Symbolism

by Rodolphe Rapetti

The result of over ten years of research, this work offers a new analysis of European Symbolist art. It situates the Symbolist artistic movement in its historical context-industrial Europe at the end of the nineteenth century-and retraces its links with the evolution of ideas, particularly in literature. This work includes new, rare, and previously unpublished archival documents among its sources, alongside a large number of iconic and lesser-known Symbolist images, all carefully analyzed and beautifully reproduced in color.Symbolism had a huge impact on the arts and literature of its day, but also prefigured numerous aspects of modern art from Abstraction to Surrealism. Symbolist artists sought to merge the cultural spheres of art, painting, and poetry through color and line. Works by key figures-including Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustav Moreau, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, and Paul Gauguin-illustrate the Symbolists' fascination with eroticism, perversity, mysticism, religion, and the occult.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

320 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.