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'There is some
fascination to be derived from watching a change in artistic taste, or
at any rate an artistic revival, taking place - so to speak -under one's
very eyes. Hidden qualities are discovered in pictures hitherto despised
or ignored; commercial pressures are applied by the dealers, and
speculative buying begins "as in investment"; a cult that was once
"camp" soon seems to be merely eccentric and then rather dashing;
scholarly articles are written because there is nothing new to be said
about established favourites; colour supplements spread the good news to
a wider public. From some combination of these and other factors a new
taste develops.' (Francis Haskell in New York Review of Books, July
1969).
In the passage quoted above Mr Haskell, one of the best historians of
artistic taste we have, was discussing French academic painting, but the
point that he makes applies to an even greater extent to the subjects of
this chapter. In the 1960s an inexpensive book directed at the broad
mass of art lovers might have been written about Cubism, Surrealism or
Impressionism, but never Symbolism or Art Nouveau. The last-named was
considered to be the over-aesthetic last gasp of Victorian vulgarity,
while Symbolism was not even well enough known to be dismissed. Clearly
a huge shift of taste took place which allowed this chapter to be
written.
It can easily be forgotten by the person who is interested in art,
visits exhibitions and reads books on the subject that the history of
art is not absolute but fluid. Although there are independent-minded
people who make their own expeditions into the past, most take their
lead from the historians who write the books and organize the
exhibitions. The public may influence them by showing a preference for a
certain type of art, in this case for a decorative and sensual one, but
it will be the historians and the dealers who decide where the next
revival is coming from.
Because historians very naturally want to make a name for themselves by
rediscovering a new period, and dealers are interested in selling as
many works as possible, a revival will usually lead to high claims being
made for the art revived. This is certainly true of Symbolism; from
being a forgotten or ridiculed style it has swiftly risen to being 'an
alternative tradition of modern art', as Alan Bowness put it in the
catalogue of the large exhibition which finally accorded Symbolism the
accolade of historical respectability: 'French Symbolist Painters' at
the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1972. Other writers, such as Phillipe
Jullian, go even further and place the Symbolists above the established
masters of the birth of modernism.
The 'league of excellence' game is clearly not profitable in any terms
of common sense. Art is not a competitive activity, and questions of
promotion and relegation are hardly relevant to enjoyment. In the
opinion of this writer certain artists are 'better' than others because
they more consistently produce work of complexity and emotional depth,
but one style is not necessarily any better than any other. It is
natural that there has been a reaction against the somewhat clinical
approach of the Cubists and other geometrical artists, and it is healthy
that we should turn the searchlights of history into previously dim
corners, as long as we retain some balance of judgment.
Revivals of past art usually mirror contemporary trends. Abstract
Expressionism in the 1950s led to a revaluation of late Monet, and even
Turner was hailed as a 'proto-Abstract Expressionist'! It is doubtful if
the Art Nouveau revival of the mid-1960s would have occurred without Pop
Art, which rehabilitated exuberant colour and linear decoration. In
addition, Pop frequently derived from artifacts of the past rather than
from 'high art', and, as we shall see, the main impetus of Art Nouveau
was in the field of applied rather than pure art. Minimal Art, so
fashionable at the end of the 1960s, may have affected the revival of
interest in the Neoclassicism of David; and the reaction against that
Minimalism, a type of art too new to have been classified but which is
often termed 'funky', is clearly related to the revival of Symbolism:
both have an aesthetic of deliberate vulgarity.
One final factor must be considered in the revivals under consideration,
and that is the influence of drugs. The last twenty years have seen a
remarkable increase of drug-taking, especially of mind-expanding drugs
such as hashish and LSD, and particularly among the young. The qualities
of the drugs have affected the popular art of today, the strip cartoons,
the rock posters and underground magazines. Designers looking for a
style that offered a visual equivalent to their drug-induced experiences
found it in Art Nouveau and later in certain aspects of Symbolism. The
connection of these styles to a world-wide movement unconnected with art
led to a far wider dispersal of imagery than is common in most artistic
revivals. The Art Nouveau style became, for a period, standard right
across the Western world as a common language of the young. For once,
control over our view of the past slipped out of the hands of the
experts and dealers, and in this particular area they have not entirely
regained it.
As a result of this, and also because of the speed of the revival,
Symbolism, and to a lesser extent Art Nouveau, are still disputed
territory. Against the claims of their defenders, there are many experts
who dismiss certain of the painters illustrated here as artistically
absurd; but at present it is enough to describe their work and the
conditions in which it developed. If this introduction indulges in an
occasional value judgment, then the reader must check it against the
work for himself and make up his own mind.
Although Symbolism and Art Nouveau are directly related, they are not
the same thing. Indeed very few apologists agree on which artists can be
included under either heading. There is a school of thought that says
only French artists of the 1880s and 1890s can properly be called
'Symbolist', and another that excludes the English Arts and Crafts
movement from any discussion of Art Nouveau. Such art historical
nitpicking is a fruitless activity. Generic names given to movements
such as Symbolism, Cubism and so on usually appear after the movement is
well under way and are often no more than a convenient form of labelling.
Common sense and the use of the eyes show that in the last two decades
of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth there were
common ideas and visual styles circulating in Europe and America. These
styles were united only in their opposition to the main currents of art
at the time: academicism and Impressionism. To understand Symbolism and
Art Nouveau, we must therefore go back in time and see how these two
influences affected them. The two streams had their origins in two
painters: Ingres and Delacroix.
In Ingres we see for the first time the emergence of public eroticism,
which was to find its apotheosis in some Symbolist art. The paintings
were 'ideal', and thus catered to the view that high art should raise
human aspirations to a lofty plane; but their subject matter was not the
noble life of the Romans, as with David, but more often than not naked
women. The settings were usually exotic, frequently Middle Eastern,
which made them respectable and remote, but the technique was so
realistic as to make the smooth-skinned, soft-eyed beauties who
inhabited them easily available for fantasy. The new public, the
emergent bourgeoisie, in accepting Ingres had found the perfect method
for eating their cake and having it, for deriving erotic satisfaction
from the most respectable high art.
Delacroix, on the other hand, was not interested in how the mind ought
to conceive reality. He was far more interested in the eye. With
Delacroix we find for the first time the idea that the eye can act
independently of the mind, and that art can trace the actual process of
seeing. He was the first painter to examine the play of light across
objects in terms of its constituent parts. Instead of mixing colours on
the palette, he put down a far wider range of colours separately on to
the canvas and let the eye mix them there. He also began the process of
excluding black and grey as means to depict shadow, using complementary
colours instead: for the shadow of a red object, he would introduce
green, and so on. Compared to later painters such as Seurat, his
approach was still largely instinctive, but he was beginning the process
of formulating theories of how light and colour actually work.
