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His influence is perceptible in the work and theories of various
artists. Its first theoretical formulation was given by
Maurice
Denis,
when, in the late 1880s, he defined a painting as "a flat surface
covered with colours assembled in a certain order". He had taken the
idea from his friend
Paul Serusier,
who had it from
Paul
Gauguin; he, in
his turn, owed it (as we shall see) to the young
Emile Bernard.
Symbolism, thus defined, opens the way to abstraction, as
Serusier's
painting The Talisman first showed. Indeed, the major pioneers of
abstraction,
Kandinsky,
Malevich,
Kupka
and
Mondrian all began their careers as Symbolist painters.
Criticism and art history have, on occasion, bestowed a
high status on the precursors of a movement later deemed significant.
This is a notion that should be handled with the utmost care; it
suggests that art progresses in the same way as science, one discovery
becoming possible thanks to an earlier one, whose sole importance was
its pioneering role. Unlike science, art does not "progress". It adapts
to changing social relationships and modes of production and registers
transformations in everyday life and in the representation of the world.
As the circumstances of life and the way it is perceived change, so old
forms come to seem irrelevant and new forms are needed. An artist does
not make a "discovery" in the sense that scientists do. But he does
discover a "means". Thanks to this "means", he can avoid repeating the
familiar forms derived from an obsolete conception of the world; he can
once more touch upon the heart of the matter.
The eighth of nine children of a poor
insurance salesman, Carriere was brought up in Strasbourg, where he received his initial
training in art at the Ecole Municipale de Dessin as part of his apprenticeship in
commercial lithography. In 1868, while briefly employed as a lithographer, he visited
Paris and was so inspired by the paintings of
Rubens in the Louvre that he resolved to
become an artist. His studies under
Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts were
interrupted by the FrancoPrussian War (187071), during which he was taken
prisoner. In 18723 he worked in the studio of Jules Cheret. In 1878 he participated
in the Salon for the first time, but his work went unnoticed. The following year he ended
his studies under
Cabanel, married and moved briefly to London where he saw and admired
the works of
Turner. Success eluded him for a number of years after he returned to Paris
and he was forced to find occasional employment, usually with printers, until as late as
1889, to support his growing family. Between 1880 and 1885 his brother Ernest (18581908),
a ceramicist, arranged part-time work for him at the Sèvres porcelain factory. There he
met
Auguste Rodin
who
became and remained an extremely close friend.
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Paul Serusier.
The Talisman.
1888
Musee
d'Orsay, Paris |
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Jeanne Jacquemin
(see collection)
The Painful and Glorious Clown |
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Carriere Eugene
(see collection) |
Eugene Carriere
La Peinture |
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Eugene Carriere
The
Contemplator |
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Thus
Emile Bernard
understood the expressive power of colour treated as a unified plane
(with greater intensity than in
Puvis de Chavannes). But
Bernard communicated
his intuition to
Paul
Gauguin,
and it was
Gauguin
who took it to its logical conclusion and to its highest pitch of
intensity. Symbolism thus tends to include all those artists who were
not primarily concerned with a so-called "realistic" representation of
the world. It also includes artists such as the Belgians
Jean Delville and
Leon Frederic, the
occult idealism of whose subject matter clearly designates them as
Symbolist despite their overtly academic style. But the most convincing
Symbolists are those who, like
Gustaves
Moreau, may be classified as such for both
the form and content of their work.
Moreau's manner was initially academic, but underwent a slow
transformation to encompass surprising audacities of impasto and colour.
This may not prevent us from thinking it mannered and precious.
Odilon Redon
aptly defined it as "the art of a bachelor". Yet it is worth
noting that, during the few years late in his life when he taught at the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts,
Moreau's pupils included
Georges
Rouault,
Henri Matisse
and
Albert Marquet.
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Albert Marquet.
Andre
Rouveyre.
1904
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His work is narrative; he was
occasionally driven to deny, in tones of disabused weariness, that he
was a "literary" artist. But biblical or mythological subjects do not,
in themselves, make a painting Symbolist.
Moreau fits into this category
because he chose subjects which gave expression to the fantasies - one
might almost say psychodrama - of sexual roles and identity that characterise his age. He did this by depicting figures like Salome, but
also by the surprising and almost invariable androgyny of his male
subjects.
Symbolism thus touched upon the fantasies of the age as it did
upon the realm of dreams, though the latter was by no means its
exclusive preserve, dreams having been a favourite subject of the
Romantics. But the Symbolist dream had lost the confident elan of Romanticism; it had become more enigmatic, more perverse.
