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.

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.

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.

Arnold Bocklin

(see collection)

Arnold Bocklin
The Isle of the Dead
1880

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.

Ferdinand Hodler

(see collection)

Ferdinand Hodler
Day
1898

 

Ferdinand Hodler
Night
1890

 

Ferdinand Hodler
Truth II
1903