From these two sources two ways of thinking about painting emerged and
as the century progressed gradually grew further and further apart. By
the 1850s the opposition of the two schools was quite clear. The style
based on Ingres had become the established 'official art' of the day,
seen in the huge Salons and much sought after by the rich patrons of the
time, while the line of development from Delacroix had gone underground.
That these two streams of artistic development should have diverged to
such a degree in terms of public context is something that is difficult
to understand from the twentieth-century viewpoint. It seems obvious to
us that the academic art of the nineteenth century had little if any
merit, and that Impressionism, deriving from Delacroix through Courbet,
was the natural line of artistic development; and it seems extraordinary
that paintings by Monet or Renoir should have been met with savage
hostility when we appreciate them for their charm and understatement.
But savaged they were, and to understand why will help considerably in
placing movements such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau in perspective.
Academic art takes as its canons of judgment the ideals of the past. It
is a static concept which holds that the summit of artistic achievement
has already been conquered and that new art must be judged by its
adherence to already established principles. Reference should not be to
the real world but to the history of culture, which is seen as being
unaffected by the trivialities of everyday life. The Impressionists were
seen as devaluing the status of art by negating this reference to the
culture of the past.
It is, though, an ironic truth that the moment when art claims to be
'above' contemporary life is always the moment when it becomes
controlled by it. A man could exploit his workers to make a personal
fortune and then spend it on 'high art' which made no reference to the
reality of his and their situation. The combination of cultural
respectability and high prices made the Salon virtually impregnable.
The Impressionists took as their criteria not those of culture but of
its great rival, science. The Impressionists were painters of this new
technological age: Monet painting steam from railway engines, Degas
making use of the camera, Renoir depicting the emergent middle class at
play; but the last thing the beneficiaries of this new materialism
wanted was to be reminded of it. They required culture.
It was not only the subject matter of the Impressionists that made them
unacceptable, but also their methods. They used their eyes like cameras
and noted down what they perceived. This neutral method of working led
to a discovery that science was not to reach until the early years of
the present century, and which was in no way acceptable to the
contemporary 'art patron'. This was that light, and by implication
everything else, was a continuous phenomenon. Light was seen to
penetrate everything equally and continuously. Furthermore, as Monet
demonstrated in front of Rouen Cathedral, it was not static. Form itself
changed with the change of light.
To deal with this observation, a new style of painting was necessary. If
the eye shows that forms are not separate from each other in reality, a
technique such as the smooth realism of academicism will be of no use.
Thus through the middle and end of the nineteenth century we can observe
the atomization of the brush-stroke, which gets smaller and more regular
until this approach reaches its logical conclusion in the dots of pure
unmixed colour which make up the paintings of Georges Seurat.
For Seurat, science was all. 'They see poetry in what I have done. No, I
apply my methods and that is all there is to it,' he said; and no more
rigorous statement of the scientific method has ever been made by an
artist. The Impressionists could rely on their eyes, but for Seurat this
was too haphazard. Unfortunately, the eye cannot see the atomic
structure of the world, so it is necessary to postulate a theory. So
Seurat in his moment of complete scientific neutrality found himself
taking art straight back into the realms of'idea'. Only his particular
sensibility enabled him to steer the narrow path between what he
observed and what he suspected he observed; and with his premature death
the stream of art that had started with Delacroix and led through the
Impressionists ran into a serious impasse which it could in no way have
avoided.
The problem for those Symbolist artists, such as Gauguin, who approached
their take-off point along the runway of Impressionism, was to find a
new subject matter without losing the lessons learned along the way. The
Impressionists had shown that a precise observation of nature led to
what is now known as a 'field theory', the idea that all things are part
of the field of observation of the observer and carry equal weight
within it. Furthermore, the observer himself is part of this field. The
Impressionists had not drawn this last conclusion because they were
committed to the idea of the impartial observer; but the implication
lurked in their work. The years from 1880 to 1910 were to see the first
attempt to deal with this implication.
Aware that to continue neutral observation of nature could only lead to
the pure scientism of Seurat, Symbolist painters turned in the only
direction available to them, inwards. The problem was how to depict the
world of the subconscious, of the archetype, without falling into an
academic rendering of myth. The answer as we shall see was to retain the
external world as subject matter, but to paint in a way that reflected
not what the dispassionate eye saw but what the observer felt. If one
accepts that the observer and the observed are part of the same whole,
then it becomes possible to describe one through the other. The feelings
of the artist could be shown by a reworking of observed reality.
This idea was both difficult to grasp and a huge step in a new
direction. Even in the work of hallucinatory painters such as Goya, we
feel we are being shown something that was as real to the artist as
everyday life, not a deliberate attempt to describe internal feelings
and states of consciousness by recreating the external world to mirror
the internal. It is not surprising that few if any of Gauguin's
followers were able to understand this point, and that, to begin with at
any rate, his influence was principally stylistic.
The first entirely successful painting in the new style, Gauguin's
Vision after the Sermon, is very much concerned with problems of
symbolic landscape and the relationship between the observer and the
observed. A group of Breton women have heard a sermon on the text of
Jacob wrestling with the Angel, and after the service apparently
participate in a communal vision. The problem for Gauguin was how to
show the nature of this vision. He could hardly show it naturalistically
because visions are not natural phenomena, so an Impressionist technique
would not do. Equally, an academic technique would be too clear-cut and
idealized to express the strong emotions involved.
Given the state of confusion in thinking about the question of showing
the internal world at that time, Gauguin's solution is astonishingly
precise and complete. Instead of painting a 'real' landscape, he paints
an emotional one. The figures of Jacob and the Angel inhabit a flat red
ground of considerable spatial ambiguity. The bright colour not only has
strong emotional associations but also pushes the figures forward,
contradicting their size, so that it becomes impossible to say exactly
where they are. The tree leaning across the picture strengthens this
effect by seeming to grow out of the picture plane into the space in
front of the surface. The women grouped along the bottom of the painting
have the effect of cutting the viewer off from the action, making it
clear that it is their vision that is being depicted and that it is
their state of mind that governs the emotional landscape. If one looks
at the women carefully, it will be seen that very few are looking
directly at the wrestling figures; in fact most appear to have their
eyes closed and to be directing their attention to a spot some distance
to the left of the apparition. This underlines the point that the
figures are part of their state of mind rather than independently
observed, and indeed the whole painting has a unity about it which
implies that it is impossible to separate the painting into subject and
object, observer and observed.
