Art Appreciation Lecture Series 2014 Realism to Surrealism: European art and culture 1848-1936

Symbolism: myth and melancholy

Dr Georgina Cole

5/6 March 2014

Lecture summary:

This lecture examines Symbolism, the international avant-garde movement that spread across Europe and America from the 1880s to 1910s. Reacting against the dominance of Realism and Impressionism, the Symbolists rejected narrative and naturalism in favour of the subjective representation of an idea or an emotion. The talk sketches out some of the characteristics of Symbolism as it developed in France in the work of Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Puvis de Chavannes, looking briefly at some of the Symbolists working outside France, such as Khnopff, Böcklin and Munch.

Slide list: 1. Gustave Moreau, Galatea, c.1880, oil on wood, 85.5 x 66 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris 2. Paul Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, 1897-98, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 3. Frans Van Mieris, Boy Blowing Bubbles, 1663, oil on panel, Mauritshuis, The Hague 4. Odilon Redon, The eye, like a strange balloon, moves toward infinity, 1892, Lithograph, Art Institute of Chicago 5. Edouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay 6. Eugène Delatre, Portrait of J K Huysmans, 1894, etching and aquatint 7. J K Huysmans, À Rebours [Against nature or Against the grain] (Paris: Charpentier, 1884) 8. Paul Gaugin, Portrait de Stéphane Mallarmé, 1891, Etching, drypoint and engraving 9. Odilon Redon, illustration for Mallarme’s A throw of the dice will never abolish chance, 1897, lithograph, Bibliotheque nationale de France 10. Berthe Morisot, Woman knitting, c.1883, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 11. Claude Monet, La Grenouillère, 1869, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 12. Gustave Moreau, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1864, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art *13. Gustave Moreau, Galatea, c.1880, oil on wood, 85.5 x 66 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris 14. Gustave Moreau, Jupiter and Semele, 1895, oil on canvas, Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris 15. Gustave Moreau, Salome dancing before Herod, 1874-76, oil on canvas, Armand Hammer 16. Gustave Moreau, The Apparition, 1876, watercolour, 72 x 105 cm, Musée du Louvre 17. Odilon Redon, Araignée, 1887, lithograph, British Museum 18. Odilon Redon, Mystery, c. 1910, oil on canvas, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. *19. Odilon Redon, The eye, like a strange balloon, moves toward infinity, plate one from To Edgar Poe, 1892, Lithograph, Art Institute of Chicago 20. Odilon Redon, Closed Eyes, 1890; Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, Musee d'Orsay, Paris 21. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Summer, 1891, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art *22. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Shepherd’s Song, 1891, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art 23. Puvis de Chavannes, The Dream, 1883, oil on canvas, 102 x 82 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris *24. Fernand Khnopff, I lock my door upon myself, 1891, oil on canvas, Neue Pinakothek, Munich 25. Arnold Böcklin, The Island of the Dead, 1880 (third version), oil on wood, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin Proudly sponsored by

Slide list continued

26. Edvard Munch, Self portrait with skeleton arm, 1895, lithograph, Munch Museet, Oslo 27. Edvard Munch, Dance of life, 1899, oil on canvas, Munch Museet, Oslo 28. Edvard Munch, The Vampire, 1895, 91 x 109 cm, Munch Museum, Oslo *29. Edvard Munch, Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice), 1893, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Reference:

Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolits art (New York: Praeger, 1972)

Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art in Context (Berekely: University of California Press, 1989)

William H. Robinson, “Puvis de Chavannes’s ‘Summer’ and the Symbolist Avant-Garde”, Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 78, no. 1 (1991): 2-27

Jennifer L. Shaw, “Imagining the motherland: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of France”, Art Bulletin 79, no. 4 (1997): 586-610

Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, “The balloon as metaphor in the early works of Odilon Redon”, Artibus et Historiae 13, no. 25 (1992): 195-206

Images:

Gustave Moreau, Galatea, c.1880, oil on wood, 85.5 x 66 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Odilon Redon, The eye, like a strange balloon, moves toward infinity, plate one from To Edgar Poe, 1892, Lithograph, Art Institute of Chicago

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Shepherd’s Song, 1891, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fernand Khnopff, I lock my door upon myself, 1891, oil on canvas, Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Edvard Munch, Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice), 1893, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts Boston