Misplaced Pages

#456543

106-487: Odilon Redon (born Bertrand Redon ; French: [ɔdilɔ̃ ʁədɔ̃] ; 20 April 1840 – 6 July 1916) was a French Symbolist draftsman, printmaker, and painter. Early in his career, both before and after fighting in the Franco-Prussian War , Redon worked almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography , works known as his noirs . He gained recognition after his drawings were mentioned in

212-447: A French Creole woman, was pregnant with his brother Gaston. The young Bertrand Redon acquired the nickname "Odilon" from his mother's first name, Odile. Redon started drawing as a child; at the age of ten, he was awarded a drawing prize at school. He began the formal study of drawing at fifteen but, at his father's insistence, he changed to architecture. Failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris' École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for

318-436: A career as an architect, although he briefly studied painting there under Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1864. (His younger brother Gaston Redon would become a noted architect.) Back in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpting, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography . His artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he was drafted to serve in the army in the Franco-Prussian War until its end in 1871. At

424-512: A certain vulgarization of it: the replicas of Symbolist works of art led to their devaluation to a certain kitsch taste, and the attempt to find a new language far removed from the crude bourgeois aesthetic sometimes degenerated into a poor substitute for it. Symbolism influenced several contemporary movements, such as modernism and naïve art , as well as several of the early "isms" of avant-garde art , such as Fauvism , expressionism , futurism , surrealism and even abstract art : some of

530-404: A clear preference for artistic realism throughout the century, which was evident in movements such as realist painting and impressionism. In contrast to this, first poets and then artists expressed a new way of understanding life, more subjective and spiritual, a reflection of their existential anguish in a time of loss of both moral and religious values, which is why they entered into the search for

636-512: A constant, especially in art linked to religious beliefs, from Egyptian art or Aztec art to Christian art , Islamic art , Buddhist art or any of the multiple religions that have arisen throughout history. A symbolic background has been present in most modern artistic movements, such as the Renaissance , Mannerism , Baroque , Rococo or Romanticism . In general, these movements have been opposed to others that placed greater emphasis on

742-403: A high degree of refinement based solely on the artist's sensibility. In France, Théophile Gautier turned a quotation from Victor Cousin 's Course de philosophie into the motto l'art pour l'art , which was the workhorse of aestheticism. This phrase synthesized the belief in the absolute autonomy of art, which dispenses with any moral or ideological conditioning to express the idea of beauty as

848-478: A homogeneous style, it was an amalgam of styles grouped by a series of common factors, such as themes, ways of understanding life and art, literary and musical influences, and an opposition to realism and scientific positivism. It was a sometimes contradictory movement, which mixed the desire for modernity and a break with tradition with nostalgia for the past, the ugliness of decadentism with the beauty of aestheticism, serenity with exaltation, reason with madness. There

954-541: A large extent, especially thanks to the work of Gaetano Previati ; Futurist artists such as Umberto Boccioni , Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carrà were close to symbolism in their early work, as well as Giorgio de Chirico , the greatest exponent of metaphysical painting . For its part, surrelism was influenced by artists such as Odilon Redon , William Degouve de Nuncques and Alberto Martini , whose mark can be perceived in artists such as Paul Delvaux , René Magritte , Paul Klee or Salvador Dalí . As we have seen, France

1060-416: A new language and a new category of values that manifest their inner world, their beliefs, their emotions, their fears, their longings. According to Johannes Dobai, "Symbolist art tends to generalize, through images, an individual, or rather unconscious, experience of the world." Symbolism was an eclectic movement, which brought together a number of artists with common concerns and sensibilities. More than

1166-508: A phenomenon that emerged in the United Kingdom, the dandies are children of Victorian morality, and although they rebel against it, they do so from a passive attitude, reduced to insolence, sarcasm and skepticism. They disdain vulgarity and focus on pleasure, whether physical or intellectual. Decadentism was a fin-de-siecular current perceptible both in art and in literature, music and other cultural manifestations, which emphasized

SECTION 10

#1732765078457

1272-562: A reaction towards more natural and handcrafted forms, as seen in the Arts & Crafts movement, which led to a revaluation of the decorative arts. All this led to the so-called "Aesthetic Movement", led by John Ruskin , who defended the dignity of craftsmanship and a conception of art aimed at beauty. Ruskin advocated a gospel of beauty , in which art is consubstantial with life, it is a basic necessity that makes human beings rise from their animal condition; rather than an embellishment of life, art

1378-450: A romantic vision of evil and the occult sciences; a certain tendency towards the grotesque and the sensational, and a taste for the morbid and perverse; a rejection of conventional morality; and a dramatic conception of life. Romantic sensibility was carried to exaggeration, especially in the taste for the morbid and terrifying, and an "aesthetic of evil" emerged, appreciable in the attraction to satanism , magic and paranormal phenomena, or