Gauguin was the first artist to attempt to live like his art. The
Impressionists were typical bourgeois Frenchmen who did not seek to be
involved in scandal or to live differently from the general public; the
academicians were of course successful members of high society. Gauguin,
on the other hand, after he had come to the point of view that his art
could be about his life, realized that this inexorably meant that his
life had to be about his art. He therefore, and at times his actions
seem oddly deliberate, set about creating a character for himself,
Gauguin the painter, the martyr, the iconoclast, the wild man of the
avant-garde. It was a role he relished.
It is in this determination not to separate art and life that we can see
the clearest connection between Gauguin and other Symbolist painters of
quite different styles. A glance through the illustrations of this
chapter will show that we are not considering a style but an attitude of
mind, which affected artists of differing training and aesthetic
intention.
Painters brought up in the academic tradition also faced a dilemma,
albeit a less sophisticated one than that faced by followers of
Impressionism. The academic style had by the 1870s run out of the little
steam that it ever had, and the classical subject matter was seen to
hold no more surprises. Painters who did not wish to enter the
matter-of-fact world of the Impressionists, and who also lacked the
vision and courage of a Gauguin, were forced to look further afield for
images which would still have some power and mystery. They were helped
in this by the rising interest in the occult, typified by the exotic
speculations of Eliphas Levi, and in Eastern thought, made fashionable
by the arrival in society of Madame Blavatsky. As one might expect it
was the cruder and more spectacular elements that appealed to most of
the artists. These interests coincided with a fashion for drug-taking,
usually laudanum or hashish, based upon the experiments of Baudelaire
and Gautier some years earlier.
It was an easy and attractive method of escaping the triviality of
everyday technological life. Gauguin who used his own mind for his
source material, needed only to 'become himself' to fulfil his role; the
occultists, not quite capable of comprehending the subtlety of Gauguin's
role and unable to find a ready-made occult society to live in, had to
create one of their own. The result was the Salon de la Rose+ Croix,
headed by one of the most preposterous figures in the history of art,
the self-styled Sar Peladan.
Peladan would have been a familiar enough figure in the 1970s, guru of a
small band of beaded and bearded followers publishing incomprehensible
underground magazines. But in the Paris of the 1880s, already reeling
under the onslaught of Wagner and anxious for anything that would break
the stifling monotony of life, he was hailed, by some, as a saviour. His
books, including an erotic novel of almost total obscurity entitled Le
Vice supreme, were avidly read, and young painters and writers flocked
to him. He was exactly what they needed, a man with a complete system
that did away with the boring business of having to find their own. All
you had to do was wear robes, take part in the odd minor rite and paint
the most cryptic and sensational pictures you could.
However the Salon de la Rose + Croix was not entirely ridiculous, in
spite of its leader. The idea on which its art was based had already
attracted many painters of talent, Gauguin included, and in the field of
literature Stephane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine and, a lesser figure, J. K.
Huysmans. The idea was that the function of art is not to define the
obvious but to evoke the indefinable. The feeling that art should
concern itself with ideas rather than with everyday life, but with ideas
that had a basis in the human imagination rather than in the moribund
dreams of the academy, was to be the strongest single impulse in the art
of the period: and its consequences have conditioned much of the
'difficulty' of twentieth-century art.
Clearly, the methods of Gauguin were too private and those of Peladan
too exotic to appeal to the public at large, so the time was soon ripe
for a more widely-based style to emerge which would allow the art-loving
public to feel that it could be involved without having to change its
way of life. It follows from this that the new style would not be of
painting or sculpture but of applied art, so that the public could
incorporate the idea into its life-style.
The relationship between a man and the picture he owns is essentially a
static one which requires time and patience to enter. How much more
satisfactory then actually to use the work of art, whether in the form
of printed material, books, china or glass. And so because many
Symbolists were concerned less with problems of picture-making than with
evolving a life-style, it was logical that the next development should
be concerned with the application of art to life. In this sense Art
Nouveau was both the natural child of Symbolism, in that it continued
the earlier movement's preoccupation with style, and a reaction against
it, in that it shifted the emphasis from the private to the public
world.
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Gauguin Paul
Vision after the Sermon
Bernard Emile
Breton Women on a
Wall
Denis Maurice
Breton Dance
Filiger
Charles
Breton Cow-herd
Serusier Paul
The Talisman
Grasset
Eugene
Spring
Levy-Dhurmer
Lucien
Our Lady of Penmarc'h
Puvis de Chavannes Pierre
St Genevieve
Watching over Paris
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Gauguin
and
Symbolism
Writers on Symbolism, faced with the daunting prospect of giving shape
to such a many-sided movement, are prone to the invention of massive
similes. Philippe Jullian, the movement's principal apologist, has
described it as a walk through a huge forest, with each glade and path
representing a different aspect of the movement, or, more convincingly,
as a visit to a museum, with various groups of rooms opening off each
other. My suggestion is that one might think about it as a huge and
somewhat exotic railway station. The lines converge towards it from all
parts of the art landscape, some of them terminating here, while others
pass through towards stations further down the line called
Expressionism, Abstraction and Surrealism. The two stations of Symbolism
and Art Nouveau are separate but so close as to be virtually joined.
Each platform is subtly different from the next. The
Gauguin platform is
flooded with sunlight, but not very crowded; the Rose + Croix platform
is in deep shadow and the seats on the train are covered in red velvet,
alchemical brews are offered in the buffet car and the price of the
tickets is your good taste. A few passengers are changing to this train
from the one standing on the academic platform, where everybody seems to
wear top hats and the Legion d'Honneur, although neither train ever
seems to go any great distance. Between them, the Pre-Raphaelite train
is pulling in from England, with an Arts and Crafts coach, booked
through Art Nouveau, stuck on the end. At the extreme north edge of the
station Munch sits gloomily by himself waiting for Strindberg, who, as
usual, is late.
Whatever metaphor one uses, the important thing is that it should
contain the idea of many separate and diverse strands if not coming
together, then at least running parallel for a period of time. Only in
this way will one avoid the problem of having to reconcile Symbolism's
many different styles or to chart a central course through its tangled
lines of development.
In describing the movement's artists and their interrelationships one
can start almost anywhere; but the work of Gauguin is as good a place to
begin as any, although it postdates some of the other work illustrated
here; his was the most consistent and subtle mind to be affected by the
Symbolist idea.
In 1883 Gauguin had given up his job as a bank clerk to become a
full-time artist, a decision that led eventually to the break-up of his
marriage two years later. He had been a Sunday painter until then, using
the Impressionist style to which he had been introduced by his friend
Camille Pissarro. Once he had made his decision, his commitment to art
was total, and he soon began to find that Impressionism was not a style
that could easily contain such a full-blooded approach. It was not until
1888, after a visit to Martinique which had given him a taste for bright
colour, that he found the solution to his problem. Aware that the
painting of everyday life was too tame an undertaking for a man of his
voracious appetite for experience, and unwilling to enter the moribund
world of classical myth that was practised in the Academy, Gauguin
deliberately turned his back on 'civilization' and set out to find the
most primitive area of France. For artists to look to the primitive is
now such a commonplace idea that it is easy to forget how radical it was
at that time. The Pre-Raphaelites in England had turned to the past for
inspiration, but because they found it more exquisitely beautiful than
the present. Gauguin was not interested in beauty as much as power. He
needed to find some culture where ideas were still felt emotionally
rather than played with intellectually, and he found it in Brittany, a
part of France that still retained a sense of Celtic otherness.