The most striking characteristic of Symbolist artists is their
withdrawal into the realm of the imagination. It is the solitude of the
dreamer, of one who, marooned on a desert island, tells stories to
himself. It is the solipsistic solitude of one who is sure of nothing
outside himself. Certain artists, like
Fernand Khnopff, made a virtue of
their solipsism. Others, like
Redon, sought a technique capable of
rendering the elusive, enigmatic qualities of experience.
It follows that our subject can be divided into a number of more or less
overlapping circles. A significant part of Symbolist art is tinged with
a religiosity of a Catholic, syncretic or esoteric kind. Symbolism also
produced a certain mystique of art for art's sake, in the spirit of
James Abbott McNeill Whistler or Stephane
Mallarme. Though these trends are, in theory, easy to distinguish, they
tended in practice to mingle; the artists' needs were not so various as
their styles, and their works frequently hung side by side in the
salons. Finally, certain artists were Symbolists only for a certain
period, while others remained so throughout their lives.
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French sculptor Claudel is best known for her love affair with
fellow artist
Auguste Rodin, the basis for a late '80s French
film starring Gerard Depardieu and Isabelle Adjani.
Ayral-Clause, a professor of French and the humanities at
California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo,
cites original documents and other research to argue that
although
Rodin
is usually depicted as having abandoned a wimpy
Camille, in fact Camille was so feisty and in-your-face (a
necessity for a woman artist in a man's world) that he wound up
running for cover to escape her "insults" once their
15-year-long affair was over. Camille went mad and spent her
last 30 years in an asylum. Ayral-Clause's account of these
events is clear, although sometimes marred by an artificial
prose style with odd syntax: "Events that are denied at the time
they occur are often brought back to life through letters or
journals discovered later on." Art history students may be
disappointed by the generalized comments about Claudel's
artworks themselves (shown, along with photos, in 69 b&w
illustrations), since the woman, rather than the artist, is in
the limelight in this biography. By contrast, Ayral-Clause fully
accepts
Rodin as a great artist and great man, reserving
criticism for Camille's brother,
the far-right-wing poet and diplomat Paul Claudel, who
ensured she was buried in a common grave for paupers despite
the family's great wealth.
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Camille Claudel
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Camille Claudel
born Dec. 8, 1864,
Villeneuve-sur-Fère, Fr.
died Oct. 19, 1943, Montdevergues asylum, Montfavet, near Avignon
French sculptor of whose work little remains and who for many years
was best known as the mistress and muse of Auguste Rodin. She was
also the sister of Paul Claudel, whose journals and memoirs provide
much of the scant information available on his sister's life.
Between the ages of about 5 and 12, Camille Claudel was taught by
the Sisters of Christian Doctrine. When the family moved to
Nogent-sur-Seine, the educationof the Claudel children was continued
by atutor. Camille had little formal education from that point on,
but she read widely in her father's well-stocked library. By her
teenage years she was already a remarkably gifted sculptor, and her
abilities were recognized by other artists of the time. When in 1881
her father was once again transferred, he moved his family to Paris.
There Camille entered the Colarossi Academy (now the Grande
Chaumière) and met a lifelong friend, Jessie Lipscomb (later
Elborne). Her first extant works are from this period.
Claudel and Rodin probably first met in 1883. Shortly thereafter she
became his student, collaborator, model, and mistress. While
continuing to work on her own pieces, she is believed to have
contributed whole figures and parts of figures to Rodin's projects
of that period, particularly to The Gates of Hell. She continued to
live at home until 1888, when she moved to her own quarters near
Rodin's studio at La Folie Neubourg. By 1892 her relationship with
Rodin had begun to crumble, and by 1893 she was both living and
working alone, though she continued to communicate with him until
1898. From this point on she worked ceaselessly, impoverished and
increasingly reclusive. She continued to exhibit at recognized
salons (the Salon d'Automne, the Salondes Indépendents) and at the
Bing and Eugène Blot galleries,though just as often she would
utterly destroy every piece ofwork in her studio. She became
obsessed with Rodin's injustice to her and began to feel persecuted
by him and his “gang.” Alienated from most human society, living at
a great distance from Paul—the one family member close to her—her
condition overwhelmed her. On March 10, 1913, she was committed by
force to an asylum at Ville-Évrard. In September 1914 she was
transferred to the asylum of Montdevergues, where she remained until
her death.
(Encyclopedia Britannica)
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Camille
Claudel
The God Has Flown,
or
The Imploring Woman.
1894-1905
Musee Rodin, Paris |
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Camille
Claudel
The
Age of Maturity.
Destiny, or Life.