1484-562: A sensual but languid type of beauty, with a certain air of melancholy and idealization of the female figure. On September 18, 1886, Jean Moréas published in Le Figaro a literary manifesto in which he defined symbolism as "the enemy of teaching, declamation, false sensibility and objective description". According to Moréas, art was the analogical and concrete expression of the Idea, in which sensory and spiritual elements merge. For his part,

1590-411: A special emphasis on the world of dreams and mysticism , as well as on various aspects of counterculture and marginality, such as esotericism , Satanism , terror , death, sin , sex and perversion —symptomatic in this sense is the fascination of these artists with the figure of the femme fatale . All this was manifested in line with decadentism , a fin-de-siecle cultural current that stressed

1696-487: A special interest in mother-child relationships. One of his hallmarks was to envelop the figures in a yellowish mist, like limbs, an effect that isolates the figures and separates them from the viewer, with the aim of emphasizing their essence. Henri Fantin-Latour was a painter of a rather realistic style, as denoted by his portraits and still lifes inspired by Chardin . However, his compositions inspired by musical themes-especially by Wagner , Schumann and Berlioz -have

1802-596: A strong symbolist component, in compositions in which he recreates fantastic worlds populated by Pre-Raphaelite-looking nymphs. Sermizelles Sermizelles ( French pronunciation: [sɛʁmizɛl] ) is a commune in the Yonne department in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté in north-central France . Located close by is the Château de Domecy-sur-le-Vault . This Yonne geographical article

1908-582: A style based on soft drawing and phosphorescent-looking coloring. He was influenced by artists such as Holbein , Dürer , Bosch , Rembrandt , Goya , Delacroix and Corot . Scientific materialism also exerted a powerful influence on his work: he studied anatomy , osteology and zoology , knowledge that is reflected in his work; hence his preference for heads with closed eyes, resembling protozoans . Redon illustrated numerous works by symbolist writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe or The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert (1886). In 1884 he founded

2014-641: A subjective coloring, alien to naturalism. In his youth he briefly passed through the workshops of Delacroix , Coutoure and Chassériau and made two trips to Italy, but perhaps most transcendent for the formation of his serene and restful style was his relationship with the Greek princess Maria Cantacuzeno, who transmitted her intense spirituality to him. In 1861, with the allegories of War and Peace (Municipal Museum of Amiens ) he began his muralist work, for which he received numerous commissions throughout France and which would make him famous. He painted murals in

2120-498: A time, any work of art from the second half of the 19th century with a dreamlike or psychological content was considered symbolist. Finally it was considered to be a broad cultural current covering a timeline between the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed throughout Europe—including Russia—and with some reminiscences in the United States, a current that agglutinated totally or partially diverse autonomous styles, such as

2226-609: A twilight setting. Eugène Carrière started as a lithographer before studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he was a student of Alexandre Cabanel. In 1890 he founded with Puvis de Chavannes the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, where he exhibited regularly. Realist in style, his subject matter delved into symbolism thanks to his interest in emotional suggestion, with a velaturas technique of gray and brown tones that would be characteristic of his production. His subject matter focused preferably on domestic scenes, with

SECTION 20

#1732765078457

2332-434: A type of leonardesque beauty, with undefined features, which will have a symbolic equivalent in flowers such as the lily or animals such as the swan and the peacock . Symbolists often portrayed characters such as Eve, Salome , Judith , Messalina or Cleopatra , prototypes of femme fatale, of the vampiric female who turned female sexuality into a dangerous and mysterious power, often associated with sin, as glimpsed in

2438-473: Is a taste for magic, theosophy and occult sciences, and a certain attraction to Satanism. In relation to this, a work of reference for Symbolist artists was Eduard von Hartmann 's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1877), in which it was stated that art should be a method of penetrating the unconscious and revealing its most hidden mysteries. In connection with a taste for the mysterious and unconscious,

2544-418: Is also an overlap between different styles that coexist simultaneously: Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism , modernism , symbolism , synthetism , ingenuism ; as well as between the plastic arts: painting, sculpture, illustration , decorative arts , and between these and poetry, theater, and music. Art historiography has found it difficult to establish stylistic parameters common to symbolism. For

2650-473: Is always more abstract than we imagine. Form and color speak to us of form and color, and that is all". With Symbolist art, the autonomy of artistic language is achieved: art breaks with tradition and builds a parallel universe, paving a virgin ground that will serve as a foundation for new ways of understanding art in the early 20th century: the historical avant-garde . Symbolism was also an attempt to save Western humanistic culture, called into question since

2756-541: Is at the basis of Symbolist art, to the point that some experts consider it a part of the Romantic movement. The immediate predecessor of Symbolism was Pre-Raphaelitism, a group of British artists who were inspired—as their name suggests—by Italian painters before Raphael , as well as by the newly emerging photography, with exponents such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti , John Everett Millais , William Holman Hunt , Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones . Although his style