In Pont-Aven, on the Brittany coast, Gauguin found a temporary haven. He
took with him the young painter
Emile Bernard, who had originally
suggested that he look in that part of France for his answer. Between
them they evolved a new style of painting, which they called Synthesism.
A few years later, after the two painters had quarrelled (throughout his
life Gauguin was quite incapable of retaining friends for longer than
two or three years), Bernard insisted that it was he that had been the
first to paint in the new style and that Gauguin had merely copied him.
But whoever was the first to execute the first painting, there is little
doubt that it was Gauguin who provided the theoretical basis. Compared
to The Vision after the Sermon, Bernard's Brittany paintings are
decorative but unsophisticated. He grasped the visual essentials of the
new style, but its aesthetic and philosophical implications were beyond
him. Nevertheless, Gauguin obviously benefited from the younger
painter's presence. He enjoyed the cut and thrust of argument and was
always open to new ideas. It was this urge to test his theories against
other painters whom he admired that led him to Vincent van Gogh, with
ultimately tragic results. It is an indication of the accuracy of
Gauguin's eye that he, almost alone, understood the value of what
Van Gogh was doing.
The two wrote to each other frequently, Gauguin expounding his theories
with relish and exuberance and Van Gogh painfully trying to explain his
more personal methods. He was aware that he might be susceptible to
Gauguin's more powerful personality, and on one occasion let himself be
persuaded to paint a picture from his imagination rather than from life.
It was the nearest
Van Gogh got to Symbolism, and he quickly rejected
it. Although the Dutch painter's work has in common the use of 'real'
landscape distorted to reflect the emotions of the painter, it lacked
the other essential ingredient of Symbolism: the existence of an
independent Idea. Van Gogh's paintings are always direct descriptions,
while Gauguin's employ the idea of symbolic reference to something other
than the ostensible subject.
This can be seen in the portrait Gauguin painted of himself, to send to
Van Gogh, which is inscribed Les Miserable, a reference to Victor
Hugo's novel of an alienated man pursued relentlessly by society.
Gauguin's attitude to painting and to himself as a painter is revealed
in a letter written to Bernard describing the work: 'I believe it is one
of my best efforts, so abstract as to be totally incomprehensible....
First the head of a brigand, a Jean Valjean [the hero of Les
Miserables],
personifying a disreputable Impressionist painter likewise burdened
forever with the chains of the world. The drawing is altogether
peculiar, being complete abstraction. The eyes, the mouth, the nose are
like flowers on a Persian carpet, thus personifying the symbolic side.
The colour is remote from nature, imagine a confused collection of
pottery all twisted by the furnace! All the reds and violets streaked by
flames, like a furnace burning fiercely, radiating from the eyes, the
seat of the painter's mental struggles. The whole on a chrome background
sprinkled with childish nosegays. Chamber of a pure young girl. The
Impressionist is such a one, not yet sullied by the filthy kiss of the
Academie des Beaux-Arts.'
Gauguin referred to himself as an Impressionist because, although he was
reacting against Impressionism, there was still no word to describe his
style. None of the Impressionists themselves would have accepted such a
romantic and alienated description of the painter's role. The
description is also illuminating in showing how Gauguin thought about
symbols. Colours and visual emblems are used for their associative value
rather than as direct reference. Not many of us nowadays would associate
the background wallpaper with the 'chamber of a pure young girl', but we
would accept that it does have a certain innocence about it. Gauguin was
wise enough not to ram the symbols down our throats by making them too
specific, and it is this psychological subtlety that raises him above
most other practitioners of Symbolism.
As one might expect, a man of such force of personality and novelty of
thought had a considerable effect on those painters who were drawn to
him. These included
Emile Bernard,
Maurice Denis,
Paul Serusier and
Charles Filiger, all of whom passed through a 'Breton' period. Denis and Bernard
were attracted by the simple way of life in Brittany, and, using it as
subject matter, managed to simplify their own paintings. They took as
their method Gauguin's use of flat colour, and at times seem to venture
further into the area of decorative abstraction than their master. But
neither painter managed to incorporate the philosophical content that
was the basis of much of Gauguin's art. Where he succeeded in capturing
some of the intensity of the religious feeling native to that part of
France, they could only show the colourful patterns of Breton life.
Filiger, on the other hand, was more successful in portraying the piety
of the peasants. Intensely religious himself, suffering from guilt about
his homosexuality, he found it far easier than his more sophisticated
friends. But where they lacked Gauguin's psychological insight, Filiger
lacked his aesthetic boldness. Rather than invent a new method of
painting, Filiger preferred to refurbish the old ones. In this he bears
some similarity to the Pre-Raphaelites, in that he also returned to
pre-Renaissance sources for inspiration, in his case to Giotto and the
Sienese.
Gauguin's most direct disciple was
Paul Serusier, who was a theorist and
writer as well as a painter. Serusier's career shows that he was highly
susceptible to influences and picked up theories like blotting paper.
His writings are thus more important than his paintings, with one odd
exception. This is a work called The Talisman, painted on a cigar-box
and glowing with rich colour. It was executed in curious circumstances,
with Gauguin standing literally at the painter's right hand telling him
what to do. 'What colour is that tree?' Gauguin would ask. 'Yellow,'
replied Serusier. 'Then put down yellow.' So Serusier would apply yellow
straight from the tube. The result of this practical lesson he took back
with him to Paris and showed all his friends, slightly uncertain whether
he was showing them a work by himself or Gauguin. There seems to be no
doubt that Serusier actually painted the picture, but as he never again
achieved anything near its quality, the credit for the work should
really go to Gauguin, and is another indication of the extraordinary
power of the man.
With Gauguin's departure, his followers, as one might expect, were left
in disarray. Some stayed on in Brittany, and were forgotten, others
returned to Paris to find other umbrellas to shelter under, the Nabi
movement being the principal of these. This was a theoretically
high-minded ('Nabi' means prophet in Hebrew) but loose grouping of
artists including Maurice Denis, Serusier, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard
Vuillard and Paul Ranson, and as one might expect of such an
aesthetically diverse body, never produced a style unique to itself. The
carefully observed bourgeois interiors of Vuillard have little to do
with paintings such as April by
Maurice Denis.
