As the spokesman of innovative aesthetic theory, Oscar Wilde (1854— 1900)
deserves our further attention. He personified the figure of the dandy
à la Robert de Montesquiou though with greater wit and
more manifest humanity. His comedies, laced with delightful paradoxes,
deride the prejudices and snobbism of the Victorian society he knew so
well. His essays present his conception of art in a certain whimsical
disorder. As a public figure he was the embodiment of the fin de
siecle aesthete. It is thought that Bunthorne, in Gilbert and
Sullivan's Patience (1881), was originally conceived as a
caricature of
Rossetti, but the British public assumed it was a portrait
of Wilde, who had already made himself famous at the age of twenty-seven
by his inspired posturing. Bunthorne is a highly affected fellow who
readily acknowledges in private that he has no use for the aesthetic
oddities he publicly pretends to enjoy. The satire was amusing and
reassured a public disconcerted by the aesthetic
preferences of Wilde or of artists like
Rossetti and
Whistler. The
aphorism cited above comes early in Wilde's novel The Picture of
Dorian Gray. It is the last of a scries that deserves to be
quoted in full:
"All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
(...) All art is quite useless."
Some of these
aphorisms are rather modern in tone, though the portentous notion of a
hidden "peril" has dated badly. Wilde gives concise expression to some
essential truths about art: art is indeed both surface and symbol, both
delectation and communication, an intimate fusion of what is represented
and of the means by which it is represented. It is at once an "aesthetic
arrangement", in
Whistler's famous phrase, and an evocation of an aspect
of experience which cannot be signified by any other means.
Thomas Cole (1801-1848) may be described as a precursor of Symbolist art in the
same sense as
Goya,
Fuseli or
Blake. British by birth, he made his
career in the United States, to where his parents emigrated when he was
eighteen. His allegorical work, an outgrowth of the Romantic spirit,
possesses irresistible charm. The sequence of paintings entitled The
Voyage of Life
is reminiscent of allegories of human life in the English tradition of
edifying literature, of which Pilgrim's Progress is perhaps the most
perfect example. By contrast, The Titan's Goblet, which dominates a vast
landscape, is born of the same imaginative vein as
Goya's Panic. Partly
because
Cole
died relatively young, at 47, the more imaginative part of
his œuvre had little influence on the next generation of artists, though
he did contribute to the founding of the Hudson River School of
landscape painting.
His The Voyage of Life and The Course
of Empire have a clearly didactic purpose, yet
Cole's
treatment possesses a colouristic charm enhanced by his vision of
wide-open spaces. This poetic reverie delighted his public, which also
found comfort in the idea that it was being instructed and elevated.
|
|
Thomas Cole
The Voyage of Life: Youth
|
|
Though
there had always been a taste for imaginative painting in Protestant
America, the country was not receptive to the Symbolist aesthetic.
Decadence had emerged in Europe in opposition to the scientific world
view and the religion of progress; it had little appeal in the New
World, where these were founding tenets. Like the Romans confronted with
the art of the Greeks, the popular classes in America, with their
pragmatic outlook and fundamentalist religion, were suspicious of any
notion that artists had access to a "superior reality". The populist and
mercantile mentality, so pervasive in the United States, inclined to see
in a taste for the arts a foolish affectation.
The poet W. H. Auden went so far as to suggest that, when Oscar Wilde was
sentenced to jail in 1895 for homosexuality, it reinforced the
assumption, already well entrenched in the United States, that art and
poetry were pastimes attractive only to women and effeminates. Wilde had
enjoyed tremendous success with the media during a lecture tour in the
United States when he was only twenty-seven. On that occasion he had
displayed great virtuosity in provocation, and the public he had
successfully shocked felt thoroughly vindicated by his condemnation
fourteen years later.
The
dominant trend in America was a form of realism whose romantic overtones
were particularly prominent in the representation of nature. Symbolist
works were relatively rare, but occasionally appeared in the production
of artists practising other genres. Most of those today classified as
Symbolists received their artistic training in Europe. This was the case
with John White Alexander (1866-1915), and
Elihu Vedder (1836-1923).
Vedder came to fame through his illustrations for the Ru-baiyat
of Omar Khayyam. He was taught the rudiments of his art by a
genre painter, Т.Н. Matteson, and went to Europe for the first time in
1856. He never considered studying in England: it was Paris and above
all Florence that attracted him. In 1867 he settled in Rome, though he
frequently returned to the United States. He also painted landscapes in
a romantic vein, but we are concerned here with his fantastical or
allegorical works such as The Cup of Death.
A self-taught painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) also came to
Europe, traversing the Atlantic four times between 1877 and 1896. In the
1880s he began to treat sombre, expressive subjects drawn from the
operas of Wagner (Siegfried and The Flying Dutchman,
and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. His Death on a Pale
Horse is an expressive conjunction of the imaginary and the real;
the apocalyptic figure of Death is shown galloping around an ordinary
racecourse.
Arthur Bowen Davies (1862-1928) played a historic role in American art: as
President of the Society of Independent Artists, he contributed to the organisation of the famous Armory Show, which brought the American
public into contact with modern art. Critics of the day considered him a
Romantic artist, but the label is somewhat uninformative. A work like The Unicorns (1906) stands at the crossroads between
Romanticism, Symbolism, and even Surrealism.
James
Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) went to Europe when his father, an
engineer, was put in charge of the construction of a railway between
Moscow and Saint Petersburg. He studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris,
where his classmates included
Fantin-Latour and
Alphonse
Legros.
Together they created the Society of Three (Societe des Trois), an
amiable fiction which allowed Whistler, who settled in London, to
maintain his contacts with artistic and literary circles in Paris; his
friend Stéphane Mallarme translated his famous Ten O'Clock
Lecture into French.
Whistler was no Symbolist in his subject
matter, though he had in common with the Symbolists a resolve to
dissociate art from the utilitarian. This, of course, he shared with
Wilde. In 1885, six years before Wilde published the views quoted above,
Whistler declared: "Art is a goddess of dainty thought - reticent of
habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others.
She is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only - having
no desire to teach." (Ten O'Clock Lecture).
|
|
| |
|
Arthur Bowen Davies
(see collection)
|
|
Arthur Bowen Davies
Ten Nudes
by a Waterfall |
|
|
|
Alphonse
Legros
(b Dijon, 8 May 1837; d Watford, 8 Dec 1911).
British
etcher, painter, sculptor and teacher of French birth. He is said to
have been apprenticed at the age of 11 to a sign-painter, at which time
he may also have attended classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon.
He was employed as assistant on a decorative scheme in Lyon Cathedral
before moving in 1851 to Paris, where he worked initially for the
theatre decorator C. A. Cambon (1802–75). He soon became a pupil of
Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, whose methodical instruction and liberality
in fostering individual talent proved of lasting benefit to Legros. In
1855 he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, attending
irregularly until 1857. During this period Legros had a taste for early
Netherlandish art and for French Romanticism, which was later superseded
by his admiration for Claude, Poussin and Michelangelo. However, his
devotion to Holbein proved constant and was apparent as early as his
first Salon painting, Portrait of the Artist’s Father (1857;
Tours, Mus. B.-A.).
|
|
| |
|
Alphonse
Legros
Calvary |
|
|
|
Alphonse
Legros
Communion |
|
|
|
Alphonse
Legros
A May Service for Young Women |
|
|
|
Alphonse
Legros
The Confession |
|
|
|