2862-766: Is crossed, it can mean: individualism in literature, freedom of art, abandonment of taught formulas, tendency towards everything new, strange and even unusual; and it can also mean: idealism, disdain for social anecdote, anti-naturalism. Symbolist painting was closely linked to literature, so that many of the works of the Symbolist literati served as inspiration for artists, especially Edgar Allan Poe , Charles Baudelaire , Gustave Flaubert , Gérard de Nerval , Arthur Rimbaud , Stéphane Mallarmé , Oscar Wilde , Maurice Maeterlinck , Stefan George , Rainer Maria Rilke , Richard Dehmel , Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal . Other literary referents of symbolism are found in

2968-699: Is held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago . Redon was the inspiration for Guy Maddin 's 1995 short film Odilon Redon, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity . In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition entitled "Beyond The Visible", a comprehensive overview of Redon's work showcasing more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and books from The Ian Woodner Family Collection . The exhibition ran from 30 October 2005 to 23 January 2006. In 2007,

3074-498: Is life itself. Another theorist of the movement was Walter Pater , who established in his works that the artist must live life intensely, following beauty as an ideal. For Pater, art is "the magic circle of existence", an isolated and autonomous world placed at the service of pleasure, elaborating an authentic metaphysics of beauty. Subsequently, authors such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler , Oscar Wilde , Algernon Charles Swinburne and Stéphane Mallarmé developed this tendency to

3180-434: Is one of psychological introspection, often idealized, especially in the woman, in whom the eyes, mouth and hair are emphasized. Baudelaire compared the eyes to jewels and the hair to a symphony of scents or a sea of waves. The eyes were considered mirrors of the soul, generally nostalgic and melancholic. As for the mouth, it could be large like a flower or small as a symbol of silence, as in the work of Fernand Khnopff . As for

3286-521: Is realistic, with images of great detail, bright colors and brilliant workmanship, his works are full of symbolic allusions, often of literary inspiration and with a moralizing tone, as well as a strong mysticism. His subject matter is often centered on medieval legends—especially the Arthurian cycle —the Renaissance world or shakespearean dramas. His aesthetic generally focuses on feminine beauty,

Odilon Redon - Misplaced Pages Continue

3392-603: Is the dark attraction to the perverse woman, the femme fatale , the Eve turned Lilith , the enigmatic and distant, disturbing woman, the woman that Manuel Machado defined as brittle, vicious, and mystical, pre-Raphaelite virgin and Parisian cat . She is a woman loved and hated, adored and reviled, exalted and repudiated, virtuous and sinful, who will adopt numerous symbolic and allegorical forms, such as sphinx , mermaid , chimera , medusa , winged genie, etc. A type of artificial and androgynous , ambiguous beauty became fashionable,

3498-647: The Copernican Revolution relegated the Earth as the center of the universe and, especially, since the Darwinian theory of evolution relegated the human being from his condition as sovereign of creation. Faced with the excessive scientism of Western 19th century culture, the symbolists sought to recover human values, but they found themselves in a scenario in which these were already distorted, in crisis, so what they recovered were values in decadence,

3604-834: The Getty Museum in California. Most of the paintings remained in the Domecy family collection until the 1960s. At 40, Redon married Camille Falte, a young Creole from Île Bourbon. They had a son, Arï Redon (30 April 1889 – 13 May 1972 in Paris). A visual artist himself, and subject of his father's portraiture as a child, Arï's partner was Suzanne Redon. Redon died on 6 July 1916 in Paris. During his early years as an artist, Redon's works were described as "a synthesis of nightmares and dreams", as they contained dark, fantastical figures from

3710-742: The Nabis at Durand-Ruel 's. Redon had a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture. The figure of the Buddha increasingly showed in his work. Influences of Japonisme blended into his art, such as the painting The Death of the Buddha around 1899, The Buddha in 1906, Jacob and the Angel in 1905, and Vase with Japanese Warrior in 1905, among others. Baron Robert de Domecy (1867–1946) commissioned Redon in 1899 to create 17 decorative panels for

3816-472: The Rosicrucians . Stylistically there was great diversity within Symbolist painting, as is denoted by comparing the sumptuous exoticism of Gustave Moreau with the melancholic serenity of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes . Pictorial symbolism was related to other earlier and later movements: Pre-Raphaelitism is usually considered an antecedent of this movement, while at the beginning of the 20th century it

3922-658: The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presented the exhibition "As in a Dream" with a survey of Redon's work with more than 200 drawings, lithographs, pastels, and paintings. The Grand Palais in Paris, France featured a vast exhibition of Redon's art from March to June 2011 The Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland showed a retrospective from February to May 2014. The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo , The Netherlands, had an exhibition with an emphasis on

4028-541: The Société des Artistes Indépendants . Alphonse Osbert studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, where he was a disciple of Henri Lehmann , Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon . His first stylistic reference was the Spanish Baroque , especially José de Ribera . He was also influenced by Georges Seurat and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Through his friend the critic Henry Degron he entered