April
is an interesting work because it shows how a painter like
Denis, whose sympathies, where subject matter was concerned,
were with the main body of the Symbolists but who had learned
too much from Gauguin to use their methods, embarked on a path
that led towards Art Nouveau. The strongest part of the painting
is the organization of the various arabesques that curve across
the surface, from the path to the vegetation in the foreground.
Denis has attempted to counter this fluidity with a straight
fence drawn halfway up the painting, but the effect is awkward.
The emotional content of the work is no more than a suggestion
of mood. The next generation followed illustrators and designers
such as
Eugene Grasset in retaining the decorative flow of
line while rejecting the Symbolist content.
Before we finally leave Brittany for the more civilized decadence of
Paris, one curious work demands attention. This is Our Lady of Penmarc'h
by
Levy-Dhurmer, an artist who painted in various Symbolist styles. The
almost faux-naif placing of the figures, and the disturbing degree of
realism he brings to the faces, make it a work that could have been
painted at any time in the last hundred years, and yet is quite unlike
anything else. That a minor painter can produce one work of such
startling freshness of vision is perhaps indicative of the character of
Symbolism; like its successor, Surrealism, it created the sort of
cultural climate where such flowers could be encouraged to bloom. The
same cannot be said for any of the more systematic approaches to art.
Levy-Dhurmer was able to experiment in many different Symbolist styles,
bringing to each an eclectic professionalism. His decorative panels of
marsh-birds show a quite different approach to paint from the Breton
picture, the shimmering veils of colour reminding one of Whistler or
even late Monet. If Wagner was the principal musical inspiration of
Symbolism, this work corresponds to Scriabin's chromatic landscapes.
Mean while Gauguin himself was pursuing his quest for the primitive to
its logical conclusion. In 1891, just as his stylistic innovations were
beginning to be absorbed and imitated on a wider scale, he left France
for the South Seas. He had understood the central problem of Symbolism,
which was that it was impossible to infuse a painting with mystery and
archetypal meaning if you are carrying around in your luggage the
traditions of French nineteenth-century painting, or, as a later poet
put it, "You cannot light a match on a crumbling wall,' and in spite of
the time he had spent in Brittany he still felt hemmed in by
civilization.
When he finally reached Tahiti,
Gauguin found that Western colonial
civilization had already destroyed most of the old culture of the
islands, and that the ease of living he had anticipated was not to be
found. It was only the role he had taken upon himself that kept him
going and enabled him to paint the paradise which he had expected to
find, and which, as he now realized, existed only in his imagination.
His method of painting remained essentially the same as it had been in
Brittany. The painting Manao Tupapau is typical of the period. The title
means 'Thinking of the Spirit of the Dead', and it shows a ghostly
figure appearing to a young girl. In his description of the work Gauguin
makes it clear that the apparition is in the imagination of the girl and
not a literal event.
Having made this point, he continues: 'She rests on a bed which is
draped with a blue pareu and a cloth of chrome yellow. The reddish
violet background is strewn with flowers resembling electric sparks and
a rather strange figure stands beside the bed. As the pareu plays such
an important part in a native woman's life, I use it as the bottom
sheet. The cloth has to be yellow both because the colour comes as a
surprise to the viewer and because it creates an illusion of a scene lit
by a lamp, thus rendering it unnecessary to simulate lamplight. The
background must seem a little frightening, for which reason the perfect
colour is violet. Thus the musical part of the picture is complete.'
Gauguin's use of the word 'musical' is interesting. Poets such as
Verlaine and Mallarme had pushed literature towards music, because they
saw that only by liberating it from the normal use of words could they
make it truly symbolic of a state of mind. Most of the Symbolist
painters, as we shall see, did not manage an equivalent liberation of
visual language. Gauguin on the other hand realized that by freeing
colour and form from their descriptive roles he could achieve a result
very similar to Symbolist verse. Instead of being pictures of symbols,
the pictures were symbols.
Gauguin's life in Tahiti went from bad to worse. He lived in a state of
poverty, and by the mid-1890s had contracted syphilis. His quarrels with
the other French residents had left him in near isolation, so he moved
to a more primitive island, Papeete, but found things no better there.
He even considered returning to France, but his friends there warned
that it was the exoticism of his subject matter that was bringing him
the occasional sale, and that a move to France would dry up even that
meagre market. In 1897 he attempted suicide, but, as always in practical
affairs, failed.
Just before the attempt on his life, he painted his largest painting,
which he saw as his testament. Entitled Where do we come from? What are
we? Where are we going?, the work is the masterpiece of Symbolism, if
the movement is considered from any sort of broad perspective. It is
designed to be read from right to left, starting with the two women in
the bottom right-hand corner, representing pure joy in living, moving
through the man picking fruit (the Tree of Knowledge) to the idol
representing man's pursuit of the unknown. All stages of human life are
shown, from the baby to the old man. The symbolism of the work is not
overt, as Gauguin had long known that to make a symbol too obvious
rendered it impotent, and so the painting can be considered on many
levels. It is a pessimistic work in that it offers no easy answer to the
questions it asks, and optimistic in its rich colour and form. One might
say that, just as Gauguin had anticipated twentieth-century field theory
in his earlier work, here he demonstrated the point that Wittgenstein
was to reach forty years later, that the question is the answer, that
the way the painting is realized is the solution to the problem posed.
| |
Paul Gauguin
Where do
we come from? What are
we?
Where are we going?
|
|
Gauguin was almost alone in his time in so successfully marrying content
and form. In this he was untypical of Symbolism, and nowadays it is the
discordance between the two elements that we recognize as being the most
consistent aspect of the style. Yet although Gauguin is isolated by his
genius, he had much in common with many other painters in the movement.
We have seen how he had a strong effect on the artists grouped round him
in Brittany, but it is also true that some painters had an influence on
him. Chief amongst these was
Puvis de Chavannes.
Puvis is probably the least sympathetic of the Symbolists to our modern
tastes. The uniform greyness of his compositions, the deliberate lack of
excitement and the unending classically draped maidens (if anyone ever
painted 'maidens' rather than girls, it was Puvis) make it difficult for
us to understand the revered position he held in the eyes of many
painters of the time. Artists as diverse as Gauguin, Seurat and Aristide
Maillol paid homage to him, and the Nabis adopted him as their
godfather.
But it is in the neutrality of the works, the very factor which makes
them difficult to appreciate, that Puvis's claim to fame lies. We are
accustomed in these days of Minimal art to an aesthetic of neutrality
and Hard-Edge painting has demonstrated the effect of treating all parts
of the canvas with the same level of intensity. In the 1870s, when Puvis
arrived at his mature style, such an aesthetic was revolutionary.
