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Developments in the 19th Century
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Art Styles
in 19th century -
Art Map
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SYMBOLISM
in
German -
speaking
Countries and
Scandinavia
(Between Romanticism and Expressionism)
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German - speaking
Countries and
Scandinavia
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A day will
come when the memory of a tremendous event will attach itself to my
name - the memory of a crisis unprecedented in the history of the
earth, of the most profound collision of consciences, of a decree
issued against everything that had been believed, required and
hallowed until our time...
Friedrich Nietzsche
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In the
German-speaking world, the "crisis unprecedented in the history of the
earth" - the great social and cultural debate which Symbolist art so
closely echoes - produced three giant protagonists: Richard Wagner
(1813-1883), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and King Ludwig II of
Bavaria (1845-1886). Wagner and Nietzsche cast an imposing shadow over
subsequent generations. Not content with transforming harmony, vocal
style and the staging of opera, Wagner strove, through the hypnotic
music of his tetralogy, to express a fundamental aspect of the crisis
then shaking the mytho-cultural system of the West. The great operatic
cycle based on the Nibelungen legend relates (in a form which was later
to influence cinema) the mythical events leading to the twilight of the
Nordic gods.
More than any other philosopher of his time, Nietzsche (who admired and
defended Wagner before launching a violent polemic against him) was
keenly aware of the consequences that followed from the collapse of
traditional structures of thought and values. "I am, quite as much as
Wagner," he declared, "a child of my time, I mean a decadent; the only
difference is that I have been aware of this and have resisted it with
all my power."
A man of delicate constitution, he was emotionally and psychologically
vulnerable and subject to a variety of ills: eye-trouble, intestinal
disorders and frequent migraines. He lived through this ordeal as might
a tragic hero - until the ultimate collapse of his intellect. He saw it
as his role in life to formulate the conditions of an existence worthy
of man in a world which had survived its gods.
As we have seen, the strong sense of decadence in Europe at this time
coincided with the zenith of European power. Nietzsche, with his
impassioned and wilful sensibility, realized that the old ideas and
philosophical categories had been irrevocably damaged by the theoretical
and scientific criticism of the previous two centuries and their allies,
the scientific discoveries and economic and social mutations of the day.
They had therefore to be swept aside to make room for the new; this was
his undertaking.
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Wagner is the preeminent Symbolist composer; others include Gustav
Mahler (1860-1911), and Claude Debussy - who was in no sense the
"Impressionist" he has often been thought. Nietzsche remains the only
Symbolist philosopher, above all in the poetic and image-laden language of
his Zarathustra; the mordant philosopher of a theory of decay and
rebirth. This makes it particularly apposite to quote his evaluation of
the spiritual climate prevailing in Germany, one which, in many parts of
the country, made Symbolism's uneasy religiosity extremely alien. "In
Germany," he writes, "among those who live outside religion today, I
find (...) a majority of men in whom the habit of work has, from
generation to generation, destroyed the religious instincts." And he
goes on - he, the uncompromising atheist - to speak with bitter irony of
the naivete of the scientist of his day who believes in his own
superiority and "instinctively regards the religious man as an inferior
individual". Here, in a nutshell, is the whole issue of Symbolism - and
an explanation of why it and the problematic that it expresses have been
an object of repression throughout the the 20th century.
As to King Ludwig of Bavaria, Wagner's patron, he embodied in tragic
form the spirit of the Symbolist age. For, like des Esseintes, he lived
withdrawn into a world of dreams. Unlike des Esseintes, he had at his
disposal the budget of a state and could satisfy his whims on an
incomparably grander scale. Royal palaces, which had in the past been in
some degree functional, became no more than a stage set on which his
delusions were enacted. No necessity of state, no symbolism of power
commanded the construction of Neuschwanstein. It was as though the king,
sensing the divorce between what he was supposed to embody and the
actual drift of the world, resolved the contradiction by ignoring
reality. And so his palaces survive, freighted with fantasy and
unreality, as perfect examples of "decadent" architecture.
Men and ideas moved about Germany in relative freedom. Emperor William
II had his own, absurdly narrow views on art, and sought to impose them;
yet from Bern and Vienna to Oslo and Stockholm, new ideas in art were
propagated and discussed. The Copenhagen Academy might close down a
Gauguin exhibition in 1885, the Berlin Academy an exhibition of
paintings by Munch in 1892, but change had begun. It took institutional
form in the founding of the Sezession in Munich (1892), Vienna (1897)
and Berlin (1899). Artists were "seceding" from the control of the
academies and from the sclerotic conventions of style that the academies
imposed.
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Arnold Bocklin
born Oct. 16, 1827, Basel, Switz.
died Jan. 16, 1901, Fiesole, Italy
painter whose moody landscapes and sinister allegories greatly
influenced late 19th-century German artists and presaged the
symbolism of the 20th-century Metaphysical and Surrealistic artists.
Although he studied and worked throughout much of northern
Europe—Düsseldorf, Antwerp, Brussels, and Paris—Bocklin found his
real inspiration in the landscape of Italy, where he returned from
time to time and where the last years of his life were spent.