4134-447: The "symbol", that is, of a type of content, whether written, sonorous or plastic, whose purpose is to transcend matter to signify a superior order of intangible elements, has always existed in art as a human manifestation, one of whose qualities has always been spiritual evocation and the search for a language that transcends reality. Thus, the presence of the symbol in art can be perceived as early as prehistoric cave painting and has been

4240-431: The 1884 novel À rebours ( Against Nature ) by Joris-Karl Huysmans . During the 1890s, Redon began working in pastel and oil , which quickly became his favorite medium, abandoning his previous style of noirs completely after 1900. He developed a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture, which increasingly showed in his work. Redon is perhaps best known today for the dreamlike paintings created in

4346-531: The Bible, with a special predilection for fatal characters such as Salome. Moreau was still trained in Romanticism under the influence of his teacher, Théodore Chassériau , but evolved to a personal style in both subject matter and technique, with images of mystical cut with a strong component of sensuality, a resplendent chromaticism with an enamel-like finish and the use of a chiaroscuro of golden shadows. He

Odilon Redon - Misplaced Pages Continue

4452-660: The English Pre-Raphaelitism , the French Nabis, the modernism present for example in Gustav Klimt or even an incipient Expressionism perceptible in the work of Edvard Munch . According to Philippe Jullian , "there has never been a symbolist school of painting, but rather a symbolist taste." Symbolism exalts subjectivity, the inner experience. According to Amy Dempsey, "the Symbolists were

4558-567: The Japanese painting style found on folding screens, byōbu , is discernible in his choice of colors and the rectangular proportions of most of the up to 2.5 metres high panels. Fifteen of them are located today in the Musée d'Orsay , acquired in 1988. Domecy also commissioned Redon to paint portraits of his wife and their daughter Jeanne, two of which are in the collections of the Musée d'Orsay and

4664-601: The Parisian Rue de Rochefoucauld—now the Musée Moreau—where he produced some 850 paintings, in addition to drawings and watercolors. Moreau was a teacher of Henri Matisse , Albert Marquet and Georges Rouault , among others. Another avant-la-lettre reference was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes , a singular painter whose style differs completely from Moreau's baroque symbolism, a classical and serene style that would have been classified as academicist if it were not for

4770-665: The Sphinx (1864, Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York), Orpheus (1865, Louvre Museum , Paris), Jason and Medea (1865, Musée d'Orsay , Paris), Diomedes devoured by his horses (1870, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen ), The Apparition (1874–1876, Gustave Moreau Museum , Paris), Salome (1876, Gustave Moreau Museum, Paris), Hercules and the Hydra of Lerna (1876, Art Institute of Chicago ), Cleopatra (1887, Louvre Museum, Paris), Jupiter and Semele (1894–1896, Gustave Moreau Museum, Paris). He lived almost in seclusion in his house in

4876-581: The Symbolist movement. The closest roots of symbolism, already in the 19th century, are to be found in Romanticism and some of its offshoots, such as Nazarenism and Pre-Raphaelitism . Already in these movements some of the features of symbolism can be perceived, such as subjectivism, introspection, mysticism, lyrical evocation and attraction to the mysterious and the irrational. Romantic artists such as William Blake , Johann Heinrich Füssli , Caspar David Friedrich , Eugène Delacroix , Philipp Otto Runge , Moritz von Schwind or Ludwig Richter largely prelude

4982-650: The Symbolists showed a special preference for allegory , for the representation of ideas through images evocative of those ideas. For this purpose they often resorted to emblematics , mythology and iconography related to medieval legends and figures from popular folklore, especially in Germanic and Scandinavian countries. Another variant of the occult was the attraction to eroticism, latent in artists such as Moreau or Redon and evident in Rops , Stuck , Klimt , Beardsley or Mossa . Ultimately, this attraction also led to

5088-438: The allegory of Franz von Stuck 's Sin (1893, Neue Pinakothek , Munich). Some of the women of the period who served as references for symbolist and modernist artists were the dancers Cléo de Mérode , La Bella Otero and Loïe Fuller , as well as the actress Sarah Bernhardt . Fin-de-siecle art—symbolism, modernism—relied on a series of increasingly diverse media for its dissemination, thanks to technological advances and

5194-552: The ambiguous realm of the undetermined. In 1903, Redon was awarded the Legion of Honour . His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by André Mellerio in 1913; that same year, he was given the largest single representation at the groundbreaking US International Exhibition of Modern Art (aka Armory Show ), in New York City, Chicago and Boston. His choice of color and subject matter in

5300-586: The appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled À rebours ( Against Nature ). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon's drawings. In 1886, Redon exhibited his work with the Impressionists in their the last exhibition. The same year, he also began participating in the exhibitions of Les XX in Brussels. In the 1890s, Redon worked in pastel and oil; he did not make noirs after 1900. In 1899, he exhibited with