Academic painting was usually concerned with the attempted highlighting
of a single moment, and dramatic lighting would usually be employed,
rather as in a certain brand of Hollywood epic. The Impressionists had
been led to an 'all-over' aesthetic where each part of a painting
carried equal weight, but their discoveries could not be applied to
anything other than a small easel painting: they depended too much on
the painter being able to set down his canvas in front of the subject.
Puvis de Chavannes was not interested in imitating nature; his concern was with
large-scale decorative schemes. His solution was to use large
essentially flat areas of equal colour. This enabled him to create a
general mood rather than to illustrate a specific moment. Thus almost
all Puvis's paintings show figures in a state of rest or minimal
movement. St Genevieve, subject of a large decorative scheme for the
Pantheon, is seen standing on a balcony looking out over the city of
Paris, of which she is the patron saint. Where other painters might have
shown an incident in the life of the saint, Puvis shows the broader
aspect of her relationship with the city. One might call it abstract
figurative painting.
Occasionally Puvis would attempt a more emotionally charged scene as in
The Poor Fisherman, a painting much admired by Seurat who adopted its
tonality in many of his works. It makes no concessions whatever to the
pleasure principle: the tonality is uniformly grey, and there is no
story for us to grasp. Yet the painting is a disturbing one. J.K.
Huysmans, a frequent defender of Symbolism, wrote: 'It is dry, hard, and
as usual, of an affected naive stiffness. I shrug my shoulders in front
of this canvas, annoyed by this travesty of biblical grandeur achieved
by sacrificing colour to line. But despite this disgust which wells up
in me when I stand in front of the painting, I cannot help being drawn
to it when I am away from it.'
One can sympathize with Huysmans'
predicament. There is an awkwardness to the painting that makes
it strangely affecting. The sloping lines of the shore and mast
have the disconcerting effect of making the whole landscape seen
unstable and menacing, while the flat solidity of the paint
surface brings it forward to add a touch of claustrophobia. The
figures seem to be both immovable and in states of awkward
imbalance. It seems to be a very general painting, in that no
specific event is taking place, yet the girl in the background
is clearly in motion. All in all it is one of the most
disturbing paintings to come out of a movement whose intent
frequently was to disturb, but the effect is brought off without
the paraphernalia that characterizes so much Symbolist work.
Like his paintings, the influence of Puvis was general rather than
specific. One can see it in Seurat, who lies outside the scope of this
book; in Gauguin, who borrowed Puvis's use of flat paint, although with
a more ambitious palette; in Maurice Denis, whose April uses figures of
girls dressed in white as a method of ordering the composition, a device
surely learnt from Puvis. In the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler one can
detect an influence in the rather flat use of paint in large decorative
schemes. Hodler was known both for figure compositions, which are often
strongly reminiscent of Puvis, and for paintings of mountains. The Alps
of course had long been a favourite subject of painters, but they were
usually treated dramatically, with thin shafts of sunlight spotlighting
the mountains. Hodler used a more neutral technique, and tended to give
equal weight to all parts of the painting. The result is light and airy,
but without focus. As a result one realizes that the subject of the
painting is not the light effects in the mountains, as it usually was
with other painters, but the mountains themselves. The very neutrality
of the treatment imbues the subject with a metaphysical quality.
|
Moreau Gustaves
Oedipus and Ike Sphinx
Hercules and the Hydra of Lerna
|
Moreau and Redon
In complete antithesis to Puvis, the other great father figure of
Symbolism,
Gustaves
Moreau, plunged into rich and vibrant colour. His
career had started in the orthodox fashion, in the Salon, where he was
known for paintings such as Oedipus and Ike Sphinx, which combined Ingres' style of painting figures with a tonality not far removed from
Puvis. Like Puvis, Moreau wished to break way from the anecdotal aspect
of academicism, and so he tended to show his figures at the moment of
confrontation rather than action. In Hercules and the Hydra of Lerna,
the hero is shown facing the monster across a sea of bodies prior to
battle. The result is a tense stillness rare in academic painting. But
the preparatory sketch for the painting shows that Moreau's interests
were elsewhere. Already the paint is beginning to break up, and it is
becoming difficult to tell where one element stops and another starts.
In 1870, when his official career seemed set for success, Moreau
withdrew from public exhibition. 'He is a hermit who knows the train
timetables', said Degas, somewhat cattily, and it is true that Moreau
kept himself fully informed of all new developments in painting. His
open-mindedness made him the best teacher in Paris, and painters as
ultimately diverse as Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet and Georges Rouault
studied with him, all excepting him from their contempt for art teaching
at the time.
During the period of
his absence from the Salon, Moreau concentrated on watercolours and oil
sketches. Like Gauguin, he realized the necessity for a new visual
language, and in many ways his solution was even more startling than
Gauguin's and still remains controversial today. Instead of a flat and
systematic use of colour for composition, Moreau began to investigate
the paint surface itself. He was a great admirer of Baudelaire and
Mallarme, and wished to find a method of painting equivalent to their
rich and evocative use of metaphor. His painting style became looser,
the pigment being laid on thickly and allowed to create accidents of
colour. One could say with some justification that Moreau discovered the
principles of Abstract Expressionism, and that by the end of his life he
was painting what he called 'colour studies' that rival the best works
by Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline, albeit on a far smaller scale.
When he returned to showing his work in public, the change was obvious.
Where before the paint had been smooth and the details impeccably
painted, now the surface was thick and crusted with colour, brushmarks
clearly visible. The paintings caused a sensation, but surprisingly were
not vilified like those of the Impressionists, whose style was often
more restrained. The public could see that Moreau's work was still Art
by its subject matter: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, David Meditating,
and, endlessly, Salome. Salome had become, both for Moreau and for
writers such as Mallarme and Huysmans, the central symbol of the age.
Evil and innocent at the same time, exotic and sensual, alluring but
dangerous, she exemplified the Symbolist view of women, a view which had
become a literary cliche in Romantic poetry. Moreau returned to the
subject again and again, showing her dancing before Herod almost naked
in a dimly lit temple.
In 1886 Huysmans used Moreau's paintings of Salome to set the scene for
his novel A Rebours. His hero, a tedious aesthete named Des Esseintes,
surrounds himself with 'evocative works of art which would transport him
to some unfamiliar world, point out the way to new possibilities and
shake up his nervous system by means of erudite fancies, complicated
nightmares and suave and sinister visions'. Pride of place in his
collection of works by Moreau, Redon and Rodolphe Bresdin goes to
Moreau's Salome. Huysmans devotes considerable space to a description of
this work, and the following should give a flavour of his style:
'With a withdrawn, solemn, almost august expression on her face she
begins the lascivious dance which is to rouse the aged Herod's dormant
senses; her breasts rise and fall, the nipples hardening at the touch of
her whirling necklaces, the strings of diamonds glitter against her
moist flesh; her bracelets, her belts, her rings all spit out fiery
sparks; and across her triumphal robe, sewn with pearls and patterned
with silver, spangled with gold, the jewelled cuirass of which every
chain is a precious stone, seems to be ablaze with little snakes of
fire, swarming over the matt flesh, over the tea-rose skin, like
gorgeous insects with dazzling shards, mottled with carmine, spotted
with pale yellow, speckled with steel blue, striped with peacock green.'