Bocklin first won a reputation with the large mural “Pan in the
Bulrushes” (c. 1857), which brought him the patronage of the king of
Bavaria. From 1858 to 1861, he taught at the Weimar Art School, but
his nostalgia for the Italian landscapepursued him. After an
interval during which he completed his mythological frescoes for the
decoration of the Public Art Collection (Öffentliche Kunstsammlung),
Basel, he settled in Italy and only occasionally returned to
Germany, and then to experiment with flying machines. During his
last two decades, Böcklin's work became increasingly subjective,
often showing fabulous creatures or being based on dark allegorical
themes, as in “Island of the Dead” (1880), which provided the
inspiration for the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead by the
Russian composer Sergey Rachmaninoff. Such spectral scenes as his
“Odysseus and Calypso” (1883) and “The Pest” (1898) reveal the
morbid symbolism that anticipated the so-called Freudian imagery of
much 20th-century art.
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Arnold
Bocklin
(see collection) |

Arnold
Bocklin
Venus Genitrix
1895 |
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Ferdinand Hodler
born March 14, 1853, near Bern
died May 20, 1918, Geneva
one of the most important Swiss painters of the late 19th and early
20th century.
He was orphaned at the age of 12 and studied first at Thun under an
artist who painted landscapes for tourists. After 1872, however, he
worked in a more congenial atmosphere at Geneva, under Barthélémy
Menn. By 1879, when Hodler settled in Geneva, he was producing
massive, simplified portraits owing something to the French realist
painter Gustave Courbet. By the mid-1880s, however, a tendency to
self-conscious linear stylization was visible in his subjectpictures,
which dealt increasingly with the symbolism of youth and age,
solitude, and contemplation, in such works as “Die Nacht” (1890;
“The Night,” Kunstmuseum, Bern), which brought him acclaim
throughout Europe. From this time his serious work can be divided
between landscapes, portraits, and monumental figural compositions.
The latter works present firmly drawn nudes who express Hodler's
mystical philosophy through grave, ritualized gestures. These
pictures are notable for their strong linear and compositional
rhythms and their clear, flat, decorative presentation.
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Ferdinand Hodler
(see collection) |

Ferdinand Hodler
Communion with the Infinite |
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There was thus a constant ferment of ideas, to which new currents were added from throughout
the German-speaking world: Switzerland, Austria and Germany. Artists
influenced by Symbolism appeared in both Catholic Bavaria and Protestant
Prussia. Neither the religious cleavage which bred distinct cultural
attitudes in Belgium and the Netherlands, nor the struggle between
Church and secular republic which made such a deep mark on France at the
turn of the century, had any real equivalent in Germany.
German artists ventured beyond their frontiers. We note that
Hans von Marees (1837-1887) who had trained in Berlin, and
Max Klinger
(1857-1920), a native of Leipzig, met the Basle-born artist
Arnold
Bocklin (1827-1901) in Italy. They felt
drawn at first to the mythological tradition of antiquity, and this in
due course lent them affinities with the Symbolists.
Bocklin, the doyen of the artists cited in this chapter, was an
energetic figure devoid of the languid melancholy of "decadence".
Italy's light and aura of antiquity were decisive in his early
development; his paintings quickly came to be populated with
mythological figures, with centaurs and naiads. Not until his fiftieth
year did he begin to paint the powerfully atmospheric works associated
with his name today.
Among the most famous of these is the painting known as The Isle of the
Dead (1880, which
Bocklin himself entitled "a tranquil place".
It was clearly important to him; he made five different versions of the
composition. The new title was suggested by the white-draped coffin on
the boat, the funerary presence of the cypresses, and the overwhelming
impression of immobility and silence. The white figure vividly lit by a
setting sun is contrasted with the dark, vertical forms of the trees,
impervious to the slanting rays of the sun. Like a dream, the painting
condenses a number of contradictory sensations and emotions.
Bocklin's choice of imagery is not coincidental. A young widow had asked
him for an "image to dream by", and the funereal serenity perhaps echoes
something of the artist's own emotions about death. At the age of
twenty-five, during one of his stays in Rome, he had married the
daughter of a pontifical guard who bore him eleven children between 1855
and 1876; five of them died in infancy, and the
Bocklin family was twice
(in 1855 and 1873) forced to flee cholera epidemics.
Bocklin's art reveals a robust temperament. He showed no reticence
towards the new technologies then sweeping the
continent. He devoted time to the invention of a flying machine,
negotiating with businessmen for its manufacture. His Germanic feeling
for nature was expressed, in canonic Romantic fashion, in such paintings
as The Sacred Wood (1882), but its most striking expression is
The Silence of the Forest (1885) in which a bizarre unicorn, part cow,
part camel, emerges from a forest, bearing an equally enigmatic woman on
its back.
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Arnold
Bocklin
(see collection)
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Arnold Bocklin
The Isle of the Dead
1880
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Ferdinand Hodler
(1853-1918), the son of a modest family of the canton of Bern, lost his
parents and all his siblings to tuberculosis before his fifteenth year.