5406-422: The artist's own imagination. His work represents an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. Redon wanted to place "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible". A telling source of Redon's inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journal A Soi-même ( To Myself ). Of his process he wrote: I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to

SECTION 50

#1732765078457

5512-622: The artist, who came to live his own life as a work of art-as can be seen in the figure of the dandy . For aesthetes, art should have no didactic, moral, social or political function, but should respond solely to pleasure and beauty. This movement arose in the United Kingdom, cradle of the Industrial Revolution , where in the first half of the 19th century artistic styles—especially in architecture and decorative arts—of eclectic cut such as historicism developed. Against this, an "Aesthetic Discontent" began to emerge, which provoked

5618-424: The choice of his subjects, where the recourse to symbol and allegory as a means of conveying the message is indeed appreciated. He was an outstanding muralista , a procedure that suited him well to develop his preference for cold tones, which gave the appearance of fresco painting . He had a more serene and harmonious style, with an allegorical theme of evocation of an idealized past, simple forms, rhythmic lines and

5724-535: The circle of Maurice Denis and the Nabis, and assiduously attended the salons of the Rosicrucians . Osbert's production focused on a type of bucolic and dreamlike landscapes of ethereal tones, with a preference for blue and mauve, populated by female figures in motionless, contemplative attitude. On most occasions these figures allude to the Muses , dressed in vaporous veils and framed in idyllic landscapes, generally with

5830-519: The critic fr:Charles Morice defined symbolism as the synthesis between the spirit and the senses ( La Littérature de tout à l'heure , 1889). A literary antecedent of this movement was the book Against the Grain (À rebours) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884), a hymn to aestheticism and eccentricity as a vital attitude, in which he relates the work of certain artists such as Gustave Moreau , Rodolphe Bresdin and Odilon Redon to decadentism. In this novel

5936-466: The critic and poet Arthur Symons in the magazine Savoy , author of the essay The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900), where he advocated symbolism as an attempt to spiritualize art and turn it into a religion that would substitute nature for fantasy. Symbolism was closely linked to aestheticism , a philosophical-artistic movement which, against the materialism of the industrial era, opposed

6042-474: The darkest side of the human being, but the only one they could rescue. According to art historian Jean Clair , his "aim was to transform the cultural crisis that reached its zenith in the belle époque into a culture of crisis." One of the essential features of symbolism was subjectivity, the exaltation of individualism, of personal temperament, of individual rebellion. Remy de Gourmont said that "symbolism is, although excessive, intemperate and pretentious,

6148-421: The depiction of the occult and the irrational, as opposed to representation, evocation, or suggestion. Just as in poetry the rhythm of words served to express a transcendent meaning, in painting they sought ways for color and line to express ideas. In this movement, all the arts were related and thus the painting of Redon was often compared to the poetry of Baudelaire or the music of Debussy . This style placed

6254-557: The description of reality—a trend generally known as naturalism —such as academicism , Neoclassicism , realism or Impressionism . Some Renaissance artists such as Botticelli and Mantegna exerted a great influence on the Symbolist painters: the former especially in England ( Beardsley , Burne-Jones , Ricketts ) and the latter in France with Moreau and Redon, and even Picasso . Other Renaissance artists who gave great relevance to

6360-630: The dining room of the Château de Domecy-sur-le-Vault near Sermizelles in Burgundy . Redon had created large decorative works for private residences in the past, but his compositions for the château de Domecy in 1900–1901 were his most radical compositions to that point and mark the transition from ornamental to abstract painting. The landscape details do not show a specific place or space. Only details of trees, twigs with leaves, and budding flowers in an endless horizon can be seen. The colors used are mostly yellow, grey, brown and light blue. The influence of

6466-456: The end of the war, Redon moved to Paris and resumed working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. He called his visionary works, conceived in shades of black, his noirs . It was not until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters ; he published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le Rêve , in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until

SECTION 60

#1732765078457

6572-467: The ephemerality of life and equality in the face of death. In the Rococo (18th century), a special reference for the Symbolists was Jean-Antoine Watteau , whose works moved away from the conventional symbolic allegory that had been prevalent in the Renaissance and Baroque to explore a more subtle and hidden symbolism, one that must be delved into to understand the artist's intentions and, therefore, closer to

6678-406: The ever-increasing speed of communications. The new art relied on a variety of propagandistic media such as magazines, exhibitions, galleries, advertising posters, illustrated books, production workshops and artists' societies, private schools and academies and other types of promotion and sales channels. The speed of dissemination and reproduction led to both the cosmopolitization of the new style and

6784-482: The exaltation of art and beauty, synthesized in Théophile Gautier 's formula of " art for art's sake " ( l'art pour l'art'), which was even referred to as "aesthetic religion". This position sought to isolate the artist from society, to seek his own inspiration autonomously and to be driven solely by an individual quest for beauty. Beauty was removed from any moral component, becoming the ultimate goal of

