Symbolist Landscapes


Book Description




The Mystic North


Book Description




Symbolist Art in Context


Book Description

The Symbolist art movement of the late 19th century forms an important bridge between Impressionism and Modernism. But because Symbolism emphasizes ideas over objects and events, it has suffered from conflicting definitions. In this book, Michelle Facos offers a comprehensive description of this challenging subject.




The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature


Book Description

Lother Hönnighausen's book examines the literature and the visual arts of English symbolism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.




Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form


Book Description

This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices. Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of “nature’s experiments”—the belief that the study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths, above all about the human mind and body—extended from the scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists’ solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a ready-made methodology for fin-de-siècle truth seekers. By using experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully strange. Focusing on the scientific, psychological, and experimental tactics of symbolism, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form demystifies the avant-garde value of experimentation and reveals new and important insights into a foundational period for the development of European modernism.




Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art


Book Description

This innovative analysis of the role of imagination as a central concept in both literary and art criticism studies works by Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Kandinsky, and Mondrian.




Mystical Landscapes


Book Description

This richly illustrated volume explores mystical themes in European, Scandinavian, and North American landscape paintings from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. This book features works by Emily Carr, Marc Chagall, Arthur Dove, Paul Gauguin, Lawren Harris, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Georgia O'Keeffe, Vincent van Gogh and James McNeill Whistler, among others. Common to their work is the expression of the spiritual crisis that arose in society and the arts in reaction to the disillusionments of the modern age, and against the malaise that resulted in the Great War. Many artists turned their backs on institutional religion, searching for truth in universal spiritual philosophies. This book includes essays investigating mystical landscape genres and their migration from Scandinavia to North America, with a focus upon the Group of Seven and their Canadian and American counterparts. Accompanying an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d'Orsay, this book offers a penetrating look at the Symbolist influence on the landscape genre.




Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century


Book Description

This study identifies and analyzes the different types of landscape painting that dominated the Scandinavian countries in the 19th century. The author shows how the wilderness became a symbol of Nordic strength, as well as a counter-image to industrialization and European urban culture.




A Sourcebook of Gauguin's Symbolist Followers


Book Description

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) played a seminal role in Post-Impressionist France. In his writings and work, he favored emotional responses to nature over intellectual uses of lines, color, and composition. In 1888 he and Emile Bernard developed a new style called Synthetism. Three groups of Gauguin's symbolist followers—Pont Aven, Les Nabis, and Rose + Croix pursued and extended the Synthetist vision. This sourcebook focuses on the most prominent adherents of the three schools directly affected by Gauguin's symbolism. This is the first comprehensive, single-volume guide and bibliography of artists in these three important French avant-garde movements. This work covers the entire careers of 16 artists by providing biographical sketches, chronologies, citations to primary and secondary literature and exhibitions.




Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, Second Edition


Book Description

Acclaimed for treading new ground in operatic studies of the period, Simon Morrison’s influential and now-classic text explores music and the occult during the Russian Symbolist movement. Including previously unavailable archival materials about Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, this wholly revised edition is both up to date and revelatory. Topics range from decadence to pantheism, musical devilry to narcotic-infused evocations of heaven, the influence of Wagner, and the significance of contemporaneous Russian literature. Symbolism tested boundaries and reached for extremes so as to imagine art uniting people, facilitating communion with nature, and ultimately transcending reality. Within this framework, Morrison examines four lesser-known works by canonical composers—Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Scriabin, and Sergey Prokofiev—and in this new edition also considers Alexandre Gretchaninoff’s Sister Beatrice and Alexander Kastalsky’s Klara Milich, while also making the case for reviving Vladimir Rebikov’s The Christmas Tree.