He painted works by turn Symbolist, patriotic and intimiste, which
elicited the enthusiasm of Guillaume Apollinaire. Though not in the
Symbolist vein, his poignant series of quasi-expres-sionistic canvases
devoted to the death of his companion Valentine Godé-Darel deserves to
be mentioned. When she gave birth to Hodler's daughter in 1913,
she was already suffering from the cancer which caused her death.
Hodler
was commissioned to decorate numerous public buildings both in Germany
and in Switzerland. The patriotic message of these large paintings is
expressed in the unambiguous and heroic terms typical of such work.
Paintings such as Day I (1899-1900)
and Night (1890) are
characteristic of
Hodler's Symbolist vein. The first of these is
allegorical, and only certain formal traits, the repetitive sinuosity of
line and the mannered symmetry of the gestures, remove it from the
academic style. Night, however, with its central figure waking in terror
under the weight of a black-draped form, is the more fascinating for the
imprecision of the fear it records. Something similar may be said of
Autumn Evening (1892-1893), in which the perspectival view and
fron-tality of the path seems to draw the spectator into the painting,
symbolically evoking the efforts and expectations of an entire life.
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Ferdinand Hodler
(see collection)
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Ferdinand Hodler
Day
1898
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Ferdinand Hodler
Night
1890
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Ferdinand Hodler
Truth II
1903
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Klinger practised a broad range of artistic forms: sculpture, painting
and etching. His graphic work was complex, sombre and richly
imaginative; it took the form of series of etchings, of which the first
began to appear in 1878. They include Eve and the Future (1881),
Dramas
(1 881— 1883), A Life (1881-1884), A Love (1879-1887) and the most
famous of them all, his Paraphrase on the Discovery of a Glove (1881).
This sequence begins in realist manner with a man picking up a woman's
glove on a roller-skating arena. It continues in imaginary vein with the
tributes paid to the fetishized object. In the extraordinary penultimate
print the glove is carried off by a sardonic pterodactyl flying out of
the window in a crash of broken glass. The man's arms reach through the
broken panes in a futile attempt to restrain the animal.
But unreality appears from the outset, even in the ostensibly
realistic prints. One easily overlooks the tiny wheels of the
roller-skates on the feet of these dignified men and women; the
slant of the bodies in the second print then seems enigmatic and
even surrealist. The dream-like nature of the sequence
is subtly hinted at: in the penultimate print the pterodactyl cannot, it
seems, have emerged from the unbroken frame of the window. Were the
panes then broken by the outflung arms?
"Modern" as Klinger seems in his prints, his painting and sculptures
(not least his famous monument to Beethoven), display a
grandiloquence at poles from the manner of his graphic work - though
entirely typical of the period.
Otto Greiner
(1869-1916), an admirer of
Klinger's (to whom he dedicated a sequence of
prints), was also an able craftsman. His Devil Showing Woman to the
People,
though highly competent in execution, is utterly devoid of the ambiguity
encountered in Klinger's work; it leaves no room to the imagination and
merely echoes the cruder stereotypes of the day. As much may be said of
Julius Klinger's coloured zincograph of Salome (1907). Salome is
shown triumphantly carrying off not the severed head of St John but
severed genitals. Julius Klinger's work nonetheless has the merit of
self-mockery which, one suspects, is lacking in Greiner's print.
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Julius Klinger Salome
1909
Julius Klinger (1876-1942),
austrian painter, draftsman, illustrator, graphic artist.
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Otto Greiner
Devil Showing Woman to the
People
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Otto
Greiner
(b Leipzig, 16 Dec 1869; d
Munich, 24 Sept 1916).
German painter and printmaker. He started a lithography
apprenticeship in Leipzig in 1884 and also took drawing lessons.
Between 1888 and 1891 he studied at the Akademie der Bildenden
Künste in Munich under Sándor Liezen-Mayer. In the autumn of
1891 he made his first journey to Italy, visiting Florence and
Rome, where he met and befriended Max Klinger. From 1892 to 1898
he lived in Munich and Leipzig. In 1898 he moved to Rome, where
he used Klinger’s former studio, and where he remained until
1915, when he was forced to leave because of Italy’s affiliation
with the Allies. Greiner’s work is based on careful graphic
preparation and in particular on accurate life drawing. The nude
was central to his interests: like Klinger he saw it as the
epitome of beauty in nature and believed it should serve as a
basis for all stylistic formation. This is apparent from such
paintings as Odysseus and the Sirens (1902;
Leipzig, Mus. Bild. Kst.) as well as from his prints. Among his
recurrent interests, along with portraiture, were antique and
fantastic subjects, which are represented in the majority of his
112 paintings. His only cycle, On Woman (1895), the
eroticism of which is typical of the last decade of the 19th
century, is his best-known work.
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Otto Greiner
Devil Showing Woman to the
People
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Otto Greiner
Ulysses and the Sirens
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Otto Greiner
Fin de Siècle
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Otto Greiner
Study for etching "Ganymed"
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