6890-534: The exploration of death or illness, as in Munch , Ensor and Strindberg . Another characteristic of Symbolist art was synesthesia , the search for a relationship between pictorial qualities (line, color, rhythm) and other sensory qualities such as sound and scent: Gauguin thus spoke of the "musical aspect" of his art; Rimbaud related vowels to colors (A-black, E-blue, I-red, O-yellow, U-green); Baudelaire also applied colors to perfumes. This interrelation between

6996-667: The expression of individualism in art"; and Odilon Redon was of the opinion that "the future is in a subjective world". This exaltation of individual will entails the absence in this current of distinctive stylistic hallmarks common to all the artists, who are united more by a series of abstract concepts than by an established methodological program. Among these shared concepts are mysticism, religiosity and aestheticism, linked to an idealistic philosophy impregnated with fin-de-siecle pessimism that has its maximum expression in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer . Also common to most of these artists

7102-414: The expression of the idea. 2. Symbolist, for which it will express this idea by means of forms. 3. Synthetist, for which it will present these forms and these signs, according to a method that is comprehensible in general terms. 4. Subjective, for which the object will never be considered as an object but as a sign of an idea perceived by the object. 5.(Consequently it will be) decorative. On the other hand,

7208-426: The fascination with vice and sexual deviance. Symbolist art overexcites the senses, which produces a sense of decadence, which will be the state of mind characteristic of the fin de siècle . Paul Verlaine wrote: I like the word "decadentism". It has a glow of gold and purple. It gives off beams of fire and the glitter of precious stones. Since 1886 a magazine entitled Le Décadent was published in France, which

7314-425: The first artists to declare that the true aim of art was the inner world of mood and emotion, rather than the objective world of outward appearances". To this end, they used the symbol as a vehicle for the expression of their emotions, which took the form of images of strong subjective and irrational content, in which dreams, visions, fantastic worlds recreated by the artist predominate, with a certain tendency towards

7420-616: The first decade of the 20th century, which were inspired by Japanese art and leaned toward abstraction . His work is considered a precursor to Surrealism . Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux , Aquitaine , to a prosperous family. Redon's father made his fortune in the slave trade in Louisiana in the 1830s. Redon was conceived in New Orleans and the couple made the transatlantic journey back to France while his mother Marie Guérin,

7526-400: The idea, the latent, the subjective; it is an externalization of the artist's self, hence their interest in intangible concepts, religion, mythology, fantasy, legend, as well as hermeticism, occultism and even Satanism. According to the critic Roger Marx they were artists who sought to "give form to the dream." Against naturalism, artifice is defended, against the modern the primitive, against

7632-463: The landscape, they preferred—as in Romanticism —solitary and nostalgic places, evocative, suggestive, preferably wild and abandoned, unsullied by man, in open, almost infinite horizons. They are not usually empty landscapes, but generally resort to human presence, for which the landscape is a vehicle of evocation or a projection of psychic states. Symbolism, understood as a means of expression of

7738-406: The morbid and perverse, tormented eroticism, loneliness and existential anguish. In this style, the symbol is an "agent of communication with mystery," allowing the expression of hidden intuitions and mental processes in a way that would not be possible in a conventional medium of expression. The symbol makes manifest the ambiguous, the mysterious, the inexpressible, the hidden. Symbolist art exalts

7844-540: The most existential aspects of life and pessimism as a vital attitude, as well as the evasion and exaltation of the unconscious. Another current linked to symbolism was aestheticism , a reaction to the prevailing utilitarianism of the time and to the ugliness and materialism of the industrial era. Against this, art and beauty were granted their own autonomy, synthesized in Théophile Gautier 's formula "art for art's sake" ( L'art pour l'art ). Some Symbolist artists were also linked to theosophy and esoteric organizations such as

7950-521: The most existential aspects of life and society, with a pessimistic attitude derived from the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard , and a rebellious and anti-social attitude inspired by works such as The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire and Against the Grain by Huysmans . Their general characteristics are a taste for elegance and fantasy, as well as for the exotic—which is denoted in their predilection for orchids, butterflies or peacocks—a predilection for artificial beauty, while denigrating nature;

8056-454: The most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium. The art historian Michael Gibson says that Redon began to want his works, even the ones darker in colour and subject matter, to portray "the triumph of light over darkness." Redon described his work as ambiguous and undefinable: My drawings inspire , and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in

8162-475: The multiple tendencies linked to realism in the field of culture throughout the 19th century. Factors such as the progress of science since the Renaissance —which in this century led to scientific positivism , the development of industry and commerce that originated with capitalism and the Industrial Revolution , the preference of the bourgeoisie for cultural naturalism, and the emergence of socialism with its tendency toward philosophical materialism , led to

8268-484: The objective the subjective, against the rational the irrational, against the social order the marginalization, against the conscious the hidden and mysterious. The artist no longer recreates nature, but builds his own world, liberates himself expressively and creatively, aspires to the total work of art , in which he takes care of all the details and becomes an absolute creator. Paul Cézanne considered art as "a harmony parallel to nature"; and Oscar Wilde stated that "art

