is shared by
Henri Matisse and many other modernists.
Constantin Brancusi, clockwise from upper left: Supplicant Child, 1906; Sleep, 1908; Sleeping
Muse 1910; Newborn, 1915; and two versions of The Origin of the World, 1920s
Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss, 1907 version (left) and the Memorial park at Tîrgu Jiu,
Romania showing the The Gate of the Kiss, 1937 and part of contemplation group
The Kiss, which symbolizes the marriage of the
material and the spiritual, life and death, and
in general the dialectical unification of the
dualities of human experience
Brancusi, Endless Column, Memorial park at Tirjiu Jiu
cast iron with copper coating, 1937
Brancusi, Endless Column, (left) under re-construction, 1999
(center) Segments of Endless Column
(right) Donald Judd, (US Minimalist sculptor, 1928-1994) Untitled, 1970
Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1925, marble, stone, and wood
Brancusi’s Paris studio 1927 – photographs by Brancusi
“All my life I have sought the essence of flight. Don’t look for mysteries.
I give you pure joy. Look at the sculptures until you see them.
Those closest to God have seen them”