Le symbolisme

by Rodolphe Rapetti

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 Pre-Raphaelites, 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 This volume, the culmination of over a decade of research, brings together a number of rare and previously unpublished archival documents, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of the Symbolist movement in its entirety.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.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

397 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Murray Ewing · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been a collector of books of Symbolist art for a while — though, for the art rather than the text. Recently I’ve been reading them, though, and I have to say Rapetti’s text is one of the better ones — it doesn’t have the condescension and basic dismissal of Gibson’s Big Art book, Symbolism, and has a lot of interesting, well-researched points to make, both on individual artists and the movement as a whole, though it's perhaps better as further reading on the subject than as an introduction (Thames & Hudson's Symbolist Art by Edward Lucie-Smith is good for that). The writing is a bit dry and somewhat wordier than I’d like, perhaps as a result of its being translated. (It’s a heavy book, too. I wonder if I was supposed to read it with the aid of a lectern. Perhaps carved in a representation of a support pillar to Rodin’s Gates of Hell?) Ultimately, though, I judge a book on Symbolist art not by the text but the pictures, and Rapetti’s volume, though it contains some good ones, is rather more sparse than others. Good text, then, but less good on the pictures.

[Mir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to read at the same time as Kingdom Of The Soul: Symbolist Art In Germany, 1870 1920 -- quite a difference in national character.