8374-639: The other hand, Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin exerted a powerful influence on the beginnings of Symbolism, thanks to his links with the Pont-Aven School and Cloisonnism . This current was also linked to modernism , known as art nouveau in France, Modern Style in United Kingdom, Jugendstil in Germany, Sezession in Austria or Liberty in Italy. Symbolism emerged as a reaction to

8480-447: The pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer , opposed to the positivism of Auguste Comte , and in the subjectivist philosophy of Henri Bergson and his advice to seek truth through intuition. Another philosophical reference was Friedrich Nietzsche . Besides France, the other country that contributed intense baggage to the theory of symbolism was United Kingdom, the cradle of decadentism. Helping in that field were some articles by

8586-431: The pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into

8692-452: The pioneers of abstraction, such as Kandinsky , Malevich , Mondrian and Kupka , had a symbolist phase at the beginning of their work. Fauvist coloring was heir to symbolism, cloisonnism and synthetism , in an evolutionary line that begins with the smooth color without shadows of Puvis de Chavannes , continues with the enameled color and enclosed in black contours of Émile Bernard , color that Gauguin took to its maximum expression and

8798-427: The poet Gustave Kahn noted in 1886 that: The essential aim of our art is to objectify the subjective (the externalization of the idea) rather than to subjectify the objective (nature seen through the eyes of a temperament). In the preface to his Livre des masques (1896), Remy de Gourmont wrote of symbolism: What does symbolism mean? If we stick to the strict and etymological sense, almost nothing; if this limit

8904-729: The protagonist, Jean Floressas des Esseintes, withdraws from the world to live in an environment created by him in which he devotes himself to enjoying literature, music, art, flowers, jewels, perfumes, liquors and all those things that stimulate an idealized existence, removed from the mundane noise. As his title indicates, the character lives "against the grain of common sense, of moral sense, of reason, of nature." The protagonist fills his house with symbolist works of art, which he defines as "evocative works of art that will transport him to an unknown world, opening up new possibilities and agitating his nervous system by means of erudite fantasies, complicated nightmares and soft, sinister visions." This book

9010-417: The representation of an illusory space, gravity, the three-dimensional appearance. Among the motifs favored by the Symbolists are traditional themes—though frequently reinterpreted—and newly invented ones. Among the former are portraits , landscapes and narrative painting of tales and legends, which serve as new avenues for symbolizing concepts such as love, loneliness, nostalgia, etc. Symbolist portraiture

9116-467: The rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance—heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top—recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for

9222-495: The role that literature and music played in Redon's life and work, under the title La littérature et la musique . The exhibition ran from 2 June to 9 September 2018. Symbolist painting In painting, symbolism was a fantastic and dreamlike style that emerged as a reaction to the naturalism of the realist painting and Impressionist trends, whose objectivity and detailed description of reality were opposed by subjectivity and

9328-494: The second part of his career led to Redon being considered a precursor to Dadaism and Surrealism . According to Surrealist André Masson , Redon's use of bright colors in his flower pastels, as well as his choice of depicting uncommon or imaginary species renders his works "released from stylized naturalism", thus demonstrating the "endless possibilities of lyrical chromatics". In 1923, Mellerio published Odilon Redon: Peintre Dessinateur et Graveur . An archive of Mellerio's papers

9434-517: The senses was theorized by Baudelaire in his Correspondence (1857), in which he defended the expressiveness of art as a means of satisfying all the senses simultaneously. On the other hand, the Lithuanian Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis , who was a painter and composer, created a theory whereby color was the point of union between the various arts, which in painting was the link between the various motifs and in music

9540-406: The smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased. Redon's drawings are characterized as mysterious and evocative by Joris-Karl Huysmans in the following passage from the novel À rebours (1884): Those were

9646-467: The style developed by the Symbolist artists. Another precedent usually considered is Francisco de Goya , an artist somewhere between Rococo and Romanticism—rather an unclassifiable genius—who preluded Symbolism in works such as The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799, Museo del Prado , Madrid). Romanticism was an innovative movement that was the first fracture against the main engine driving modern times: reason. According to Isaiah Berlin , there

9752-399: The symbolic content of their works were Giorgione , Titian and Albrecht Dürer , who were also admired by the 19th century symbolists. A certain degree of symbolism is also seen in the work of Baroque artists such as Rubens and Claude Lorrain , as well as in a genre widely treated at this time, that of the vanitas , whose purpose is by definition always symbolic: to remind the viewer of

9858-409: The terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on

9964-418: The theoretical level, it drew on the work of thinkers and philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche , who pointed to the symbol as the basis of art; Henri Bergson , who opposed objective reality and defended its subjective perception; and Arthur Schopenhauer , whose book The World as Will and Representation (1819) powerfully influenced fin-de-siècle pessimism. One of the characteristics of decadentism