This passage, and the use to which Huysmans puts such paintings in his
book, gives an idea of the essentially literary interpretation of art
common in Symbolist circles. Although Huysmans captures some of the
richness of the painting, he adds too many of this own theories and
prejudices to be an accurate critic, and his discovery of erotic
nightmares in the Salome seems to me ridiculous. Moreau's paintings,
however much they may try to locate the subconscious levels of myth —
and it is doubtful if the painter thought that way at all - remain
essentially charming and innocent. His figures evoke characters from a
medieval romance rather than chimaeras from the realms of sleep, and the
all-over use of colour in continuous arabesques piled one on top of each
other implies a positive energy-filled world rather than the negative
and decadent end of a culture that Huysmans describes.
Moreau's work remains paradoxical, and in the final analysis, compared
to artists such as Gauguin, unsatisfactory. The figures of nubile young
girls Moreau was so fond of never quite fit into the almost abstract
background; it is as if he had discovered the tool of abstraction and
then did not know what to do with it. His instincts as a painter were
those of an Impressionist, but his aspirations as a man of culture were
towards the Salon and the by then empty pool of myth. At his best, as in
the Salome paintings, the two parts of his art came together to produce
works of startling beauty. But his art is a useful touchstone; through
it we can see how painters such as Gauguin achieved a new synthesis
which was beyond Moreau, but we can also see how much closer he got to a
satisfactory solution than many of the painters of the Salon de la Rose+
Croix.
|
Redon Odilon
Portrait of
Gauguin
The Marsh
Flower, a Sad and Human Head
|
The other Symbolist artist with a claim to greatness was
Odilon Redon.
Like Moreau, he was something of a recluse, and although he was lionized
by younger painters after Gauguin's departure for Tahiti had left the
movement bereft of a hero, he always remained independent. His vision
was too private and personal to have any significant influence.
Redon was one of those fortunate men who make the right connections at
the right time. At the moment when he decided to devote his life to art
he met two men who were to have a profound influence on him. These were
a botanist, Clavand, whose particular speciality was microscopic work
and Rodolphe Bresdin, an important precursor of Symbolism in general.
Bresdin was a master printmaker in both engraving and lithography, whose
entire oeuvre is in black and white. It is indicative of his influence
on the younger artist that Redon did not touch colour for the first
twenty years of his working life. Bresdin's work combined an eye for
detail, and this influence, coupled with the even more curious sights he
saw down Clavand's microscope, started Redon on his course as an
imaginative artist.
Redon's oeuvre can be divided into two parts: the early black and white
works in the form either of drawings or lithographs, and the later work
using colour. For many years it was by the later work that he was
chiefly known, while recently the tendency has been to consider the
earlier work more important. The coloured paintings are often extremely
beautiful, reminiscent in their loose paint and treatment of figures of
the work of Moreau. Redon's Pandora shows the same free use of thick
paint and rich colour coupled with a carefully drawn figure, although
the nude is more classically derived than Moreau's medieval figures. The
use of flowers is also typical of Redon's later work, underlining his
continued interest in the natural world. The painting is charming and
airy, but lacks the punch of his early work.
Perhaps the most interesting of Redon's paintings is the Portrait of
Gauguin, done as a memorial (in 1904). The profile of the artist is
idealized and given a sumptuous setting in which flower forms rest on a
more abstract background. Redon had long been an admirer of Gauguin and
had corresponded frequently with him. Why he chose this particular form
for the portrait is made clearer by his own comment on Gauguin's work:
'Above all else I love his sumptuous, regal ceramics; it was here that
he created truly new art forms. I always compare them to flowers
discovered in a new place where every one seems to belong to a different
species, leaving the artists who follow the task of categorizing these
flowers into their respective families.' The portrait can then best be
read as a portrait of Gauguin the ceramicist, and its glowing colours do
remind one of the glazes on pottery.
But it is in his earlier black and white work that Redon's particular
genius emerges. He seems to have had an open line to his subconscious,
and his images entirely lack the literalism, the deliberate and rather
forced peversity, of much Symbolist art. Flowers with faces, spiders
with leering grins, skeletons that are somehow also trees; his subjects
come directly from the world of dreams, and his masterly technique
enables him to transfer them directly on to paper. Yet there is nothing
uncontrolled about his work; the effect is deliberate and preconceived.
Often a title is added which is like a small poem running parallel to
the visual impact: The eye floats towards infinity like some weird
balloon; The breath of wind which supports human beings also inhabits
the spheres; or His weak wings could not lift the animal in those black
spaces. Like all Symbolist poetry, these titles are not easy to
translate because the words are used for their evocative sound as much
as for their meaning. The last mentioned reads in French: L'aile
impuissante n'eleva point la bete en ces noires espaces.
Typical of his works in black and white is that entitled The Marsh
Flower, a Sad and Human Head. As so often in Redon's work, the
background is impenetrably dark. The head hanging from the plant seems
to create its own light and illuminates only a small area. There is no
explanation for the image, no literal meaning beyond the cryptic title.
Mallarme, who much admired the work, wrote to Redon about it: 'This head
of a dream, this flower of the swamp, reveals with a clarity which it
alone knows and which will never be talked about, all the tragic
fallacies of ordinary existence. I love too your caption which, although
created from a few words, correctly shows how far you penetrate into the
heart of your subject.'
Huysmans included work by Redon in the same context as work by Moreau;
and yet significantly, while he was able to write the purplest of
passages about Moreau's work, he found that Redon's works would not
really yield to verbal description. They are not too self-contained and
purely visual, and as such are not typical of much Symbolist work.
|
Bocklin Arnold
Isle of the Dead
Delville Jean
The Idol of
Perversity
Point Armand
The Siren
Seon Alexandre
The Chimaera's Despair
Frederic Leon
The
Lake — The Sleeping Water
Schwabe Carlos
Death
and the Gravedigger
|
The Rose + Croix painters
Gauguin,
Moreau and
Redon are all manifestly artists of originality and
quality, and like all great artists they pursued their own visions even
when it led them into isolation. The main body of Symbolist work was
neither obviously good nor original and tended to be executed to a
formula. In the case of artists discussed so far one feels that the
visual is inseparable from the aesthetic issues; while with most
Symbolists one feels that the idea came first and the vision followed.