1899-1913
Musee d'Orsay, Paris |
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Rodin
Auguste Rodin, who was born in Paris in 1840 and died in Meudon in
1917, was similar in age to many of the Impressionists. He was
attracted and inspired by all the proposals and formal
suggestions that came from their movement, but also by the newly
emerging "ideiste" art - painting from the imagination. A highly
gifted artist, who developed great skill as a sculptor. Rodin began
his career under the sculptor Carrier Belleuse, working on the
decoration of the Commercial Exchange in Brussels. His liberation
from academism came through his study of Michelangelo on a trip to
Italy in 1875. He was impressed by the epic nature of nude muscular
figures and by the technique of "incompleteness". The creation of
The Gates of Hell in 1880 revealed Rodin's search for a new, vital,
and impassioned monumentality, with a Dionysian rhythm, in which the
core of the sculpture seems to explode into the surrounding space
and the figures appear to dissolve in the luminosity of the whole.
Rodin was mainly interested in the subject of movement.
Although he was not a great theorist, it is clear from his thoughts
on sculpture, collected by his students and his secretary, the poet
Rainer Maria Rilke, that he believed in the need to overcome "closed
form" and to "transfer inner feelings to muscular movements; give
movement to express life". "The expression of life," he said, "can
never be halted or frozen if it is to conserve the infinite
flexibility of reality." The statues and groups that he created,
both the famous monumental examples and smaller works such as the
sensitive nude ballerina figures (Iris, Messenger of the Gods,
1890-91), are rarely calm and restful, even when action is not
crucial. Rodin was accused by many artists and critics - including
Matisse, who visited him in 1906 and sought his advice in the medium
- of neglecting the whole, of not achieving a compositional or
sculptural synthesis, but rather of proceeding with an assembly of
separate details, albeit each realized with the inspiration of
genius. However, he continued with his research into the
many-faceted and ever-changing profiles of an object, pursuing the
organic vitality that seemed to animate the sculpture from within. A
great modeller rather than a sculptor, Rodin found it very difficult
to work in stone, so the job of translating his extraordinary
inventions into marble was left to the skilful collaborators whom he
had gathered around him: Emile-Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929), who
worked as an assistant in his studio from 1893 to 1908, and Charles
Despiau (1874-1946). Together with
Aristide
Maillol (1861-1944),
they continued the debate into this new form of sculpture, by now
free from academic mannerism and devoted to recapturing essential
formal values derived from the relationships between mass and light
and filled and empty space, and from the rhvthmic articulation of
planes and lines. For
Maillol this renewal process ranged from a
return to the classical ideal forward to the neo-Hellenic plastic
arts (he lived in Greece for a year and was inspired by the ancient
statues). In contrast, Bourdelle, boosted by his Christian faith,
reverted to medieval-inspired sculpture of simplified, robust, and
heroic figures.
THE GREAT WORKS OF RODIN
Rodin's first sculptural assignment was the ornamental doors (The
Gates of Hell) for the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, commissioned by the
Ministry of Fine Arts in 1880. The narrative scenes, taken from
Dante's Divine Comedy and from Ovid's Metamorphoses, comprised more
than 186 figures in high and low relief, their dramatic passion
reflected in the pained faces and exaggerated movements. The doors
were never completed and were broken up into smaller sections; Bourdelle then reassembled them according to Rodin's elaborate
scheme, producing four examples to be found today in museums in
Paris, Zurich, Philadelphia, and Tokyo. Various motifs were taken by
Rodin and enlarged in later elaborations — The Three Shadows (1880),
The Kiss (1886), and The Thinker (1888) - the last being an
enigmatic and symbolic meditation on human destiny. From 1884 to
1886 Rodin worked on the Burghers of Calais group, erected later in
1895. This was a realistic depiction of the six French citizens who
during the Hundred Years' War offered to give their lives to King
Edward III if he were to raise the siege on their, by then,
destitute city. When Rodin was commissioned in 1885 to sculpt the
funerary monument of Victor Hugo, destined for the Pantheon, he
planned a group featuring the poet naked and pensive, accompanied by
gesticulating Muses. This interpretation, not being sufficiently
conventional, was rejected, and the work was not finished (albeit in
an altered form) until 1909. when it was placed in the gardens of
the Palais Royal. A similar fate befell the monument to Balzac,
commissioned in 1883 by the Societe des Gens de Lettres and rejected
by them following a discussion over its excessively free technique
and its originality, deemed too superficial and inadequate in its
portrayal of the subject. Cast in bronze after Rodin's death, it v.
as placed in the Boulevard Raspail in 1939.
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Rodin Auguste
(see collection)
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Auguste-Rene Rodin
Eternal Idol
1889
Musee Rodin, Paris |
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