10070-667: The town halls of Paris and Poitiers , the Panthéon , the Sorbonne and the Boston Public Library , among others. His monumental style was based on the absence of depth, constructive linearity and compositional majesty, as well as the philosophical reflection inherent in his scenes. In 1890 he founded with Rodin , Carrière and Meissonnier the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, which organized various exhibitions of young artists and new trends until 1910. Odilon Redon

10176-412: The ultimate goal of the artist. Thus, symbolist poetry is based on preciosity and sensuality, on lyrical effects that sparkle like precious stones, and art seeks the suggestiveness of the image, the richness of the symbol, the sensual aesthetic that they draw even from elements such as vice and perversion, which are refined to achieve an image of strong visual impact. A parallel phenomenon to aestheticism

10282-616: Was dandyism , in which the cult of beauty is carried over to one's own body: dandies wear elegant clothes, are overly concerned with their personal image, are interested in fashion and seek to keep up with the latest fashions in dress; they are fond of accessories, such as hats, gloves and walking sticks. In general, they are urban characters, of bourgeois origin—although sometimes they renounce this distinction—often with liberal professions and fond of technological novelties. In terms of character, they tended to be haughty and confrontational, and liked to be admired and even regarded as celebrities. As

10388-478: Was "a shift of consciousness that split the backbone of European thought." For the Romantics, the objective world of the senses had no validity, so they turned to its antithesis: subjectivity. Artists turned to their inner world, it was their own temperament that dictated the rules and not society. Faced with academic rules, they gave primacy to the imagination, which would be the new vehicle of expression. All this

10494-422: Was a pupil of Stanislas Gorin, Jean-Léon Gérôme , Rodolphe Bresdin and Henri Fantin-Latour . He developed a fantastic and dreamlike subject matter, influenced by the literature of Edgar Allan Poe , which largely preceded surrealism . Until the age of fifty he worked almost exclusively in charcoal drawing and lithography , although he later showed himself to be an excellent colorist in both oil and pastel, with

10600-433: Was an image of the divine cosmic order . Symbolist painting advocated memory composition as opposed to the à plein air painting advocated by Impressionism . One of its essential features was the line, in sinuous contours of organic appearance, a fluid and dynamic, stylized line, in which representation passes from naturalism to analogy. It reclaims the two-dimensionality inherent to painting, abandoning perspective and

10706-598: Was considered the "Bible of decadentism", the revelation of the fin de siècle feeling. Symbolism was spread by numerous magazines such as La Revue wagnerienne (1885), Le Symbolisme (1886), La Plume (1889), La Revue blanche (1891) and, especially, La Pléiade (1886, renamed in 1889 as Mercure de France ), which was the official organ of symbolism. In the latter magazine the critic Gabriel-Albert Aurier in 1891 defined Symbolist painting as idealist, symbolist, synthetist, subjective and decorative : The work of art will be: 1. Idealist, for which its only ideal will be

10812-425: Was in a way the official organ of this movement. In its first issue, on April 10, 1886, it announced to society the decadence of values such as morality, religion and justice, and pointed out symptoms of the process of social involution such as history, neurosis, hypnotism and drug dependence. Decadentism was an anti-bourgeois and anti-naturalist movement, which defended luxury, pleasure and hypersensitivity of taste. On

10918-456: Was influenced by artists such as Leonardo , Mantegna and Delacroix , as well as Indian art , Byzantine art and Greco-Roman mosaic. His works are of fantastic cut and ornamental style, with variegated compositions densely populated with all kinds of objects and vegetal elements, with a suggestive eroticism that reflects his fears and obsessions, in which he portrays a prototype of ambiguous woman, between innocence and perversity: Oedipus and

11024-489: Was linked to Expressionism , especially thanks to figures such as Edvard Munch and James Ensor . On the other hand, some schools or artistic associations such as the Pont-Aven School or the group of the Nabis are considered symbolist or directly related to symbolism. They were also heirs to some extent of Neo-Impressionism , whose puntillist technique was the first to break with Impressionist naturalism. On

11130-419: Was the cradle of symbolism, both in painting and in poetry and other artistic genres. Gustave Moreau can be considered the father of pictorial symbolism; in any case, his work predates the emergence of "official" symbolism by two decades, since from the 1860s Moreau was already painting pictures in which he recreated his particular world of luxurious and detailed fantasy, with themes based on mythology, history and

11236-613: Was transmitted by Sérusier to the Nabis ; the leading exponent of Fauvism, Henri Matisse , revealed that his painting Luxury I was inspired by Girls by the Sea by Puvis de Chavannes. Expressionism considered artists such as Paul Gauguin , Edvard Munch or James Ensor as immediate antecedents, and some expressionist artists had an early symbolist phase, such as Georges Rouault , Alfred Kubin , Egon Schiele , Oskar Kokoschka , Franz Marc and Vasili Kandinsky . Futurism, although theoretically opposed to symbolism, received its influence to

#456543