The Symbolist movement prefigured numerous offshoots of modern art, from Abstractionism to Surrealism, and wielded significant influence over the arts and literature between the 1880s and World War I. In deliberate revolt against an era marked by Positivism, the Symbolist movement--essentially an art of the idea and of subjectivity-combined the quest for modernity with a purposeful return to archaism.

The Symbolist movement prefigured numerous offshoots of modern art, from Abstractionism to Surrealism, and wielded significant influence over the arts and literature between the 1880s and World War I. In deliberate revolt against an era marked by Positivism, the Symbolist movement--essentially an art of the idea and of subjectivity-combined the quest for modernity with a purposeful return to archaism. Grounded in the philosophical ideas of the German Romantics, the Baudelairian theory of correspondences, and the Wagnerian idea of Gesmatkunstwerk (total artwork), Symbolists renewed the timeless harmony that had been lost between man and the world and that could only be revived through the evocation of myths. The PreRaphaelites, Gustav Moreau, and Puvis de Chavannes are key figures of this movement, which also includes some of the most innovative artists of the period, from Gauguin, Redon, Ensor, Munch, and Hodler, to Burne-Jones, Bocklin, Khnopff, and Klimt. This volume, the culmination of over a decade of research, brings together a number of rare and previously unpublished archival documents, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of the Symbolist movement in its entirety. Symbolism places the movement within its historical and intellectual context, examines its famous and lesser-known artists and works, and sheds new light on the fundamental issues raised by art at the end of the nineteenth century--from Cloisonnism to the non-objective use of color.

Introduction

Guiding Spirits

The Pre-Raphaelifes and George Frederic Wafts

Pierre Purls de Chavannes (1824-1898)

Gusfave Moreau (1828-1898)

Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901)

A Subversive Idealism

Strange Beauty

Safanism and Mockery

Tradition and Stylistic Vocabulary

"Idealism"

Symbolism in its Day

Inventing Symbolism

Cloisonnism

Symbolism, Neo-lmpressionism, Divisionism

Symbolism, Decadence, Naturalism

Symbolisf Art

Demaferialization and Abstraction

A Synfhesis of the Arts

"Decorative" Art

Moment and Duration

Myth and History

Myth, History, National Territory

Mythological Spaces

Landscapes

A Magic Language

Enamored of Insfability

Wary of Rafionalify

Hysteria: A New Expressive Repertoire

The Subconscious and New Expressions of Ego

Chaos and Chance

The Absent Artist: Discovering the Art off he Mentally III

Conclusion

Notes

Selected bibliography

Index of Proper Names