The most notorious of Symbolist groups, the Salon de la Rose+ Croix,
took as their bible the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe said of poetry:
'Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience,
it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern
whatever either with Duty or with Truth.' When Poe refers to Taste he
does not necessarily mean the word in terms of good or bad taste: the
meaning is that a work of art should be judged by its aesthetic
qualities (including its power to stimulate the imagination) rather than
its moral content. The French Symbolists were much drawn to Poe's own
subject matter, with its haunted castles and necrophiliac heroes; and,
like Poe, they often showed woman as beautiful but corrupt, an
immaculate and pure skin enclosing a fetid swamp.
To Poe were added Wagner, with his technique of building up passages of
augmented triads until the nerves are at breaking point, Baudelaire,
Mallarme and Verlaine, who had begun to investigate these areas in
poetry. In painting they drew largely on the academic styles, although
artists such as
Arnold Bocklin influenced their choice of subject
matter. Bocklin's allegories of life and death were immensely popular,
and there was a time when an engraving of his Isle of the Dead was as de
rigueur in a fashionable house as a Hockney would be today. His subdued
tonality and the classical quality of his figures were a little insipid
for the painters of the Rose+ Croix, who were aiming at headier brews,
but there is little doubt that Bocklin prepared a good deal of the way.
The English Pre-Raphaelites also had their effect. We shall return to
them later; at the moment it is sufficient to point out the similarity
between the religious ecstasies depicted by Rossetti and the almost
orgasmic self-absorption of many figures in French Symbolist painting.
On both sides of the Channel artists were trying to find methods of
showing ideas rather than actual events.
Typical of the most extreme elements of the Rose + Croix is the work of
Jean Delville, whose paintings usually have a strong Satanic element.
Delville had a phenomenal drawing technique and an imagination quite
devoid of the usual restraints that an artist imposes on himself. His
work often approaches the erotic with a determination that even the most
liberated painters of today might balk at. A drawing, The Idol of
Perversity, of an almost naked figure seen from about the height of the
groin, is idealized in that the breasts have a tautness and fullness
unobservable in reality and the lips are unbelievably full; it is a
fantasy, and its modern equivalent in terms of style is Vargas, the
American pin-up artist, although his creations are far cosier.
Satan's Treasures, a large oil painting, also shows Delville's skill in
achieving a visual effect. The precision of the drawing is combined with
a red so strong that it creates a vibration across the centre of the
painting; it is like looking into a fire and half-seeing figures
writhing inside it. The arabesque of Satan's wings, if that is what they
are, is an effect as overstated as the quality of the red, and sweeps
the eye into a disturbing vortex. It is impossible to look at the work
without in some way being affected by it.
Writers on nineteenth-century art differ wildly in their opinions on the
quality of paintings such as this. It is obvious that in terms of the
central development of art over the last hundred years, this type of
Symbolism is quite unrelated to the standards we normally use to judge
art. We cannot say it is 'bad', as we might say that Andre Derain's
later work was 'bad' compared to his earlier work, because the
intentions of Symbolism are so different from those of the mainstream of
modern art. Delville was not interested in making points about the
objective nature of art; he wanted to arouse a strong reaction in the
viewer. Our own reactions will, of course, be very different from those
of the public of the 1890s, for we bring to the paintings an awareness
and enjoyment of the discrepancy between intention and effect, which
makes it even more difficult to make up our minds.
Many paintings of French Symbolism strike us as absurd, or at least
incongruous. Both
Point's
The Siren and
Seon's
The Chimaera's Despair
combine a sophisticated approach to colour and brushwork with a
ridiculous central figure. In itself, Seon's painting is skilfully
composed, with the strong vertical of the cliff giving a curiously
unstable effect to the painting, while the cold colours create an
intense emotional landscape. Unfortunately the figure of the Chimaera
presents more difficult problems which Seon could not resolve. Poets of
the time repeatedly referred to Chimaeras, but they could allow the
unsettling poetry of the word itself to carry their medium. But the
painter has to show what the poet has only to describe, and this desire
to follow the poets into essentially literary fields was the undoing of
many a Symbolist masterpiece. Seon's Chimaera seems to have strayed out
of a literary tea party, and looks more as if she is complaining about
the cucumber sandwiches than singing a universal song of archetypal
despair.
But Symbolism was nothing if not ambitious, and the artists of the
movement were continuously looking for that one stunning image, a
metaphor that would illuminate the human condition.
Leon Frederic 's
The
Lake — The Sleeping Water comes very close to bringing off an unlikely
effect. At first sight the image seems merely sentimental; but the more
it is examined the more disturbing it becomes. The sleeping children are
drawn with great accuracy of observation, and the swans really seem to
be floating over them. The lack of central focus makes the painting seem
specific and general at the same time.
Absolute self-confidence was a necessary aspect of the movement in its
more public forms such as the Rose + Croix. The doubt and hesitation one
finds so often in the work of really great artists had no place in such
a deliberate assault on conventional life in the name of hidden truth.
It was an inevitable part of the aesthetic of this area of Symbolism
that the paintings should exhibit no trace of the self-searchings that
appear in the work of Gauguin or even Moreau. This led to a quality
which we might call 'synthetic', in the way that Miss World is a
'synthetic' rather than a real woman.'The product must show no evidence
of hard work or struggle; it must seem effortless and as if it arrived
complete.
This aspect of Symbolism is at its clearest in the more religiously
inclined painters. Satanism and perversity provided one kind of thrill
for painters like Delville, but the sicklier aspects of Roman
Catholicism offered images of equal emotional weight with the added
benefit conferred on sales by respectable sentimentality.
Carlos Schwabe
was one artist associated with the Rose+ Croix who made this area his
speciality. His paintings were executed with meticulous regard to
detail, and one can often detect the influence of the English
Pre-Raphaelites in the early Renaissance quality of his work. His
painting of detail is usually far superior to the over-all ordering of
the work, as can be seen in the Virgin of the Lilies, where the lilies
are beautifully observed and then used in a compositional device that
looks more like a celestial escalator than anything else.
The literalness
of the image destroys it. The same can be said of his
Death and the Gravedigger. The painting very nearly
comes off; the use of vertically hanging branches of willow
skilfully expresses the mood of the picture, the colour of the
angel is finely judged, and the curve of her wings around the
old man is an oddly touching idea. But then Schwabe has to show
the reaction of the gravedigger, a real man suddenly confronted
with an unreal situation, and the picture breaks down. His
reaction is too unsubtle, too much in the traditions of Grand
Guignol to carry conviction, and now it is a different type of
pleasure that takes over, pleasure in the discrepancy between
the intention and the realization, a 'camp' pleasure. Such is
the fate of many Symbolist paintings.
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